One last lash at Deronda

{And now, one last post on Daniel Deronda, this one by Maggie Bandur. For the whole run of Deronda posts, just scroll on down!}

I really don't think I should have the last word, but I do feel like I need to express a sense of disappointment with Daniel Deronda. When I began it, I was so swept up, I thought this is the book I am going to be giving as a gift for the next several years--with a long explanation why the recipient should commit to 900 pages. But I do think the book never quite gels, and it is not a challenge to my expectations, but a flaw. Even as I am touched by Gwendolen's unrequited love, I still feel all her dealings belong to a separate novel from the one of mystical religious awakening.

I also found myself affected by the scenes where Deronda and Mordecai are drawn to each other--in the shop, on the bridge. There's something undeniably beautiful about them. But the first part of the novel paints Deronda so convincingly as the typical deeply humanistic, but unambitious protagonist, that it is hard for me to believe him when he tells Gwendolen he has always been wanting a sense of duty. I don't object to a character not realizing he has a void and then discovering the spiritual sense that fills it; I just don't think Eliot has shown me his development convincingly. The child who had such a hissy fit when someone mildly suggested he should be a singer seems unlikely to be the adult who, not only takes the revelation of himself being a Jew so calmly--a revelation that immediately changes his status in the society to which he has hitherto been so devoted--but now feels as if his whole life is fulfilled. I think his journey might need another 50-100 pages to feel real. Although I laughed when his mother basically asks, "So who's the girl?" I suppose that explains a lot.

I found myself unexpectedly amused several times towards the end. When Mirah lashes out from jealousy, she is such a stranger to normal human emotion that she wonders at the revelation that this "jealousy" must be what all those arias she sings are about! And Gwendolen, whose whole story is about her learning to be less selfish, never stops talking about herself long enough for the basic courtesy of asking Daniel how he is doing, and so it takes him weeks to tell her the news he is getting married and moving away forever. And as much as she needs his comfort, what special message does Deronda really impart to her about how to live beyond be kinder? It makes me think of Mark Markowitz's comment: maybe these people just aren't very nice.

There is so much that is good and clever and well-observed about the book, that I would still recommend it, but it is not a complete enough piece to give for Christmas (or Hannukah). And I know it is a moral failing, but I find myself clinging to the hope that "off screen" the characters are getting a traditional Victorian novel ending. Humbled and with diminished circumstances, Gwendolen can marry Rex and Hans will marry Anna, and they will all live happily ever after. I was surprised how much I ended up liking the selfish, flighty, pretentious Hans because he seemed to have the right attitude toward the proceedings: when Hans suggests Gwendolen will marry Rex, and Daniel wonders why she should have to wed again, Hans replies, "'You monster!' retorted Hans, 'do you want her to wear weeds for you all her life--burn herself in perpetual suttee while you are alive and merry?" Yeah!

Disappointed in Daniel Deronda

{This may be the final post in the back-and-forth that Maggie Bandur and I have been conducting on Daniel Deronda, though it’s possible that my assessment here will prompt Maggie to respond. Regardless, thanks for sticking with us through this (unexpectedly slow-paced) reading.}

In his introduction to the Penguin Classics edition of Daniel Deronda, Terence Cave sums up contemporary responses from English readers and critics. My paraphrase: It would be great if it weren’t for all that stuff about Jews. Cave notes, however, that even as English critics praised the Gwendolen Harleth sections and dismissed the Jewish characters and themes, Jewish publications were doing the opposite. It’s easy, therefore, to write off the English establishment’s response as anti-Semitism, or, at a minimum, discomfort with the different social strata and lives represented by Eliot’s Jewish characters.

The problem is that they’re right. They’re not right about the Jewish characters and themes themselves being a problem, of course--that’s where the social discomfort in the response is hard to deny--but their criticisms point to the way that the failure of those aspects of the novel to be integrated with the novel’s other concerns ultimately dooms Daniel Deronda. Think back to where the book begins: We watch a striking young woman throwing caution, and propriety, to the winds at the gaming table. We meet the young man, of mysterious past, who is watching her--and who quickly, anonymously, intervenes to help her clear a debt. We know their stories will be intertwined, and that these next many hundred pages will reveal some sort of approach, combat, and resolution of their independent wills and fates.

That Eliot doesn’t deliver what we expect is not a flaw. Her decision to instead show a mismatch, a truly unrequited love, is impressive, and it makes for some moving scenes, as Gwendolen realizes that Deronda is not the safe harbor she’d been counting on. And her desire to bring in larger themes, and paint a portrait of a mostly neglected, often despised people is also admirable. Cave defends her decisions in the introduction,

The evidence might, it is true, seem to confirm the view that the novel falls into two separate parts, each appealing to different tastes and different cultural norms; but that would be to accept the least demanding reading (on both sides), whereas patently the point of the novel is to make unusual demands on the reader.

He is right that Eliot is trying to do something new, and it’s our job as readers to attempt to meet her on her ground. The problem, however, isn’t with her plan, but with her execution: She wants us to see Deronda driven by a quest for identity and purpose, a quest that can’t be fulfilled through a typical social life and novel-ending marriage. Yet Deronda’s questing always feels light, of limited depth and complexity. I compared him once before to Tolstoy’s Pierre, and I think the comparison remains instructive: Pierre is flighty and irresponsible, but we never question the fact that he’s driven by his inchoate desire to belong to something larger. By contrast, Deronda’s similar desire never ripens for the reader.

That failure can be laid squarely at the feet of Eliot’s two most important Jewish characters, Mirah and Ezra. Her secondary Jewish characters are wonderfully drawn: we believe in, and appreciate, all the Cohens from the minute they appear on stage. But Mirah and Ezra suffer greatly from a flaw that in literature is all but insurmountable, even after we discount for contemporary distrust of sentimentalism: perfection. I wrote before about Mirah’s gauziness, the insipidity that makes her as formless and uninteresting as a love interest in Dickens, but Ezra is just as bad. What do we know of him? He’s ill, he’s obsessed with Jewish history and philosophy, and he’s unfailingly kind and polite. But when we attend his discussion group with Deronda, we hear nothing from him that captivates, see nothing of the fervor or eloquence that could make us understand Deronda’s fascination. Like Mirah, he exists only as a perfection, an instrument for opening Deronda’s mind, and thus we have a hard time caring about just what Deronda’s mind is being opened to.

The same problem plagues the revelation of Deronda’s Jewish heritage. His mother--who at least is memorable in her self-absorption and caustic speech--turns out to be someone we’ve never encountered before, and the big secret of Deronda’s Jewish ancestry is exactly the one we’ve assumed we’d learn. The revelation fazes us barely more than it fazes Deronda (though perhaps we benefit unfairly from the passage of time in that case; it’s conceivable that seeing the very picture of an English gentleman revealed as a Jew could have provided a salutary shock to Eliot’s readers in her day)--it merely opens the door for him to definitively break with Gwendolen’s fantasies.

Gwendolen Harleth is a character worth reading 900 pages for, even if the novel disappoints. And nothing by Eliot could ever be devoid of interest, given her piercing intelligence and facility with epigrammatic observations. But oh, how I wish that Daniel Deronda were the novel it appears to be in its opening, full of fire and dash, mixing self-dealing subterfuges by Lush and clever machinations by Gwendolen, honorable doubt from Deronda and long-held secrets from Sir Hugo. What I wish for, I realize, is a much more traditional novel--and perhaps not a George Eliot novel at all. But sometimes it’s worth remembering the value of form, and this book brought it to mind: to watch such a compelling set-up dissolve into so much inchoate blandness can’t help but frustrate.

Yes, but how long is the apprenticeship?, or, Impatience then and now

{My friend Maggie Bandur and I are nearing the end of our wander through Daniel Deronda, and, in realization of that, in today's post Maggie backtracks a bit, taking us to an earlier scene that caught her eye. If you're just joining us and want to follow the whole thread, just scroll down to earlier entries and work your way back up; the first post is here.}

I appear to be the hold-up here, and while Levi travels for work and family, edits a book, hold down a prestigious job and runs six miles a day, I have no such excuses. I have spent much of the last month literally staring at the wall. This is the hiring time for television writers, when most of the shows staff up, and if you don't get one of the lucrative chairs when the music stops, you may not work again for a while. And although TV staff jobs will give you a mouth like a sailor, you develop no other transferable, marketable skills.

I would like to think it's not just my fretting that has held me back. The fact is I have actually (Shhh!) finished the book. I do think I am still trying to process how I ultimately feel about Daniel and Gwendolen and Mirah and their fates. (They all die. Shhh.) So, if I am permitted to backtrack a little--and Levi never responded to my e-mail to tell me I couldn't--there is a conversation in Daniel Deronda that has really stuck with me, especially in my current mental state. I was so tickled to discover, in the midst of this nineteenth-century novel, a conversation I have had many times: the one where someone asks how to break into the entertainment industry and--more importantly--how long before they can expect to be famous?

Her family having lost their money, Gwendolen decides she is going to take to the stage as an actress and singer. After all, she's always been a hit at parties. She goes to Klesmer, the composer for advice, and the results are eerily familiar. Gwendolen presents her plan with "the conviction that now she made this serious appeal the truth would be favourable." Klesmer takes a looong time answering and then begins ominously: "The gods have a curse for him who willingly tells another the wrong road."

Klesmer suspects Gwendolen does not understand the realities of what is involved:

Well, then with that preparation, you wish to try the life of the artist; you wish to try a life of arduous, unceasing work, and--uncertain praise. Your praise would have to be earned, like your bread; and both would come slowly, scantily--what do I say?--they might hardly come at all.

Gwendolen assures him she is ready--while betraying that she isn't:

I am quite prepared to bear hardships at first. Of course no one can become celebrated all at once.

And when Klesmer lays out the discipline and sacrifice involved, Gwendolen tries the classic defense of, "But I've seen so much crap; it can't be that hard":

"I will be obliged to you if you will explain how it is that such poor actresses get engaged. I have been to the theatre several times, and I am sure there were actresses who seemed to me to act not well and who were quite plain."

