GYPSIES AND JEWS: GEORGE ELIOT’S USE OF “RACE” IN
THE SPANISH GYPSY AND DANIEL DERONDA
by
Anna McLauchlan
B.A., Simon Fraser University, 1990.

THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILMENT OF
THE REQUIREMENT FOR THE DEGREE OF
MASTER OF ARTS
In
INTERDISCIPLINARY STUDIES
(English and History)

© Anna McLauehlan, 2004
THE UNIVERSITY OF NORTHERN BRITISH COLUMBIA
December 2004
All rights reserved. This work may not be reproduced
in whole or in part, by photocopy or other means, without the
permission of the author.

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Abstract
As a public intellectual and eminent novelist, but also as a woman who transgressed
the social and sexual mores of the Victorian age, George Eliot held a privileged but
precarious position in her English society. This “borderline” position offered her a unique
vantage point from which to critique the patriarchal values that underlay many o f the social,
scientific, and intellectual discourses o f her time. While Eliot acknowledged a basis of
biologically inherent differences between individuals and groups, she also understood the
role of culture or circumstance in the shaping and altering o f character traits. Based out of
her own experiences, Eliot contested the idea that biologically-based differences, however
fixed and immutable they seemed, should form a basis for discrimination.
In her later fiction, in particular, Eliot creates characters whose biological and
cultural identities are indeterminate and blurred. It is through the development o f these
characters that Eliot attempts to reclaim “borderline” identities as sites for the development
o f exceptional traits and characteristics. The Spanish Gvpsv (1868) is often viewed as a
prototype for the themes and ideas developed in Daniel Deronda (1876). In both works,
Eliot’s protagonists are borderline characters; Fedalma and Deronda are o f unknown
parentage and are privileged wards who pass for members o f the dominant social group, yet
each is alienated from that dominant group by some perceived inherent difference or
“otherness.” In both stories, the nature o f the protagonist’s “otherness” turns on “race.”
These borderline characters, through a combination of circumstances that arise from
perceptions o f inherent difference, develop exceptional moral and social characteristics. The
characters are exceptional both in that they deviate from norms and in terms o f their relative
superiority to those norms, thus calling into question the hierarchy o f biological types which

in

underlies or founds the dominant social order. In both these works, which combine race and
gender concerns, Eliot subverts literary conventions as well as cultural expectations in order
to sympathetically challenge her readers’ understanding and move them past the prevailing
cultural beliefs that she recognized as restrictive to the moral and cultural progress o f her
society. In both works, there is a difficult and perhaps irresolvable tension between the
biological determinism and cultural forces that operate on the protagonists —a tension that
reflects the conflicts that Eliot had to overcome in her own life and career as an exceptional
woman.

IV

TABLE O F CONTENTS

Abstract

ii

Table of Contents

iv

Acknowledgments

v

Dedication

vi

INTRODUCTION

1

Chapter One

George Eliot’s Borderline Position in Victorian Society

24

Chapter Two

The Exceptional Woman in The Spanish Gvpsv

43

Chapter Three

Daniel Deronda and the Hidden Jew

65

CONCLUSION

90

Works Cited

94

Acknowledgements
It is with great appreciation and gratitude that I acknowledge Dr. Kristen Guest for her faith,
encouragement and guidance during the work and completion o f this thesis.
I am also grateful to both Kate Lawson and Bruce Wyse, the professors with whom I began
my George Eliot studies at UNBC, to my committee members and support staff at UNBC,
and to family and friends for their patience and support throughout my writing o f this thesis.
Thanks to all o f you.

Dedication

To the great loves o f my life
my husband, Douglas,
and our son, Alexander.

1

Introduction: Gypsies and Jews in George Eliot’s Later Fiction

There are in Daniel Deronda the figures based upon observation and the
figures based upon invention. This distinction, I know, is rather a rough
one. There are no figures in any novel that are pure observation and none
that are pure invention. But either element may preponderate, and in those
cases in which invention has preponderated George Eliot seems to me to
have achieved at the best but so many brilliant failures. (James 165)

In his 1876 review o f George Eliot’s last novel Daniel Deronda. Henry James draws
attention to what he sees as failures in characterization and a resulting lack o f artistic unity in
the novel. According to James, the work suffers from what he refers to as its “Jewish
burden”(165) —the more “inventive” but less compelling Jewish characters and plot that
make up half o f the novel.
James, like other generally admiring critics, lauded Eliot’s presentation o f the English
characters, especially Gwendolen Harleth, the spoiled woman-child and unlikely heroine of
the English half o f the novel who provided the most compelling reading for Eliot’s
contemporaries. Yet Eliot’s sympathetic portrayal o f modem Jews - and particularly her
heroic privileging o f the “borderline” racial character o f Daniel Deronda —proved unsettling
to her contemporaries who approached the English novel with very particular ideas o f form
and subject and judged it with strict, yet subjective, criteria.
On the one hand, Victorian critics approached any new fiction with “the unquestioned
assumption that art presses closely upon life, both emotionally and intellectually” (Carroll 2)
and thus they applauded realistic representation of detail in character, sentiment and action.
On the other hand, however, they also desired affirmation o f their own understanding of such
detail, and judged the value o f the realism from their own particular social, cultural, and

2

moral perspective which was predominantly white, middle-classed, and male. While Henry
James was perhaps an exceptional critic by nature o f his own burgeoning and ultimately
successful attempts at novel writing, most o f Eliot’s contemporary critics were nonetheless,
like James, educated, white men who occupied positions o f relative power and superiority
underpinned by contemporary ideas about race, class and gender.
Writing under a male pseudonym and with an unprecedented mastery o f realistic
representation, Eliot’s earliest fiction seemed not only to respect the literary criteria o f her
critics but also to confirm many cultural values and beliefs. The short stories in Scenes of
Clerical Life (T856f and Eliot’s first novel, Adam Bede (1859), realistically depicted the
moods and expressions o f local characters while affirming familial bonds, religious
teachings, and a patriarchal traditional heritage known, shared and understood by her
readership. However, even in these earliest works, keen readers such as John Blackwood,
Eliot’s publisher, detected signs o f unorthodoxy, particularly in some unconventional
situations and melancholy characterizations. In an 1857 letter responding to Blackwood’s
concerns, George Eliot (the yet disguised female writer, bom Mary Ann Evans) defended her
literary methods: “My artistic bent is directed not at all to the presentation o f eminently
irreproachable characters, but to the presentation o f mixed human beings in such a way cast
to call forth tolerant judgement, pity, and sympathy” (GEL 2:299). ' This early response to
criticism o f her artistic efforts emphasizes Eliot’s purposeful defiance o f literary eonventions
but also synthesizes the philosophical and moral basis for all Eliot’s fiction to follow.
With the revelation of the unconventional woman behind the pseudonym and the

' A ll references to George Eliot’s original letters and notes are from George Eliot: Life and Letters (Ed. J.W.
Cross. 1885. 3 vols. Boston: Dana Estes & Co., 1968) and The George Eliot Letters (Ed. Gordon S. Haight. 9
vols. N ew Haven: Y ale UP, 1978). Hereafter these sources w ill be abbreviated as Life and GEL respectively.

publication o f her second novel The Mill on the Floss (1860). Eliot’s critics became
engaged in debates about the unorthodoxy of both the author and her fiction. Such debates
were aggravated by a succession o f first-rate fictional works that nonetheless exhibited
dramatic departures from conventional forms and subjects and culminated in sympathetic and
heroic privileging of racial protagonists in The Spanish Gvpsv and Daniel Deronda. the two
works to be discussed in this study. For many o f Eliot’s Victorian critics, both The Spanish
G v p s v and Daniel Deronda represented extreme, though not entirely unprecedented,

departures from the cherished themes, characters, and forms of Eliot’s earliest fictional
works. The Mill on the Floss had posed an early challenge to thematic expectations,
particularly with its tragic conclusion for the unconventional but sympathetic heroine, while
Romola (1863), historically set in fifteenth century Italy, exemplified a dramatic shift away
from the bucolic characters o f the English countryside. In Middlemarch. generally
considered Eliot’s masterpiece, Eliot experimented with a multi-plot form to explore
complex psychological and social themes in a near- contemporary English setting. The
Spanish Gvpsv (1868), a book length poetic drama set in Inquisitorial Spain, and Daniel
Deronda (1876), a dual-plot Bildungsroman that extends past its contemporary English
setting into a foreign and distant future, exhibited further departures in subject and form. In
both of these later works, the once-familiar themes o f family relations and cultural heritage
are strained, literary conventions are further upturned, and foreign characters and outcasts of
society - the gypsy and the Jew - are given rank with, if not a moral superiority to, the
Christian and the Englishman.
This thesis broadly argues that through her “borderline” racial protagonists in these
two later texts Eliot subverts literary conventions as well as cultural expectations in order to

4

move her readers past the prevailing values and beliefs that she recognized as restrictive,
and even destructive, to the moral and cultural betterment of her society. This study begins
with an overview o f some o f the Victorian reviews o f Daniel Deronda as a means of
highlighting the extent to which Eliot’s use o f “race” in her fiction unsettled her
contemporary audience, and, to a large extent, continues to be a problem to the modem
student of her work. Based on the premise that the idea o f race mattered as much to George
Eliot as it did to her critics, this study explores Eliot’s unique use o f race in The Spanish
Gvpsv and Daniel Deronda.
In these texts, Eliot’s protagonists, ignorant o f their racial heritage until a critical
moment in their young adulthood, occupy a “borderline” position as inherently “marked”
yet privileged members o f the dominant society. In each case, the markings are neither
simply nor clearly those o f visible or physiological difference; rather, Eliot’s gypsy and
Jewish protagonists are marginalized by a combination o f cultural and biological
circumstances, thus blurring and complicating the existing ideas o f opposition between
privileged and subordinated members within a dominant society. As considered by Kristen
Guest, the “borderline” other differs markedly from that o f an “absolute” racial “other” who
has been the source o f many literary, cultural and post-colonial studies:
Unlike the colonial subject who is racially and culturally distinct from the
colonizer, the “borderline” other shares significant physical attributes with the
dominant population. In western culture in particular, dominant and marginal
groups often participate in a common cultural and linguistic context and may
even share a related racial heritage. Despite their similarities, however, it is
partially through the definition and exclusion of marginal groups that the

