Labours of a Modern Storyteller: George Eliot and the Cultural Project of ‘Nationhood’ in Daniel Deronda

Abstract

If one were momentarily to suspend disbelief as to the wisdom of appealing to an artist for an interpretation of her own work, a particularly rife place for doing so would be with George Eliot and Daniel Deronda. Writing to Barbara Bodichon in October 1876, Eliot claims of her last novel that she ‘meant everything in the book to be related to everything else there’ (Haight 1955, 290). The history of criticism on Daniel Deronda seems for the most part to take us in quite the opposite direction, following the lead, as it does, of F. R. Leavis’s pronouncement on the well-nigh ungodly split between the Gwendolen/Grandcourt plot and the Deronda/Mordecai plot (1949, 79–125). This latter, often referred to simply as the ‘Jewish portion’ of the novel, is, in Leavis’s view, nothing more than a blight upon the rest of the book — there simply to be done away with; in his words, literally to be cut away. When, pace Leavis, the two parts of the novel are read together, the Jewish portion is often interpreted as a corrective to the dehumanised personal relations defining the Gwendolen plot.¹ In other words, the Mordecai/Deronda story finds itself in the unusual position of being deemed either completely superfluous or utterly indispensable to the novel as a whole. In whichever case, the two plot-lines are in some sense treated as separable from one another.