"Ah, my dear Miss Harleth, that is the easy criticism of the buyer. We who buy slippers toss away this pair and the other as clumsy; but there was an apprenticeship to the making of them. Excuse me: you could not at present teach one of those actresses; but there is certainly much she could teach you."

First of all, let me be clear I don't ever begrudge having this conversation. It is where everyone starts, there is a special place in hell for people who shit on others for having their same dream, and when it gets down to it, we're all in the same boat: If you look at the facts, making a living doing something creative is more or less statistically impossible and please don't make me look down to where the roadrunner has lured me out over the cliff. But there is something surprising and comforting in the le plus ça change . . . of this passage. I haven't been so delighted since Anna Karenina, shut out of society, decided to write a children's book. Apparently, frustrated, creative people with nothing better to do have been writing children's books for at least two hundred years! (Now, that I think about it, I could write a pretty good children's book.)

But when Klesmer discourages Gwendolen, I found myself ashamed that I do not take enough time to think about the honor and privilege that comes with a life in the arts:

I am not decrying the life of a true artist. I am exalting it. I say, it is out of the reach of any but choice organisations--natures framed to love perfection and to labour for it; ready like all true lovers, to endure, to wait, to say I am not yet worthy.

I do long to be such a worthy, choice organisation. But I am also sure Klesmer would not consider what I do to be art. And it is hard for me to tell the world that all I want to do is express my innermost soul--so now, won't you just give me tens of millions of dollars and a crew of two hundred to do it?

Judging Deronda

{Back at Daniel Deronda, responding today to Maggie Bandur's post from Wednesday. Despite all the other distractions, readng and non-reading alike, we've finally both made it well past the 500-page mark!}

I was pleased to see Maggie raise the question of why Deronda is so uncomfortable with the idea that the Cohens--whose company he clearly enjoys--might be Mirah's relatives. All the possible reasons she adduces seem likely to play at least some part, but the crucial one is eventually identified by Deronda himself the night that Mordecai invites him to the Philosophers' club:

Deronda thought, "I shall never know anything decisive about these people until I ask Cohen point-blank whether he lost a sister named Mirah when she was six years old." The decisive moment did not yet seem easy for him to face. Still his first sense of repulsion at the commonness of these people was beginning to be tempered with kindlier feeling. However unrefined their airs and speech might be, he was forced to admit some moral refinement in their treatment of the consumptive workman [Mordecai].

It's their "commonness," which in this case seems to be a combination of their actual class and their lack of any refinement that might lift them out of it.

What's hardest to process, looking back from our era, is the sense of class as essentially catching, transmittable. If we're honest, we'll all admit that we've been unpleasantly surprised at some point by the uncouth relatives or connections of a friend or loved one, but we root that critique not in their class, but in their behavior--and even then we question our reaction, remembering the role of opportunity and unearned advantage in making us who we are. We may judge, but we do so uncomfortably. Still less do we allow that judgment to affect our sense of the friend we already know. Economic class in America may be far more heritable than we would like to tell ourselves, but we are nonetheless beyond the point of thinking it marks a person and his descendants for life. Yet that seems to be exactly the source of Deronda's fear.

I was also pleased to see Mark Marowitz, in the comments, not only come out as a Grandcourt partisan (!), but suggest that perhaps Deronda actually isn't a nice person. It's a thought that had been nagging at me, too: Is Deronda perhaps just a privileged prig? We have seen him take two generous actions: reclaiming Gwendolen's jewels and saving Mirah from drowning. Both acts involved beautiful women, and the former--the only one that required thought more than instinct--was in aid of a woman of his own class, and required only money. Other than that, what have we seen of Deronda? A friendliness with the Meyricks that seems wholly good. A friendship with Grandcourt that seems to be much more about watching a mirror of the bad self he might become than it is about enjoying Grandcourt's company. And we have his friendship with the Cohens, in which he evinces kindness, but his motives are at least partially instrumental.

Then there's his spiritual questing, in which he is beginning to remind me of Pierre in War and Peace, a character who spends most of the novel so wrapped up in himself that he barely even notices the Napoleonic war. Can someone this preoccupied with himself be nice? Sure, he's incredibly solicitous of Mordecai, but that seems rooted substantially in a desire to see himself as serving a larger purpose.

No, I think the only powerful article for the defense comes in the context of Gwendolen. When Deronda realizes the depth of her despair at her ill-chosen marriage, he forces a conversation, and the urgency of his advice rings true, and utterly selfless:

"[T]here are many thoughts and habits that may help us to bear inevitable sorrow. Multitudes have to bear it." . . .

"Then tell me what better I can do," said Gwendolen, insistently.

"Many things. Look on other lives besides your own. See what their troubles are, and how they are borne. Try to care about something in this vast world besides the gratification of small selfish desires. Try to care for what is best in thought and action--something that is good apart from the accidents of your own lot."

In that scene, Deronda is fierce and focused; we are able to see both his magnetism and the power he could bring to a friendship if he so chose. Will we see that Deronda again?

Mirah and Deronda and Gwendolen, living in different worlds

{I apologize for the slow pace into which my friend Maggie Bandur and I have fallen recently in our back-and-forth stroll through Daniel Deronda; beset by the usual plagues of the blogger--work and travel foremost among them--we have fallen off the pace, but we're back at it. Today, it's Maggie, taking off from my post last week about Deronda's Jewish themes and their place in Victorian literature.}

I, too, am fascinated with Eliot's depiction of Jewish culture in the Victorian era, although I have trouble not seeing it through today's lenses. It makes me terribly uncomfortable when Mirah keeps apologizing for being Jewish because "I know many Jews are bad." I wonder if her perfect, wan saintliness was necessary to get the nineteenth-century reader on board with the story. This only-slightly different Victorian doll lures one into a deeper examination of Jewish life and culture in England -- a culture Eliot obviously cared about and studied -- just as the fans of Tom Sawyer's antics looking for a sequel find themselves reading a subtle examination of race in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

As the book explores the merchants and working class philosophers of the Jewish community, we see a portrait of the Cohen family, with its pawnbroker father and delightfully precocious children. After young Jacob shows off his own pocketknife:

"Have you got a knife?" says Jacob, coming closer. His small voice was hoarse in its glibness, as if it belonged to an aged commercial soul, fatigued with bargaining through many generations.

"Yes. Do you want to see it?" said Deronda, taking a small penknife from his waistcoat-pocket.

Jacob seized it immediately and retreated a little, holding the two knives in his palms and bending over them in meditative comparison. By this time the other clients were gone, and the whole family gathered to the spot, centering their attention on the marvellous Jacob: the father, mother, and grandmother behind the counter, with baby held staggering thereon, and the little girl in front leaning at her brother's elbow to assist him in looking at the knives.

"Mine's the best," said Jacob, at last, returning Deronda's knife, as if he had been entertaining the idea of exchange and had rejected it.

The little girl wants to show Deronda her Sabbath dress, the adults show their commitment to assimilation by talking about going to see the Emperor and Empress of France at the Crystal Palace, and the family generally proves itself to be friendly and generous. So I do not understand with my modern mind why, with Deronda obviously liking them, he is upset by the notion they might be Mirah's relatives. Because of the father's occupation? Because they talk about money? Because they are tradespeople, and she is such a special flower? Is it a matter of anti-Semitism or merely class or just an English dislike of commercial ambition? I am not sure I understand the implications exactly -- but I am relatively sure I wouldn't like them.

I also wondered if the introduction of the uncanny and mystical Mordecai was the other side of the stereotype coin: the fetishized, spiritual version of "the other," a sort of Victorian precursor to Madonna studying Kabbalah. Mordecai yearns for a like-minded friend to whom he can pass on his revelations and scholarship, before consumption takes him. (Although Eliot does state his illness makes his age difficult to determine, I assumed he was as old as Methuselah -- which we learn later cannot be the case.) But I am being unjust. Eliot does show many facets of this world, and, indeed, Deronda's outlook is constantly evolving and expanding -- as presumably the reader's is, too.

As a reminder that these topics remain, after so many hundreds of years, fraught, it was interesting to me to hear Mordecai calling for the establishment of a Jewish homeland. Although I suppose I knew that Zionism had existed -- well, since the destruction of the second temple -- it is something I tend to associate with post-World War II. He dreams of a "new Judea, poised between East and West -- a covenant of reconciliation." I wish he could see his desires to come to fruition -- yet would he grieve to see how precariously it is still poised?

But all of this also makes me worry about poor Gwendolen. (Yes, she is poor Gwendolen now.) Gwendolen, having been placed in a terrible situation, believes Deronda may have the knowledge of how she might endure it. But Gwendolen, "with all the sense of inferiority that had been forced upon her, it was inevitable that she should imagine a larger place for herself in his thoughts than she actually possessed." My heart breaks as I recognize that situation of being so affected by another human being and their words, when they do not reciprocate -- or even suspect -- that level of need for their good opinion:

[I]t was as far from Gwendolen's conception that Deronda's life could be determined by the historical destiny of the Jews, as that he could rise in the air on a brazen horse, and so vanish from her horizon in the form of a twinkling star.

Indeed, Gwendolen's world of manners and mores seems very far from the one in which Mirah and Mordecai live, surrounded by echoes of ancient history and national destiny. As I read on, I wonder how the novel will resolve these differing threads. Or is this a book about how we all inhabit different worlds which others may never fully understand? Or is there, perhaps, a problem in the writing that Mirah and Gwendolen seem to be in different novels?

Eliot, Dickens, Trollope, and Jewish characters

If readers know only one thing about Daniel Deronda, it's that it takes up the question of the Jewish experience, and the place of Jewish citizens, within British society. Yet that theme is barely present in the first half of the book: aside from a throwaway reference by Gwendolen to those "unscrupulous" "Jew dealers" in the opening pages, there's no reference to Judaism until the appearance of Mirah Lapidoth, nearly 200 pages in:

"I am English-born. But I am a Jewess."