5

dominant population consolidates its power. As a result, marginal group can
neither be dismissed as “irredeemable savages” nor comfortably assimilated to
prevailing norms. The central problem with the “borderline” case in
mainstream culture is therefore that, unlike the racial other o f colonial
discourse, marginal ethnic or social groups in a European context are
problematic “others” whose participation in western culture vexes attempts to
define them in oppositional terms. (109)
In Victorian times, “borderline” others included such diverse groups as the poor, the insane,
criminals, as well as Irish, Jews and, arguably, gypsies. O f interest in Eliot’s later works is
that the gypsy and Jewish protagonists are “borderline” individuals first by their mysterious
and ambiguously defined origins which, for each, marks his or her position in the dominant
culture as one o f ambivalence; though exemplary individuals, they are viewed with suspicion
by many members o f the dominant society. In each story, the subsequent revelation o f the
protagonist’s “borderline” racial heritage complicates his or her assimilation into the
dominant society and unsettles prevalent notions o f cultural and biological difference.
In many ways, the “borderline” positions o f these characters reflect Eliot’s own status
in Victorian society: an exceptional intellect and artist, she was also viewed with suspicion
by many o f her contemporaries in an age when women were generally considered “naturally”
inferior to men. While anonymity or a pseudonym hid the mystery o f her sex from the public,
the revelation o f the woman behind the writing disrupted many o f the cultural and biological
beliefs o f the dominant society. This thesis argues that through her use o f “race” and
particularly through her use o f borderline racial protagonists, Eliot exposes and contests
many of the tenets o f cultural and biological determinism as she saw them being applied to

subjugate women and other groups within a patriarchal social system.
Chapter One of this thesis explores how Eliot’s moral and aesthetic vision evolved
out o f her gender-based concerns as a public intellectual in Victorian society. As a public
intellectual, Eliot was exposed to and immersed in the leading cultural and scientific
discourses o f her day. These discourses identified women and the so-called “lower races”
(along with criminals and idiots) as “naturally” inferior to middle and upper class, educated
white men and were advanced through natural science generally and Darwin’s evolutionary
theory in particular. Eliot’s experience as a subject o f phrenology, a pseudo-science that was
directly related to evolutionary theory, exemplified for her the conflicts inherent in and
between discourses o f biological and cultural determinism as well as the shortcomings of
scientific method as the authoritative means for understanding fundamental human
characteristics and differences. In response to these concerns, and as an attempt to address
them in a manner appropriate to her intellectual background and moral disposition, Eliot
began writing fiction. In her later fiction, many o f Eliot’s earliest concerns about the conflicts
between biological and cultural determinism are explored through her use o f “borderline”
racial protagonists. In both The Spanish G v p s v and Daniel Deronda. the purposeful blurring
of biological and cultural considerations is informed by Eliot’s initial and long-standing
objective for all her fiction - to gain a sympathetic understanding for all “struggling, erring,
human creatures” (GEL 3:111).
Chapters Two and Three focus, respectively, on The Spanish Gvpsv and Daniel
Deronda. The Spanish G v p s v has often been eonsidered as a prototype for Daniel Deronda.
and this thesis considers the related thematic concerns o f the two texts. Textual
considerations include how Eliot uses the sympathetic and heroic appeal o f a borderline

7

racial protagonist to challenge many cultural and biological claims about gender and
“race” as they were being used and abused within a patriarchal power structure. Eliot’s
representations o f the gypsy and the Jew in the respective texts is informed by her literary,
historical and cultural understanding and exemplifies both an intellectual and personal
opposition to elaims o f biologieal and gender determinism that were espoused in her time.
Through alterations and subversions o f both subjeet and form in each text, Eliot reelaims
the stereotypically feminized emotions o f love, pity, and sympathy as much needed
universal emotions to deal with the moral failings and ultimate degeneracy o f a social
system based on oppression o f its less privileged members.
In The Spanish Gvpsv. Eliot’s female protagonist, Fedalma, is called upon to fulfill a
role o f soeial leadership; however, given the ruthlessness o f patriarchal claims - both
biological and cultural —Fedalma ean only achieve a qualified victory which comes at a
disproportional emotional cost. Daniel Deronda is a fuller and more complex experiment
with the moral failings o f patriarehal soeial systems, and its contemporary setting and
characters make the novel a particularly pointed critique o f Eliot’s time and society. Daniel
is a male protagonist who both embodies and develops, out of his borderline position, some
stereotypically female characteristics (selflessness, sympathy for others, and a near
maternal compassion for oppressed and suffering individuals, particularly women), which
eventually aid in his moral and personal victories within and outside the dominant culture.
Through Daniel’s sympathetic understanding o f oppressed groups and individuals, the
reader is also given profound insight into the inverse situation in which women struggle and
suffer in their attempts to counter or appropriate positions o f power typically associated
with men. In both texts, there is an unresolved thematic tension that turns on Eliot’s

8

blurring and subversion o f gender characteristics and roles, in combination with her use
of “race” considerations.
Chapters Two and Three also consider the complex interplay o f subject and form in
these later works. The Spanish G y p s y ( 1 8 6 8 ) marks a foray into the genre o f dramatic
poetry with a form and a subject that has its roots in classical tragedy. Daniel Deronda. with
its dual plotline and doubling o f protagonists, inverts and disrupts many o f the conventions
o f the English bildungsroman on which the novel’s movement seems to be premised.^
Throughout this thesis, I will argue that Eliot’s use o f race allows her to address a difficult
and perhaps irresolvable tension between the biological determinism and cultural forces
that she had to overcome in her own life and career as an exceptional and “aberrant”
woman. Her attempt is rooted in the privileging o f a racial “other,” according her or him
with a sensitivity, insight, and moral authority - much like her own —that surpasses that of
members o f the dominant and patriarchal society.

What Henry James and other nineteenth eentury reviewers o f Daniel Deronda saw

2

Although beyond the scope o f this study, it is worth noting that the disruption o f literary forms in Eliot’s later
works may be a reflection o f the influence o f German literary traditions. W hile E liot’s proficiency in German
and her vast reading and knowledge o f German literature and philosophy is well-documented in her published
notes and journals, the influence o f German literary traditions evident in Eliot’s fiction was largely lost upon
her contemporary readership and today remains an understudied but potentially fertile area o f in George Eliot
scholarship. Eliot’s studies and appreciation o f German writers such as Schiller, Hegel, and Goethe would
necessarily have immersed her in the debates about the German bildungsroman and about the meaning and
connotations o f the German word “bildungs” itself. Similarly, Eliot was familiar with the “bourgeois tragedy,”
the most popular form o f German drama in the nineteenth century and one practiced by Goethe, Wagner and
Hebbel. The “bourgeois tragedy,” like the tragedy o f The Spanish G v p s v . is an exploration o f kinship and
individual love in which threats to a bourgeois domestic order are played out in a “fem inine” (daughter or
w ife) opposition to the father figure in the drama. For a general overview o f German philosophical debates
about the bildungsroman form, see “Bildungsroman, 1766” (The Literarv Encvclopedia at www.LitEncvc.com .
13 Novem ber 2002). For a detailed history o f the critical discourses surrounding the form over a 200 year
period, see Todd Kontje’s The German Bildungsroman: Historv o f a National Genre (Columbia, SC: Camden
House, 1993). For a comprehensive study o f German tragedy, see Gail K Hart’s Tragedv in Paradise: Familv
and Gender Politics in German Bourgeois Tragedv 1750-1850 (Columbia, SC: Camden House, 1996).

9

as a breach o f artistic unity and failure in characterization had much to do with cultural
and social expectations about the realistic novel. However, these expectations were also
related to Eliot’s status as a woman who upturned societal conventions and expectations of
feminine behaviour even as she held a place as a leading intellectual and eminent novelist.
The public acknowledgement o f Eliot’s intellectual and artistic prowess before the
revelation o f the unconventional woman behind the pseudonym had, very early on, left
many of Eliot’s critics in the awkward position o f admitting to her exceptional talent while
at the same time trying to uphold their own beliefs about male superiority in intellect and
art. After the lifting o f the pseudonym, even Eliot’s most admiring critics began to qualify
their praise with the claim that her writing was indeed exceptional fo r a woman and
recurrently responded to new works with what would become a formulaic combination of
“reverence and reservation” (Carroll 32). Daniel Deronda was one more novel in a
progression o f exemplary fiction that put “new and difficult demands” on the reader (32),
especially through Eliot’s considerations and use o f “race,” particularly Jewishness, in a
contemporary English setting. Rather ironically, then, it was through somewhat unified
claims o f racial and cultural superiority that many Victorian critics attempted to challenge
both the work and its author.
While many of today’s readers are compelled to admit that the Jewish plot is often
plodding and the Jewish characterizations over-elucidated and resultantly stiff, the many
attacks on the Jewish plot in Eliot’s time are disturbing both for their racism and their
hostility towards Eliot personally. Many reviews begin with a pointed comment on Eliot’s
failed literary efforts with the novel and follow up with concerns about Eliot’s interest in
and considerations of contemporary Jews. For example, to an unsigned 1876 Speetator

10

reviewer, no book by this “great author” has “ever seemed so laboured,” even “forced”
and “feeble” at times, a characterization most evident in response to Daniel and the other
Jewish characters (CH 365-6)/ Another reviewer applauds Eliot for her grasp o f character
psychology even as he remains “dissatisfied with the Jewish episode” on the grounds that it
has not “sufficient connexion (sic) with broad human feeling to be stuff for prose fiction to
handle,” the “Jews being a curious people” (CH 374).
The latter comment, as willfully ignorant as it is racist, brings to the forefront the
existing and disparate perceptions o f contemporary Jews against which Eliot was reacting.
Eliot’s sympathetic portrayal o f English-Jews and especially o f a Jewish hero, through the
character o f Daniel, was indeed a departure from the literary stereotypes with which
Victorian readers would have been most familiar - namely Shakespeare’s Shylock and,
closer to home, Fagin —the irreligious, alien, atavistic, and venal Jew-villain o f Charles
Dickens’s 1847 novel Oliver Twist. In terms o f the actual and varied lives and conditions of
English-Jews, particularly those who held fast to their Jewish heritage, Eliot’s readers were
far less familiar and were interested in only in so much as they could see and thus
distinguish, generally along class lines, such Jews from themselves. Eliot’s readers were
thus wary o f the spectre raised, by Daniel in particular, o f the gentlemanly and scholarly
Jew, who by nature o f his invisibility in both class and racial terms, could, if he so chose,
pass comfortably as an Englishman. This type of Jewish character was not based on literary
stereotypes, but rather on the actual existence o f modem figures such as Benjamin Disraeli
—the Jewish-bom Englishman whose early conversion to Anglicanism served as a public

^ All references to Victorian reviews o f Daniel Deronda are taken from David Carroll’s comprehensive
collection George Eliot: The Critical Heritage (The Critical Heritage Series. N ew York; Routledge, 1971).
Hereafter, references to this text w ill be abbreviated CH.

