
The Age of Innocence
David Stuart Davies looks at Edith Wharton's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel
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Jul
04
Jul
12
Writing
about Daniel Deronda (1876) in the
current hectic political climate invites caution; and that is precisely what makes
George Eliot’s novel so interesting. Eliot/Evans herself must have known that
she would be courting controversy in making Jewishness her central fictional
subject, and exploring the very beginnings of Zionism in a sympathetic way. She
creates a hero who turns out to be not the English gentleman he is presented
as, but the child of Jewish parents who then takes up the cause of his newly
discovered identity. And she pits a Jewish heroine against an English gentle
(and gentile) woman, both seeking Deronda’s love. Nineteenth-century society
was effortlessly and unthinkingly anti-semitic, for all Disraeli’s success,
power and prominence. Fictional representations of Jewishness in Dickens and
Trollope revealed a readiness to indulge in stereotypes which must have
reflected and played to the prejudice of their readerships. Those highly
successful authors show little complexity or empathy in their representations,
and little willingness to go imaginatively beyond standard expectations.
Then
along comes George Eliot. Eliot had already defied convention in her personal
life, by living with George Henry Lewes as wife in all but name. And while it’s
easy to write this now, without giving it close thought, it must have been
extremely difficult to live it out in her own society. Eliot was, then, an open
thinker, perhaps an oppositional thinker, and one who had made herself secure
in the openness of her own unconventionality. She was ready to take on a
difficult subject. But why this particular subject? Eliot was widely and deeply
read and commentators suggest that she would have read the works of Moses Hess
in the original German. Hess’s Rome and
Jerusalem (1862) was one of the earliest arguments for a Jewish state in
Palestine, embedded in socialist principles.[i] Through Mordecai, a
central character in the novel, puts into words many of Hess’s principles.
But
the particular writerly challenge for Eliot was to show the meeting of two
worlds, that of English upper-class society whose anti-semitism was immediate
and unexamined, and that of Jewish society in England, generally lower class
and ill-represented. Now in spite of her empathetic intent, there are still
many parts of this novel that make uncomfortable reading. When Daniel is
seeking out Mirah’s lost mother, he is tremendously relieved when he discovers
that the Cohens are not her relatives. This is a shop-keeping and pawn-broking family
who welcome him in to their world, and who indeed have given the fullest shelter
to Mordecai. But for Daniel, ‘if these were really Mirah’s relatives, he could
not imagine that even her fervid filial piety could give the reunion with them
any sweetness beyond such as could be found in the strict fulfillment of a
painful duty.’ If Daniel were to reflect for a minute, he would see that if
Mirah found her mother and brother, it wouldn’t matter what they were! It is
difficult to know at this point whether Eliot is showing that Daniel shares the
prejudices of his society, or whether indeed she is betraying her own prejudices.
Nonetheless,
Eliot’s stroke of genius is to have Deronda, the eponymous hero, straddle both
the Jewish and non-Jewish worlds. Initially we see him as simply liberal and
sympathetic, his rescue of Mirah from her self-drowning an act of human
empathy. But, in a watery novel where drowning features more than once, Deronda
is in the early chapters adrift upon the stream. Literally resting on his oars
when he spots the unhappy Mirah, he is in need of a cause. She gives him one at
first, but only as a shadow of the far greater cause which he will eventually
espouse.
Narratively,
this is a highly complex novel. The chapters where Deronda meets Mirah do not
come till the second volume – in terms of the original instalments in which the
novel was published, some way in. Conversely, the novel begins with Gwendolen
Harleth and Deronda’s first sighting of and interaction with her, which in
‘real time’ actually take place subsequently to his saving of Mirah. The two
episodes and interactions could not be more different. Gwendolen is gambling;
Mirah is about to take her life. In both cases, Daniel is the saviour; but
ostensibly, Mirah’s case is far more serious than Gwendolen’s. However, as the
novel develops, we see that Gwendolen is in just such a state of existential
distress as Mirah, in spite of the venal means whereby she expresses it. It is
Daniel’s gift, perhaps, that he treats both cases equally.
The
first revelation of this comes in Chapter 3 (chronologically set a year earlier
than the first two chapters), when a hidden painted panel at their newly-rented
home, Offendene, is shown to disclose ‘an upturned dead face, from which an
obscure figure seemed to be fleeing with outstretched arms’. Gwendolen’s
response is disproportionate, and it is accentuated when, playing charades in
Chapter 6 with Gwendolen as the statue of Hermione, the panel flies open to
reveal the unsettling image again. This elicits ‘a piercing cry from Gwendolen,
who stood without change of attitude, but with a change of expression that was
terrifying in its terror. She looked like a statue into which a soul of Fear
had entered’. The combination of
impersonating the apparently lifeless Hermione and the sudden apparition
associates Gwendolen’s fear with death. But as later iterations of it suggest,
it is more complex than that. ‘Solitude in any wide scene impressed her with an
undefined feeling of immeasurable existence aloof from her, in the midst of
which she was helplessly incapable of asserting herself.’ This is something
like existential angst, the dissolving of the self into the immeasurability of
the surrounding world – something we are more familiar with in the
twentieth-century novel. It particularly distresses Gwendolen that it can, as
here, seize her in the midst of company. Gwendolen’s terror will find its
apotheosis in Grandcourt; even, perhaps, that is what draws her to him. As she
herself realizes, ‘she was not going to marry [him] solely for her mamma’s sake
… she was drawn towards the marriage in ways against which stronger reasons
than her mother’s renunciation were yet not strong enough to hinder her’. It
will lead to her moment of tragic resolution; and the workings out of the novel
will very very slowly allow her to find some measure of goodness too.
Mirah
by comparison is inevitably a cipher; it is the eponymous Deronda who is the
dramatic and emotional counterbalance to Gwendolen in the novel, and he who
marries the supposed two parts of the novel, the Jewish and the non-Jewish
parts. The novel was persistently seen as split in this way both by English
critics who should have known better and by Jewish admirers who sought in the
novel affirmation for their own aims. F.R. Leavis as late as 1982 actually
proposed a whole new novel, Gwendolen
Harleth, quarried from Eliot’s text – just leaving out the boring Jewish
bits.[ii] And Mordecai Ben Hillel
Hacohen, who in 1899 seized on Eliot’s novel as espousing the Zionist cause,
was impatient with ‘Nearly all the first part and many chapters in the other
parts [which] have nothing to do with the great idea, the cornerstone of the
story, or with Mordecai.’ As they say, Eliot was clearly doing something right
if each ‘side’ wanted to excise the other.
The
impulse to excise is itself worrying, and inherently against the imaginative
exercise that George Eliot was engaged in all her life. Which brings us back to
our current state. We have become frightened to explore areas of thought that
are difficult and complex, that may lay us open to combat; or, reflexively, we
become combative. Eliot was courageous in exploring one of the faultlines of
her own society; and perhaps because of her fame and the following her many
novels had attracted, she carried her reading public with her. To a twenty-first
century audience, her attempts may seem creaky, even paternalistic. But she was
always concerned to engage her reader in the lives of others. Read Daniel Deronda and see what you think!