Thirty Things, Number 19: Read 'Daniel Deronda'

… Do not think of me sorrowfully on your wedding-day. I have remembered your words – that I may live to be one of the best women, who make others glad that they were born. I do not yet see how that can be, but you know better than I. If it ever comes true, it will be because you helped me…

(Eliot, G, 1876: Daniel Deronda, Penguin Books, 810)

I admire George Eliot. Sometimes I think I want to be her. She writes awesome sentences like this one:

The fact was, notwithstanding all his sense of poetry in common things, Deronda, where a keen personal interest was aroused, could not, more than the rest of us, continuously escape suffering from the pressure of that hard unaccommodating Actual which has never consulted our taste and is entirely unselect. (380)

However, I also like the way she refuses to submit to the standard conventions of a fairytale romance. I like that it takes her 800 pages to tell a story, and that in those 800 pages she can talk about love, literature, religion and politics and I don’t get bored, rather I slowly fall in love with her quiet, soft spoken parentless hero myself. And yet, at the end of 800 pages I couldn’t really tell you that much about Daniel Deronda or why, were he real, I’d be leaning on him just as Gwendolen was. He isn’t an obvious heir to a huge amount of money, he isn’t a dashing navy captain, he isn’t a classics reading Cotton Mill owner he doesn’t own Donwell Abbey or even Pemberley, he is just a well educated, considerate and thoughtful guy. Turns out that’s much more attractive than those other things.

And because he is well educated, considerate and thoughtful he becomes something of a saviour to two women, rather than a suitor or lover, and I kind of like that about him too. Deronda saves two drowning women, and encourages them to live full and meaningful lives. The first rescue is from a quite literal drowning. Daniel rescues Mirah when she despairing of ever find happiness again, prepares to meet her fate in the cold wet embrace of the Thames. He then brings her into the hospitality of good, gentle and caring women, who help Mirah find her place in London society through music, as Mirah is able to teach singing to earn her living. The second woman, Gwendolen, he saves from drowning in her own sorrow caused by the strangling grasp of her marriage and her narrow view point which has not prepared her to think of any life beyond herself, or to find any joy past her immediate disappointments.

Poor Gwendolen. In the hands of any other novelist this young, attractive and energetic heroine would have made a brilliant marriage. But, shaped by Eliot she looses her fortune, marries a bastard and then quietly falls in love with a man who does not love her. I say quietly falls in love, because I don’t even know if Gwendolen herself knows she is in love with Deronda, but I get the clear impression that she was. Even before her bastard of a husband conveniently drowns. If she’d been alive today and not been a Victorian wife she would have been stalking that boy on twitter big time, and pouring out her soul on that soulless medium that makes deep emotional confessions with even relative strangers possible; facebook chat.

Instead Gwendolen and Deronda steal snatches of conversation in the ballroom and at soirees. At first I found Gwendolen somewhat insipid. She’s selfish and she moans and she’s a little bit emo, and she’s fairly certain life is “all like a dance set beforehand” (451) and she is every bit a Gen Y lass. And then I realised she was a bit of me, or maybe I was a bit like her, and that perhaps was the brilliance of Eliot in creating a woman who when I first met her I didn’t really like. She was a brat and she was selfish and served her right marrying Grandcourt, and being cut up with guilt and jealousy over his lover and their kids. Then as she poured out her soul to Deronda I realised that like Gwendolen I had opportunity before me, but I was afraid of disappointment or getting my hands dirty and so I didn’t really know what to do. That sometimes I found life to be so pointless that I was frozen into inaction because did it really matter what I did, I was never going to change anything. I was just a woman in love with the wrong man, cut up with jealousy over his ex-girlfriend and their kid.

So when Deronda took Gwendolen under his care and did his best to lift her from the muddy waters of self doubt and self pity, I heard him saying to me that I needed education, passion and purpose. That then:

life would be worth more to you: some real knowledge would give you an interest in the world beyond the small drama of personal desires. It is the curse of your life – forgive me – of so many lives, that all passion is spent in that narrow round, for want of ideas and sympathies to make a larger home for it. Is there any single occupation of mind that you care about with passionate delight or even independent interest?” (451)

