I recently watched the wonderful BBC adaptation
of George Eliot’s novel Daniel Deronda, starring Hugh Dancy as the eponymous
hero, the ethereally beautiful Romola Garai as Gwendolen Harleth, Hugh
Bonneville as the smug Henleigh Mallinger Grandcourt, and a host of other BBC
stalwarts that added visual depth and emotional intensity to this film.
Daniel Deronda was first published in 1876. It was the last novel Eliot
completed and the only one set in the contemporary Victorian society of her
day. Its mixture of social satire and moral searching, along with a sympathetic
rendering of Jewish proto-Zionist and Kabbalistic ideas has made it a
controversial final statement of one of the greatest of Victorian novelists. An
article in the Guardian discusses how Eliot actually shocked some of her
readers by dealing with this topic and emphasises how Eliot’s portrayal of
Judaism and Zionism continues to resonate. For me, Eliot highlights the themes
of inner and outer struggles in the characters’ search for meaning, identity,
and self-worth.
This is a deep
novel and hard to outline in a blog post. However, information on Wikipedia
(see below) has proved incredibly useful in understanding the greater themes of
this riveting book.
Daniel Deronda is the ward of the wealthy Sir Hugo Mallinger and hero
of the novel, Deronda has a tendency to help others at a cost to himself. At
the start of the novel, he has failed to win a scholarship at Cambridge because
of his focus on helping a friend, has been travelling abroad, and has just
started studying law. He often wonders about his birth, and whether or not he
is a gentleman. As he moves more and more among the world-within-a-world of the
Jews of the novel, he begins to identify with their cause in direct proportion
to the unfolding revelations of his ancestry. Eliot used the story of Moses as
part of her inspiration for Deronda. As Moses was a Jew brought up as an
Egyptian who ultimately led his people to the Promised Land, so Deronda is a
Jew brought up as an Englishman, and the novel ends with his plan to do the
same.
Gwendolen Harleth is the beautiful, spoiled daughter of a widowed mother. Much
courted by men, she is flirtatious but ultimately self-involved. Early in the
novel, her family suffers a financial crisis, and she is faced with becoming a
governess to help support herself and her family. Seeking an escape, she
explores the idea of becoming an actress and singer but ultimately marries the controlling
and cruel Henleigh Grandcourt, although she does not love him. Desperately
unhappy, she seeks help from Deronda, who offers her understanding, moral support,
and the possibility of a way out of her guilt and sorrow. As a psychological
study of an immature egoist struggling to achieve greater understanding of
herself and others through suffering, Gwendolen is, for many, Eliot's crowning
achievement as a novelist and the real core of the book.
Daniel Deronda is
composed of two interwoven stories and presents two worlds that are never
completely reconciled. Indeed, the separation of the two and the eventual
parting of one from the other is one of the novel's major themes. There is the
fashionable, familiar, upper-class English world of Gwendolen Harleth and the
less familiar society-within-a-society inhabited by the Jews, most importantly
Mordecai (or Ezra) Cohen and his sister, Mirah. Living between these two worlds
is Daniel, who gradually identifies more and more with the Jewish side as he
comes to understand the mystery of his birth and develops his relationships
with Mordecai and Mirah. In the novel, the Jewish characters' spirituality,
moral coherence, and sense of community are contrasted favourably with the
materialist, philistine, and largely corrupt society of England. The inference
seems to be that the Jews' moral values are lacking in the wider British
society that surrounds them.
The BBC never fails
in its visually compelling and captivating adaptations of classic novels. The
series is beautifully photographed, with the wealth and opulence of the British
upper class severely contrasted with the squalor and poverty of the poorer
levels of society. The acting is wonderful, and Dancy and Garai are just
perfect as the main characters. Familiar faces from previous BBC classics are
evident, and overall, present a sterling cast.
There is so much
more to this book than what I have outlined, but if the idea of 484 pages is
too daunting, see the series first to get acquainted with the novel.
by Fiona Ingram