Deonrda was silent, inwardly wondering that he had not said this to himself before, though any one who had seen delicate-faced Spanish girls might simply have guessed her to be Spanish.

"Do you despise me for it?" she said presently in low tones, which had a sadness that pierced like a cry from a small dumb creature in fear.

"Why should I?" said Deronda. "I am not so foolish."

"I know many Jews are bad."

"So are many Christians. But I should not think it fair for you to despise me because of that."

It's particularly interesting to read this--even knowing that it comes from the mouth of a character who has already been established as upright and sensitive--having earlier this winter read Oliver Twist (1838) and Trollope's The Way We Live Now (1876).

While acknowledging the fact that drawing inferences about social change from the skewed data points represented by a small group of novels is risky, it's hard not to in this case. Oliver Twist is infamous for Dickens's antisemitic portrayal of Fagin. Even when you know going in that it's going to be bad--so bad that Dickens himself later regretted his portrayal of Fagin, and reportedly tried to balance the scales a bit by making Riah in Our Mutual Friend an irreproachable human being--it's startling to encounter. Dickens refers to Fagin simply as "the Jew" 100 times. He makes off-hand reference to the size of Fagin's nose. And he depicts him as wholly without redeeming qualities, an utter villain driven by inhuman greed. As Stephen Gill writes in his introduction to the Oxford World's Classics edition,

Fagin is the real agent of darkness in this novel. . . .What determines the presentation of Fagin is a kind of concentrated ferocity, but it is almost certainly without conscious anti-Semitic intent. . . . Fagin's Jewishness is part and parcel of his wickedness, for this is the age-old stereotype, the Jew as scapegoat.

It is the very unthinkingness of Dickens's antisemitism that is so suggestive of a social valence: casting about for a villain, he simply made him a Jew. And, to the extent that Philip Collins's Charles Dickens: The Critical Heritage can serve as our guide, the portrayal seems to have gone all but unnoticed by contemporary reviewers--if they were horrified, it was by Dickens's choice to depict with some realism the squalor of London poverty and low life.

That's what makes the depictions of Jewish Britons by Trollope and Eliot not quite forty years later so interesting. Trollope's concern, as always, is with depicting society as it is, and thereby showing us both its foibles and its progress. And what he reveals in The Way We Live Now, published while Disraeli was Prime Ministe, is a society in which antisemitic prejudice, while still present, has receded to a place where it is merely one of a number of prejudices--against trade and new money, for example. Jewishness, like a lack of a title, is an obstacle to be overcome before one can be accorded full membership in society, but some sort of acceptance--if not full--is at least conceivable, provided there's enough money involved. This exchange, between Georgiana, desperate to escape her home life and thus looking to get married at almost any cost, and a old friend who married well is indicative of the improved, if still equivocal, place of Jews in the novel:

She had plucked up so much courage as had enabled her to declare her fate to her old friend,--remembering as she did so how in days long past she and her friend Julia Triplex had scattered their scorn upon some poor girl who had married a man with a Jewish name,--whose grandfather had possibly been a Jew. "Dear me," said Lady Monogram. "Todd, Brehgert, and Goldsheiner! Mr. Todd is--one of us, I suppose?"

"Yes," said Georgina boldly. "And Mr. Brehgert is a Jew. His name is Ezekial Brehgert, and he is a Jew. You can say what you like about it."

"I don't say anything about it, my dear."

"And you can think anything you like. Things are changed since you and I were younger."

"Very much changed, it appears," said Lady Monogram.

That seems, roughly, to be the same position that Eliot's characters find themselves in. The fact that Mirah Lapidoth is Jewish conveys nothing like the horror occasioned by Fagin, certainly, but at the same time the essentially kindly Meyricks seem utterly perplexed by it. The daughters attend synagogue with Mirah, which seems quite ecumenical of them, but they find it largely uncongenial. Their only reference point is Sir Walter Scott's Rebecca, and they find Mirah's Jewishness "less reconcilable with their wishes" than Rebecca's malleable faith was with Scott's plot. "Perhaps," wonders Amy,

it would gradually melt away from her, and she would pass into Christianity like the rest of the world, if she got to love us very much, and never found her mother. It is so strange to be of the Jewish religion now.

That "like the rest of the world" tells you almost everything you need to know about the British mind of the 1870s, doesn't it?

So what, in the second half of the novel, will Eliot do with the theme of Judaism? Unlike Trollope, her concerns are more intellectual than social, so I expect that the Jewish faith and the Jewish race will surely be wrestled with as ideas at least as much as social qualities--but who will do the wrestling? Will Deronda's infatuation with Mirah hold, and draw him away from his upbringing? Ah, the fun of watching a novel unfold, not knowing what is to come!

Back to Eliot, at least briefly

Last week's cross-temporal hunt for emoticons and the many pages I need to read as a judge for the fiction category of the Daphnes has put me behind both my reading and my blogging schedule for Daniel Deronda. Rather than leave you (and my co-Derondan, Maggie Bandur) in the lurch entirely, I'll stall a day or two by offering a brief bit from George Eliot: Interviews and Recollections, a volume edited by K. K. Collins that gathers contemporary reports of encounters with George Eliot. It's not as rich or quotable as the comparable book about Henry James, The Legend of the Master, but it's well worth having alongside when reading or thinking about Eliot.

Tonight I'll just share two anecdotes. First, a short, secondhand impression, via James T. Fields, published in his Biographical Notes and Personal Sketches in 1881:

[Dickens gave] an excellent description of Mr. and Mrs. Lewes. The latter he finds most interesting "with her shy manner of saying brilliant things."

And then this one, also secondhand, published in James Adderley's In Slums and Society: Reminiscences of Old Friends in 1916:

I have been told that George Eliot was in a railway-carriage once with a friend, and there was a "muscular Christian" sort of parson conversing with them about all the topics of the day. The reverend gentleman got out at a certain station, and the friend remarked enthusiastically:--

"Ah! That's the sort of parson I like. No nonsense about him!"

"Is he the sort of parson you would like to have at your deathbed?" said George Eliot.

"Oh no!" said the lady.

The only proper way to close the post after that, I think, is to turn things over to Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon:

Eliot on adults not seeing what children see nor realizing what they feel

{Editorial note: Today's post from Maggie Bandur continues our back-and-forth through Eliot's Daniel Deronda. You can scroll down for earlier posts from the past couple of weeks.}

As someone who was not a terribly happy child--and as you can see in my post on Tom Brown's School Days--I am fascinated by the fact adults do not always see, and, more importantly, can't believe, that children can be deeply unhappy. Even if everyone else has had pleasant childhoods, this still involves a mass amnesia as to the intensity of one's own childhood passions and fears, and how often something said by an adult was taken to heart in a way the adults never suspected.

So, I was excited to see George Eliot's deep understanding of youthful psyches, as she describes Daniel Deronda's discovery, based on an unrelated and offhanded comment by an adult, that something about his own birth is irregular. When a tutor explains the Popes' many "nephews" were their illegitimate children, we see the alertness of youth as Daniel fixates on that fact, and the propensity of children to make imaginative leaps, as he assumes (it turns out, correctly) that his birth is illegitimate because he is also being raised by an "uncle":

Having read Shakespeare as well as a great deal of history, he could have talked with the wisdom of a bookish child about men who were born out of wedlock and were held unfortunate in consequence

--but he had never thought it applied to him until that one sudden flash of insight:

The ardour which he had given to the imaginary world in his books suddenly rushed towards his own history and spent its pictorial energy there, explaining what he knew, representing the unknown.

(It is also it is interesting how Eliot characterizes this kind of understanding: "He had not lived with other boys, and his mind showed the same blending of child's ignorance with surprising knowledge which is oftener seen in bright girls.")

Eliot understands the effect these sudden revelations can have on a child:

Who cannot imagine the bitterness of a first suspicion that something in this object of complete love was not quite right? Children demand that their heroes should be feckless, and easily believe them to be so: perhaps a first discovery to the contrary is hardly a less revolutionary shock to a passionate child than the threatened downfall of habitual beliefs which makes the world seem to totter for us in mature life.

And even more perceptively, why children may never say anything about them:

Those who have had an impassioned childhood will understand the dread of utterance about any shame connected with their parents. The impetuous advent of new images took possession of him with the force of fact for the first time told, and left him no immediate power for the reflection that he might be trembling at a fiction of his own. The terrible sense of collision between a strong rush of feeling and the dread of its betrayal, found relief at length in big slow tears, which fell without restraint until the voice of Mr. Fraser was heard saying--

"Daniel, do you see that you are sitting on the bent pages of your book?"

In spite of the turmoil going on inside--the upending of his whole world--Daniel doesn't betray his emotions beyond sitting on his book and one petulant outburst when Sir Hugo asks playfully if he would like to be a famous singer, which Daniel takes to mean he won't be raising him as a gentleman. Although Sir Hugo has a mild awareness that his ward is unhappy about something, he is completely wrong about what it is, and here Eliot captures the blindness adults have towards the feelings of children:

Let Sir Hugo be partly excused until the grounds of his action can be more fully known. The mistakes in his behavior to Deronda were due to that dulness towards what may be going on in other minds, especially the minds of children, which is among the commonest deficiencies even in good-natured men like him, when life has been generally easy to themselves, and their energies have been quietly spent in feeling gratified.

Sir Hugo feels no shame--feels pride even--in everyone assuming Daniel is his illegitimate son. And since he isn't bothered by the whole thing, it does not occur to him that Deronda might be. With a child's capacity for silent misery and an adult's inability to notice, Deronda reaches adulthood with Sir Hugo never telling him the story of his parentage--and Deronda never having the heart to ask!

And the outcome of this silent hurt is not all bad. Deronda certainly takes his early slights with more grace than I did:

The sense of an entailed disadvantage--the deformed foot doubtfully hidden by the shoe makes a restlessly active spiritual yeast, and easily turns a self-centered, unloving nature into an Ishmaelite. But in the rarer sort, who presently see their own frustrated claim as one among a myriad, the inexorable sorrow takes the form of fellowship and makes the imagination tender. Deronda's early-awakened susceptibility, charged at first with ready indignation and resistant pride, had raised in him a premature reflection on certain questions of life; it had given a bias to his conscience, a sympathy with certain ills, and a tension of resolve in certain directions, which marked him off from other youths much more than any talents he possessed.

