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by Wendy W. Fairey

  And Becky Sharp goes on, even beyond the text. Thackeray himself plays cruelly with her future in a May 1848 letter to the Duke of Devonshire. Having espied her, he reports, “kicking up her petticoat in Kensington,” he dwells with some relish on her visible decline:

  She has lost what little good looks she once possessed and wears fake hair and teeth (the latter give her a rather ghastly look when she smiles). . . .

  P.S. The India mail just arrived announcing the utter ruin of the Union Bank of Calcutta, in which all Mrs. C’s money was. Will Fate never cease to persecute that suffering saint?

  No, I say. That’s not in the book. You can’t do that to her. If one must take liberties, I prefer those of Mira Nair’s 2004 film version of Vanity Fair, in which Becky, now Reese Witherspoon, is last seen in India, essentially untouched by time, seated in an elephant howdah with Jos Sedley at her side. This ending, or new beginning, both honors and mocks the novel’s enmeshment with Empire. And what fun to set Becky loose in India. I am sure she will soon snag a maharaja.

  One of the most astute assessments of Becky Sharp I have come upon is that of Thackeray’s contemporary George Henry Lewes, in his August 1848 review of Vanity Fair in the Athenium. “The character of Becky,” he writes, “is among the finest creations of modern fiction. She is perfectly unlike any heartless clever woman yet drawn . . . Profound immorality is made to seem consistent with unfailing good humor.”

  What Lewes presents in this assessment might be seen as a formula for resilience—that quality in Becky Sharp that I have supremely prized. Becky is endowed with resilience, as was my mother. Resilience means picking yourself up no matter what difficulties or inconveniences befall you and proceeding undaunted with the business of your life. The undaunted part of this is important. Undaunted implies being undefeated. It also suggests being impervious to change. You may be older and you may have lost your singing voice. But your ebullient spirit remains intact. Perhaps your survival depends on your being a little heartless. Life hasn’t really touched you. You haven’t allowed that to happen. You are unchanged though ever adapting to changing circumstances.

  Jane Eyre has another, more painful way of surviving. She holds onto her sense of herself, no matter what happens, no matter what blows she receives. She feels these blows acutely; she feels the morsel of bread snatched from her lips and the drop of living water dashed from her cup. But she is tenacious. She holds on.

  When I was a child, I needed to believe that my mother was resilient, because she was all I had and she wanted her children to believe in her invulnerability. Surely, though, she must have suffered. When she was in that awful orphanage, when Scott Fitzgerald dropped dead in her living room, when Bow Wow tried to ruin her, when she aged and lost some of her great beauty, she, too, must have suffered and just held on. Probably she was both resilient and tenacious. And I am both of these things as well. I’m still plain Jane, however this disquiets me, doggedly caring for a tough little self. But I’m Becky, too. With zest for the game, whatever its vagaries. So Becky Sharp and Jane Eyre come together. Perhaps they both deserve our compassion.

  Daniel Deronda

  I am moved by the letter the widowed Gwendolyn Grandcourt writes to Daniel Deronda after the two have met for the last time. From the opening of the novel he has served as the moral compass for George Eliot’s fallible, engaging heroine: the young woman who believed she could “manage” Henleigh Grandcourt—one of English fiction’s most chilling husbands—who married to save her family from financial ruin, though knowing of Grandcourt’s illegitimate children, and has paid for her rash gamble with harrowing suffering that even her husband’s death does not assuage. Gwendolyn has turned eagerly, desperately to Deronda to help her to be “better.” But if all their encounters are taut with urgency, this last is uniquely so because Daniel, an orphan figure who neither reintegrates into English society like David Copperfield nor acts as a catalyst to change it like Jane Eyre or Becky Sharp, must tell Gwendolyn of new directions in his life she cannot share in. He comes to her to reveal his discovered Jewish identity and to communicate his plans both to depart from England and to marry. The reader who still harbored hopes Gwendolyn and Daniel might come together is out of luck. That’s not George Eliot’s plan for them in this last, and perhaps strangest, of her great novels.

