Daniel Deronda Essay -- Essays Papers

Daniel Deronda Daniel Deronda, the final falsehood produce by George Eliot, was also her most controversial. Most of Eliots prior novels dealt mostly with provincial English life scarcely in her final novel Eliot introduced a falsehoodline for which she was both praised and disparaged. The novel deals not only with the approach shot of age of Gwendolyn Harleth, a young English woman, but also with Daniel Derondas discovery of his Judaic individualism. 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 tow main characters over the course of several years as they struggle with their own self discovery. The novels primary egg-producing(prenominal) character, Gwendolyn, is an essentially aloof figure that resists any genuine emotional connection. She enters into a union with Grandcourt in hopes of advancin g herself socially but the resulting marriage is disastrous. Deronda, later saving young Mirah from suicide, is drawn into a Judaic community. Deronda eventually discovers his Jewish heritage and marries Mirah. The two move to Palestine in hopes of helping to realise a Jewish homeland there. Eliot was not ignorant of the risks she ran in composition 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 port There is nothing I should care more to do, if it Were possible than to come alive the imagination of Men and women to a vision of human claims in Those races of their partner men who diff... ... a November 1876 letter to John Blackwood This is what I cherished to do- to widen the English vision a little in that delegation and let in a little conscience and refinement. I expect to excite more resistance of feeling than I have 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. capital of the United Kingdom Penguin,1995. ix-xxxiii.Haight, Gordon. Ed. The George Eliot Letters Volume VI. LondonYale Univ.Press, 1955.Karl, Frederick R. George Eliot Voice of a Century. New York Norton & Co., 1995.