Joe Post, "“The Outer World Presses on Me and Narrows the Inward Vision”: Interiority and Exteriority, Place and Character in *Daniel Deronda*"

As Book V of Daniel Deronda opens, George Eliot describes the wintery scene at Topping Abbey. A “splendid fall of snow” had just blanketed Sir Hugo’s residence just days after Christmas.* The guests and inhabitants of the Abbey, eager to take in the architecture of building, set out on a walk through the grounds. When they come upon the stables, the narrative pace slows, offering an expansive description of the choir-turned-stables. With its broken limestone and “touches of snow…on every ledge,” the exterior of the stables gives a “startling effect” to the interior (419). Inside, “each finely-arched chapel was turned into a stall,” light falling inside and shining upon the many faces of the horses. Gwendolen’s response to the scene bursts out, “Oh, this is glorious!” The stables caused Gwendolen to forget “everything but the immediate impressions, and she promptly regrets having voiced her preference for the Abbey’s stables over those she has at Diplow.

This singular moment, leaving so strong an impact on Gwendolen, paints the portrait of an antique building re-appropriated for a use far different from its original purpose. A blending of interior and exterior gives the stables the forcible impression that prompts Gwendolen’s outburst. Throughout the novel, setting often has more force than mere background. If the “discrete representation of any specific individual is intertwined with the narrative’s continual apportioning of attention to different characters who jostle for limited space within the same fictive universe” (Woloch 13), then the literal space these characters occupy must similarly “jostle” for attention within this fictional space. Gwendolen’s response to physical space does not comprise the only interaction between characters and place. The fitting comparisons of Gwendolen’s and Daniel’s lives continue in comparing their interaction with and occupation of spaces within the novel. Daniel’s penchant for rowing brings him into contact with important epoch-shaping moments in his life.

The  tendency toward reading setting as “mere backdrop for the human drama that really count[s]” can sometimes distract from the way that place shapes the unfolding of a character (Buell 3).** Gwendolen herself exhibits this tendency when she first arrives at Offendene. While Eliot’s narrator offers a detailed physiognomy of Offendene a few pages earlier, Gwendolen reduces the estate to a backdrop: she says that it is “charming” and a “romantic place; anything delightful may happen in it; it would be a good background for anything” (26). Gwendolen offers no agency or influence to place, but as the novel continues, place becomes increasingly important for Gwendolen and Daniel.  

Daniel’s river excursions offer the setting for two important moments in his interaction with Mirah and Mordecai. Both of these moments depend on Daniel’s poetic sensibilities, his “fervor which made him easily find poetry and romance among the events of everyday life.” While rowing on the Thames in Book II, Daniel first sees Mirah on the riverbanks, but it is only later that evening, on his return trip, that he engages with Mirah. With the approach of Daniel’s “favorite hour— with its deepening stillness and darkening masses of tree and building between the double glow of the sky and the river,” Daniel settles down in his boat to watch the water.  He places himself in such a way that none but the nearest passerby could observe him looking out. While thus reclined, he sees Mirah preparing her coat as a “drowning shroud.” Yet does the setting merely remain as setting? Does this twilight hour have any deeper significance within the narrative of Daniel’s character? Later, at the close of Book V, Daniel again rows along the Thames, this time encountering Mordecai near a different bridge. As Daniel rows,

the gray day was dying gloriously, its western clouds all broken into narrowing purple strata before a wide-spreading saffron clearness, which in the sky had a monumental calm, but on the river, with its changing objects, was reflected as a luminous movement, the alternate flash of ripples or currents, the sudden glow of the brown sail, the passage of laden barges from blackness into color, making an active response to that brooding glory.

The juxtaposition of sky and water, of calm and movement offers a tension that leads naturally into Daniel’s unexpected meeting with Mordecai. When they seek a place to converse, Mordecai worries that finding some unfamiliar spot will hamper his prophetic mind, admitting that “In new places the outer world presses on me and narrows the inward vision.” Gwendolen’s experience at the Abbey’s stables shows a clear moment of the outer world overpowering the inward vision, whereas Daniel’s poetic sensibilities open himself up to receive what interpretations the world around him may offer for understanding the many figures that populate those spaces.

Setting and place within Daniel Deronda offers fertile ground for literary interpretation. The cultivated natural spaces of Offendene, Diplow, and Topping Abbey function in direct relation to those more constructed spaces within built places. The Abbey’s library in which Gwendolen seeks Daniel’s advice, the “new and striking scene” of the Philosophers club in which Daniel sees Mordecai preach to unreceptive ears, even the Meyrick’s home bedecked with images and portraits represent spaces that function as more than “mere backdrops” for “human drama.” The ebb and flow between characters and place extend the connections made between the interiority and exteriority of individual characters. So much of the novel concerns itself with showing what characters are thinking and feeling while exposing the inability of others to accurately interpret that interiority. In much the same way, setting enters the novel with an irrelevant degree of what Woloch calls “minorness,” functioning as much as a character through which to see into central figures as any other “minor” character within the novel.

*Perhaps contemporary readers of the novel’s serialization had to make an imaginative leap, as this installment appeared in June 1876.

** While Buell may argue for even greater agency and centrality of setting and environment within ecocritical readings of texts, I focus here on developing an awareness of how place and setting may inform interpretations of characters.