A review by vanityclear
Daniel Deronda by George Eliot

2.0

Middlemarch this ain't. I'm currently reading through some literary criticism on the book to figure out what bugged me so much about it—its splintered structure and wild wheelings between Gwendolyn Harleth's sections and Daniel Deronda's, for one, and Eliot's ridiculously childish characterization of innocent Mirah, as well as Gwendolyn's utter lack of magnetism (though in review after review she is called proud/self-absorbed but also sparkling/absorbing/etc, which I did not find true in the slightest). What makes it so unlikeable, I think, is that every character is a type, and Eliot is so clearly working to achieve an end: to "ennoble" the Jews in the eyes of her English readers, and thus she creates unworkable, unbelievable characters—perfect Daniel Deronda, pure and childlike Mirah, Gwendolyn who is so self-absorbed she is a parody of herself (and so laughably clings to Daniel to tell her what to read so that she isn't so ignorant, not, seemingly, because she actually wants to become less self-absorbed, but because she wants him to love her like she loves him). It takes 69 chapters to get to this from Gwendolyn: “she was for the first time feeling the pressure of a vast mysterious movement, for the first time being dislodged from her supremacy in her own world, and getting a sense that her horizon was but a dipping onward of an existence with which her own was revolving.”

The only chapter I really enjoyed was Daniel's meeting with his mother, where some real meat and character came to the fore: independence, feminism, anti-semitism, religious pressures on women, control, the family, childlessness ... This makes me drool:

"No," said the Princess, shaking her head, and folding her arms with an air of decision. "You are not a woman. You may try—but you can never imagine what it is to have a man's force of genius in you, and yet to suffer the slavery of being a girl. To have a pattern cut out—'this is the Jewish woman; this is what you must be; this is what you are wanted for; a woman's heart must be of such a size and no larger, else it must be pressed small, like Chinese feet; her happiness is to be made as cakes are, by a fixed receipt.' That was what my father wanted. He wished I had been a son; he cared for me as a makeshift link. His heart was set on his Judaism. He hated that Jewish women should be thought of by the Christian world as a sort of ware to make public singers and actresses of. As if we were not the more enviable for that! That is a chance of escaping from bondage."

[Listened to the Juliet Stevenson recording]