Deronda's childhood disappointment forms him into a deeply sympathetic adult. The detailed, insightful description of his childhood mind only makes the insipid Mirah, whose own bad childhood unrealistically only intensified her inborn saintliness and didn't teach her a single practical skill for dealing with the world, stick out all the more. She has not reappeared for a while; she must get better.

Mirah Lapidoth appears, bearing tears and treacle

{Editorial note: this is the fifth in the series of posts that my friend Maggie Bandur and I are trading back and forth as we wander through George Eliot's Daniel Deronda.. Scroll back for earlier posts if you want to get up to speed.}

I'll start by following up on Maggie's post about Gwendolen Harleth's specific brand of awfulness--for which she makes a solid case--by noting that her skeptical eye led me to read a later exchange between Gwendolen and her mother differently than I would have. Their fortune lost, the family is in scrimp-and-save mode, which does not sit well with Gwendolen, who, reluctantly, is about to go out as a governess while the rest of the family takes residence in a small, remote cottage. "How shall you endure it, mamma?" asks Gwendolen. After she expands on the incipient horrors a bit, her mother replies,

"It will be some comfort that you have not to bear it too, dear."

It would be, wouldn't it? At risk of doubting a mother's sincerity, I find myself reading that as less about her daughter's tender sensibilities and more about the fact that a crowded house is more tolerable the fewer self-entitled whiners you fill it with.

Distrust of intentions and sincerity is actually a good way into the point of today's post, which addresses a new character whom Maggie mentioned at the end of her post: Mirah Lapidoth, "the very Dickens-like, beautiful, but oh-so-sad eighteen-year-old" who is prevented by Deronda from acting on her intention of throwing herself in the Thames.

What Deronda didn't realize is that the Thames might have puked her right back up. She's awful. Throughout this discussion, Maggie and I have in different ways given Eliot credit for her complicated, nuanced portrayals of women . . . and then suddenly she drops on us a character dripping with all the worst sentimental Victorian ideas about the innocence and purity of young women. Deronda is clearly love-struck at first sight by those very qualities, allied as they are to a helpless frailty that is equally intolerable to a contemporary reader, and decides to take her under his wing. Even Eliot seems to sense that perhaps she's taken things a bit too far, for she opens the next book with an account of his hitherto unsuspected romantic side:

To say that Deronda was romantic would be to misrepresent him; but under his calm and somewhat self-repressed exterior there was a fervour which made him easily find poetry and romance among the events of everyday life. . . . To Deronda this event of finding Mirah was as heart-stirring as anything that befell Orestes or Rinaldo.

Now, I suppose it's entirely possible that Eliot has brought Mirah into the book primarily to complicate and advance the plot. As those who've suffered through the unlikely machinations of Raffles in Middlemarch can attest, Eliot is at her weakest when she is trying to make her novels conform to Victorian expectations for mystery and surprise; it makes you wish she could have read some late Henry James and realized that it is possible to write a great novel in which almost nothing happens.

Even if that's the case, it doesn't quite excuse the load of sentimental bosh that is Mirah's life story. After Deronda takes her to the home of his friends, the Meyricks, she relates her entire history. At length: it takes up more than 13 pages in the Penguin Classics edition. We get page after page of her sinister father and his sinister companions, her pure heart only slowly awakening to danger, the desperate measures she took to escape, her childlike faith in the goodness of people that is only slowly eroded. Of her life on stage, she says,

I missed the love and the trust I had been born into. I made a life in my own thoughts quite different from everything about me: I chose what seemed to me beautiful out of the plays and everything, and made my world out of it; and it was like a sharp knife always grazing me that we had two sorts of life which jarred so with each other--women looking good and gentle on the stage, and saying good things as if they felt them, and directly after I saw them with coarse, ugly manners.

It's all not only bloatedly insipid, and thus dull, it's also hard to believe. And that's the part I keep getting hung up on. Here, for example, is Mirah's disjointed first explanation to the Meyricks and Deronda of how she came to this pass:

My name is Mirah Lapidoth. I am come a long way from Prague by myself. I made my escape. I ran away from dreadful things. I came to find my mother and brother in London. I had been taken from my mother when I was little, but I thought I could find her again. I had trouble--the houses were all gone--I could not find her. It has been a long while, and I had not much money. That is why I am in distress.

Now, if a stranger came up to you on the street and told you that story, would you instinctively believe them, and want to know more? Or would you slowly back away? And what if they followed it with one of those life stories in which every man's hand is against them, every piece of luck is bad, and everyone is always doing them wrong?

Yet Deronda--and the Meyricks as well, who don't even have love as an excuse--seem to harbor no doubts at all. They are wholly sympathetic, positively brimming with belief. I realize there's always a substantial risk in trying to extrapolate about real people in the past from what we're given in fiction, but could people possibly have been that much more credulous then? Are we that much more thoroughly cauterized by cynicism?

As a modest, unscientific test, I decided to turn to Dickens's Little Nell, whose untimely death in The Ol Curiosity Shop is held up as powerful evidence of Victorian love of Dickens's treacly heroines. But was she really received that heartily? Were there no dissenting voices at the time?

If so, Philip Collins didn't turn any up when he assembled Charles Dickens: The Critical Heritage. "Little Nell," he writes,

made her mark immediately: [Dickens's friend and biographer John] Forster was able to predict for her "as long a life as any member of the great family of English fiction can hope to enjoy." Comparisons with Cordelia and Imogen were frequent. At a less literary, more personal, level, she could be imagined "cling[ing] with a never-ending fondness around our necks, inseparable for ever." (Ainsworth's Magazine, January 1844). . . . Nor was the international furore about her restricted to simple unsophisticated readers and arguably ga-ga old men like Landor and Jeffrey. For the austerely intellectual Westminster Review, for instance, she was "the happiest and most perfect of Dickens's sketches . . . a tragedy of the true sort."

The "fierce reaction" against her, Collins notes didn't begin until much later.

Which suggests that, yes, Deronda and the Meyricks may not be atypical in their susceptibility to Mirah's sentimental innocence, and that perhaps Eliot herself thought she was creating a character as believable, and fully fleshed-out, as any of her others. At this point in the novel, I think that's the only way we can read the situation; even so, it's hard for me to reconcile with Eliot's perceptiveness and intellectual acuity, or with the flaying, modern wit she allows Gwendolen to wield.

Gwendolen Harleth as seen from the distaff side

{Editorial note: this post from my friend Maggie Bandur continues our back-and-forth series as we make our way through George Eliot's Daniel Deronda. Scroll back through the blog and you'll see the first three posts.}

When I saw Levi’s post about women in Victorian literature, I assumed the topic had been covered, but then I found myself mildly annoyed with the warmth and admiration with which he described Gwendolen Harleth. I mean, she’s so clearly a--well, one of those women who sigh disingenuously and say, “I don’t know what it is, but I have no women friends,” with a subtle implication that other women are mean or jealous, when it is so often she who is, at best, uninterested in anyone of her own sex. Reading back over his post, however, Levi clearly says she has a tendency towards the toxic00and my reaction perhaps reveals more about me than anything else. But still . . .

I had just finished Can You Forgive Her? before embarking on Daniel Deronda, and Trollope does describe the mental states of very different men and especially women so beautifully. (Although, when you get down to it, you could argue, Alice and Glencora are saved from their real doubts and turmoil, by steadfast, serious men who are (mostly) confident this phase will pass.) Eliot is even better. And perhaps because she is a woman, she gives us a character we don’t often see: the woman about whom all the other women say, “Why don’t any of the guys notice that she is horrible?”

And Gwendolen is a little horrible.

She shirks participating in her half-sisters’ education. “’It bores me to death, [Alice] is so slow. She has no ear for music, or language, or anything else. It would be much better for her to be ignorant, mamma: It is her rôle, she would do it well.’” Her mother exhorts her to be kind to her friendly cousin:

"You know, you can’t expect her to be equal to you." "I don’t want to be equal," said Gwendolen, with a toss of her head and a smile, and the discussion ended there.

She even participates in behavior that today’s psychologists would consider sociopathic:

Though never even as a child thoughtlessly cruel, nay, delighting to rescue drowning insects and watch their recovery, there was a disagreeable silent remembrance of her having strangled her sister’s canary-bird in a final fit of exasperation at its shrill singing which had again and again jarringly interrupted her own. She had taken pains to buy a white mouse for her sister in retribution, and though inwardly excusing herself on the ground of a peculiar sensitiveness which was a mark of her general superiority, the thought of that infelonious murder had always made her wince.

White mouse aside, I wish that Isabel had left the cabinet with the creepy portrait open on purpose to ruin her vain charades. And even more damning to me:

In the ladies’ dining-room it was evident that Gwendolen was not a general favourite with her own sex; there were no beginnings of intimacy between her and other girls, and in conversation they rather noticed what she said than spoke to her in free exchange. Perhaps it was that she was not much interested in them, and when left alone in their company had a sense of empty benches. Mrs. Vulcany once remarked that Miss Harleth was too fond of the gentlemen; but we know that she was not in the least fond of them--she was only fond of their homage--and women did not give her homage.

Yes, Gwendolen is constrained by convention: the segregated dinners exist because “the amiable Lord Brackenshaw, who was something of a gourmet, mentioned Byron’s opinion that a woman should never be seen eating...” (!) But Gwendolen isn’t thwarted in her ambition to make art or enter politics, and not for a moment do I believe she really wants to be an adventuress. She wants only to make an effect. She needs admiration--and since women don’t exist to her, it is the admiration of men. This need--all that society can really offer her-does not make Gwendolen unworthy of sympathy; quite the opposite:

She rejoiced to feel herself exceptional; but her horizon was that of the genteel romance where the heroine’s soul poured out in her journal is full of vague power, originality and general rebellion, while her life moves strictly in the sphere of fashion; and if she wanders into a swamp, the pathos lies partly, so to speak, in her having on satin shoes. Here is a restraint which nature and society have provided on the pursuit of striking adventure; so that a soul burning with a sense of what the universal is not, and ready to take all existence as fuel, is nevertheless held captive by the ordinary wirework of social forms and does nothing in particular.

