WE CAN CATCH George Eliot in the act of conceding that the body of an actress is a problem when we look for the Rachel figure in Daniel Deronda. She is dissolved there, not framed and set apart as in Villette; there is more than one rare, unique actress in the novel. Not only does the text name her outright—along with Ristori and Jenny Lind—but it conjures her by almost all its themes: Jews; performing and criminal women; above all, the separateness and connectedness of individuals and peoples. She is recalled by three separate characters: the diva who turns up toward the end to inform her son, the eponymous hero, that he really is, by blood, the Jew he wishes to be; the English society girl Gwendolen Harleth, who frivolously imagines she can be a tragic actress like Rachel; and poor, gentle Mirah Lapidoth, whose mountebank father stole her away from her mother and put her onstage for his profit. Arguably, the Jewish tragedienne provided the germ out of which George Eliot’s extraordinary, ambitious last novel grew. Daniel Deronda quite explicitly casts the Jews as the heroes of history’s longest-running tragedy, currently being revised by Zionists into something between tragedy and history, therefore fit subject for a novel about the confluence of will and destiny. Coming to the novel from the history and legend of Rachel, one is ready to suspect that the actress’s notorious passion for jewelry helped to motivate the twinning of Jews and jewels that unites the Gwendolen and the Deronda plots. Daniel Deronda turns on the paradox that Jews like jewels are at once valuable in themselves and symbols of other, more abstract values, representations of tradition and affiliation which can be loaded with meanings that contradict those they already have. As signs of (economic) change and changing signs, Jews and jewels together illustrate one of the novel’s major themes: the arbitrary nature of signs, and how their names inform the way we look at things and people.
The connection (made by pawning, not punning) is insistent, and by tracing it one may summarize much of the story. Gwendolen Harleth loses at roulette in the first chapter, which is set in a gambling casino on the Continent; she pawns her turquoise necklace to a Mr. Wiener in order to pay her gambling debts. Daniel Deronda, who watched her play and felt mysteriously drawn to her, helpfully redeems it and returns it to her anonymously, forging a bond between them, making her look to him for redemption later, and oddly prefiguring his ultimate redemption of his people. The turquoises were the legacy of Gwendolen’s dead father, who was replaced, in her childhood, by a stepfather who was perhaps worse than inadequate. Later, after she has married sinister, sadistic Henleigh Grandcourt, Gwendolen sees Deronda again at a country house party in England; she winds the turquoises around her wrist to signal to him that she is again in trouble. By then she has been further burdened by other jewels which are more valuable, also more negative in their symbolic valence: the diamonds sent her by Lydia Glasher, her husband’s cast-off mistress, on her wedding day (they were originally his mother’s). By marrying Grandcourt, Gwendolen betrayed a promise she made to Lydia, and in effect denied her connection with victimized womankind; the poisoned diamonds are a sign of her instability, her vanity, her greed.
While Gwendolen has been marrying and betraying, Daniel has saved Mirah, another pretty and desperate young woman, from drowning herself in the Thames. That action takes him to another pawnshop, where he hopes to find her lost mother. In order to have an excuse to come back to the shop (run by Jews, of course), he pawns a jewel of his, a diamond ring. That will turn out to be his father’s legacy: his mother, when she commands him to visit her in Genoa, will ask him to wear the ring. In the end Mirah’s father will steal the ring, freeing the orphaned young couple to marry and go eastward out of the fallen world of Europe into Zion, cleansed of material things like jewels, ready to effect a visionary action in a place where physical signs of spiritual relationships (like objects and parents) don’t figure. Gwendolen, also purged by the tragedy of her marriage and Grandcourt’s drowning, will stay at home, also freed of unnecessary baggage: Grandcourt’s estate goes to Lydia’s son.
