Between Cultures: Daniel Deronda

George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda is an extremely complex and tortuous novel, structured by many plots and subplots. Because of its complexity and the unwonted interlocking of events and situations, the book has been the target of extensive criticism for lack of cohesion.

The text seems to propel its meanings in different directions, without any apparent unity. However, on a close analysis, it becomes clear that it is precisely this internal rupture which brings all the separate meanings to a focal point.The text was evidently meant by Eliot as a virulent critique of Englishness, as manifested in her contemporary society. To articulate this critique of deeply rooted racial and ethnic prejudice, Eliot opposes to it the Jewish spirit and rhetoric.

The contingence of the two worlds is bound to create a rupture in the structure of the text. As it shall be seen, cultural difference is represented through the relationships established between the three main characters, Daniel Deronda, Gwendolen Harleth and Mirah Lapidoth. Daniel Deronda is a cultural hybrid, balancing on the borderline of two different identities.His liminal role is symbolized by his position between the two women, the English Gwendolen and the Jewish Mirah. The choice that Deronda will eventually make by marrying Mirah has the effect of an identity shift towards otherness or what he, Deronda, had perceived as otherness before. The narrative structure is important because of its episodic representation of events.

The focus of the storytelling shifts from one character to another, drawing interesting parallels between their life stories and their personalities. In the scheme of the text, Deronda occupies a middle point between Gwendolen and Mirah.The two women are constructed as opposites in almost every respect. This limit between their characters is inhabited by Deronda, who will have to make a choice between the two. Gwendolen Harleth, who is introduced first in the text, is a beautiful, willful and self-centered woman who has a very romantic notion of her own character.

Her narcissism is plainly visible in a number of different scenes in the novel, both directly through her fixation with her own reflected image and indirectly through her self-centered perspective of the world.Despite these moral faults, Gwendolen is far more complex than all the other characters in the book. Right until the end, Gwendolen appears as a splendid and passionate character, self-indulgent and independent. Her own beauty is one of her central preoccupations. Gwendolen is an epitome of self-love, making a true profession of simply being herself and delighting in her own existence.

Her passion for gambling is also symbolic, as she appears to be attracted by the way in which this context sets off her figure and character. This passion is also a token of her deeply sensual nature.Gwendolen is dependent on riches and beautiful things, because she finds it intolerable to exist on a grim background. As a true narcissist, Gwendolen sees her reflected image in everything that surrounds her. She constantly places herself outside her own being so as to be able to watch her own body as a spectator might. The early scene of Gwendolen’s endearment to her own image in the mirror is very significant: “Her beautiful lips curled into a more and more decided smile, till at last she took off her hat, leaned forward and kissed the cold glass which had looked so warm.

How could she believe in sorrow? ”(Eliot) The scene poignantly emphasizes Gwendolen’s warm passion for herself. To her, the mirror is warm, enlivened by her expression. Eliot therefore constructs Gwendolen as a perfect narcissist, who is entirely dependent on her own reflection in the things that surround her. It is this self-love that both shelters Gwendolen from misery and plunges her violently into it. Self-contentment and the highly aesthetic image she has of herself make her doubt the possibility of sorrow or regret.

She is satisfied in herself completely.However, when her independence is threatened, after the financial ruin of her family, Gwendolen is forced to focus on things outside herself and assume positions that mar the delight she takes in her own reflection. The interesting thing that disrupts Gwendolen’s story as recounted in the first part of the novel is her constant remembrance of Deronda’s ironic glance fixing her while she was gambling. This subversive glance, which is in the beginning the sole communication between the two strangers is the beginning of Gwendolen’s complete moral reform under Deronda’s influence.Deronda’s other act of carefully returning the necklace that Gwendolen was going to pawn in the hope of earning more money at the game of cards is also a threat to her self-contentment. What is interesting is therefore the way in which Deronda’s influence on Gwendolen progresses from this subversive form to the ultimate surrender of the young woman.

The way in which Deronda relates himself to her is also important. He is attracted by her, but he regards her with superciliousness at the same time.Gwendolen is a marked representative of Englishness, giving tokens of racism when she gambles through her stereotypical ideas of Jewishness: “These Jew dealers were so unscrupulous in taking advantage of Christians unfortunate at play! ”(Eliot 14) Her sense of morality is in perfect accordance with her willful and independent nature. Revolted against the new, poor condition of her family, she blames Mr.

Lassmann who had risked her family’s property and lost it all: “What is the good of calling the people's wickedness Providence? ”(Eliot 199) Interestingly, Gwendolen fails to notice that Mr.Lassmann’s “wickedness” is extremely similar to her own, in her unbridled passion for gambling. Gambling itself, as well as being a symbol for Gwendolen’s luscious and passionate nature, may pertinently be a parallel for the stereotypical image of the Jews as a greedy people. Gwendolen’s self-indulgence is often paired by criticism or intolerance of the others’ faults. Mirah is in every way constructed as an opposite of Gwendolen.