There is something poignant in how Gwendolen knows she wants something, but doesn’t know what. But she clearly knows she doesn’t want anyone else to have it. Still, much as Gwendolen might not like it, I was also touched by Eliot’s evocation of a vulnerability that ties her to all women:

Could there be a slenderer, more insignificant thread in human history than this consciousness of a girl, busy with her small inferences of the way in which she could make her life pleasant?...

What in the midst of that mighty drama are girls and their blind visions? They are the Yea and Nay of that good for which men are enduring and fighting. In these delicate vessels is borne onward through the ages the treasure of human affections.

It does probably help my sympathy (or schadenfreude) that things are stacking up against Gwendolen that could make her very unhappy, indeed. But I imagine she will take it with more spirit, than the very Dickens-like, beautiful, but oh-so-sad eighteen year old, who just appeared so Deronda can want to protect her. (Speaking of Dickens’s women, I reject the apocryphal stories of people running down to New York harbor to ask the arriving ships if Little Nell had died, because no one is described as asking hopefully.) I trust that there will be more to this new character--already she has been identified as a Jewess, which I’m sure was shocking at the time--but I can’t imagine her being equal to Gwendolen. And I don’t know that I want her to be.

(I have not answered Levi’s questions, but I did have some thoughts about hunting for later.)

Gwendolen Harleth, spoiled child, and the place of women in Eliot's Victorian England

In Friday's Daniel Deronda post, Maggie raised the question of gender, and Eliot's presentation of women. It's a topic that's inescapable--how could the author of "Silly Novels by Lady Novelists" not be constantly presenting us with reasons to think about women, their education, work, and rights, in her writing?

Unsurprisingly, Eliot's portrayals of women are among the most interesting and nuanced in Victorian literature. I've lately been admiring Trollope on that front, and his novels share a crucial characteristic with Eliot's: they are often about the women found in their pages, at least as much as they are about the men. The women aren't adjuncts to their men, or plot points or prizes for their men to fight over, but active agents in their own lives. Simply presenting them as rational, individual creatures would represent a step up from Dickens's fatuous, treacly angels, but Trollope and Eliot do more: they show us the choices women in general have, and then they help us understand how individual women approach them.

What is of particular interest on that front in the early pages of Daniel Deronda is how Eliot both succinctly describes the limitations women face and uses those limitations to help us understand the spoiled child character that she gives Gwendolen Harleth in the early going. Here, for example, is Gwendolen's answer to a question from Grandcourt, a presumed suitor, about her future plans:

"I don't know. We women can't go in search of adventures--to find out the North-West Passage or the source of the Nile, or to hunt tigers in the East. We must stay where we grow, or where the gardeners like to transplant us. We are brought up like the flowers, to look as pretty as we can, and be dull without complaining. That is my notion about the plants: they are often bored, and that is the reason why some of them have got poisonous. What do you think?" Gwendolen had run on rather nervously, lightly whipping the rhododendron bush in front of her.

Gwendolen is being flirtatious, certainly--and what better calls to mind the familiar nervous energy of flirtation than her "whipping the rhododendron bush"? But she is also being honest, and the honesty, examined closely, is chilling: women, she says, must live where they are or stay where they're taken, with essentially no choice in the matter. Their only recourse? To become toxic.

It is that refusal to deny reality that helps to explain Gwendolen early on. She knows that she is essentially a commodity, and that her job is to fetch the best price she can. Of Grandcourt, just before meeting him--and ensuring that she looks her best, so that he will feel "admiration unmixed with criticism"--she thinks, "She did not expect to admire him, but that was not necessary to her peace of mind." Elsewhere, reminded that if she intends to hunt, she must marry a man who can keep horses, she replies, "I don't know why I should do anything so horrible as to marry without that prospect, at least." Told that Grandcourt is a "delightful young man":

"Oh, yes," said Gwendolen, with a high note of careless admission, taking off her best hat and turning it round on her hand contemplatively. "I wonder what sort of behaviour a delightful young man would have?" Then, with a merry change of face, "I know he would have hunters and racers, and a London house and two country-houses,--one with battlements and another with a veranda. And I feel sure that with a little murdering he might get a title."

Her hearers are shocked, but to readers Gwendolen's wit feels clever, daring, individual, and pleasantly modern. It helps us to believe that even as she is capricious and demanding, she also is magnetic and interesting. Unlike, say, the dissolute young Sir Felix Carbury in Trollope's The Way We Live Now, Gwendolen is that rare spoiled child whose vivacity and appeal we comprehend. We see why people want to be around her, and why they're willing to put up with her less admirable qualities to do so.

Her humor is also her form of rebellion, and--along with her physical impulsiveness (whipping the rhododendrons, twirling her hat, jumping with her horse)--at the same time a reminder of the stifling limitations of her life. She is too smart and engaged for the society, and the choices, she's confronted with, and the friction generated by the difference between her human potential and her social value must be burnt off in that nervous energy. But her understanding of that disjunction also puts her at risk: she knows that she intuitively understands more than her family and friends, but she fails to realize that that understanding nonetheless has limits--limits whose effects are exacerbated by the differing social place of men and women. We see that in her first in-depth thoughts about Grandcourt:

Certainly, with all her perspicacity, and all the reading which seemed to her mamma dangerously instructive, her judgment was consciously a little at fault before Grandcourt. He was adorably quiet and free from absurdities--he would be a husband to suit with the best appearance a woman could make. But what else was he? He had been everywhere, and seen everything. That was desirable, and especially gratifying as a preamble to his supreme preference for Gwendolen Harleth. He did not appear to enjoy anything much. That was not necessary: and the less he had of certain tastes or desires, the more freedom his wife was likely to have in following hers. Gwendolen conceived that after marriage she would most probably be able to manage him thoroughly.

How was it that he caused her unusual constraint now?--that she was less daring and playful in her talk with him than with any other admirer she had known? That absence of demonstrativeness which she was glad of, acted as a charm in more senses than one and was slightly benumbing. Grandcourt after all was formidable--a handsome lizard of a hitherto unknown species, not of the lively, darting kind. But Gwendolen knew hardly anything about lizards, and ignorance gives one a large range of probabilities. This splendid specimen was probably gentle, suitable as a boudoir pet: what may not a lizard be, if you know nothing to the contrary?

It's unclear whether Gwendolen is the one thinking of Grandcourt as a lizard, or Eliot's narrator is, but the image is striking, and Gwendolen's ignorance telling. This, we are made to understand, will not go well.

{PS Questions for Maggie, to be addressed in her post later this week, if she's interested: Mr. Lush. Is he, as it seems early on, a straight Iago figure? Even if so, does he offer us a counterbalancing vision of a male being hemmed in by society and social position? Is this role as Grandcourt's consigliere all he could hope for, or do we have a sense that it's more what he's made himself suitable for? Alternative questions: How much do we as contemporary readers understand about hunting culture from reading Eliot (and even more so, Trollope)? I know that on my first encounter with the Victorians, I was entirely ignorant--now I certainly know more, but do I really understand what it would be like to be out with a hunt?}

Network notes on Daniel Deronda?

{Editorial note: today's post is a contribution from my longtime friend Maggie Bandur, TV writer and book reader. As I explained earlier in the week, we're reading Daniel Deronda together and trading off posts. Enjoy!}

I was very excited and intimidated when Levi asked me to work on this project. I have always been a big reader, but not in a very organized or academically supervised way. I have taken it upon myself to read several Very Important Books of the Canon every year and lately have despaired of the opportunity to use any of this knowledge. Although I work with well-educated people, many of whom are devouring whatever this year’s equivalent of Gone Girl is, I am surprised how many times I get teased for my reading of musty, old books. But I live by my pen! And as a television writer, I am one of the few who still can. Perhaps sitcoms don’t require a deep knowledge of art and literature--but if one is going to spend a lot of time repurposing well-trodden stories, shouldn’t one steal from the best?

Delighted to finally dive into pure intellectual discourse, I was a little disappointed to find myself comparing Daniel Deronda to television and movies--something I don’t normally do. And this before I had read Levi’s introduction. Comparing current television to novels is blecchy. Yes, a television series--one which succeeds--does have the opportunity to show its characters evolve in rich, beautiful, literary ways. But for a show to succeed these days, it seems they must be shocking, at least when first out of the gate. There has been an escalation in violence and sadism and sexy medieval incest, in order to hook people long enough to one day, maybe, explore subtler character moments. This is not, of course, new. The sublimely talky The West Wing pulled a bait and switch by starting the series with Rob Lowe in bed with a call girl, and do you remember that the pilot for The X-Files had Agent Scully in a bra. Can you imagine?! But that deeply humanistic eye for behavior and personality and the mundane which make novels special --well, it must be slipped in between meth deals gone wrong and zombie attacks. George Eliot’s “profusion of aphoristic insights” would not be likely to survive in this golden age of television. Save that for Twitter.

But perhaps I was put in mind of television because I found the opening chapter not at all surprising. It was, in fact, a format with which I was very well acquainted. A famously common and cliched network note is “Start the story sooner.” One easy way to answer this demand is the common trick of opening a show with an extreme situation--dramatic or comic--and then flashing back to how did we get here. Why is Bryan Cranston in his underwear in the desert? Why are foreigners torturing Jennifer Garner? Eliot is telling us who the main players will be, and we learn a bit of Deronda’s character before he disappears for quite some time.

This choice of opening did make me wonder if Eliot had had to deal with editors who complained, “You can’t have a book called Daniel Deronda and not introduce him for 200 pages!” Was this her method of starting the story sooner? Perhaps the chapter’s epigraph is a subtle criticism:

Men can do nothing without the make-believe of a beginning. . . . His less accurate grandmother Poetry has always been understood to start in the middle; but on reflection it appears that her proceeding is not very different from his; since Science, too, reckons backwards as well as forwards, divides his unit into billions, and with his clock-finger at Nought sets off in medias res.