  Failing at first to understand—how could Gwendolyn have imagined a life for Deronda so distant from her own needs and sphere of reference?—the character is jarred into a sense of her insignificance, “dislodged,” George Eliot tells us, “from her supremacy in her own world.” Hers is “a shock which went deeper than personal jealousy—something spiritual and vaguely tremendous that thrust her away, and yet quelled all anger into self-humiliation.” Yet however “spiritual” this scourging of ego, Gwendolyn feels lost. The reality of Daniel’s marrying Mirah, who to Gwendolyn has been only an insignificant little Jewish singer, causes her to cry out that she is forsaken. Daniel grasps her hand in agonized sympathy. They part. She sobs and collapses, then in hysterical outbursts to her mother keeps asserting, enigmatically and emphatically, she will live.

  The letter Gwendolyn writes to Daniel in the wake of this shock is the last time her voice is heard in the novel. She tries to reassure the man she has relied on as a lay confessor:

  Do not think of me sorrowfully on your wedding day. I have remembered your words—that I may live to be one of the best of women, who make others glad they were born. I do not yet see how that can be, but you know better than I. If it ever comes true, it will be because you helped me. I only thought of myself, and I made you grieve. It hurts me now to think of your grief. You must not grieve any more for me. It is better—it shall be better with me because I have known you.

  I think of Gwendolyn sorrowfully—but also admiringly. Her pain is palpable. She fixes on “grief,” reiterating her worry about Daniel’s grief, but it is Gwendolyn’s grief I share here. Daniel, in departing, has laid out for her an ideal of altruism that he links to Victorian womanhood. To be “the best of women” is not to be a doer of great deeds or a famous actress and singer, like his own mother, but to “make others glad they were born.” It’s almost as if he’s suggesting Gwendolyn become a kind of Dorothea Ladislaw “the effect of [whose] being on those around her,” we are told at the end of Middlemarch in an apology for her not succeeding in an uninspired era to accomplish greater things, “was incalculably diffusive.” Or that she emulate him in his exquisite sympathy for others, though in that he is a man, its very diffusiveness, that word used so affirmatively at the end of Middlemarch, makes it almost a disease of action-inhibiting awareness, at least until he assumes the “social captaincy” of his serving his new-found people. I love the simple honesty of Gwendolyn’s self-doubt. “I do not see yet how that can be,” she avers. And the precision of her final shift of verb tense: “it is better—it shall be better with me because I have known you,” which underscores her hope, her despair, and her integrity in refusing to express false certainty.

  Daniel Deronda for me is George Eliot’s most fascinating novel, and it is also among the books of my reading life that I have found most affecting. The struggles of its complicated heroine say so much about the author’s values and her fears—and about my own: a perceived need to rise above egotism, however ebullient, and to find—George Eliot’s phrase—a “wider life,” some purpose larger than the advancement of self, however challenging that quest may prove. It’s also of relevance to me that the wider life her hero Daniel Deronda finds is as a Jew. I share this heritage and also an original ignorance of it, although, unlike Daniel’s, my own discovery of being Jewish has never seemed to offer me either an identity or a direction.

  I confess it seems a bit pat to me how the Jewishness for Daniel settles everything. Not to be, as he had assumed, the illegitimate son of the worldly Sir Higo Mallinger, but rather, as he discovers from the mother who sought to deprive him of his heritage, the grandson of a renowned Talmudic scholar—it’s all
so providential, allowing our hero full entry to the culture he has already been drawn to. If Gwendolyn, by the novel’s end, can hope only for a yet vaguely defined “better” future, Daniel has found his future in his reclaimed past. He has received his grandfather’s trunk of Jewish documents and is further guided by the inspired union with Mordecai/Ezra, the vatic figure teaching him Hebrew, who serendipitously turns out to be Mirah’s brother.