11

and legal disavowal o f his Jewish heritage, thus allowing him to pursue a lengthy and
successful career in British politics (starting in 1837 and culminating in his Prime
Ministership in 1878).
While Disraeli’s social mobility had considerably upset the issue o f absolute
difference for many of his English contemporaries, Eliot opposed not the man and his
position so much as his persisting beliefs in the superiority of the Jewish race. It is clear that
Eliot had something o f Disraeli’s situation in mind in her drawing o f Daniel. Eliot’s text
rejects the notion o f “passing” as an Englishman in favour of distinct racial identity and
racial pride, while also exemplifying the ideology o f conversion as a tyranny from which
the Jewish people need to be set free /
Such portrayals were, however, ill-received by Eliot’s critics. In one o f the most
unsympathetic reviews of the novel, the critic accedes that Eliot has “fallen below her usual
height” and complains that the reader “never feels at home”; the author is “ever driving at
something foreign to [the reader’s] habits o f thought” (CH 376-377). Most offensive to the
reviewer is Daniel’s rejection of English privilege and his embrace o f his racial heritage:
[Wjhen a young man o f English training and Eton and University education.

" A s suggested by Patrick Brantlinger, Eliot uses “Jewish history and racial pride as a way to critique the
narrowness o f English nationalist history and racism,” but also as “a romantic cultural and political analogue
for the difficulties she encountered throughout her career as a woman” (256). E liot’s efforts in gaining
unconditional access to a career withheld on the basis o f prejudicial assumptions allowed her to sympathize
with others in similar positions. One such person was the Jewish scholar Emmanuel Deutsch, Eliot’s Hebrew
language teacher and close friend from 1867 until his death in 1873. Deutsch was Eliot’s m ost likely
contemporary model for Daniel Deronda’s Jewish mentor, Mordecai; like Mordecai, Deutsch was fatally ill,
dreamt o f travelling to the East, and died on route during a journey to Palestine.
Less frequently commented upon by Eliot’s biographers is the fact that D eutsch’s career as a
transcriber at the British Museum was impeded by prejudice. A respected journalist and scholar, he was
nonetheless, “passed up for recognition and promotion” because he was a Jew. (Baker 133). Thus, unlike
Disraeli, w hose conversion allowed him access to positions otherwise withheld from Jews, Deutsch suffered
the consequences o f remaining openly Jewish.

12

and up to manhood, o f assumed English birth, so obliging also as to
entertain Christian sympathies, finishes off with his wedding in a Jewish
synagogue, on the discovery that his father was a Jew, the most confiding
reader leaves off with a sense o f bewilderment and affront. (ÇH 377)
Summing up his disparaging comments, the reviewer connects Daniel Deronda with an
earlier work: “O f course in the design o f Daniel Deronda we are reminded o f the part played
by Fedalma in The Spanish G v p s v . Fidelity o f race stands with this author as the first of
duties and virtues, nor does it seem material what the character o f the race is” (CH 379). The
reviewer’s concerns with Eliot’s use or misuse o f racial fidelity, particularly through Daniel’s
betrayal o f his English upbringing, are exemplary o f many o f the Victorian reviews and
highlight the readers’ expectations o f a conventional ending - that is, one which upholds the
cultural expectations o f the dominant society.
In both The Spanish G v p s v and Daniel Deronda the possibility o f a conventional
romantic ending is upset by the protagonists’ acceptance o f racial and cultural claims that are
beyond those o f the dominant society. However, contrary to the assertion that “the character
o f the race” is not “material” to the author o f these texts, Eliot’s choice to focus on the gypsy
and the Jew does indeed matter. Considerations o f the extent to which Eliot uses particular
Victorian cultural and historical understandings o f these individual “races” - gypsy and Jew - is critical to this study and will be considered more fully in discussions o f the individual
texts, but it is worth stressing here some broader similarities of these “borderline” racial
groups that highlight their centrality to Eliot’s thematic intentions.
Throughout European history, the gypsy and the Jew have both and alternately been
upheld as the most ambivalent marker o f a racial “other.” This ambivalence is grounded in

13

their physical proximity and physiological similarity to members o f the dominant culture,
as well as in their varying levels of acceptance and rejection o f dominant cultural values.
Unlike colonial subjects whose biological and cultural inheritance was seen, by Victorian
observers, to be fixed in distant but defined geographical spaces, gypsies and Jews existed
throughout western history as homeless people who occupied peripheral spaces in the many
dominant societies in which they lived and moved. Historically,
Both were pariah groups, assumed to be antisocial, and often accused of being
enemies o f mankind. Throughout their histories in Europe they had been
wanderers. Their host nations periodically forced them to leave countries they
had assumed to be their homelands. (Semmel 104)
And yet, despite periodic expulsion and diaspora, both groups continued to uphold their
racial and cultural autonomy and to gather strength to their numbers. The cohesion o f these
groups (through particular cultural beliefs and binding traditions) was at once exemplary of
and threatening to the values o f many a host nation or society and thus repeatedly
complicated efforts o f containment or assimilation.
Additionally, whereas overt physiological differences (such as facial features or skin
colour) were part o f a scientific discourse that marked the colonial subject as inescapably
“other,” both the gypsy and the Jew often shared physiological similarities with members of
their host nations, thus complicating attempts to define them as biologically and
fundamentally different or inferior. In the absence o f incidental, particular, or stereotypical
“racial” attributes (such as the wagons and brightly coloured costumes of the gypsies, or the
gathering o f men in skull caps near a Jewish synagogue), a gypsy or a Jew, could and might
infiltrate and disrupt the cultural domain o f the dominant society. The disruptive, and

14

potentially dangerous, physical and physiological proximity o f the borderline “other” is
a cultural notion that Eliot plays upon with her borderline protagonists in her later works
and one which unsettled readers o f both The Spanish Gvpsv and Daniel Deronda.
In the case o f Fedalma in The Spanish Gvpsv and Daniel in Daniel Deronda. the
borderline protagonists, ignorant o f their racial heritage and brought up in the dominant
culture, dramatically exemplify the idea o f threatening invisibility in a borderline “other.”
Eliot’s use o f borderline races, gypsies and Jews, parallels, subverts and exemplifies, in
broader cultural terms, the personal conditions and experiences o f the borderline
protagonists. Like the borderline races they come to represent, the protagonists, before the
revelation o f racial heritage, share an ambivalent cultural and biological position in which
they can neither be defined in purely oppositional terms nor be fully assimilated into the
dominant culture.
Notably, many o f the Victorian responses to both The Spanish G v p s v and Daniel
Deronda exemplify these troubling concerns with regard to the borderline protagonist and his
or her racial affiliation: the revelation o f a previously-hidden racial heritage, which should
have allowed the reader to define, oppose if necessary, and ultimately contain the character,
does nothing o f the sort. Rather, the displacement o f the protagonist into another society and
culture destabilizes conventional and culturally-reproduced strategies o f containment that
would allow the dominant society to maintain its position o f relative superiority. The only
recourse left to the critic, if he was speaking as a privileged member o f the dominant society,
was to attack the author for her failed literary efforts; as noted by Reina Lewis in her
considerations o f Eliot’s contemporary reviews,“[t]he unwelcome elements o f hereditary
determinism and scientific theory made [The Spanish Gvpsvl a bad poem and a failed

15

romance just as they were held to blight Daniel Deronda” (225).
And yet, it must be noted that the historical placement, the romanticized setting, and
the formal distancing o f Eliot’s dramatic poem seemed to soften the immediate cultural threat
o f Eliot’s use of race. In contrast, Daniel Deronda. with its contemporary setting, characters,
and concerns, encouraged a broader and more dynamic critical discourse. For example, in
opposition to the many markedly hostile responses to the novel were the fewer, though no
less important, enthusiastic and laudatory reviews by Jewish readers, from within England
and elsewhere. While non-Jews claimed that Jews were not interesting, compelling, or
worthy enough to warrant broad human interest, Jewish reviewers applauded Eliot’s careful
study, realistic portrayals, and sympathetic understanding o f contemporary Jewish
conditions. They were also able to articulately and accurately deduce the root cause o f the
many negative reviews o f the novel: as one Jewish reviewer succinctly states, “To make a
Jew the hero of a story, or even to endeavour to enlist the sympathies o f the reader in his
favour, was contrary to the canons o f fiction” (CH 407). In other words, within literary
boundaries defined by the hegemonic English society, Eliot’s subject did not fit the accepted
forms o f the realistic novel.
While the affirmative responses by Jewish readers rescued Eliot from a sense of
ultimate defeat and despondency, Eliot had herself anticipated the English resistance to her
use of race and to the Jewish parts o f the novel, recording in her journal after the first three
books o f Daniel Deronda had been serially published, “The Jewish element seems to me
likely to satisfy nobody” (GEL 6:238). That Eliot could and did persevere with what she
knew to be a very contentious and difficult argument in her novel exemplifies the heartfelt
urgency o f her concerns. In a later 1876 letter to Harriet Beecher Stowe, Eliot defines some

16

of these concerns:
As to the Jewish element in Deronda, I expected from the first to last in
writing it, that it would create much stronger resistance and repulsion than it
has actually met with. But precisely because I felt that the usual attitudes of
Christians towards Jews is —I hardly know whether to say more impious or
more stupid when viewed in the light o f their professed principles, I therefore
felt urged to treat Jews with such sympathy and understanding as my nature
and knowledge could attain to. Moreover, not only towards the Jews, but also
towards all oriental peoples with whom we English come in contact, a spirit of
arrogance and contemptuous dictatorialness is observable which has become a
national disgrace to us. There is nothing I should care more to do, if it were
possible, than to rouse the imagination o f men and women to a vision of
human claims in those races o f their fellow-men who most differ from them in
customs and beliefs.” (GEL 6:301)
“Sympathy and understanding,” “nature and knowledge,” “imagination” and “a vision of
human claims” - such associations are the basis o f Eliot’s artistic and philosophical
position in her presentation of Jews in Daniel Deronda. but they are also her response to the
“spirit o f arrogance and contemptuous dictatorialness” which she saw operating in her
society at large with regard to both race and gender and felt in her own borderline
experience as an eminent but suspect female intellect and artist.
Insomuch as Eliot’s use o f borderline racial protagonists in her later works posed
problems with relation to literary conventions and broader cultural beliefs, her own
borderline position (as an unconventional woman and exceptional artist), had for a longer

17

time unsettled and disrupted many of the prevalent gender claims o f her time. The
briefest look at Victorian reviews o f Eliot’s fiction as a whole affirms Kristin Brady’s
statement that “no male writer has been analyzed in terms of gender to the extent that
George Eliot has been” (2). The reviews o f Daniel Deronda are perhaps unusual in their
prevalent concerns about the “race” subject rather than the gender o f the author, but at least
one of Eliot’s contemporaries was able to make, if obliquely, the connection between
“race” and gender in Eliot’s later works. In an unsigned 1881 obituary (later revealed to be
written by Leslie Stephen), the reviewer summarized the charges that had been laid upon
George Eliot by many Victorian readers o f Daniel Deronda:
The poor woman was not content simply to write amusing stories. She is
convicted upon conclusive evidence o f having indulged in ideas; she ventured
to speculate upon human life and its meaning, and still worse, she
endeavoured to embody her convictions in imaginative shapes, and probably
wished to infect her readers with them. This was, according to some people,
highly unbecoming in a woman and very inartistic in a novelist. (CH 467)
Considered in light of modem feminist literary criticism which claims that Eliot’s gender
had much to do with what she wrote, how she wrote and how that writing was received,
Stephen’s assessment o f Eliot’s talents and related shortcomings is particularly perceptive
for its time. As Dorothea Barrett suggests in her 1989 study o f Eliot and her fiction, “It is
easy to criticize George Eliot for failures in ventures which other novelists do not attempt”
(154). With particular reference to Daniel Deronda. Barrett adds that this seminal work
“crosses more boundaries, and is therefore more strained, than any other George Eliot
novel” (154).