But Levi raises a good point. Do other books begin this way? Although I can’t immediately find an example, I have a sense I have read thrillers or YA books that begin similarly--stories that are perhaps more influenced by (or hope to one day be) movies. But are there any contemporary examples? Did Eliot hit on this method herself? In which case, has television perhaps been, all along, stealing from the best?

While reading, I was also put in mind of another entertainment cliche. The screenwriting book du jour, Save the Cat, claims that to sympathize with a character, particularly an anti-hero, we have to know that they are, at heart, a redeemable person, and nothing shows goodness like being kind to an animal. The opening chapter manages to show us that Gwendolen is a rare and remarkable creature, proud and perhaps not wholly good. By so quickly ruining her, isn’t Eliot ensuring her our sympathy, even as she is about to expose Gwendolen in some detail as “The Spoiled Child?” And not to skip too far ahead, but Eliot seems to have discovered the link between likability and animals, as I suspect we are to know an upcoming suitor is not to be trusted because he cruelly teases a loyal dog who wants his affection.

I believe I am supposed to pose questions. If I might broach another potentially blechhy subject, I will probably want to look at Eliot’s portrayal of women. Perhaps in comparison to Dickens and Trollope?

(On a side note, I believe Levi and I read Middlemarch at the same time for a freshman Intro to Fiction class taught by Iris Murdoch scholar Elizabeth Dipple. After not liking the book at first (perhaps because I didn’t know where it was going?), I fell in love about 200 pages in. Although I rarely set a book aside, one of the lasting legacies of Middlemarch is that I have given many books a much longer, fuller shot than they may have deserved. (Including, controversially, Don Quixote.) That class had an unexpectedly large impact for me: It was the first time I realized Dickens was funny after previously having Great Expectations beaten to death in high school English; I was introduced to Murdoch with A Fairly Honourable Defeat and had its deeper themes explicated in a way I might not have caught on my own, suggesting that college existed for a reason; and I had Jane Eyre somewhat ruined by Professor Dipple pointing out that Mr. Rochester’s teasing, coming from a man in such a superior position, was cruel. (Having recently re-read Jane Eyre, however, she was wrong: Jane is a badass; she can take care of herself.) )

(Oh, and P.S., all happy families are alike.)

In which we meet Daniel Deronda, and watch him watch a fascinatrix

{Editorial note: as I explained in Monday's post, today marks the start of a back-and-forth, intended to be a bit conversational, between me and my friend Maggie Bandur as we make our way through Daniel Deronda.}

Like Middlemarch, Daniel Deronda opens on the topic of its female protagonist's beauty. Middlemarch's opening line, though not as familiar as "Happy families are all alike," is reasonably well known, and is generally, I think, considered to be a strong one:

Miss Brooke had that kind of beauty which seems to be thrown into relief by poor dress.

I would actually class it with "Happy families" in another way, however: as a line that's more memorable than effective, more showy than good. It strikes me as a line an author comes up with very early on, admires, then retains even as the subsequent paragraphs and pages develop along different lines. Oh, I'm exaggerating a bit: Eliot does at least go on to explain herself, which Tolstoy doesn't really do--but wouldn't the chapter work better opening with this line, instead, from the middle of that paragraph:

She was usually spoken of as being remarkably clever, but with the addition that her sister Celia had more common-sense.

Whereas before all you had was a bit of information about appearance, couched in a line seemingly designed to make you think about the sentence itself as much as about its content, now you have a bit of insight into character, and the first hints of a relationship. And opening with "she" puts the whole thing at a further remove, adding a tiny bit of mystery and putting us into the perspective of the outside world looking on and assessing.

Which is closer to what we get in the opening of Daniel Deronda:

Was she beautiful or not beautiful? and what was the secret of form or expression which gave the dynamic quality to her glance? Was the good or the evil genius dominant in those beams? Probably the evil; else why was the effect that of unrest rather than of undisturbed charm? Why was the wish to look again felt as coercion and not as a longing in which the whole being consents?

Nicely handled, no? I'm being a bit unfair, of course: I gave Middlemarch a single sentence, whereas Deronda gets a whole paragraph. But it reads that way: the blunt question that begins the book leads you to the next, and the next; instantly, we feel part of a pattern of thought.

With the second paragraph, we learn who is doing the thinking:

She who raised these questions in Daniel Deronda's mind was occupied in gambling.

The "she," we'll soon learn, is the book's heroine, Gwendolen Harleth, and right away she's being paired for us with the title character. The rest of the chapter lives up to its opening: Eliot puts us in the fashionable French casino where Gwendolen is gambling with a cool recklessness that fascinates the crowd around her. We shift from Deronda's perspective to the narrator's, and then are turned over to a chorus of the moneyed and fashionable, who trade comments and questions about Gwendolen ("For my part I think her odious. . . . It is wonderful what unpleasant girls get into vogue."), smoothly delivering some early exposition along the way. By the end of the chapter, which runs a mere eight pages, Eliot has introduced her two main characters, made her first steps toward placing them in society, and shown us their mutual, if unacknowledged, awareness of a potent force between them.

That makes Eliot's next move all the more interesting: the second chapter brings a letter recalling Gwendolen home, her family's fortune lost, her hopes for a glittering social life dashed. Without seeing Deronda again, she hurries home, not telling anyone of her troubles . . . after which Eliot carries us back a year. One hundred and fifty pages will pass before we see Deronda again, and more than that before he and Gwendolen are brought back into proximity.

It's a structure that only a supremely confident author would attempt, and I'm not entirely sure that it works. Eliot's decision to essentially set the problem for us at the outset is brilliant, but is the power of that opening scene dissipated too much by the number of pages it takes to get us back to that moment in its characters' parallel lives?

And with that, I'll turn it over to Maggie, who, if all goes well, will appear here on Friday. She may take up that question about the early structure, or she may go off in a completely new direction. Either way, I hope you'll join us!

Diving into Daniel Deronda

If I may speak for you--presuming, I hope not overmuch, upon our eight-year online acquaintance--we'll start this post by stipulating that there are few topics more tiresome than "In this current golden age of television, have TV shows become what novels used to be?" As they used to say in Mad magazine, "Blecccch."

And yet . . . (You knew there was an "and yet" coming, didn't you?) I did have that thought a tiny bit when I was reading Rebecca Mead's thoughtful new book My Life in Middlemarch and came upon this passage:

"We all grumble at 'Middlemarch,'" a reviewer for the Spectator said. "But we all read it, and all feel that there is nothing to compare with it appearing at the present moment int he way of English literature, and not a few of us calculate whether we shall get the August number before we go for our autumn holiday, or whether we shall have to wait for it until we return."

Though I tend to watch TV deeply in arrears, this does jibe uncannily with the feeling of watching a popular show these days: being part of a group, a contentious, easily irritated group that starts at every sign and waits, breathless, to see whether its conjecture will be borne out. That's the characteristic I love best about the current upper-middlebrow TV-watching culture: the way it returns us to a long tradition of serial narrative, of, if not exactly reading for the plot, at least of truly not knowing what will come next, and finding ourselves unable not to wonder. {Side note: this is one of the reasons that I love sports.}

Mead's aside reminds us that that used to be the case with these novels, too--and, for most of us, that was in some sense our own experience the first time through. The first time I read Middlemarch, I marveled at Eliot's profusion of aphoristic insights, but I also wondered, page by page and chapter by chapter, just where Dorothea would end up. It's one of the qualities I most admire in Trollope lately: he offers his characters a range of wholly plausible choices, and we truly don't know which they'll choose until they do.

In contemporary television fandom, this uncertainty, this demonstration of the potency of the installment, is made most clearly manifest in the many online TV clubs and episode recaps, the most prominent of them being Slate's. Certainly, these episode-by-episode back-and-forths can at times be of modest interest, offering recaps and little else. But at their best, they can serve as an interesting record of how we responded in real time, of what it was like to watch plots unfold and characters develop, of how a narrative took advantage of and worked with and subverted our ingrained expectations about how plots turn and people behave.

All of which is by way of a long preamble to an announcement. Having been prompted by the incomparable Patrick Kurp to read Daniel Deronda--which, despite my love (and re-reading) of Middlemarch, I've never taken up--I've dragooned my good friend Maggie Bandur, TV writer by trade, book reader by inclination, into reading it with me and trading posts and questions and ideas. If you've been an IBRL reader for a long time, Maggie's name may be familiar: she's written here before on Tom Brown's Schooldays and Clarissa, and I have no doubt she'll be good, and smart, company.

If all goes well with the other bits of life, I'll start things off on Wednesday with a brief post about the book's opening, and Eliot's quick, yet incredibly effective introduction of Gwendolen Harleth. If you're interested in reading along with us, we'd be glad of the company: there's no set schedule, but I would imagine we'll progress reasonably slowly, say, 150-200 pages a week? Come along--as usual when you read Eliot, you have nothing to lose but your confidence in received opinion!

Dickens and Eliot

Last week I quoted from an anonymous review of The Mystery of Edwin Drood that appeared in the Spectator on October 1, 1870, written in response to some early critical reviews. The reviewer--thought to be R. H. Hutton--did a good job of arguing for Dickens's strengths, but he also acknowledged Dickens's reliable weak points:

No doubt there are all Mr Dickens's faults in this story quite unchanged. He never learned to draw a human being as distinct from an oddity, and all his characters which are not oddities are false. Again he never learned the distinguishing signs of genuine sentiment; and just as nothing can be vulgarer than the sentimental passages of Nicholas Nickleby and Martin Chuzzlewith, so nothing can, at any rate, be much falser or in worse tase than the sentimental scenes in Edwin Drood. Mr Dickens could not get over the notion that a love scene was a rich and luscious sort of juice, to be sucked up in the sort of way in which a bowl of punch and a Christmas dinner are so often enjoyed in his tales; and not only so, but all beauty, all that he thinks lovable, is apt to be treated by him as if it were a pot of raspberry jam, something luscious to the palate, instead of something fascinating to the imagination and those finer powers by which harmony of expression is perceived.

