Kyle Johnston, "The Proprieties of Literature and Practical Life: The Realism of Books 3 & 4 of Daniel Deronda"

In her first conversation with Gwendolen at Quetcham Hall, Mrs. Arrowpoint, establishing her position as an authority on literary sentiment, insists on both the imaginative originality and truthfulness of her writing: “So many, you know, have written about Tasso; but they are all wrong. As to the particular nature of his madness, and his feelings for Leonora, and the real cause of his imprisonment, and the character of Leonora, who, in my opinion, was a cold-hearted woman, else she would have married him in spite of her brother—they are all wrong. I differ from everybody” (46). Torquato Tasso, a sixteenth-century Italian poet and dramatist, was imprisoned by his patron, the duke Alphonso II of Este, from 1579-1586 for madness, although legend held that it was actually to end an affair between Tasso and the princess Leonora d’Este (Oxford Reference, Wikipedia). Mrs. Arrowpoint’s study constructs the historical figure Tasso’s life “as a sort of romance” of which “there is so much that must be true” (47). Indeed, Mrs. Arrowpoint thus imagines her work as fulfilling a dual, seemingly paradoxical purpose of both creating a sustained constructed fantasy, and revealing through excavation a hidden, historical truth. Though the narrator tells us Gwendolen does not understand the meaning of her words, she is entirely correct in paraphrasing Mrs. Arrowpoint’s thoughts on the function of literature as “Imagination is often truer than fact” (47).

 Mrs. Arrowpoint’s ideas about literature return some two hundred pages later in Chapter 22 when Catherine Arrowpoint asserts her intention to marry Herr Klesmer. In her book, Mrs. Arrowpoint condemns the figure of Leonora, that “cold-hearted woman,” for submitting to the duties of her family and class and refusing her artist lover, and yet, faced with the same situation in her own life, she cannot accept Catherine’s love of Klesmer, for “it would be too hard—impossible—you could not carry it through” (245).  Mrs. Arrowpoint does not seem to feel the contradiction between her life and her study of Tasso's life. It is the narrator who, characteristically, notes the contradiction but asks the reader not to judge Mrs. Arrowpoint's flaws too harshly and, in so doing, establishes an opposing theory of literature’s relationship to reality: “It is hard for us to live up to our own eloquence, and keep pace with our winged words, while we are treading the solid earth and are liable to heavy dining. Besides, it has long been understood that the proprieties of literature are not those of practical life” (245). Winged words are opposed to solid earth. What happens in literature cannot always happen in lived experience. The epigraph of the chapter reads

We please our fancy with ideal webs

Of innovation, but our life meanwhile

Is in the loom, where busy passion plies

The shuttle to and fro, and gives our deeds

The accustomed pattern. (237)

Literature becomes an “ideal web” for acting out desires—the desire to marry outside of class obligations, for example—that the deterministic machinery of lived experience would reproduce into “accustomed patterns.” Literature opens a space where what cannot be imagined in lived experience can be imagined; it can hold the germ of an ideal that would be “too hard—impossible” to live.

Read in this way, Daniel Deronda’s mode of realism is not metonymic but metaphoric, not the naturalist “imitation of the everyday,” as Auerbach describes Madame Bovary, but a push toward something larger than what it refers to, a seeking of a kind of redemption or ideal in a larger system of meaning, similar to what Peter Brooks identifies in The Melodramatic Imagination as the “moral occult,” which the melodramatic mode, in the hands of novelists like Balzac and Henry James, draws on to create a sense of moral weight. Brooks finds in Balzac and James a repeatedly signified larger struggle between good and evil. The struggle in Daniel Deronda is epistemological—do we know things individually and abstractly, or contingently within a larger whole?—and reconciling these questions seems to carry an untold spiritual and moral weight. Daniel himself wants

some way of keeping emotion and its progeny of sentiments—which make the savours of life—substantial and strong in the face of a reflectiveness that threatened to nullify all differences. To pound the objects of sentiment into small dust, yet keep sentiment alive and active, was something like the famous recipe for making cannon—to first take a round hole and then enclose it with iron; whatever you do keeping fast hold of your round hole. Yet how distinguish what our will may wisely save in its completeness, from the heaping of cat-mummies and the expensive cult of enshrined putrefactions? (365)

He struggles to reconcile sentiment and reflection, to not lose his attachment to individual things in spite of a historical awareness that pounds those things into an undifferentiated dust. How to retain an individual meaning which is apparently absent, a lack, the “round hole” of a cannon, in spite of an understanding which sees all particular meanings as arising from the same processes?

            

A bit later, Daniel experiences a feeling of sublime transcendence listening to the Hebrew liturgy at a synagogue. His lack of knowledge of Hebrew effaces all the differences of the service into one meaning: “all were blent for him as one expression of a binding history, tragic and yet glorious. He wondered at the strength of his own feeling; it seemed beyond the occasion—what one might imagine to be a divine influx in the darkness, before there was any vision to interpret” (368). Daniel experiences something beyond the occasion in which all of its particular meanings are merged together to create a surplus of meaning too strong to contain. This surplus of meaning carries over to the reader as well. There is something sublimely important about this moment which suggests a universal human spiritual connection.

            

This chapter immediately follows Gwendolen’s last chapter in Book IV. Entering her room at Ryelands for the first time, Gwendolen sees “herself repeated in glass panels” (358), recognizes in the images herself as Mrs. Grandcourt, before the housekeeper delivers her a package containing the diamonds and letter from Lydia Glasher. After reading the letter, Gwendolen has a “spasm of terror” (359):

She could not see the reflections of herself then: they were like so many women petrified white; but coming near herself you might have seen the tremor in her lips and hands. She sat so for a long while, knowing little more than that she was feeling ill, and that those written words kept repeating themselves in her. (359)

The letter and the “poisoned gems” do nothing more than tell Gwendolen what she already knew, and yet their receipt entirely changes her understanding of herself and her position. It is not that the letter makes Gwendolen question her morals, but that it reorients her from seeing herself as a particular person to one of a type. She can no longer recognize herself in the mirrors: she is one of so many undistinguishable petrified women. She no longer sees herself abstracted as a unique, individual subject, but as one of any number of interchangeable objects occupying the role of Grandcourt’s lover. Her symbolic role is already defined: the written words repeat themselves in her, beyond her control. While Daniel finds in struggling with the contradiction between the particular and the typical a kind of spiritual transcendence, Gwendolen finds a terrific void, an existential emptiness that, like Daniel’s experience, has a surplus of meaning beyond the particular occasion.