Ronda! ... : ... a great place in Spain. It was loved by Ernest Hemingway (those fabulous cliffs are thought to have inspired the ending of For Whom the Bell Tolls) and it's the place from which Eliot's hero derives his surname ("Daniel of Ronda"). It really is a beautiful place. Everyone should go.Sadly, Eliot does't take her Daniel to Ronda. Such a shame! But that disappointment aside, she's given us a fine book with some lovely surprises. I love it when someone at work asks "How's your book going?" and you update them on recent developments and find you're both laughing because it's so mad.Bits I liked (with spoilers): "Since she was not winning strikingly, the next best thing was to lose strikingly.""'Gwendolen will not rest without having the world at her feet,' said Miss Merry, the meek governess: hyperbolical words which have long come to carry the most moderate meanings; for who has not heard of private persons having the world at their feet in the shape of some half-dozen items of flattering regard generally known in a genteel suburb?""There were many subjects in the world—perhaps the majority—in which she felt no interest, because they were stupid; for subjects are apt to appear stupid to the young as light seems dull to the old;""The answer may seem to lie quite on the surface:—in her beauty ... and even the waiters at hotels showed the more alacrity in doing away with crumbs and creases and dregs with struggling flies in them.""but a moment is wide enough for the loyal and mean desire, for the outlash of a murderous thought and the sharp backward stroke of repentance.""His English had little foreignness except its fluency;""we are rationally sure that the blind worm can not bite us mortally, but it would be so intolerable to be bitten, and the creature has a biting look—we decline to handle it.""for Grandcourt ... looked as neutral as an alligator;""'much quotation of any sort, even in English is bad. It tends to choke ordinary remark. One couldn't carry on life comfortably without a little blindness to the fact that everything had been said better than we can put it ourselves.'""Happily he was modest, and took any second-rateness in himself simply as a fact, not as a marvel necessarily to be accounted for by a superiority.""All the while there was a busy undercurrent in her, like the thought of a man who keeps up a dialogue while he is considering how he can slip away.""'And nothing that I don't like?—please say that; because I think I dislike what I don't like more than I like what I like,' said Gwendolen, finding herself in the woman's paradise, where all her nonsense is adorable.""'It would be most remarkable,' said Mrs. Gascoigne, 'if he were to become Lord Stannery in addition to everything else. Only think: there is the Grandcourt estate, the Mallinger estate, and the baronetcy, and the peerage,'—she was marking off the items on her fingers, and paused on the fourth while she added, 'but they say there will be no land coming to him with the peerage.' It seemed a pity there was nothing for the fifth finger.""'He really is not disgusting.''That is very moderate praise, Gwen.''No, it is not, for a man,' said Gwendolen gaily.""'I will wait till after Christmas.'What should we all do without the calendar, when we want to put off a disagreeable duty? The admirable arrangements of the solar system, by which our time is measured, always supply us with a term before which it is hardly worth while to set about anything we are disinclined to.""Lady Mallinger, with fair matronly roundness and mildly prominent blue eyes, moved about in her black velvet, carrying a tiny white dog on her arm as a sort of finish to her costume;"A blush is no language: only a dubious flag-signal which may mean either of two contradictories.""'A little private imitation of what is good is a sort of private devotion to it,'""'I cannot bear people to keep their minds bottled up for the sake of letting them off with a pop. They seem to grudge making you happy unless they can make you miserable beforehand.'""'My dear child, the boys are such a trouble—we could never put up with them, if we didn't make believe they were worth more,'""for if you are fond of looking stonily at smiling persons—the persons must be there and they must smile""She rose, pushed her chair away without hurry, and walked out of the room with something like the care of a man who is afraid of showing that he has taken more wine than usual.""but to Gwendolen's ear his words had as much insolence in them as his prominent eyes, and the pronoun 'you' was too familiar. He ought to have addressed the folding-screen, and spoke of her as Mrs. Grandcourt.""Then she kissed him on each cheek, and he returned the kisses. But it was something like a greeting between royalties.""Sometimes it occurs to Jacob that Hebrew will be more edifying to him if he stops his ears with his palms, and imitates the venerable sounds as heard through that muffled medium. When Mordecai gently draws down the little fists and holds them fast, Jacob's features all take on an extraordinary activity, very much as if he was walking through a menagerie and trying to imitate every animal in turn, succeeding best with the owl and the peccary.""'Then are we to part and I never be anything to you?''It is better so,' said the Princess, in a softer, mellower voice. 'There could be nothing but hard duty for you, even if it were possible for you to take the place of my son.'""'Had I not a rightful claim to be something more than a mere daughter and mother?'""'It is a talent to love—I lack it.'""And what sort of dispute could a woman of any pride and dignity begin on a yacht?""she had no art to conceal that sort of joyous expectation which makes the present more bearable than usual, just as when a man means to go out he finds it easier to be amiable to the family for a quarter of an hour beforehand.""And all the while he felt as if he were putting his name to a blank paper which might be filled up terribly.""If Sir Hugo in his bachelorhood had been beguiled into regarding children chiefly as a product intended to make life more agreeable to the full-grown, whose convenience alone was to be consulted in the disposal of them—why, he had shared an assumption which, if not formally avowed, was massively acted on at that date of the world's history;""'A Jew!' Gwendolen exclaimed, in a low tone of amazement, with an utterly frustrated look, as if some confusing potion were creeping through her system."
