ELH

ELH 68.3 (2001) 699-724

"A Difference of Native Language": Gender, Genre, and Realism in Daniel Deronda

Sarah Gates

Genre studies of Daniel Deronda generally find themselves addressing the issue identified in Jerome Beaty's 1959 essay as "The Question of Unity." ¹ That is, in response to Leavis's judgment that the Jewish half of the novel ought to be removed and the novel renamed Gwendolen Harleth, critics have either defended the novel's unity or proposed new ways to understand its doubleness, often by calling the English plot something like "realism" (or "social realism" or "novel") and the Deronda plot something nonrealistic ("romance," "epic," or even "allegory"). ² However, the generic structures in the novel present a more complex picture than such a stark division into two plot lines suggests. For one thing, the protagonists from either side occupy a plot and genre together; for another, each half is animated by the play of more than one generic convention and by the relationship between these traditional genres and their realistic context. Whereas in Eliot's earlier fiction the force of realism acts as a kind of demystification of the energies produced by, for example, romance or pastoral in order to rein them in to the stable domestic closures that constitute the transcendent endings traditional to English realism, in Deronda Eliot adds the weightier energies of epic and tragedy to the kinds of romance that have directed so many of the stories in her earlier works, and in so doing stretches that force beyond its capacity to perform this demystifying and domesticating function. ³ Furthermore, as she does in the other novels, Eliot includes the complication of characters who occupy at the novel's opening unmarriageable subject positions; that is, they have internalized as their life stories antidomestic genres--and worse, internalized the "wrong" gender roles within those genres. In the earlier novels, a husband and wife are created out of such antidomestic materials fairly easily in order for domestic closure to take place, partly by means of a process that Nancy Miller has called "the regime of the male gaze" which virilizes the male and feminizes the female (causes her to see, as Miller says, "as a woman" rather than as, for example, a knight or saint). ⁴ This process, which seems only slightly disturbing in Adam Bede (for [End Page 699] example) becomes painfully dramatic in Deronda, where the domestic scene to which the female hero must sacrifice ambition and potential not only has no transcendence but becomes a virtual prison. Moreover, the re-gendering regime fails to domesticate her in the usual way, so that while the eponymous hero sails off successfully into his new epic script, she is left in the only position available to her dangerous energies: that of tragic scapegoat. To understand the nature of Eliot's feminism in these intersections of gender, literary form, and realistic technique is my aim in this essay.

The novel's epigraph seems an apt place to begin--unpacking, as it does, the aphorism about "limits" that opens the epilogue to Middlemarch (that "every limit is a beginning as well as an ending"):

Men can do nothing without the make-believe of a beginning. Even Science, the strict measurer, is obliged to start with a make-believe unit, and must fix on a point in the stars' unceasing journey when his sidereal clock shall pretend that time is at Nought. His less accurate grandmother Poetry has always been understood to start in the middle; but on reflection it appears that her proceeding is not very different from his; since Science, too, reckons backwards as well as forwards, divides his unit into billions, and with his clock-finger at Nought really sets off in medias res. No retrospect will take us to the true beginning; and whether our prologue be in heaven or on earth, it is but a fraction of that all-presupposing fact with which our story sets out. ⁵

These two quotations can be said to form the limit between Middlemarch and Daniel...