While I'd argue that to say that "all his characters which are not oddities are false" is going way too far--what about Pip, or David Copperfield, or, to dip into the second ranks, Steerforth or Jaggers?--the reviewer's description of Dickens's susceptibility and approach to sentiment is right on.

I've found that weakness coming to mind again and again over the past week as I've been reading Middlemarch, a novel that, after a diet of Dickens, seems fully to justify Virginia Woolf's oft-repeated claim that it is "one of the few English novels written for grown-up people." Eliot has none of the linguistic verve of Dickens, and when she tries to introduce the traditional dramatic elements (secrets from the past, for example) of which he makes such inventive use, the attempt feels mechanical. But she makes up for all of that with the acuity of her insight and her willingness to speak honestly and plainly about human feelings and failings. Nearly a century and a half on, it's still bracing. She has Henry James's interest in the shadings of thought and emotion, and if she doesn't have quite his fineness of perception, she also doesn't suffer from his finickiness.

Almost every page of Middlemarch offers something worth noting, from an aphoristic flash ("Duty has a way of behaving unexpectedly"; "The troublesome ones in a family are usually either the wits or the idiots") to a fully fleshed-out passage of a character's thought. Here, for instance, is a scene that seems right to set against the above indictment of Dickens's treacle:

Dorothea had again taken up her abode at Lowick Manor. After three months, Freshitt had become rather oppressive: to sit like a model for Saint Catherine looking rapturously at Celia's baby would not do for many hours in the day, and to remain in that momentous babe's presence with persistent disregard was a course that could not have been tolerated in a childless sister. Dorothea would have been capable of carrying baby joyfully for a mile if there had been need, and of loving it the more tenderly for that labour; but to an aunt who does not recognize her infant nephew as Bouddha, and has nothing to do for him but to admire, his behaviour is apt to appear monotonous, and the interest of watching him exhaustible.

The irony is gentle, but the undercutting of the home-and-hearth cliches is genuine and serious.

Mere pages later comes the following exchange, in which the well-intentioned Mrs Cadwallader offers Dorothea advice, privately:

"You will certainly go mad in that house alone, my dear. You will see visions. We have all got to exert ourselves a little to keep sane, and call things by the same names as other people call them by. To be sure, for younger sons and women who have no money, it is a sort of provision to go mad: they are taken care of then. But you must not run into that. I daresay you are a little bored here with our good dowager; but think what a bore you might become yourself to your fellow-creatures if you were always playing tragedy queen and taking things sublimely. Sitting alone in that library at Lowick you may fancy yourself ruling the weather; you must get a few people round you who wouldn't believe you if you told them. That is a good lowering medicine."

"I never called everything by the same name that all the people about me did," said Dorothea, stoutly.

"But I suppose you have found out your mistake, my dear," said Mrs Cadwallader, "and that is proof of sanity."

Dorothea was aware of the sting, but it did not hurt her. "No," she said, "I still think that the greater part of the world is mistaken about many things. Surely one may be sane and yet think so, since the greater part of the world has often had to come round from its opinion."

Mrs Cadwallader couches her advice in humor, but she's no less serious about it; the oscillation between the two tones--and Dorothea's restrained bristle at the guidance--seems so natural, so convincing, and so much more subtle than Dickens could ever have hoped for. This feels like the realism, the attempt to explicate the reality of human interactions, that novelists continue to grapple with today, hardly dated at all.

Credulity

{Photo by rocketlass.}

Lee Sandlin's endlessly interesting new book on the Mississippi, Wicked River, is a work of history, so ordinarily I would wait to write about it until October's ghosts have returned to their crypts. But one passage from its panorama of adventure and incident suits the month's theme, and thus seems worth sharing. It comes from a chapter titled "Oracles," which, in Sandlin's wonderfully meandering way, wanders through millenarian prophecies, circus boats, minstrel shows, ice jams, and steamboat explosions--but it starts firmly in October country:

It was a credulous age. . . . [People] were eager to believe in anything, no matter how strange, as long as it was bad news. They were particularly fascinated by occult portents of doom. Everybody knew that owls and whip-poor-wills were evil omens, that a dog howling in the night meant somebody was about to die, that prudent people had to carry a tuft of wool tied with thread at all times to prevent being ridden by witches. It was a time of seances and mirror divination and spirit rapping--an era when, as Melville observed in Moby-Dick, "the rumor of a knocking in a tomb will terrify a whole city."

Sandlin then turns to the truly strange example of Harriet Beecher Stowe's husband, Calvin, who

was a down-to-earth and practical man, but . . . was tormented all his life by visions of weird presences infesting the world. On the streets mingling with ordinary people, he said, was another race, "with the human form and proportion, but under a shadowy outline that seemed just ready to melt into the invisible air, and sometimes liable to the most sudden and grotesque changes." These "rational phantoms," as he called them, were hunted by yet another supernatural race, which appeared as "heavy clouds floating about overhead, of a black color, spotted with brown, in the shape of a very flaring inverted tunnel without a nozzle. . . . They floated from place to place in great numbers, and in all directions, with a strong and steady progress, but with a tremulous, quivering, internal motion that agitated them in every part." And then there were the devils--a great many devils, down every street and in every meeting place. They were "very different from the common representations," he said. "They had neither red faces, nor horns, nor hoofs, nor tails. They were in all respects stoutly built and well-dressed gentlemen. The only peculiarity that I noted in their appearance was as to their heads. Their faces and necks were perfectly bare, without hair or flesh, and of a uniform sky-blue color, like the ashes of burnt paper before it falls to pieces, and of a certain glossy smoothness.

Those descriptions come from a biography of Harriet Beecher Stowe that Charles published in 1891; although his account seems utterly bizarre to us now--and, frankly, in its specificity and insistence can’t help but seem like the product of a disordered mind--it’s not particularly strange that Stowe went pubic with his visions: 1891 was still the heyday of the spiritualist movement, which had erupted in midcentury and gained strength after the slaughter of the Civil War (as it would again after World War I). And Harriet herself was, at least in some form, an enthusiast, as shown by a letter to her from George Eliot that D J. Enright included in his Oxford Book of the Supernatural. Stowe had written to Eliot of a two-hour conversation with Charlotte Bronte that Stowe had conducted via a Ouija Board; Eliot, politely, was having none of it:

Your experience with the planchette is amazing; but that the words which you found it to have written were dictated by the spirit of Charlotte Bronte is to me (whether rightly or not) so enormously improbable, that I could only accept it if every condition were laid bare, and every other explanation demonstrated to be impossible. If it were another spirit aping Charlotte Bronte--if here and there at rare spots and among people of a certain temperament, or even at many spots and among people of all temperaments, tricksy spirits are liable to rise as a sort of earth-bubbles and set furniture in movement, and tell things which we either know already or should be as well without knowing--I must frankly confess that I have but a feeble interest in these doings, feeling my life very short for the supreme and awful revelations of a more orderly and intelligible kind which I shall die with an imperfect knowledge of. If there were miserable spirits whom we could help--then I think we should pause and have patience with their trivial-mindedness; but otherwise I don’t feel bound to study them more than I am bound to study the special follies of a particular phase of human society. Others, who feel differently, and are attracted towards this study, are making an experiment for us as to whether anything better than bewilderment can come of it. At present, it seems to me that to rest any fundamental part of religion on such a basis is a melancholy misguidance of men’s minds from the true sources of high and pure emotion.

Among those “[o]thers, who feel differently,” was another of the era’s sharpest minds, William James. Along with the Society for Psychical Research James conducted investigation after investigation into mediums, spiritualist practices, and unexplained phenomena. James himself, though interested, was skeptical--yet even as he was disappointed again and again by fraudulent mediums, he never quite gave up his willingness to be open to the idea that there are things beyond our ken. In his great biography of James, Robert D. Richardson quotes a letter from James to a family friend that, better than anything else I’ve encountered, helps me--a natural skeptic--understand the way that a piercing, inquisitive mind can be drawn by the currents of the time:

I have hitherto felt . . . as if the wonder-mongers and magnetic physicians and seventh sons of seventh daughters and those who gravitated towards them by mental affinity were a sort of intellectual vermin. I now begin to believe that that type of mind takes hold of a range of truths to which the other kind is stone blind. The consequence is that I am all at sea, with my old compass lost, and no new one, and the stars invisible through the fog.

Reflecting in another letter on the sordid trail of chicanery and falsehood he and other researchers had uncovered, James refines that “at sea” feeling to a concise statement more clearly befitting a scientist:

It is a field in which the sources of deception are extremely numerous. But I believe there is no source of deception in the investigation of nature which can compare with a fixed belief that certain kinds of phenomenon are impossible.

A perfect skeptic’s creed for October nights if ever I’ve seen one!

The Eustace Diamonds

Like many readers, I love Victorian novels in part for their sprawling capaciousness. Needing to fill out each monthly number drove Victorian novelists to layer plot twists and characters in a way that contemporary novelists have no real pressure to do. (In fact, I recently figured out why Claire Messud's The Emperor's Children (2006) left me unsatisfied: it was Victorian in ambition but nearly 300 pages short of Victorian in length, and that absence was evident in the way that crucial facets of central characters felt sketched rather then fully imagined, let alone fully drawn.) Anthony Trollope was not much for plotting--Dickens, whom he criticized for his melodrama, could have plotted circles around him. But he was such a professional (committing himself to writing 250 words every hour he was at his desk) and such a perceptive observer of human nature that the heft of his novels usually goes unnoticed, filled as they are with detailed explications of interesting characters. The Trollope novels I've read feel less like treks through a plot, from a start to an obvious finish, than they do visits with some interesting people and their society, to be begun at any point and to be ended at the first convenient marriage; that they come up to the length of a typical three-decker Victorian novel seems incidental.