THE DIPTYCHThis novel was renewed my interest on how George Eliot wrote. I am highly tempted to read more about her and approach literary evaluations of her writing, but before I do so I want to read Adam Bede and Silas Marner and may be reread The Mill on the Floss.When I read Romola I considered GE’s cosmopolitanism and breath of knowledge. These elements are also present in Daniel Deronda but with an added edge. With Middlemarch it was the role of the narrator and the clear presence of the author that attracted me. In DD the voice of the writer is also clear but in less authorial fashion and, one suspects, speaking more often through her characters. What struck me most, and want to select for my review this time, is the structure of the novel. It is clearly divided in two. Clearly a diptych. Already MM seemed to me to consist of two parallel stories joined somewhat seamlessly in the middle. The study of provincial evolved around two foci, the doctor Lydgate and the illuminated Dorothea. Both idealists. The twists and turnings of the plot, however, managed to link the two stories creating a middle path in Middlemarch were these two different versions of dreamers confronted each other and helped each other in correcting their reflections.This double structure is again present in Daniel Deronda, GE’s last novel, but with a wider gap between the two panels. With almost separated frames the novel reads like a double portrait, or a diptych with two facing and complementary donors searching for an object of adoration that is however missing – for the Self is never in the other. The two subjects pursue their mirroring images and transverse their separating frames by engaging in dialogs and verbal encounters. The twists and turns of the plot this time do not fuse their separated worlds. Only their minds bridge the gap.Generally I do not discuss characters in my reviews, but I can't avoid it this time. In this novel, the two protagonists, the sitters in the double portrait, baffled me. Gwendolen (Gwen), potentially a highly irritating young woman, fascinated me because I thought she was such a modern character. I expected that young powerful women in today’s professional world, and who are not just capable and intelligent, but also beautiful—and I am thinking of top Wall street traders, or international lawyers of the type, of for example, Amal Aladdin--, must have a similar self-assurance and defiance and inner drive and independence and élan as Gwen. But even if these contemporary women have had a better chance to explore and exploit their abilities in their chosen fields of excellence than GE has allowed Gwen, she did not get on my nerves. I was enthralled by her modernity. Daniel, in spite of having claimed the title of the novel, remained for me an equivocal figure. It is almost as if in my diptych Daniel—with his messianic role turned around, for he is the Christian leading onto the Jewish— is a donor who through a process of transubstantiation has become the object of adoration.And in that transformation, the novel dims and blurs its cast of characters and becomes more and more an exploration of ideas, spirituality and politics, with a defence of Judaism and a daring proposal of Zionism. In all this Daniel emerges as an ethereal saviour but poor Gwen succumbs and loses her leading edge.And that is what made me wonder about how GE wrote her books and planned her work in her mind. Did she spend half of her day doing intellectual research on the subjects that captivated her and did she then transcribe her reading into her novel in the afternoons? What was her true objective, to expand her erudition, or to mould it into something else?I will have to put aside my curiosity for a while and continue reading her work, but with her intelligent writing and formidable abilities she certainly makes me ponder about the process of writing, that elusive act - creativity. How is it born and how does it live?And how did Rothko paint the above diptych?
What do You think about Daniel Deronda (2015)?