18

Taking up on such considerations, this thesis explores Eliot’s unique use o f race in
her later works is exemplary not only o f a crossing o f boundaries, but also o f a shifting,
disrupting and blurring o f boundaries in such a way as to explore but not to solve the
vexing problems o f biological and cultural determinism that Eliot encountered in her own
life. Furthermore, strained as Eliot’s later works may be, the interest they generated and
continue to generate, are testimony to the exceptional intellect and talent o f the artist as well
as the profundity o f her human concerns. Eliot’s incontestable impact as an artist, and the
quality that set her above both her critics and other artists of her day, is perhaps best
understood through what John Keats, the romantic poet, described as “Negative
Capability’’:
...the quality [that forms] a Man o f Achievement.. .& which Shakespeare
possessed so enormously - 1 mean Negative Capability, that is when a man is
capable o f being in uncertainties. Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable
reaching after fact & reason.. .(1105)
As an acclaimed female intellectual and artist, George Eliot wrote out o f a position
that was at once privileged and precarious. On a personal level, Eliot knew and understood
herself to be at various and particular times in her life, situated within, on the periphery, or
completely outside different intellectual, literary and social circles. In other words, the
“borderline” condition - that o f the individual who can neither be opposed nor assimilated
in absolute terms - was Eliot’s ongoing personal experience and one which found its most
complex fictional form in the racial protagonists in The Spanish Gvpsv and Daniel Deronda
- works which expose, to use Henry James’ words, “brilliant failures” in subject and form.

19

Interdisciplinary Parameters and Methods of This Study
While Eliot’s unique use o f “race” in The Spanish Gvpsv and Daniel Deronda is the
basis for this study, the art in this case cannot be separated from the artist, or the intellectual
from the woman. Thus, this study will consider Eliot’s literary efforts in the context of her
non-fiction writings, her posthumously published notes, letters, and journals and sociohistorical accounts of both her personal beliefs and those o f her society. Eliot’s non-fiction
writing progressively exposes her developing intellectual positioning as well as her
emotional and moral considerations of biological and cultural determinism. Her notes and
journals offer insight into her choice to write sympathetically about “borderline” racial
characters - the “gypsy” and the “Jew”- and further exemplify the underlying complexity
o f these choices. The work o f recent cultural and literary historians further aids in
elucidating the uses o f these racial tropes in both historical and literary terms.
Because this thesis attempts to place Eliot’s intellectual and artistic expression in its
historical determination, I come back to the Victorian reviews o f Eliot’s fiction at several
points in my discussion. These reviews are, for the most part, based on close readings that
pay special attention to textual detail. Moreover, as primary historical documents they
provide a valuable overview o f the cultural and aesthetic concerns that informed Eliot’s
general readership and intellectual contemporaries. Finally, because the literary critics are
most often white, English and male, they express an opinion from the hegemonic group of
which, I will argue, Eliot is writing both for and against.
The Victorian journals, which carried the literary reviews o f Eliot’s work, also
contained essays covering a wide range o f intellectual, philosophical and scientific subjects.
In this public forum, studies and advances in the discourse of biological science were open

20

to debate, modification, and extrapolation by various players including such men as
Herbert Spencer, John Mill, Francis Gallon, T.H. Huxley and Charles Darwin. Given the
complex and shifting configurations o f the discourses that arose out o f evolutionary
science, I have limited my primary considerations o f biological claims o f the nineteenth
century to one seminal text - Darwin’s Descent o f Man (1871). Darwin’s text offers the
most objective nineteenth century considerations o f human differences, yet nonetheless
exposes the pervasive and prejudicial claims o f superiority by the educated, European men
who, in Victorian times, dominated discourses o f race and gender. Additionally, because
the publication o f Darwin’s text falls between that of The Spanish G v p s v and Daniel
Deronda. it exemplifies some of the most current theories and pressing concerns about
human differences as they would have been understood and appropriated by Eliot. I defer to
the secondary works o f more recent cultural critics to elucidate the centrality o f Darwin’s
writing in broader Victorian discourses o f biological determinism and its relation to the
specific study o f phrenology that placed Eliot firmly in these discourses.
In my considerations of “race” throughout this thesis, I acknowledge the complexity
and ambiguity o f the term and its referents. That the term “race” is misleading at best, and a
misnomer or “fiction” at worst, has been the consensus o f many late twentieth century
historians and cultural critics. As Henry Louis Gates Jr. argues in “Race.” Writing and
Difference, given the historical referents for “race,” the term and its derivatives remain
problematic misnomenelatures:
When we speak o f “the white race” or “the black race,” “the Jewish race” or
“the Aryan race,” we speak in biological misnomers and, more generally, in
metaphors. Nevertheless, our conversations are replete with usages o f race

21

which have their sources in the dubious pseudoscience o f the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries. (4)
Gates’s reference to “dubious pseudoscience” is a general reference to the some of the
misguided sociological applications o f biological and evolutionary claims in the Victorian
era. In an essay on nineteenth century ideas o f raee and gender, Nancy Stepan makes a
similar point, noting that “ ’racial dissimilarity’” in the conventional phenotypical sense
proves to be more banana peel than stepping stone;” historically, she suggests, “ ’racial
dissimilarities’” have not only been artificially used, they are themselves artifieial” (27).
To get around the terminologieal problems o f “raee,” Theodore Allen proposes that
historians and cultural critics use the term “racial oppression” : “By considering the notion
o f ‘racial oppression’ in terms o f the substantive, the operative element, namely
‘oppression,’ it is possible to avoid the contradictions and howling absurdities that result
from attempts to spliee genetics and sociology” (28). In the following chapters, 1 will
attempt to differentiate between “racial oppression” and differences o f “race” as they
would have been inscribed in the discourses —sociologieal, scientific, and otherwise —and
understood by Victorian society. However, the difficulty in using “racial oppression” in
discussing Eliot’s use o f raee in her later fiction is that Eliot, a Victorian intellectual
keeping pace with the “scientific” thought and discoveries of her day, was both shaped by
and resistant to the biological determinism and essentialist differenees that defined both
“raees” and the sexes. Thus, in references to “raee” in writings by Eliot and her
eontemporaries, 1 will follow the lead of Reina Lewis in Gendering Orientalism: Raee.
Femininity and Representation, and classify “race” as “a term that signifies a historically
variable process o f racialization —the proeess by whieh groups or individuals eome to be

22

ascribed a racial identity —and not as a word that simply denotes a given, innate, static
neutral classification” (2). Significantly, Eliot’s unique use of race in her later fiction
exemplifies an uncomfortable blurring o f a “process o f racialization” with a “given” and
“innate” classification and highlights Eliot’s own unsettled but somewhat enlightened
position in Victorian discourses of cultural and biological determinism.
According to Henry Louis Gates, “race” remains “the ultimate trope o f difference”
between “cultures, linguistic groups, or adherents o f specific belief systems” because
...it is so very arbitrary in its application. The biological criteria used to
determine “difference” in sex simply do not hold when applied to “race.”... in
such a way as to will this sense o f natural difference into our formulations,
(author’s italics) (5)
In the following discussions o f Eliot’s fiction, I will consider historically determined
“biological criteria” in the constructions o f both “race” and gender. But while in agreement
with Gates about the difference o f biological valuations o f “race” and gender, my own
position is that in looking at the cultural and biological determinism that undermined the
understanding o f the terms in Victorian times, the terms are far less separate than we
perceive them today. Nancy Stepan summarizes this connection in her considerations of
nineteenth century biological discourses; “In short, lower races represented the ‘female’
type of the human species and females the ‘lower race’ o f gender” (Stepan 40).
Insomuch as Eliot could consider biological determinants as “real” markers o f sexual
and racial difference, she could not accept the socially-debilitating consequences that arose
out o f such differences. In The Spanish Gvpsv and Daniel Deronda Eliot questions
prevalent Victorian ideas of racial and gender inferiority through the use o f borderline

23

racial protagonists - one a gypsy, the other a Jew. While “race” may be the “ultimate
trope of difference,” both the “gypsy” and the “Jew” elude definitions o f absolute
“otherness” or difference making them particularly apt choices for Eliot’s considerations
and critique o f cultural and biological determinism in her later fiction. With such assertions
in mind, the following discussions will focus on Eliot’s borderline placement in nineteenth
century discourses of cultural and biological determinism and then on Eliot’s use of the
gypsy in The Spanish Gvpsv and the Jew in Daniel Deronda as contentious but apt
analogues for Eliot’s concerns about gender determination.

24

Chapter One: George Eliot’s Borderline Position in Victorian Society
In an 1872 essay, Edward Dowden made the now famous distinction between Eliot’s
“historical” s e lf” and her “second se lf’ - the author o f the novels who is “perhaps more
substantial than any mere human personality encumbered with the accidents o f flesh and
blood and daily living”(CH 321). Dowden’s comments called attention to the “impertinent
observation and criticism” of many Victorian reviewers whose vexations, Dowden realized,
arose from their prejudicial notions about Eliot’s “historical se lf’ and from their recurrent
efforts to separate “the moral soul” o f the art from its “artistic medium” (322). As Dowden
notes further, Eliot is “artist as much as teacher” and
When a work o f art can be understood only by enjoying it, the art is o f a high kind.
The best criticism o f Shakespeare is not that whieh comes out o f profound cogitation,
but out o f immense enjoyment; and the most valuable critic is the critic who
communicates sympathy by an exquisite record o f his own delights, not the critic who
attempts to communicate thought. In a less degree the same is true o f George Eliot.
There is not a hard kernel o f dogma at the centre o f her art, and around it a sheath or
envelope which we break and throw away; the moral significance coalesces with the
narrative, and lives through the characters. (322)
O f interest here is Dowden’s displacement and conflation o f the literary critic with Eliot
herself. Insomuch as Dowden’s emphasis is away from Eliot’s “historical self,” his argument
rests on an understanding o f Eliot’s “second s e lf’ (the artist) as having a history o f its own.
The great artist is first a great critic o f the human condition and is at once able to
communicate delight with and sympathy for one’s fellow-creatures.

