Joe Post, "Generic Displacement and Judaic Fixations: Contemporary Reviews of the Final Books of *Daniel Deronda*"

An initial survey of the reviews following the publication of the final books of Daniel Deronda reveals the culmination of a growing dissatisfaction with Eliot’s last published novel. Many of these reviewers fixated on the “Jewish portion” of the novel, a concern that Eliot and George Henry Lewes had anticipated in early correspondence with William Blackwood (Martin 91). This plot, seen as completely discrete from Gwendolen’s more engaging plot, led to an overall dissatisfaction with the novel. Many reviewers cast Daniel Deronda in the shadow of Middlemarch, leading one reviewer to resituate Deronda within a separate literary category. And while this generic transplantation points to a continued interest in the formal qualities of the novel, the majority of reviewers released their initial concerns with the means of the novels production (aptly discussed by Kyle Johnston on this blog). Instead, this former distaste gave way to a preoccupation with perceived threats to English cultural superiority.

The critical dissatisfaction with Deronda began earlier than the publication of its final number in September 1876. In fact, “many reviewers found book 6 … just as satisfying as they had the first five parts” (Hughes and Lund 168). These earlier installments allowed British readers to imaginatively create their own conclusions, writing for Daniel and Gwendolen an ending far different from that which Eliot later revealed. The growing anti-Semitic sentiment that reviews for Books 6 and 6 fomented, led readers and reviewers to be “predictably dissatisfied” with Book 7 (Hughes and Lund 168). The increasing predominance of the “Jewish plot” and the pull that Judaism exerts on Daniel become the central focus of these later reviews.

Readers of Deronda initially saw the Jewish plot as subordinate and even subservient to the English plot of the novel. Some reviews of Book 4 went so far as to praise those sections regarding Mirah and Mordecai, “but they were consistently seen as unconnected to what was considered the main, that is the English, story” (Hughes and Lund 162). Part of this prioritizing of the English story involved readers’ liking Daniel only insofar as he served as potential husband to Gwendolen. One critic for the Daily News particularly stressed that he represented the broader readership in wishing that Gwendolen “were destined to marry” Daniel (Martin 97). Any possibility of Daniel’s marriage to Mirah in earlier books was denied. In addition, critics cast Mordecai as a rambling lunatic, whose Zionistic longings and preaching were as unappealing as they were improbable (Martin 98). Even reviewers who acknowledged the favorable portrayal of the Jews still resisted the inclusion of the entire Jewish plot. They didn’t seem concerned with portraying Jews positively, but rather with how the “English identity could no longer be seen as distinct from and superior to the Jewish character” (Hughes and Lund 168).

In conceiving the Jewish and English plots as disparate and unconnected, both contemporary critics and twentieth-century scholars suggested that the Jewish plot be removed to preserve Eliot’s skill as an author. Though F. R. Leavis famously declared that the Jewish plot could easily be removed from the novel to maintain the integrity of Eliot’s prowess, the same proposal appeared as early as the 4 October 1876 Guardian: “the Jewish part of the story is simply odd and inexplicable. It has nothing to do with the main plot, which would move on quite smoothly if it was all cut out” (qtd. in Martin 98). The reviewer for the Guardian had the advantage of looking at Deronda as a whole, unlike the many earlier reviews that expressed a growing dislike for the Jewish plot.

Some reviewers defended Eliot’s writing. In order to do so, though, at least one reviewer decided to recast the entire genre of the novel so as to resituate Eliot within a different literary tradition. R. E. Francillon’s “George Eliot’s First Romance”—as clearly indicated by its title—argues that while Eliot typically wrote realist fiction, Daniel Deronda decidedly stands as a romance. His review, published in the Gentleman’s Magazine in October 1876, states that Eliot’s previous works fell neatly within the prevailing form of realist fiction. In fact, Francillon identifies Eliot as among those responsible for the “disesteem into which romantic fiction has fallen” (411).  Even Romola, which others may consider a romance, was, by comparison to Deronda “no romance in the sense that the term must be applied to Daniel Deronda as the key to its place and nature” (412). For this reason, according to Francillon, reviewers of Deronda felt disappointed to find a romance where they expected a realist novel.

Francillon answers concerns over the Jewish elements of the novel by framing these elements within a romantic tradition, explaining away their peculiarity and foreignness and justifying them as perfectly reasonable within a romance. Deronda, says Francillon, “lies so far outside George Eliot’s other works in every important respect as to make direct comparison impossible. It cannot be classed as first, or second, or third, or last” (412). Francillon’s review makes apparent that he and others saw that the only means of recovering Eliot’s reputation as an author is to resituate Deronda as not operating within the same tradition of writing that Eliot herself forged. Instead of continuing a trend of writerly excellence, Eliot produced in Deronda a “new era” of her writing with a “first novel” (412). In this same way, Henry James posits Deronda’s position within a different stylistic tradition. In an article first published in the Atlantic Monthly in December 1876, James dramatizes the conversation between three friends as they reflect on Eliot’s latest novel. At one moment, Pulcheria, an overly critical reader of Deronda, says, “The tone is not English, it is German” (686). The only recourse for justifying Eliot’s expansively criticized work is to resituate, to re-categorize, to displace, and to isolate Daniel Deronda as an anomalous foray into a discarded genre.

Francillon offered a prediction for how Deronda would serve Eliot’s reputation, claiming that “it promises to secure for its author a more slowly growing, perhaps less universal, but deeper and higher fame than the works with which it does not enter into rivalry” (412). He concedes that the “world is not prone to believe in many-sided genius” (412), yet he centers his entire review on defending Eliot’s position in this category. Whether Deronda secured that fame for Eliot predicted by Francillon is subject for another blog, research for another day. Yet if Leavis’s analysis and Barbara Hardy’s distinction of the successful and less successful “piece of characterization” (124) show anything, they demonstrate that the novel’s formal, generic, and story fractures continue to divide and perplex critics.