In The Eustace Diamonds (1873), however, Trollope fails to hide the padding. The perils of serial publication make themselves known, as the plot is repeatedly summarized and conversations, if not exactly repeated, are at least echoed. Midway through the book, Trollope, who rode to hounds a couple of times each week, lets his love of hunting love get the better of him in an extended scene of a hunt, one that has none of the drama of the hunt in Phineas Finn (1869). In addition, at that point in the novel he introduces several new characters who, while individually at least somewhat interesting, as a group slow the novel and draw attention away from its central characters.

Despite that, The Eustace Diamonds is worth the occasional slog, offering many typical Trollopian pleasures. His authorial statements about human nature, though never so aphoristic or philosophical as George Eliot's, are as usual confident and convincing. Here, for example, he shows us Lizzie Eustace, the perpetual dissembler at the center of the book's events, exploding with frustration:

"And is there to be no punishment?" she asked, with that strong indignation at injustice which the unjust always feel when they are injured.

Then there's his usual facility with the minutiae of character, as in this gently ironic description of a marriage proposal offered by the remarkably unremarkable Lord Fawn:

He was now standing upright before her, with the fingers of his right hand touching his left breast, and there was something almost of dignity in his gesture and demeanor.

That "almost" is nearly worthy of Waugh, who also came to mind (along with Ivy Compton-Burnett) when I read this batch of conversation between a young governess, about to be married, and the crotchety old lady whose companion she's to be until the wedding:

"Dear me;--sent you up in the carriage, has he? Why shouldn't you have come by the railway?"

"Lady Fawn thought the carriage best. She is so very kind."

"It's what I call twaddle, you know. I hope you ain't afraid of going in a cab."

"Not in the least, Lady Linlithgow."

"You can't have the carriage to go about here. Indeed, I never have a pair of horses till after Christmas. I hope you know that I'm as poor as Job."

"I didn't know."

"I am, then. You'll get nothing beyond wholesome food with me. And I"m not sure it is wholesome always. The butchers are scoundrels, and the bakers are worse. What used you to do at Lady Fawn's?"

"I still did lessons with the two youngest girls."

"You won't have any lessons to do here, unless you do 'em with me. You had a salary there?"

"Oh, yes."

"Fifty pounds a year, I supose."

"I had eighty."

"Had you, indeed; eighty pounds;--and a coach to ride in!"

"I had a great deal more than that, Lady Linlithgow."

"How do you mean?"

"I had downright love and affection. They were just so many dear friends. I don't suppose any governess was ever so treated before. It was just like being at home. The more I laughed, the better everyone liked it."

"You won't find anything to laugh at here; at least, I don't. If you want to laugh, you can laugh upstairs, or down in the parlor."

Most of the drama of the novel is precipitated by characters feeling forced by circumstance to make impossible choices: marry for love or marry for money; break an engagement one knows to be wrong, or marry, and keep the approval of society while losing one's conscience. One of the book's relatively minor characters, the young Lucinda Roanoke, throws those dilemmas into stark, even shocking relief, crystallizing the themes of the novel in her horror at the concept of her impending marriage. She speaks frankly, cruelly, and with a strain of deep, angry fatalism, refusing to pretend that the marriage is anything but forced. She hates her fiance--hates the very idea of marriage--and her disgust after their first embrace is unexpectedly blunt:

When she was alone she stood before her glass looking at herself, and then she burst into tears. Never before had she been thus polluted. The embrace had disgusted her. It made her odious to herself.

Yet she marches onward towards the fateful day, unable to see a way out.

George Eliot, in The Mill on the Floss (1860), refused to allow a compromise with society once she'd put her heroine into a situation where there could be no right choice; instead, she brought on an apocalyptic flood. Thomas Hardy, too, who was just launching his career at the time of The Eustace Diamonds, would time and again reach for the tragic and violent in that sort of situation. In the story of Lucinda Roanoke there are hints that Trollope may yet surprise us with a turn in that direction. The night before the wedding, Lucinda's grasping, overbearing aunt has a moment of worry as she sees her to her bedroom:

An indistinct, incompleted idea of some possible tragedy had flitted across the mind of the poor woman, causing her to shake and tremble, forbidding her, weary as she was, to lie down.

Could Miss Roanoke's story possibly end with a suicide? Trollope, it turns out, is not willing to go that far. Though he does not back down from his portrayal of the cruelty of her position--the marriage is called off, but Miss Roanoke remains in some sense permanently damaged--he allows it to fade into the background, as his primary characters meanwhile do find themselves able to make some accommodation, however flawed, to the demands of society.

But even as Lucinda's aunt waited outside her door, we knew that Trollope would not choose the tragic. It is not his form. He will criticize, satirize, lay out our failings for us to see--but if we are obstinate he will not force us to acknowledge those failings by foreclosing the possibility of individual happiness. I can imagine Trollope recoiling from the relentless gloom of Jude the Obscure, for he always remains conscious that his role is at least as much that of entertainer as of commentator. A novel, he wrote in his posthumously published Autobiography,

should give a picture of common life enlivened by humour and sweetened by pathos.

If that creed led him to turn away from the darkness and fatalism that would fuel a writer such as Hardy--and would be part of the reason his critical standing fell after his death and remained low for decades--it still left him a broad palette on which to present to us characters and situations that, more than a century later, still teem with life and insight.

Trollope, the Victorians, and us, part one

Though I love Victorian novels, sometimes while reading one I find that I'm unconsciously discounting it a bit for being Victorian, and thus hemmed in by the web of restrictions and proprieties that mark the period. In a sense, I'm just setting the novel in its context--but making allowances for the period, which should enrich my reading, instead detracts from it. I suddenly realize that that I've fallen into an odd condescension, feeling an unearned superiority to the book and its writer.

I don't think I'm the only person who does this. We, after all, are modern; the Victorians were decidedly not. We are free to read and write--and think?--in a way that they were not. Openness is all, few subjects are taboo, and we therefore assume ourselves to have a more clear and direct access to the depths of human emotions, motivations, and hidden desires than Victorians could have. So we can imagine ourselves on high ground when we read them, easily understanding their meaning when they hint at events of which they aren't allowed to speak clearly--but also, we think, seeing through them, as if our x-ray goggles of modernity let us see what the authors are denying even to themselves, the deeper (often sexual) roots of their characters' behavior. In a sense, we subconsciously lower the bar of perspicacity, assuming that, trapped in their society, the Victorians couldn't possibly have understood their characters as well as we do--and thus when they try, when they do allow their characters to express deep emotion, we expect it to be sentimentally drawn, or overblown, or melodramatic.

It's a ridiculous thought, of course, one that doesn't stand up to any real scrutiny or close reading--for example, it's hard to think of anyone who understands human character better than (aside, that is, from Tolstoy, who was also of their time). But all the same, every once in a while I find my thoughts slipping in that direction--until a passage like the one below, from Anthony Trollope's Phineas Finn (1869), stops me short. In this scene, Lady Laura is talking with Phineas Finn, whom she once loved but who, because of his relative poverty and lack of position, she bypassed for a sensible marriage to a prominent and wealthy man.

"The truth is," she said, "that I have made a mistake.

"A mistake?"

"Yes, Phineas, a mistake. I have blundered as fools blunder, thinking that I was clever enough to pick my footsteps aright without asking counsel from any one. I have blundered and stumbled and fallen, and now I am so bruised that I am not able to stand upon my feet." The word that struck him most in all of this was his own Christian name. She had never called him Phineas before. He was aware that the circle of his acquaintance had fallen into a way of miscalling him by his Christian name, as one observes to be done now and again in reference to some special young man. Most of the men whom he called his friends called him Phineas. . . . But still he was quite sure that Lady Laura had never so called him before. Nor would she have done so now in her husband's presence. He was sure of that also.

"You mean that you are unhappy?" he said, still looking away from her towards the lake.

"Yes, I do mean that. Though I do not know why I should come and tell you so,--except that I am still blundering and stumbling, and have fallen into a way of hurting myself at every step."

Lady Laura's anguish is real, and her words, fettered as they remain by custom and bred-in-the-bone reticence, are fully, deeply expressive. It is the language of a person truly pushed to the edge, and it is hard to imagine how a more self-consciously sophisticated, modern approach could render it more powerful. And this is Trollope, generally considered to be one of the least of the Victorian giants--and one of the most conventional. It's all I need to remind myself not to condescend, however slightly, to the Victorians.

Not everything in Phineas Finn is that impressive--Lady Laura's wild and troubled cousin, for example, rarely becomes much more than a mix of Steerforth, Heathcliff, and Lord Byron, and Trollope has a habit of improbably resolving plot complications when they're no longer of use to him--but overall it's a remarkably engaging and powerful book.

Phineas Finn follows Can You Forgive Her? (1864) as the second of Trollope's series of Palliser novels, and, like its predecesor, it features a complex and distinctly drawn portrayal of marriage, with a wife who, while understanding the severe limits placed on her, is determined to fully employ every available lever of power to achieve some level of independence. In Can You Forgive Her? Lady Glencora Palliser, after eschewing illusions of romantic abandon, discovers that what she took to be the hardness of her husband Plantagenet Palliser was instead an inability to express his deep, moving love for her. But in Phineas Finn, Trollope presents Lady Laura's husband, Lord Kennedy, as so stringent, determined, and self-centered that he leaves no space for the real, independent existence of anyone else. Here, for example, is his response to the realization that he had been in the wrong in one of his many arguments with Lady Laura:

He was a just man, and he would apologize for his fault; but he was an austere man, and would take back the value of his apology in additional austerity.

There is no hope, Lady Laura quickly realizes, from a marriage that pits her liveliness and open heart against his desire for complete control. Unlike the Palliser marriage, which Trollope would go on to describe as it deepened and grew over the years, this one from the start seems more likely to wither than to grow, and when Lady Laura considers leaving her husband, her thought process is as heart-wrenching as her initial appeal to Phineas:

Nor, if I am driven to leave him, can I make the world understand why I do so. To be simply miserable, as I am, is nothing to the world.

More tomorrow, including some words about Phineas Finn himself, whom Trollope refers to throughout as "our hero."