25

Taking up Dowden's considerations o f Eliot as a great critic, this chapter traces
the development o f Eliot’s moral and aesthetic vision starting with her position in public
intellectual discourses rather than with her artistic vocation. It suggests that Eliot’s personal
and intellectual concerns raised moral contradictions for her that she eventually believed
could best be addressed by writing fiction. By shifting the historical window to consider
Eliot’s “second se lf’ as public intellectual rather than artist, we can see how the complexity
o f Eliot’s borderline position, which she experienced as both intellectual and novelist,
developed and changed over time and how it eventually came to inform her use o f “race” and
borderline protagonists in her later fiction.
From her early translations o f Strauss’s and Feuerbach’s critical analyses of
Christianity through to her work as editor and essayist for the Westminster Review. Eliot
participated in and contributed to the leading intellectual debates o f her time. She was thus
receptive to and knowledgeable about arguments that challenged accepted cultural “truths” or
ideological certainties. By the time she began writing fiction in 1856, the natural sciences
were established as the authoritative discourse on man’s nature and place in the universe As
both a woman and a public intellectual, this discourse, particularly in its conclusions about
women’s different and limited intellectual capacities, presented problems for Eliot.
While Eliot accepted the rationality and objectivity o f the scientific method on which
evolutionary theory was based, her critical intellect combined with her personal experience
made her skeptical of studies that categorized definitive human differences at the expense of
the mysteries o f personal circumstance and individual emotional responses that arose out of
such circumstances. One such study, with which Eliot had direct experience, was phrenology
- the study o f head size and skull shape as a supposed indicator o f mental and intellectual

26

capacities. As a subject of phrenological study, Eliot was made aware of the extent to
which scientific method could be used as a basis for justifying and maintaining a traditional
social order which was dependent on the subjugation o f women and “lower races.”
While the inferiority o f women and “lower races” had, o f course, been established by
long-held cultural beliefs, evolutionary science empirically linked the two sub-groups (along
with children and idiots) lending a renewed authority to tradition. In phrenology, as with
evolutionary science in general, notions o f women’s inferior mental capacities were bolstered
by diverse and ongoing physiological comparisons o f women to “lower races” and to past
states of civilization. Such comparisons were synthesized in Darwin’s seminal work. The
Descent o f Man (1871'). Darwin’s work, the most far-reaching and objective account o f the
physiological differences between groups and individuals, purported to find that men, in all
societies, were possessed o f larger and stronger bodies as well as more highly developed
intellectual capacities than women. Women’s smaller and weaker bodies, compromised
further by reproductive functions and capacities, translated into different and somewhat
limited mental capacities. In comparing the mental capacities o f men and women, and
different “races” or levels o f civilization, Darwin was also able to assert, with some degree of
confidence, that women’s mental characteristics were similar to both those o f children and
“lower races.”
Although Darwin was inclined toward caution when addressing the potential
sociologieal implications of such comparisons, some rather incautious assertions are yet
present in his writings and, as such, his observations, like those o f many other Victorian
scientists, seemed to offer a virtual prescription for ongoing sexual discrimination. For
instance, in a chapter outlining the secondary sexual characteristics o f man, Darwin observes

27

that man, largely owing to his greater size and strength, “is more courageous, pugnacious
and energetic than woman, and has a more inventive genius.” Darwin adds that m an’s “brain
is absolutely larger, but whether or not proportionately to his larger body, has n o t.. .been
fully ascertained” (557). In a related vein, Darwin stresses the association o f female
physiology to juvenile human forms, noting that children “resemble the mature female much
more closely than the mature male” and that the formation o f a woman’s skull “is said to be
intermediate between the child and the man”(557).
Although Darwin does not develop the psychological implications o f woman’s
purportedly more juvenile physiology, his observations and statements are in keeping with
broader scientific theories circulating in his time. As Cynthia Russett points out, such
theories (propounded by a wide range o f Victorian scientists) stressed that insomuch as
women shared physical characteristics (smaller bodies and heads) with children, they were
also likely to remain childlike in emotional character, “weak-willed, impulsive, perceptive,
markedly imitative rather than original, timid, and dependent” (54).
Further emotional characteristics were seen to arise from women’s reproductive
capacities. In a chapter entitled “Difference in the Mental Powers o f the Two Sexes,” Darwin
asserts that woman’s biological maternal instincts underlie her predominantly emotional
disposition:
Woman seems to differ from man in mental disposition, chiefly in her greater
tenderness and less selfishness.. .Woman, owing to her maternal instincts,
displays these qualities towards her infants in an eminent degree; therefore it
is likely that she would often extend them towards her fellow-creatures. Man

28

is the rival of other men; he delights in competition, and this leads to
ambition which passes too easily into selfishness. (563)
Notably, woman’s “tenderness” is subsumed by man’s “ambition” and even his
“selfishness,” for out o f man’s selfishness arises the most distinctive, and incontestable,
difference between the sexes —the propensity for men to exemplify genius and attain
eminence;
The chief distinction in the intellectual powers of the two sexes is shewn by
man’s attaining to a higher eminence, in whatever he takes up, than can
woman— whether requiring deep thought, reason, or imagination or merely
the use o f the senses and hands. If two lists were made o f the most eminent
men and women in poetry, painting, sculpture, history, science, and
philosophy, with half-a-dozen names under eaeh subject, the two lists would
not bear comparison. (564)
That women’s intellectual capacities were and would largely remain (given the fixed
biological and sexual conditions o f difference) lesser than those possessed by men is a
proposition Darwin further supports by comparing women to “lower races” :
It is generally admitted that with women the powers o f intuition, o f rapid
perception, and perhaps o f imitation, are more strongly marked than in man,
but some, at least, o f these faculties are characteristic o f the lower races, and
therefore of a past and lower state of civilisation. (563-564)
In comparing women to both children and “lower races,” while upholding intellectual
eminence as the key marker of difference between the sexes, Darwin’s writing affirms many

29

prevailing Victorian notions of both gender and cultural hierarchies in which the civilized,
white male stands at the apex.
Drawing unfavourable comparisons between women’s emotional characteristics and
m en’s intellectual capacities and extending those comparisons to “lower” (non-European,
largely non-white) races was not novel to Victorian discourses o f race and gender. Rather,
Darwin’s theorizing confirmed many long-held cultural beliefs about the similarities between
women and lower races. As Nancy Stepan argues in a recent essay on nineteenth century
science, the evolutionary theory that connected women and “lower races” had its roots in
distant history: “women [had] long been connected with other social groups represented
“metaphorically as ‘other’ and ‘inferior’ in Western culture and were socially
‘disenfranchised’ in a variety o f ways.” Thus, she points out, Aristotle likened women to
slaves “on the grounds o f their ‘natural’ inferiority” (42). Insomuch as the established racial
view of the Middle Ages had its basis in “the binary opposition between blackness and
whiteness”(42), the differences between men and women were likewise understood in binary
oppositional terms. Men had long been characterized as powerful, active, brave, logical and
rational, while women, in turn, were viewed as weak, passive, timid, illogical, and emotional.
Notably, in such a litany of split and oppositional characteristics, “one pole of these
dualities [had] been accorded and socially sanctioned as having superior value” (Perry and
Whiteside 7). The social context that guided nineteenth century scientists was one in which
“the white, European affluent class males were at the peak o f the evolutionary hierarchy
(Perry and Whiteside 6) and such men were, o f course, the ones doing the studies that
affirmed little more than the validity o f their social position. Thus, despite Darwin’s
objectivity and cautious qualifiers, his conclusions about the mental differences between men

30

and women, and between higher and lower raees, repeated an all too familiar Victorian
litany.
Additionally, Darwin’s conclusions about the physiological differences between men
and women, particularly in head size and skull shape, lent credence to earlier and ongoing
phrenological studies. Before Darwin’s writing in The Descent o f Man. phrenologists had
made the most authoritative studies o f the size and shape o f the head as an indicator o f brain
size and corresponding mental capacities. Phrenology, whieh combined many o f the same
ideas later synthesized by Darwin, was a science with which Eliot had direct experience
when, in 1844, she had her head studied and her mental constitution classified.
Though today considered a pseudo-science, phrenology was sanctioned by leaders in
the scientific community throughout the better part o f the nineteenth century. The study
originated with the writings o f Franz Josef Gall in the 1790s and the practice began to gain
credibility in the 1820s when phrenologists started “to focus on differences in the shape of
the skull o f individuals and groups” (Shuttleworth 124). In much o f the phrenological
literature o f the nineteenth century, “women and lower races [were often] compared directly
on the basis of their skull formation” and similarities were “proven” through studies of head
shape, head size, jaw structure and jaw protrusion (Stepan 46). In addition to its perceived
anthropological value, phrenology also had a broad-based popular appeal as “an explanatory
structure for the experience of internal division” and as “a social philosophy” that “offered a
new system o f classification” (Shuttleworth 128). Because this classification was based on
“innate endowment” rather than “rank and privilege,” phrenology sometimes confirmed
rather than denied the “mental equality o f the sexes” (128-129), thus holding a particular
appeal for women who had access to its practitioners.