THE IDEA OF RACHEL impressed George Eliot to the extent that the actress did not. She was sufficiently curious to go to see her more than once, but never enthusiastic. “We went to see Rachel again, and sat on the stage between the scenes,” Mary Ann Evans wrote from London to her friends Cara Bray and Sara Hennell, in June 1853. “When the drop-scene fell, we walked about and saw the green room and all the dingy, dusty paraphernalia that make up theatrical splendour. I have not yet seen the ‘Vashti’ of Currer Bell in Rachel, though there was some approach to it in Adrienne Lecouvreur.”
“We,” of course, were Evans and George Henry Lewes, who along with Charlotte Brontë had raised her expectations of Rachel—too high, she judged. (“Her acting is not acting,” one character says of Rachel in Lewes’s novel Three Sisters and Three Fortunes, or Rose, Blanche, and Violet; “No,… it is suffering,” replies another.) Evans was falling in love with Lewes; just a year later, in July 1854, she would make the bold decision to live with him although he was married to another woman. When Lewes and Evans first went off together they visited Germany, where Lewes introduced his companion to Count Varnhagen von Ense. The widower of Rahel Levin Varnhagen might well have talked to this literary, learned woman interested in the historical roots of the Bible, and therefore in the Jews, about his dead wife, the friend of Goethe. Rahel had espoused assimilation and believed it possible; she had also believed that because she represented nothing intrinsically, she was free to stand for anything. George Eliot, concerned with what she herself represented in a world that would scrutinize her closely, would have been interested in Rahel’s notion, and struck by the similarity of Rahel’s name and that of the great tragedienne. Some years later, while she was writing Daniel Deronda (which contains some scenes set in Germany), the Jewish subject matter she had researched—the questions of assimilation and Zionism, the theme of “separateness with communication”—might have reminded her of Rahel and the Jewish actress.
The source of identity is one stated subject of Daniel Deronda: “Men can do nothing without the make-believe of a beginning,” the epigraph to Chapter 1 memorably reads. The parallel, intersecting stories of Gwendolen Harleth and Daniel Deronda present alternative visions of how biological beginnings are related to character and the plots of lives. The Gwendolen story takes the conventional chronological view of personal development, for all that its heroine is seen first, in the gambling “hell,” in medias res. As most nineteenth-century novelists and twentieth-century psychologists would do, George Eliot explains the heroine’s (spoiled) character by an account of her early life. She is the child of a weak mother fallen on hard times, who encouraged her to imagine herself a princess in exile. Gwendolen’s feelings of superiority to her half-sisters, her beauty and wit and social success, make her imagine she deserves applause and distinction, therefore that she can go on the stage professionally. After she is discouraged by the pianist Klesmer (a genius, “half-gypsy, half Jew,” who advises that art requires hard work), she makes a show of a marriage that leads to tragedy. (The ironies are multiple: the history of the Jews is insistently called a tragedy, and Gwendolen’s opposite realm seems to be romance; but she does become a tragic figure in the end.)
In contrast to Gwendolen, Daniel Deronda is introduced as parentless, and virtually without a character-determining childhood. He has been brought up by a tutor and a pleasant but remote guardian, Sir Hugo Mallinger, and suffered no equivalent of the turbulent formative experiences Gwendolen has had. (The modern reader will remark that this void has left him affectless.) Where Gwendolen’s life is shaped by her desire to help and her need to separate from her mother, motherless Daniel’s story moves him, all unknowing, toward his mother. It is as if his desire (to be a Jew) conjures her up: on the one hand she is proof of his real identity, but on the other hand she is the mother he dreamed. It is not altogether a good dream: the Princess Halm-Eberstein is spectral, dying, and she explains she has only asked to see him because she is compelled by her own father’s avenging ghost
. Here, as in Gwendolen’s case, the mother is the significant parent, the clear point of origin, but here, as there, a shadowy man lurks in the background behind her. Raising the question of how destiny is determined for man and woman, gentile and Jew, the parallel plots interrogate one another. Doing so, they in effect deconstruct two of the most resonant pronouncements of the nineteenth century, Freud’s assertion that anatomy is destiny and the cliché pronounced by Disraeli’s Sidonia, among others, that race is the only truth.