And though Deronda is a piece of fiction, the point that Eliot makes in him is a good one. Life is bigger than the “small drama of personal desires”. And there are things that I care about that are beyond my own needs and wants. And its high time I got back to being a generous, other-centred person, to looking out for people like Mirah who need practical love and people like Gwendolen who sometimes need a hug and sometimes need to be kicked off their backsides, and to realise that at any given point I myself might be bit of a Mirah or a Gwendolen. For while Eliot refuses to submit to the narrative of pretty lady heroine falls in love with dashing hero and lives happily ever after, that is the story we can hope will be fulfilled in Mirah once the novel closes. So maybe the possibility of a fairytale is always there, it just depends whose eyes you look through. Mirah’s life though riddled with pain and disillusionment when we meet her is actually full of fairytale coincedences. She is rescued by Deronda who just happens to be rowing by as she contemplates suicide. He searches for her family and just happens to find her brother, in London, without even really trying. Then to top it all off, he meets his own mother, discovers he is a Jew and therefore much more appealing to Mirah and Mordecai than when everyone thought he was the son of an English Baron. And so the downtrodden but virtuous Mirah gets the hero. If that isn’t a fairytale, I don’t know what it is.

So Mirah gets a fairytale, but Gwendolen gets reality. She marries the wrong man, then falls in love with the best man in the world of the novel, and has to watch as he marries someone else. But, she has learnt to see life beyond herself. To see that Deronda had a life beyond her own, and that other people deserve fairytales too, because the world is bigger than her own suffocatingly narrow desires.

Thirty Things, Number 17: Watch Les Miserables

This is not a review. I’m not stupid enough to contemplate writing a review of a show that I work on. This is just a quick little note to record the fact that I have done yet another of the things on my list. And if it’s a review of anything, it is of my watching experience, because I was apprehensive and feared that maybe I’d seen and heard Les Mis too many times, and concerned that rather than like or not like it, I just might not be interested.

So, on Tuesday 31^st January, I went to the Queens theatre and watched the longest running musical in London[1] and I felt like a tourist, even though I spend most evenings in the building, knew everyone on stage and was mentally aware of where I would be backstage at any given point in time depending on which plot I was doing. It’s a strange way to view theatre. To be thinking things like can I see the onstage wig change (no) and so that is what the make-up looks like under lights (much more subtle than I imagined) while at the same time being involved in a narrative and the (forgive me) journey of a character or two, and every now and then thinking something like oh, that’s who sings that bit! because previously you’ve only heard something from side stage and didn’t recognise the voice, is, well, a different experience to just watching a show.

All that in mind, I was actually positively surprised about how excited I was to be watching the show, and how much I did enjoy it – the music and the narrative. Because I confess I had doubts. Its been over ten years since I saw a professional production of Les Mis. That was in Sydney. I went with school. I more remember things like being shocked that lovely ladies drew their cleavage on (to think the painting of ‘gulls’ would become quite a regular part of my job!), and not having anyone to talk to at interval because I went with my drama class and I was that popular to somehow managed not to have a single friend with me. Since then I’ve seen a schools production and an Am-dram youth theatre version, both of which were good, but slow, and left me thinking that perhaps I’d seen Les Mis enough. So although I lived in London in 2009, was here on holiday over Christmas 2010, and have now been back since May, I was never in a hurry to watch the show.

Then, when I began to put together my list of things to do, I realised that here I was working on a show that claims a space in music theatre history, is a major tourist attraction, and that if I left London without seeing it except from the wings, I’d probably feel a bit silly. So I put it on the list. I have to thank Tim Southgate for including a line from Stars in his status update a few weeks ago which prompted me to ask him to come watch it with me and actually buy tickets. And I did get excited. The day before it hit me. I realised, not only was I looking forward to hanging out with Tim before he flew back to Sydney, I was also really quite looking forward to seeing the show, even though I hear it every night.

So I can happily tick number 17 off the list. Watch Les Miserables. Done. Added bonus: I surprised myself by how much I enjoyed it, and by the nerdy little bit of me that was filled with a rush of excitement as the curtain (screen) went up at the start, simply because I was there. Not be interested? What a silly fear. Ok, so I love opera, we all know that. But sometimes I think I forget how much I like going to the theatre.

Did I mention I like theatre? I like theatre.

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[1] I’m slightly unsure about this fact. I even checked the website, but that made me confused as it claims that is “now the world’s longest running musical”, but further down the page says, “In Broadway history it is the third longest running show after Cats and Phantom of the Opera”. So, yes. That is all.