Deronda’s position with respect to both Gwendolen and Mirah is significant, because it points to the way in which he situates himself between the two cultures.According to Oliver Lovesey, “Deronda is the outsider within, the other shown to be the same/difference. ”(Lovesey 505) Deronda’s double identity is undeniable. He is both English and a representative of the other because his hidden identity as a Jew.

Deronda’s background as a Jew that does not yet know about his true identity and that was raised as an English man is of special interest to the analysis. On the one hand, he is the one to influence and ultimately ‘save’ Gwendolen from her own self and bend her rebellious and selfish nature.At the same time however, Deronda also saves Mirah only in a very different way. Unlike Gwendolen who was overindulged by her family, Mirah was constantly coerced by her father into living a life that she could not appreciate.

Her response to life in general and to sufferance is very different from that of Gwendolen. As she herself remarks while recounting the story of her troubled childhood, she was able to endure the hardships by creating a world of herself out of everything good and beautiful that she encountered: “I chose what seemed to me beautiful out of the plays and everything, and made my world out of it.”(Eliot 181)If Gwendolen places herself outside her own being to regard her own movements and figure externally, Mirah moves inside herself, enclosing there the good and beautiful things she sees in her path. It is first Mirah and then her brother that cause Deronda to shift gradually towards his Jewish identity and leave the English inheritance behind. As Lovesey remarks, Mirah represents racial otherness in the novel, the difference:“Mirah Lapidoth, who encodes racial otherness in the novel, provides Deronda access to his essential difference.

Mirah generates the novel’s typology of otherness. ”(Lovesey 505) By approaching the difference and then uniting with it, Deronda becomes himself the other. Eliot uses the opposition between Gwendolen and Mirah to give evidence of this cultural difference. In his relationship with Gwendolen Deronda represents the voice of moral authority, the one who always admonishes and points the right course.

To Mirah however he is instantly attracted because of her utter innocence and vulnerability. Saving her from the terrible act of suicide, he becomes as a guardian angel for her.According to Alicia Carroll, Deronda and Mirah are mirror images, resembling in their origins, in their life stories as well as in their moral rectitude and selflessness: “In their capacity for misery, Deronda and Mirah are mirror images, brother and sister of a tainted origin. “(Carroll 226) It is obvious that Deronda is first attracted to the stranger’s story because he feels the basic resemblance between his experience and hers: they are both in search for their origins and for their identities, and both have been taken away from their mothers at a very early age.

The question of origin that unites them is also very important because it is closely related to the idea of cultural identity. Mirah and Deronda therefore reflect each-other, while Gwendolen is identical and preoccupied only with herself. Gwendolen is distracted from any other contemplation by her own image: “Catching the reflection of her movements in the glass panel, she was diverted to the contemplation of the image there and walked toward it. ”(Eliot 214) For Gwendolen, this tight relationship with her own image is essential.

She feels different from the others, and is sensible to her own troubles more than to those of anyone else since she knows that her sensibility may be greater than that of the others: “The family troubles, she thought, were easier for everyone than for her--even for poor dear mamma, because she had always used herself to not enjoying. ”(Eliot 214) Her permanent introspection and her deep relationship with her own self make of Gwendolen a particularly interesting character.She strongly believes that she is the only one that she can know and understand herself: “How can anyone know that I exaggerate, when I am speaking of my own feeling? ”(Eliot 534) It is from these characteristics which are meant to be symbolic of Englishness in the novel, that Deronda flees to Mirah. The two are united by the force of their common background and uncertainty of birth: “Something in his own experience caused Mirah's search after her mother to lay hold with peculiar force on his imagination. ”(Eliot 175) It is in Deronda’s first reaction to Mirah that the intention of the text is made plain.He feels at the same time inexplicably connected to her, but also perceives her otherness: “He felt inclined to watch her and listen to her as if she had come from a far off shore inhabited by a race different from our own.

”(Eliot 192) The racial otherness will become his own identity through this union. Both he and Mirah share features of the Jewish people, with the tendency towards empathy and submission to the others: “Deronda's conscience included sensibilities beyond the common, enlarged by his early habit of thinking himself imaginatively into the experience of others.”(Eliot 436)The two different cultures therefore, the English and the Jew are opposed in this parallel between the characters of Gwendolen and Mirah. Deronda is therefore caught between to cultural realities, symbolized by the two women.

Gwendolen finally metamorphoses under his influence and probably manages to attain a certain degree of moral happiness, although at the price of losing her old self. Deronda also suffers an identity shift, as he is finally able to put together the missing parts of his character and find his other self, the Jewish origin.