Gwendolen, born a woman and beautiful, generally admired for being that, is embedded in artifice. She playacts very successfully in society, therefore imagines she can be an actress; she finds it hard to accept Klesmer’s advice that acting is work, not play. Her incredulousness is conveyed by a startlingly violent image: “The belief that to present herself in public on the stage must produce an effect such as she had been used to feel certain of in private life, was like a bit of her flesh—it was not to be peeled off readily, but must come with blood and pain.” Later, reflecting on what Klesmer told her, it seems to her that “his words had really bitten into her self-confidence and turned it into the pain of a bleeding wound.” The Freudian critic is invited to discuss castration, but there are other options as well. In the world of this novel, private images—products of fear, guilt, hope, and desire—have the potential to become material.
The most important of the dreams that the plot realizes is Daniel Deronda’s desire to be a Jew. His mother makes it true by telling him her life story: her word legitimizes his flesh, and significantly qualifies it. In its overarching plot as in its details, the novel asks whether the “natural” qualities seemingly lodged in the flesh—the race, the sex—are not rather formed and informed, created, as it were, by desire and dreams and language, the uncontrollable imagination and the conscious will, awkwardly collaborating. The figure of an actress presents itself to embody, if not answer, these questions.
THE PRINCESS Halm-Eberstein appears in only two scenes, dramatically, as if in a play of her own devising, before an audience of one. She receives her son in “the manner of a queen rather than of a mother,” and is so remote that she seems to him a mythological enchantress, “a Melusina, not a human mother.” (Melusina, a fairy of French legend, changes into a serpent from the waist down on one day of each week.) This cold and powerfully self-controlled mother is also a tragic victim—of her own dead father, whom she thinks she wronged, and of the desire that drove her to rebel against his repressive patriarchal will. Dying, consumed by guilt and disease, she is punished like the Ancient Mariner by having to tell her story. “I obey something tyrannic.… I have been forced to obey my dead father,” she explains. And the truth that will complete and satisfy Deronda visibly depletes her as it is wrenched out of her in a speech described as a piece of “sincere acting.”
As a girl, she explains to her son, she defied her father’s commitment to the past and future of the Jewish people, and only for that reason to his daughter. “He wished I had been a son; he cared for me as a makeshift link,” she says. She was eager to develop “the born singer and actress within me,” the talent she derives from the female line. She tells her son that he 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.” But she tries to convey it to him, in vivid and markedly “feminine” imagery: “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.” The princess tells her son she never felt the mother-love that is said to be natural in women: “People talk of their motives in a cut and dried way. Every woman is supposed to have the same set of motives, or else to be a monster. I am not a monster, but I have not felt exactly what other women feel—or say they feel, for fear of being thought unlike others. When you reproach me in your heart for sending you away from me, you mean that I ought to say I felt about you as other women say they feel about their children. I did not feel that. I was glad to be freed from you.” Cold as a daughter and a mother and a wife, eager for freedom and ambitious for herself, she knows she seems a monster in a world where women are defined by their (warm) relationships to men. But she is bound to realize her own nature, to rise to the challenge of opposing her adversary. She struggled with her father, and not for the conventional aim of choosing the husband that she wanted. Indeed, in order to live for her genius and herself, she went so far as to marry the man he chose for her, her cousin. When she thought her voice was going and wanted to leave the stage gracefully she married again, as pragmatically: her art is her most deeply felt life. As she prepares to leave her son for the last time, she tells him, “ ‘I am not a loving woman. That is the truth. It is a talent to love—I lacked it. Others have loved me—and I have acted their love. I know very well what love makes of men and women—it is subjection. It takes another for a larger self, enclosing this one,’—she pointed to her own bosom. ‘I was never willingly subject to any man. Men have been subject to me.’ ” Wise young Deronda, “with a grave, sad sense of his mother’s privations,” suggests the men were perhaps happier. He is committed to connectedness. But separating is necessary as well. Leaving his mother, he reflects that he had “gone through a tragic experience, which must for ever solemnise his life, and deepen the significance of the acts by which he bound himself to others.”
