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.