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Phrenology was reaching the peak o f its popularity in the mid-nineteenth century
when Eliot had her head measured. The so-called science was familiar to Eliot’s earliest
circle of acquaintances and was practiced by her close friend Charles Bray who had taken a
cast of her head in 1844. Erom the measurement o f her “very large” skull, Bray ascertained
that “[i]n her brain-development, the Intellect greatly predominates” and “In the Eeelings, the
Animal and Moral regions are about equal; the moral being quite sufficient to keep the
animal in order and in due subservience” (qtd. in Brady 20). Bray’s phrenological findings,
while confirming that Eliot’s head was indeed large, affirmed little more than what he
already knew about her. In fact, Eliot herself made little o f the experience until ten years
later, when Bray’s assessment was reconsidered in light o f Eliot’s romantic involvement with
George Henry Lewes, a married man, and her decision to live openly with him.
We know from The George Eliot Letters that Bray shared his phrenological data
regarding Eliot with George Combe, the Scottish popularizer of phrenology. At Bray’s
invitation. Combe was allowed to measure and analyze Eliot’s head and, initially, he
concurred with Bray’s findings and conclusions. However, when it was revealed in 1854 that
Eliot was living with Lewes, Combe was “forced to admit that phrenology had failed to read
her character” (Haight, GEL 8:xvii); in Combe’s own words “her conduct, with her brain,
seems to me like morbid mental aberration” (qtd. in GEL:8 xvii). Combe’s pronouncement
in combination with Bray’s dismay at Eliot’s altered and societally-reprehensible
circumstances led Eliot to reconsider her own assumptions about the value o f phrenology and
the theoretical basis on which it was founded. Combe’s reassessment o f Eliot’s mental
constitution illustrated to her how readily the practitioners of scientific theory, especially in

32

its vulgarized forms, abandon the pretence o f value neutrality and objectivity when that
pretence no longer provides clear answers to more complicated, value-laden questions.
By 1855, both Eliot and Lewes had “shied away from accepting the contention that
cranial bumps revealed unalterable aptitudes and dispositions” while Bray, for his part,
accused them both o f abandoning a scientific “physiological basis” for explaining human
conduct and character (Semmel 33). By Bray’s own admission, he and Eliot had “violent
quarrels” about the scientific validity of phrenology and “she taunted him more than once
both for his commitment to phrenology and for his retrograde ideas about women” (Brady
21). In several letters of the time, Eliot expressed her disdain at the prejudice underlying
phrenological classification. In an 1857 letter to Sara Hennell she writes that there is “so
much sectarian feeling” in the adherence to “phrenology” that “the associations o f the word
[phrenology] are not agreeable to me” (GEL 2:402). To Charles Bray in the same year she
writes that “every one who knows what scienee means must also agree.. .that there can be no
social science without the admission [that]...true antecedent and consequent are
proportionately difficult to discover as the phenomena are more complex” (356).
Eliot’s understanding of individual human beings as complex phenomena in which
inherent traits were difficult to distinguish and separate from larger circumstances would be
explored in her later fiction, but it was also a theme she began to address shortly after her
1854 phrenological reassessment. The conflict that Eliot perceived between the competing
influences of culture and biology on human behavior led to her writing, in quick succession,
two significant essays that were published anonymously in The Westminster Review.

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In an 1854 essay entitled “Woman in France” Eliot used phrenology to introduce
an argument about the intellectual differences between accomplished French women and
their English counterparts:
What were the causes o f this earlier development and more abundant
manifestation o f womanly intellect in France? The primary one, perhaps, lies
in the physiological characteristics o f the Gallic race: - the small brain and
vivacious temperament which permit the fragile system o f woman to sustain
the superlative activity requisite for intellectual creativeness; while, on the
other hand, the larger brain and slower temperament o f the English and
German are, in the womanly organization, generally dreamy and passive. (40)
Despite her references to phrenological interpretation, in the same essay Eliot also considers
two non-biological factors that contributed to the intellectual abilities o f French women: the
ability and willingness to marry based on mutual compatibility and the broader opportunities
for women, largely through the “the influence o f the salons” (42), to engage freely in
intellectual discourse with men. Significantly, these arguments reflected Eliot’s most
immediate personal experience: at the time she was writing her essay, Eliot was living with
Lewes in a relationship based on mutual compatibility, and she had also gained significantly
from participating in intellectual circles predominantly made up o f men. Based out o f her
own experience, the crux o f her essay lies in its appeal for a widening o f personal and social
opportunities for women as a way of providing a partial remedy for the intellectual
inequalities between the sexes.
In these arguments, Eliot recognizes that biological conditions may well determine
our psychological make-up, thus Gallic women are bom with “small brains” and

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corresponding “vivacious temperaments,” just as “[a] certain amount o f psychological
difference between man and woman necessarily arises out o f the difference o f sex” (38). On
the other hand, however, she also recognizes the role played by institutions and cultural
practices in shaping opportunities for redressing the effects of inherited conditions, and she
chastises commentators who fail to recognize the importance and irreducibility o f both sides
o f this dynamic.
These ideas are pursued in a second essay, published in 1855, entitled “Margaret
Fuller and Mary Wollstonecraft,” in which Eliot writes:
On one side we hear that woman’s position can never be improved until
women themselves are better; and, on the other, that women can never
become better until their position is improved - until the laws are made more
just, and a wider field opened to feminine activity. But we constantly hear the
same difficulty stated about the human race in general. There is a perpetual
action and reaction between individuals and institutions; we must try and
mend both by little and little - the only way in which human things can be
mended. (185)
In this essay, Eliot calls for a more relational understanding of character and circumstances
than she sees in the predominant biological and cultural discourses o f her time and her focus
is on similarities between individuals and groups rather than on perceived inherent
differences. When this focus is lost, Eliot believes, the possibility o f improving conditions for
women is impeded:
Unfortunately many over-zealous champions o f women assert their actual
equality with men—nay, even their moral superiority to men— as a ground for

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their release from oppressive laws and restrictions. They lose strength
immensely by this false position. If it were true, then there would be a case in
which slavery and ignorance nourished virtue, and so far we should have an
argument for the continuance o f bondage. But we want freedom and culture
for woman, because subjection and ignorance have debased her, and with her,
Man. (185-86)
Arguably, Eliot’s preference for moderate rather than revolutionary reform is
indicative o f her borderline position in both intellectual and political circles. As editor o f The
Westminster Review and as a contributing essayist, Eliot was a respected member o f a
privileged intellectual class. However, as a female intellectual whose sex was hidden from
the larger public by anonymity and by the assumption o f a male, or neuter, literary persona,
Eliot’s position was also precarious. Thus she embodied a similar form o f conflict to the one
she perceived in the tension between individuals and institutions. That she believed this
tension was best relieved little by little further reflects her privileged but precarious position
in intellectual circles; she could afford to wait for gradual change and thus her decision not to
become actively involved in direct political causes. The importance o f these considerations is
evident in Eliot’s sometimes contradictory position on “the woman question”- Victorian
discourses and debates on enfranchisement and education for women.
In an 1853 letter Eliot states, “Enfranchisement o f women” only makes creeping
progress; and that is best, for woman does not yet deserve a much better lot than man gives
her” (GEL 2:86). A further letter highlights Eliot’s awareness o f her exceptional and
privileged position in relation to other women. In an 1857 letter to the Brays, Eliot writes:

36

“Conscience goes to the hammering in o f nails” is my gospel. There can be
no harm in preaching that to women at any rate. But I should be sorry to
undertake any more specific enunciation o f doctrine on a question so
entangled as the “woman question.” The part of the Epicurean gods is always
an easy one; but because I prefer it so strongly myself, I the more highly
venerate those who are struggling in the thick of the contest. (GEL 2:396)
Eliot did venerate many o f her lifelong friends (such as Barbara Bodichon, Harriet
Martineau and Mrs. Peter Taylor) who publicly espoused feminist ideals. Throughout her
life, Eliot wrote often, and always with great affection, to these women. In an 1867 letter to
Taylor, Eliot writes: “I do sympathize with you most emphatically in the desire to see
women socially elevated, educated equally with men, and secured as far as possible with
every other breathing creature from suffering the exercise o f any unrighteous power” (Life
3:14). Such sincere regard for “those struggling in the thick o f the contest” is characteristic
o f Eliot’s understanding o f her own distance from that contest and, as such, o f her
borderline position in relation to other Victorian women. Through her sympathy for those
who struggling to improve conditions for women, on the one hand, and her preference for
the “part o f the Epicurean gods” on the other, Eliot blurs and complicates the existing ideas
that defined the difference between privileged and subordinate women in Victorian society.
Because o f her borderline status within her predominantly male intellectual
community and within the political milieu o f the “woman’s question,” Eliot felt herself to be
at various and particular times in her life, situated within, on the periphery, or completely
outside the circles and social groupings with which she was associated. In other words, the
conflict o f the borderline individual - one who can neither be opposed nor assimilated in

37

absolute terms - was Eliot’s personal experience. The complex emotional and intellectual
conflict of Eliot’s personal experience required some other form o f expression than
discursive essays or political critique. The proper vehicle for articulating her borderline
experience —her unique, incomplete but untethered understanding of complex human
phenomena - was fiction. It was only through fiction that Eliot could do justice to what she
recognized in herself and others as the “mystery” o f personal experience.
Eliot’s belief in the “mystery” of lived existence (coupled with her skepticism toward
the sectarian application of scientific knowledge) is the guiding principle o f her earliest
literary efforts. In an 1857 letter to her friend Sara Hennell, Eliot writes, “I feel every day a
greater disinclination for theories and arguments about the origins o f things in the presence of
all this mystery and beauty and pain and ugliness that floods one with conflicting emotions”
(GEL 2:341). A similar sentiment informs her initial response to The Origins o f Species. In a
letter to Barbara Bodichon in 1859, Eliot remarked on her skepticism regarding the value and
validity o f evolutionary theory in the face o f life’s larger “mystery” :
We have been reading Darwin’s book on the “Origin o f Species” just now: it
makes an epoch, as the expression o f his thorough adhesion, after long years
o f study, to the Doctrine o f Development.... So the world gets on step by step
towards brave clearness and honesty! But to me the Development Theory, and
all other explanations o f processes by which things came to be, produce a
feeble impression compared with the mystery that lies under the processes.
(GEL 3:227)
Eliot’s remark that Darwin’s work “makes an epoch” acknowledges its significance
even as she begins to criticize its relevance from a moral perspective founded on a position

38

that is tantamount to religious faith. The irony evident in Eliot’s phrasing o f “step by
step” progress towards “brave clearness and honesty” indicates her belief that the movement
toward the full explication o f origins and human development is ultimately less important
than the “mystery that lies under the processes.” Indeed, as Reina Lewis points out, all of
Eliot’s texts are informed and energized by her sense o f this “mystery” (199).
The “mystery that lies under the processes” is a phrase that describes a phenomenon
that by definition cannot be contained or explained by scientific methods. This phenomenon
is analogous to the ambiguity inherent in Eliot’s borderline position in Victorian society —a
position that confronts the virtue o f clarity with the value o f mystery. Such a position also
presents an emotional contrast to intellectual or ideological certainty. Charging forth
“bravely” toward ultimate “explanations” does not require is not a way o f acting that is
oriented to the appreciation o f mystery, nor does such action require or allow space for
emotional reflection.^
Eliot’s understanding of the “mystery underlying the processes” describes the
experience that compelled her to cultivate her “vocation” as a moralist through writing
fiction. It explains also why she did not continue on the path o f public intellectual and
essayist, nor take up political battle as an activist. These activities did not afford sufficient
scope for her moral philosophy. Since Eliot believed that the relationship between individual
and institution could only be mended slowly, the best way to persuade others to her belief
was by representing the complexity and intractability o f individual circumstances, whether
these circumstances are biologically or culturally determined or whether they are beyond the

^ It is noteworthy that concepts o f emotional vulnerability, pity and sympathy are conspicuously absent from
the list o f praiseworthy masculine qualities catalogued by Darwin in The Descent o f Man. Rather, Darwin
returns rather forcibly to the necessary social value o f sympathy in his final conclusions o f his later text.