During their interview, Deronda assures his mother that he will understand her: “What I have been most trying to do for fifteen years is to have some understanding of those who differ from myself,” he explains, and ventures to say he can “enter into the painfulness” of her early struggle. She rebuffs him: “ ‘No,’ said the Princess, shaking her head, and folding her arms with an air of decision. ‘You are not a woman.’ ” Her position on the insuperable gulf between men and women recalls the plight of Gwendolen, who is also a performer, and also cold. In the context of a novel that preaches understanding among different peoples, it is ominous.
Lewes had the idea that George Eliot should write Daniel Deronda as a play. But of course it had to be a novel, to allow her to expatiate largely on the difference between acting and suffering, and to elaborate the connections between separateness and connectedness, and history and tragedy. Although she did write that the actress Helen Faucit might serve as a moral model for girls, George Eliot was committed to a belief in the supreme moral power of fiction, which exercises and strengthens the sympathies, she thought, and trains people to love one another better. With Daniel Deronda, she hoped specifically to equal the achievement of Harriet Beecher Stowe, whose Uncle Tom’s Cabin had changed American readers’ views of slavery, and helped to alter the social and political world. She wanted, she said, to correct the error of anti-Semitism in England; she proposed to show in her novel that Jews were more like Christians than not. But the Jews themselves, she recognized, insisted on their difference, stressing the “separateness with communication” that had helped keep them a distinct people throughout diasporic history.
George Eliot could not resolve the paradox any better than anyone else has been able to, and suggests her impatience by a flaw in her novel. On the one hand, Daniel Deronda and his party, representations of the idea of Jewry, are too moral, idea-driven, and impalpable to be believable, or even redeemable by the several rueful or ironic acknowledgments of this; on the other hand, the “realistic” other Jews conform too well to stereotype. “Everything specifically Jewish is of a low grade,” she had written in 1848 about Disraeli’s novel. Later, she denounced anti-Semitism explicitly and emphatically. Nevertheless, when the poetic Daniel and Mirah go off to realize their ideal nation in the promised land, the Jews left behind in London for the gentile reader to love as neighbors are repugnant and reminiscent of hostile stereotypes: the too shiny, ingratiating pawnbroker Ezra Cohen, his dressy wife and daughter,
and his “whinnying” son. These real Jews in their repellent physicality are the ones who abide in England; what the reader is meant to learn from is their kinship with the ideal ones, people Sir Hugo and Lady Mallinger would be happy to dine with, who go off the map to never-never land, where they belong. A deliberate irony or a telling slip? It is difficult to say.
And Gwendolen? Can she try to be, learn to be, get to be better, as she promises her mother, or must she perforce be what she physically is, even after (in a startling image, at the end) she shucks her old skin, the way a Lamia (something like a Melusina) or a snake does? Via Rachel, it is easy to slide from the Jewish Question to the Woman Question; and indeed the comparative success of the Gwendolen plot suggests that the earnestly pursued first Question may be something like a cover for the second. The actress, Jew and woman, haunts a novel concerned to ask in multiple ways whether or not one must keep to old patterns, whether one can remake oneself to accord with an idea, whether ideas do not impress themselves upon and virtually create physical facts. Rachel interested Mary Ann Evans, who recreated herself as George Eliot to become an original and effective image in the world—even, in the end, as she received her reverent visitors at the Priory, a quite theatrical personage. The actress represented both Woman and Jew; the way she handled her particular physically determined differences seemed to the novelist to represent, more generally, the fact that everybody can stand for something beyond her self, and the possibility that by will and imagination one might conceivably elude the body’s imperatives and history’s, and transform one’s self into an image of the imagination and the will.
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