Daniel Deronda Essay -- Essays Papers

Daniel Deronda Daniel Deronda, the final novel published by George Eliot, was also her most controversial. Most of Eliots prior novels dealt largely with idyll English life but in her final novel Eliot introduced a storyline for which she was both praised and dispar get along withd. The novel deals not only with the coming of age of Gwendolyn Har allowh, a young English woman, but also with Daniel Derondas stripping of his Jewish identity. Through characters like Mirah and Mordecai Cohen, Eliot depicts Jewish cultural identity in the Victorian period. Reaction to Daniel Deronda exposes the deeply embedded anti-semitism of the period. The story follows the tug main characters over the course of several years as they difference with their own self discovery. The novels primary female character, Gwendolyn, is an basically aloof figure that resists any genuine emotional connection. She enters into a confederation with Grandcourt in hopes of advancing herself socially but the resulting marriage is disastrous. Deronda, after delivery young Mirah from suicide, is drawn into a Judaic community. Deronda eventually discovers his Jewish hereditary pattern and marries Mirah. The two move to Palestine in hopes of helping to establish a Jewish homeland there. Eliot was not ignorant of the risks she ran in writing a novel that placed a minority culture at its center. In a letter to Harriet Beecher Stowe Eliot described her aims in writing Daniel Deronda this way in that respect is nothing I should care more to do, if it Were possible than to rouse the predilection of Men and wo custody to a vision of human claims in Those races of their fellow men who diff... ... a November 1876 letter to John Blackwood This is what I wanted to do- to widen the English vision a little in that direction and let in a little cons cience and refinement. I expected to put forward more resistance of feeling than I comport seen the signs of, but I did what I chose to do- not so well as I should have like to do it, but as well as I could.(qtd. in Haight, 304)Works CitedAshton, Rosemary. George Eliot A Life. New York Penguin, 1996.Cave,Terence. Introduction. Daniel Deronda. By George Eliot. London Penguin,1995. ix-xxxiii.Haight, Gordon. Ed. The George Eliot earn Volume VI. LondonYale Univ.Press, 1955.Karl, Frederick R. George Eliot Voice of a Century. New York Norton & Co., 1995.