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scope of human understanding. Fiction writing presented Eliot with the means of
sympathetically addressing the conflict between those aspects o f life we cannot control and
those aspects that we can, between hereditary conditioning and moral agency, between
intellectual and emotional responses to the complexity o f lived experiences.
Eliot expresses these aims o f her art most resolutely and sincerely in a letter to
Charles Bray in 1859:
If art does not enlarge men’s sympathies, it does nothing morally. I have had
heart-cutting experience that opinions are a poor cement between human
souls; and the only effect I ardently long to produce by my writings is, that
those who read them should be better able to imagine and to fe e l the pains and
the joys of those who differ from themselves in everything but the broad faet
o f being struggling, erring, human creatures. (Eliot’s italics) (GEL 3:111)
Insomuch that Eliot’s moral philosophy was at the centre o f her art, she was also well
aware o f the precarious line between philosophic commentary and artistic creation. In an
1866 letter to Frederic Harrison, Eliot makes this point:
I think aesthetic teaching is the highest o f all teaehing, because it deals with
life in its highest complexity. But if it ceases to be purely aesthetic, —if it
lapses anywhere from picture to the diagram, - it becomes the most offensive
of all teaching. (GEL 4:300)
This grave and measured seriousness with regard to her vocation is further delineated in an
1878 letter:
“My function is that o f the aesthetic, not the doctrinal teacher, —the rousing
of nobler emotions, which make mankind desire the social right, not the

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prescribing o f special measures, concerning which the artistic man,
however strongly moved by social sympathy, is often not the best judge. It is
one thing to feel keenly for one’s fellow-beings; another to say, “This step and
this alone, will be the best to take for the removal o f particular calamities”
(Life 3:268).
Eliot’s understood her art as her vocation and as such it provided her with a
framework o f meaning that both incorporated and transcended her personal circumstances,
and connected her more closely with a larger soeial body. Given Eliot’s focus on the
interrelation between personal significance within a larger social group, it is not surprising
that she would appropriate the theory o f organicism (which characterized both geological and
biological science in the nineteenth century) as a way o f giving form to her artistic vision.
Reina Lewis writes that Eliot had an interest in organicism as “a theory o f the interdependent
growth and development o f organisms (individual and eolleetive, plant and human), [which]
stresses the interdependence of the parts on each other and on the whole” and further notes
that “in many ways, it is the culmination o f [Eliot’s] vision o f organicist development as the
solution to the theme o f personal will versus social and moral responsibility that structures
her fiction over a number o f years” (199). The sense o f calling or fitness o f parts within a
larger social body is reflected in the form and the content o f all Eliot’s fiction. In an 1962
essay, Bernard Paris makes a similar point when he remarks that Eliot’s fictional
characterizations are rooted in her personal beliefs about the individual’s ties to his or her
society:
The moral lives o f George Eliot’s characters - their sense o f duty and
rectitude, of personal significance and spiritual satisfaction - are very largely

41

determined by the extent to which the social experience o f the race and the
will o f society have shaped their attitudes, and by the degree to which they
feel themselves to be part of a corporate existence which is greater than
themselves. (16)
The borderline protagonists in The Spanish G v p s v and Daniel Deronda share a
“sense o f duty and rectitude” and the need for personal fulfillment —a need that is, to varying
degrees, heightened, challenged or threatened by both biological and cultural claims from the
dominant society that attempts, but ultimately fails, to define and contain them. Both
Fedalma in The Spanish Gvpsv and Deronda in Daniel Deronda are called upon to contribute
to a “corporate existence which is greater than themselves.” Complicating matters, however,
is the fact that the “social experience of the race” and “the will o f society” are not one and
the same for the borderline protagonist o f these later texts.
In Daniel Deronda. for example, Daniel is portrayed as an inherently sensitive and
loving man who is constrained, as privileged ward o f the dominant society, from acting on
sympathetic feeling until the revelation o f his Jewish heritage places him outside the society
o f his upbringing. In The Spanish Gvpsv. the conflicts between inherent and conditioned
character traits, between private and public roles, between self-fulfillment and self-sacrifice,
are equally unsettling and problematic and they derive ultimately from the conflict Fedalma
experiences between her gypsy heritage and the claims o f Spanish society. In both texts, the
revelation o f a biological affiliation with a marginal racial group reveals and compounds the
protagonist’s borderline position, and thus compels both protagonists to seek meaningful
societal action outside the cultural bounds o f the dominant society. It is this attempt to

42

balance the idea o f inherited characteristics - biological, cultural, or both —with external
or circumstantial influences that results in the thematic tensions in Eliot’s later works
Eliot’s fiction, as it develops over time, highlights her emotional and intellectual
responses to a shifting but increasingly aggravated sense o f her borderline condition, but
this response is neither absolute nor conclusive. While many o f her contemporary observers
saw her as a “freak of nature, a monstrous anomaly in whom feminine and masculine traits
waged a destructive war (Brady 3), Eliot herself understood the borderline position as one
that was at once privileged and precarious, and as such an ideal position from which to
encourage sympathetic understanding o f both the self and other in hegemonic discourses.

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Chapter Two: The Exceptional Woman in The Spanish Gypsy
In her 1 8 5 6 essay “The Antigone and Its Moral” George Eliot writes that the source
o f tragedy in Sophocle's drama lies in the “antagonism o f valid claims” ( 2 6 3 ) . In The
Antigone, the dramatic struggle is between the individual will o f Antigone, the female
protagonist, and the laws o f social order represented by Creon, Antigone’s uncle and the ruler
of Thebes. Significantly, the conflict that Eliot considers to be central in The Antigone
exemplifies her own struggle as a borderline individual in Victorian society. As a public
intellectual and as an artist, her efforts at self-fulfillment often came into conflict with
prevailing cultural beliefs about women and their place in the social hierarchy. This conflict
o f the exceptional woman, particularly one chosen for ambitious endeavours, is one o f the
central themes taken up by Eliot in The Spanish G v p s v ( 1 8 6 8 ) .
In The Spanish G v p s v . Eliot tells the story o f a woman who must renounce the claims
of conventional womanhood (specifically love and marriage) in order to accept a higher
calling o f social and political leadership. In this lengthy poetic drama set in the time o f the
Spanish Inquisition, the heroine, Fedalma, is a woman o f unknown parentage who has been
raised as the ward o f Spanish nobility. The story proper begins on the day before she is to
marry Don Silva, duke o f a Spanish fortress town near the Moorish border. On this day,
Fedalma secretly leaves the palace to explore the city and is drawn by music toward the town
square where she proceeds to dance among the common people. Her dance is stopped,
however, when her eyes meet those o f Zarca, a gypsy chief and a captive o f the Inquisition
who is being led in shackles through the square. On her return to the palace, Fedalma is
rebuked by Silva for her public performance amongst the common people. When Zarca
escapes his captors and later that evening comes to Fedalma, he reveals himself to be her

44

father and convinces her that it is her duty to join him in leading the gypsy people to a
new homeland. Fedalma accepts this duty, albeit with great reservations about leaving her
betrothed, and returns with Zarca to a gypsy encampment on the outskirts o f the town. Don
Silva, in his love for Fedalma, follows them and unwittingly helps the Zincali and their
Moorish allies to storm his own citadel. When he discovers his mistake, Don Silva kills
Zarca and at the end o f the story, Fedalma and Don Silva are tragically separated. Don Silva
resolves to redeem himself by committing to the oppressive reign o f the Inquisition, while
Fedalma, having accepted her fate, leaves the Spanish shore with her fellow-gypsies who, in
the absence o f Zarca, are expressing signs o f possible mutiny.
Fedalma’s fate is at once ennobling and tragic. She is the chosen saviour of her
people and is able to accede to a role o f social leadership, but not without the grave sacrifice
o f her love for Don Silva and without the certainty o f future success in her calling. Her fate is
thus in keeping with the themes o f classical tragedy. For example, like The Antigone of
which Eliot had written in her 1856 essay. The Spanish Gvpsv focuses on the conflict
between the protagonist’s personal desires and the cultural claims o f a patriarchal society.
Much like Sophocle’s Antigone, Fedalma opposes repressive cultural laws and in doing so
threatens the social hierarchy o f the dominant society. Further, as with Sophocles’ tragedy,
Eliot’s dramatic poem ends with tragic consequences for the noble and heroic protagonist.
Written entirely in blank verse. The Spanish Gvpsv is an ambitious work which
combines both the themes and formal versification o f classical tragedy. As George Steiner
remarks in “Verse in Tragedy,” [f]or more than two thousand years the notion o f verse was
nearly inseparable from that o f tragic drama”(154). Verse, argues Steiner, is “more exact than
prose, more self-contained” and “at once simplifies and complicates the portrayal o f human

45

conduct” (156). The Spanish Gvpsv. particularly with its versification and appropriation
o f classical tragic form, is perhaps Eliot’s most unique and ambitious attempt to represent,
but not to resolve, the conditions of the borderline character, particularly the exceptional
woman whose talents and ambitions lie beyond culturally-sanctioned norms o f female
behaviour. Such a representation is akin to what Richard Sewall calls the “tragic vision”:
...the tragic vision is not a systematic view o f life. It admits wide variations
and degree. It is a sum o f insights, intuitions, feelings, to which the words
“vision” or “view” or “sense o f life,” however inadequate, are most readily
applicable. (4)
In The Spanish Gvpsv. Eliot’s “tragic vision” is informed by her intuitive sense o f her own
borderline position in Victorian society. Like Eliot, Fedalma occupies a borderline position
that both heightens and complicates her desire for self-expression and for harmonious
communion with a larger social body. Unlike Eliot, however, the conflicts o f Fedalma’s
borderline position are aggravated to such an extent that her willfulness and desire for
freedom (the same traits that make her heroic) ultimately result in her doom.
Like much of Eliot’s poetry published between 1868 and 1874, The Spanish G v p s v
has been largely overlooked by twentieth century critics who tend to view her novels as most
exemplary o f her artistic talents and moral philosophy. This is an unfortunate oversight. As
Rosemarie Bodenheimer points out, Eliot’s poetry and dramas are “particularly remarkable
achievements...because they contain, in tensely compressed forms, a full range o f the
conflicts George Eliot was inclined to suppress in representations o f herself’ (179). In The
Spanish G v p s v . Eliot represents, exaggerates, and blurs the broadest range o f conflicts
between the inherent and culturally produced forces that operate on her borderline