  It is thus not Gwendolyn, and hardly even Mirah, but rather the spirit of Mordecai who metaphorically gets to go off into the sunset with Daniel Deronda. Eliot’s final focus is on the departure plans for the East of Daniel, Mirah, and Ezra. The Mallingers have thoughtfully supplied as a wedding gift “a complete equipment for Eastern travel,” though we are left to wonder what that might consist of—I see flowing head gear. Ezra, as fate would have it, expires before the trip; the novel concludes with an account of his peaceful, measured death, illuminated by the setting sun. His parting words assert his inextricable union with Daniel Deronda. “Where thou goest, Daniel, I shall go. Is it not begun? Have I not breathed my soul into you? We shall live together.”

  Much has been written about the two halves of Daniel Deronda. George Eliot insisted that she meant “everything in the novel to be related to everything else there,” but, from the moment of its publication, readers and critics have responded to its bifurcation. In the “English” part of the novel, the part focused on the fashionable society of Gwendolyn, Grandcourt, and the Mallingers, we get a brilliantly rendered world of cold, shallow, or lost characters, incorporated into no unifying community, guided by no uplifting passions or vision. In the opposing warm Jewish world, on the other hand, characters care for one another and have identity and values, but, as Henry James observes in his amusing “Daniel Deronda: A Conversation,” this half of the novel is “at bottom cold.” A small cadre of readers has admired and praised Eliot’s championing of Jews and of Judaism, but the majority has considered the Jewish half of Daniel Deronda a colossal failure. F. R Leavis proposes the radical cure of excising it from a novel that would then be renamed Gwendolyn Harleth.

  My response to Daniel Deronda has been less to marvel that the novel could be at once so brilliant and so problematic as to try to understand the tensions in George Eliot’s vision for it that might have led to the work’s thematic and aesthetic dividedness. This was a key focus in my doctoral dissertation. But before I revisit some aspects of that study, I want to turn back and remember how I became interested in George Eliot in the first place and how I chose her as an author whom I would “work on” for four years of my life, an interest sufficiently consuming that my husband Donald could use it as ammunition in a marital spat. “All you know about is George Eliot!” he accused in one of our more embattled moments. “That’s not true,” I said. But later I thought that to know about George Eliot was to know a great deal.

  Eliot is not one of the Victorian authors I loved in childhood. Does any child, I wonder, love George Eliot? Dickens, yes. The Brontës. But George Eliot?

  Virginia Woolf describes Middlemarch as “one of the few English novels written for grown-up people.” The converse of this statement is that it is not written for children. And are any of Eliot’s works? Most children dislike Silas Marner, once standard seventh-grade reading. I don’t remember liking or disliking it, though I have looked again at the ponderous opening, which distances the setting from the author’s own time. “In the days when the spinning wheels hummed busily in the farmhouses . . .” begins the long dense opening paragraph, a description of the outcast social standing of itinerant linen weavers at the beginning of the nineteenth century. George Eliot’s early novels are set in country towns of the 1830s or turn-of-the-century rural Midlands (the eras when, respectively, Eliot and her parents were young), but her country villages did not draw me in the way David Copperfield transported me to Suffolk. I was with David, I was David in the Rookery. In the works of George Eliot, the reader is always aligned with the author, looking back into the past through the film of her tolerant nostalgia and through the medium of her meditations. I must also have read The Mill on the Floss as a child since I have among my books an Illustrated Classics edition. But again, the author approaches the story through the distancing mechanism of nostalgia, and Eliot’s Dodsons and Tullivers are no match for Dickens’s Peggottys and “Barkis is willing.” Also it may simply be too perilous to identify with Maggie, a heroine who ends up drowning because there’s no place for her in her provincial world.

  The drowning notwithstanding—how plausible is it to be done in by a piece of machinery in a flooded river? Maybe more so in light of Hurricanes Katrina and Sandy and the Japanese tsunami, but still . . . George Eliot is perhaps too much of a realist to appeal to children. A realist and a moralist, who would see as blindness the sense of potency such heroines as Jane Eyre and Becky Sharp express and rely on. Eliot’s heroines who believe in their own potency are called egotists. Like Gwendolyn, or even Dorothea, they have to be chastened.

