Quote:
Originally Posted by astrangerhere
I am really struggling with Deronda as a character. He just feels like a Mary Sue / Marty Stu to me.
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About the unappetizing goodness of Daniel Deronda in
Daniel Deronda:
Perhaps Eliot felt compelled to introduce an early version of the Decent Male Savior we now recognize in the disturbingly likable Benjamin Sisko from "Start Wreck DS9" in order to justify her sympathetic portrayal of a Jewish woman and, later, a Jewish scholar and Zionist. She was writing a novel in serial form for a Victorian audience with a history of antisemitism.
As cumbrous as the dual plotting can feel, it might have seemed necessary to balance Mordechai and Mirah Lapidoth/Cohen with an undeniably good character who does not discover he is [plot reveal deleted] until Eliot is sure her audience identifies with him. Perhaps she anticipated that readers might need to cling to the safer side of the story. If so, I don't think it works now, but I can see why the arbitrary might have looked essential to her then.
I very much appreciate Eliot's sustained humanization of Jewish characters, just as I do her defense of Jewish people in this novel,
Middlemarch, letters to influential friends, and even a late essay that focuses on antisemitism. She is depressingly correct about snobbery and exclusion.
But Eliot's fascination/identification in
Daniel Deronda does seem superegoic to me, and as much as I always admire the levels of psychological and sociopolitical/economic intricacy she negotiates, the results in this case aren't as fluid as in
Middlemarch, with the deftness of its third-person ominiscience. Which is why I think Gwendolyn seems more alive than any other character in
Deronda when moving and thinking through time: she came more naturally to Eliot and her psychic wounds create resonant ambiguities, the kind that modern readers feel.
I don't agree with the F.R. Leavis of
The Great Tradition or
Scrutiny and usually do not, but I always appreciate his insights en route to rigid conclusions. He is wrong to suggest "improvements" to Eliot's novel -- why can't a reader who thinks like Leavis skip certain sections without inflicting his pair of scissors on everyone else? -- but he is not wrong to identify lessening engagement when Gwendolyn is absent.
And it is startling to see Eliot -- rapt in the importance of arguing her case for Jewish humanity and even Zionism -- overlook Palestinian humanity in the process because it feels like unintentional prophecy. Still, I would never expect a Victorian novelist, limited by her knowledge of outcomes, and the inequities of imperfect empathy in her time, to transcend that time. Dickens didn't do it either, and Eliot's understanding of the machinery of class was always more complex than his. I can't be upset with Eliot for being unaware of what she never could have foreseen.
And I can't blame her for getting stuck at levels of characterization involving models who were people she wanted to help but remained partly hidden to her despite her considerable compassion and insight.