(Re-read from June 07 to June 12, 2012)I had forgotten what a hard work reading Daniel Deronda was. It has to be Eliot’s most challenging and overwhelming novel, yet such a great pleasure to read and re-read! It's enormously ambitious novel, broad in its scope, space, time and history. The setting itself is untypical of Eliot’s previous novels. It’s no longer the idyllic, provincial villages of Adam Bede or Middlemarch, but Daniel Deronda is set at the heart of cosmopolitan aristocracy of contemporary London. The politics are no longer local, but global as Eliot scrutinises the exploits of British Empire. The stakes are much higher; the individual identities are threatened and lost. The conflict is personal, yet also very social. Of all the Eliot’s novels, Daniel Deronda is the most related to our contemporary society as Eliot explores the themes of racial identity, prejudice, importance of tolerance, religion, the question of gender boundaries, imperialism and Zionism. Gwendolen Harleth has to be Eliot's most remarkable and fascinating creation. In fact, I am in love with Gwendolen. The main reason I re-read this novel because I missed her. I missed being in her mind, to follow her cognitions, her mental anguish, her witty repartees, sheer snobbery, ambition and heedless narcissism. She is of course not the first vain or shallow female character ever created by Eliot. The ‘vain girl’ features in most of Eliot’s novels, often as a contrast to the heroine. She is there as Hetty in Adam Bede, Esther in Felix Holt, Rosamond in Middlemarch. But in Daniel Deronda, Gwendolen is put at the centre of the stage and her narcissism is taken to extremes, that there is a scene where she is moved to kiss her own reflection in the mirror. Like countless other women, she suffers from the restrictions Victorian society imposed on any respectable woman. She is a dreamer and sees marriage not as a loving union, but as a way to achieve status and power. She marries Grandcourt because she thinks she will be able to manage him and make him her “slave”. Yet contrary to her expectations, the marriage turns out to be an abusive one. Gwendolen fails to realise that Grandcourt also has an iron will of his own. The irony is that her decision to marry the incredibly wealthy Grandcourt was to some extent influenced by her selfless concern towards her bankrupt family. So, her partly selfless act becomes the bane of her life. Grandcourt is bent on to be “a master of a woman who would have liked to master him”. A painful psychological struggle for power ensues between them and Gwendolen is quickly crushed by him. His secret becomes her guilt, a yoke around her neck which continually gnaws at her conscience. He breaks her spirit and she becomes withered from inside, “a diseased soul”, but is forced to play a charade of a happy wife.I liked Deronda even if I found him to be rigid and morally superior. He is Eliot’s most feminine hero. His ostensibly ‘feminine’ quality of abundant empathy and psychological perceptiveness is contrasted with Gwendolen’s ‘masculine’ desire for power. He is the only person who sees Gwendolen for what she is behind her mask of superficial pride and cheerfulness. Naturally, Gwendolen is drawn to Deronda to help her make her life more bearable. He becomes her redeemer, in the same way as he redeems her necklace which she pawns after gambling. Her letter to him contains the most moving and tear-inducing lines of the whole novel. But, Deronda is the man with his own set of troubles. Unsure of his true identity, he struggles to find a stable niche in society. He is the medium which Eliot uses to explore the plight of London's scorned Jewish community and the emergence of Zionism, for which this novel is perhaps most famous for.Daniel Deronda is highly symbolic novel. All those literary references to mythology, science, philosophy, religion and mysticism, which slightly irritated me at first reading, fit perfectly in the thematic framework of the novel. The characters themselves are symbols. Grandcourt symbolises the corruption and vulgarity of English aristocracy, given to reckless materialism and hedonism. His need to crush Gwendolen could be interpreted as the Empire’s colonial ambitions to conquer and enslave the population of the Third World. Deronda’s alienation is symbolically shared by the Jewish people to a broader extent, who are scattered around the world with no actual homeland and scorned by the native population of their home countries.Overall, Daniel Deronda is a terribly exhausting but an equally rewarding read. If you are new to Eliot, I wouldn't recommend reading this first as it might put you off Eliot forever, but her earlier works such as The Mill on the Floss.
—Furqan
I completely agree. I enjoyed the book, but overall I found Mirah very boring and Deronda most interesting in his interactions with Gwendolyn who I found to be by far the most interesting character.
—Beth
This is a tale of ethics, of the way in which one young woman is overwhelmed by, shaped by and re-imagines herself due to her collision with the force of nature which is Daniel Deronda, a young man facing his own ethical questions. What do we owe to our heritage, to our parents, to ourselves? This is also a novel that explores the early Zionist movement, yet is tainted by a strong thread of (unconscious?) anti-Semitism running through it. The tale is told with a persistent current of irony, which pleasantly leavens its richly luxuriant language. In the end I found it to be most perfect in the loving way she portrays, and causes us to care deeply about, a thoroughly unpleasant young lady.
—Alexa