  As I think of George Eliot’s world view and I think of my mother’s, with its emphatic faith in the individual, I’m not surprised my mother never handed me a volume of George Eliot when I asked for another book to read from her library’s shelves. It’s perhaps more surprising that there were no George Eliot novels on those shelves, that Eliot, in fact, is missing from the F. Scott Fitzgerald College of One curriculum. Fitzgerald was a zealous student of the nineteenth-century novel, so either he didn’t think much of Eliot or he didn’t think my mother would be drawn to her. I try to imagine them in their role-playing games taking on, say, Dorothea and Mr. Casaubon:

  Dorothea: “Can I help you, dear, with your great life’s work, your key to all mythologies?

  Casaubon (blinking): I don’t think so, my dear. We’re not ready for that yet.

  At Gwendolyn and Daniel I stop short. Henry James complains that all Daniel Deronda actually does is pull repeatedly at his shirt collar. Somehow the thought of enacting George Eliot’s characters doesn’t seem much fun. Is it that they are too serious? Perhaps there’s a way they are not dramatic. A reimagining of their scenes doesn’t leave much room for improvisation. It’s not that the characters lack free will; they make moral choices of great import, but they’re enmeshed in webs—that image Eliot is so drawn to—webs of circumstance that are always closing in on them. Eliot is merciless towards their romantic illusions, which the circumstances of their lives crush out of them. Their salvation, if it comes, lies in disillusionment. To be stripped of illusions is the basis for more humble and accurate knowledge. It is a beginning, not an end. Henry James appreciated this theme in Eliot, and Fitzgerald appreciated it in James. By then, though, the dream had become the American dream. Fitzgerald is less hard on his dreamers than Eliot is on hers. His dreamers are the “sad young men,” dreaming of golden women. The dream has its own glory for Fitzgerald.

  So for one reason or another—George Eliot’s exclusion from the College of One, her not being taught in high school, the fact that in college I elected the year-long course in Romantic poetry instead of the course on the novel—I had not encountered even Middlemarch until I got to graduate school, by which time I was more or less a grown up and, Virginia Woolf would argue, ready for this great work and for its author.

  ii

  MIDDLEMARCH AND I CONVERGED in Professor Alice Fredman’s seminar on the nineteenth-century novel. Alice, who later became my dissertation advisor, was one of three tenured women at that time, the late ’60s, in the Columbia English department. The other two were Carolyn Heilbrun, who seemed every bit as intimidating as Alice, and Elizabeth Donno, a Renaissance scholar who I think wasn’t intimidating at all, but I never took a course from her or heard much about her.

  But for Alice Fredman I might never have finished graduate school. She was tough-talking and known for smoking thin cigars, but she was someone who fought for the students she took under her wing. She had been a brilliant undergraduate at Swarthmore, and at Columbia
she wrote a prize-winning dissertation on Diderot and Sterne under the tutelage of Marjorie Hope Nicholson, the first woman chairperson of the Columbia English Department. Alice’s dissertation became her first book, a second small book followed on Trollope for the Columbia Modern Writers series, but here the list ends. Her long-awaited magnum opus, a critical biography of Mary Shelley, remained always a work in progress. I think Alice’s teaching combined with her family life to absorb her. At the end of the nineteenth-century-novel seminar, she invited our whole class to a picnic at her house in Kings Point, Long Island, where we met Irwin “Freddy” Fredman her husband, who had retired from a modest career in advertising to write arcane books on Long Island history, her two pleasant teenaged daughters, and Alice’s widowed mother who lived with the family. Going to that picnic was like discovering the clerk Wemmick’s domestic nest in Great Expectations, complete with an “Aged P,” after encountering him in the harsh public world of Mr. Jaggers’s law office. I think George Eliot would have rendered Alice sympathetically if she had been a character in one of the novels—perhaps as someone who strove for greatness but settled in many ways for “the common yearning of womanhood.” At least, though, Alice got to be a wonderful professor. When she died in 1993 of a heart attack at, alas, only sixty-eight, her New York Times obituary stressed how “she became a mentor to many Columbia students and was known for her generosity to them and to her colleagues.” I also learned that “twice offered teaching awards, she refused them, saying they would be more helpful and encouraging to younger colleagues.” Of this egoless, self-subsuming gesture George Eliot would certainly have approved.