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protagonist. The complex interplay o f inherited conditions and external forces forms a
difficult and perhaps irresolvable tension in the work yet nonetheless poses a particular and
forceful challenge to the parochial and patriarchal assumptions that underlay nineteenth
century ideas about gender and race differences. Thus, by leavening the work with specific
nineteenth century notions o f racial differences and biological determinism, Eliot creates a
uniquely contemporary fem ale tragedy.
In her notes on “The Spanish Gypsy and Tragedy,” Eliot writes that the idea for the
work came to her when viewing a picture o f the Annunciation, believed to be by Titian:
It occurred to me that here [in the Annunciation] was a great dramatic motive
o f the same class as those used by the Greek dramatists, yet specifically
differing from them. A young maiden, believing herself to be on the eve of
the chief event o f her life —marriage —about to share in the ordinary lot of
womanhood, full o f young hope, has suddenly announced to her that she is
chosen to fulfill a great destiny, entailing a terribly different experience from
that o f ordinary womanhood. She is chosen not by any momentary
arbitrariness, but as a result o f foregoing hereditary conditions: she obeys.
“Behold the handmaid o f the Lord.” Here, I thought, is a subject grander than
that o f Iphigenia, and it has never been used.” (Life 3:32)
It is in these notes (posthumously published in 1884) that several important details about
Eliot’s thematic intentions with The Spanish Gvpsv are revealed. First, the notes clarify
Eliot’s decision to write something in the form o f “the Greek dramatists,” but also something
new and different from them. Second, in her reflections on the biblical story o f the
Annunciation, Eliot sees something at once ennobling and tragic in M ary’s renunciation of

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“the ordinary lot o f womanhood.” Third, Eliot specifically identifies Iphigenia (the
sacrificed daughter of Agamemnon) as a grand subject o f tragedy. In classical tragedy, the
hero is most often a man o f high social position - a great king or leader such as Agamemnon,
Oedipus, or Creon - and his conflict is generally one in which he attempts to uphold his high
position. Significantly, Eliot’s focus is not on the high-stationed male protagonist o f classical
drama, but rather on the lesser-placed - but no less tragic —female protagonist.
The hero (or heroine, as the case may be) o f Greek tragedy is one who because of
some character trait or “flaw” (often an over-weaning pride) in combination with
circumstance and fate, makes personal choices that ultimately result in his (or her) fall from
grace. For Eliot, as for many of her contemporaries, the notion o f fate (or the will o f the God
or the gods), had been replaced by something akin to conditions o f biological and cultural
determinism, or what Eliot refers to in her notes as “foregoing hereditary conditions.” It is
also in her notes that Eliot states she required “the opposition o f race” to give weight to her
heroine’s renunciation o f “the expectation o f marriage” (Life 3:32). The fact that she chose
the gypsies as the race best suited to meet that requirement helps illuminate her thematic
purposes in The Spanish G v p s v .
In the nineteenth century, the lawlessness and vagrancy o f gypsies in England made
them an “intolerable affront to the values o f modem civilization” (Behlmer 231) while the
unique culture and mysterious history o f the gypsy people simultaneously made them a
source o f increased anthropological interest. One o f the most widely read, though broadly
criticized, nineteenth century study o f gypsies, was The Zincali (1842) by George Borrow.
Borrow’s picaresque socio-historical study o f the Zincali (Spanish gypsies) originated from
his philanthropic mission to disseminate copies o f the Bible translated into Romany among

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the gypsies. While he failed to make many converts, his “upward o f twenty years” (9)
spent amongst the gypsies provided him with great insight into the gypsy way o f life. Borrow
uses historical documents, personal encounters and anecdotes, and a close study of their
language (Romany) to narrate the gypsies’ remarkable history.
Eliot’s notebooks reveal that she read Sorrow ’s text closely and from it gathered the
essential elements for the historical setting o f The Spanish Gvpsv (the fifteenth century
conflict between Spanish-Christians and subordinate religious and cultural groups) as well as
many defining characteristics o f the gypsy people. In tracing the history o f the gypsies.
Borrow notes that the Spanish gypsies “have at all times, since their first appearance in
Spain, been notorious for their contempt o f religious observances” o f the dominant society.
With no religion except fidelity to their own people (their “love o f the ‘blood’”) (9), they
were impossible converts, yet “the Inquisition looked upon them with too much contempt to
give itself the slightest trouble concerning them” (90). Borrow argues that the Spanish
Inquisition, fueled by avarice and envy, left the gypsies alone while focusing its persecution
on the Jews and Moors—the Jews being a threat in terms o f “their great riches and learning”
and the Moors for their “superior industry” (91). In Eliot’s notes on her story’s conception
she states that she could not use the Jews or the Moors to exemplify the inherited conditions
o f her protagonist “because the facts o f their history were too conspicuously opposed to the
working out o f [her] catastrophe.” By this she means that the Jews and the Moors also
contributed directly and significantly to the development o f European culture and
civilization, whereas the gypsies had no such claims, and no pretense to any such claims. In
fact, the gypsies preferred to not identify with European civilization. Eliot’s protagonist,
biologically affiliated with a group exempted from the claims o f civilized society, is thus

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appropriately positioned to make unique and different claims about her own powers,
talents and abilities.
In addition to appropriating some o f Borrow’s history o f the gypsies in Spain, Eliot
makes use o f many o f Borrow’s romantic observations o f gypsy culture and character traits.
Most importantly, The Spanish G y p s y captures Borrow’s sympathetic yet ambivalent view of
gypsies as both aberrant and exceptional people. Borrow’s attitude toward the gypsies is
marked by impulses o f sympathy and enchantment on the one hand, and derision or censure
on the other. Borrow writes o f the gypsies as “a privileged people” (22) who are as a whole,
strikingly beautiful and bodily strong (25-26), and who are furthermore exemplary by nature
of the antiquity of their race despite centuries o f persecution and diaspora (44): “Perhaps
nothing speaks more forcibly for the antiquity o f this sect or caste than the tenacity with
which they have uniformly preserved their peculiar customs since the period o f their
becoming generally known” (44). Conversely, however. Borrow does not discredit, either by
example or by personal observation, the more stereotypically pejorative views o f gypsies that
have defined this group in history and literature. For example. Borrow prefaces The Zincali
with the immediate qualifier that his study “contains little that is edifying to a moral or
Christian point o f view”(8). He uses a sixteenth century petition against the Spanish gypsies
to show how some less savoury cultural habits o f the gypsies have remained uniform over
time. In this petition, written to Philip the Third, the writer categorically describes gypsies as
liars and cheats, heretics and atheists (93-95), “ ’a people who cause scandal’” and “ ’are
prejudicial to morals and common decency’” (97), and who are not only “ ’idle and useless’”
(99), but have “ ’sucked the vitals o f the state’” (100). Borrow’s observations and interviews
with contemporary gypsies often confirm the views put forth in this historical document and

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he ends his study with the conclusion that “the position which the Gitanos [Spanish
gypsies] hold [and held] in society in Spain is the lowest, as might be expected” (141).
This summary of gypsy culture and characteristics in many ways, but incompletely,
explains Eliot’s choice o f “gypsy” as the oppositional race in The Spanish Gypsy. While
their distinguishing characteristic is fidelity to other members o f their race, the fundamental
condition represented by the gypsies is their rejection o f and freedom from the cultural
constraints that define European history. Thus, in so far as “being gypsy” can be an inherited
condition distinct from cultural influences, it represents the purest opposition to the society of
Catholic Spain in which Eliot’s protagonist, Fedalma, is raised. Additionally, however, the
apparent lack of ambition with regard to the power or wealth o f civilized nations makes them
a race more to be watched than feared. In other words, the borderline condition o f the gypsies
is one of profound ambivalence: they can neither be dismissed as unthreatening to cultural
norms nor comfortably assimilated into the workings o f the dominant society. It is just this
sort of ambivalence with which Eliot accords her gypsy protagonist in The Spanish Gvpsv.
but she does so both through a blurring o f visible marks o f difference and through a emphasis
on cultural conditions that ultimately make Fedalma’s exceptionalism, or difference,
strikingly visible.
At the beginning o f The Spanish G v p s v . Fedalma’s position in society is
simultaneously privileged and precarious. While not an immediate threat to the political
economy o f the dominant society, she still warrants close watch by its leaders. As a
privileged ward in Don Silva’s home and as his betrothed, Fedalma is referred to by the
common people as “Lady Fedalma.” Yet, Fedalma is also a “dark” woman o f unknown
parentage who is known to spurn the religious observances o f the Catholic Church, and the

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Holy Fathers in the Spanish city derisively concur that “the Duke’s wedding her/[will be
a] union of light and darkness” (227). Notably, in these early descriptions o f Fedalma, the
“darkness” accorded to her seems to be a reference to both her mysterious origins as well as
to some indeterminate or ambiguous difference o f complexion. According to Borrow’s
observations o f the gypsies, gypsies “are darker or fairer according to the climate” o f the
country in which they dwell, though they are generally darker than most Europeans (14).
Significantly, Fedalma’s external or physical traits are typically described in abstract
terms, thus further blurring the line o f absolute difference from normative society. For
example, in her first appearance in the drama she is described in physical terms no more
specific than “a figure lithe” with “ripened arms” and “regal head” (245). Though she is
suspected to be “infidel,” and most likely Jewish, (227), her racial heritage initially remains a
mystery to both herself and others; as Don Silva declares, before he knows the secrets of her
birth, she “[h]as been baptized and nurtured in the [Catholic] faith” and she “bears no marks/
That tell o f Hebrew blood” (258). Notably, “marks” o f “Hebrew blood” go similarly
undefined throughout the text, thus at once emphasizing Eliot’s skepticism about a purely
biological basis o f human differences and focusing attention back to the cultural conditions
that form individual character. Like the borderline race o f gypsies that Fedalma comes to
represent, she eannot be defined as “other” on the basis o f mere appearance. Rather, Fedalma
is initially a suspect individual precisely because o f her ambiguous and ambivalent position
in relation to the dominant social group.
In The Spanish Gvpsv. Eliot’s description of the oppressive nature o f the Spanish
Christian society is her first attempt to exaggerate the cultural forces that operate on her
protagonist. Significantly, the specific historical context o f Eliot’s story is one is which all

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people o f dubious heritage (racial, religious or otherwise) are threatening to the social
order and, thus, liable to persecution. The story is set in the Spanish territory o f Andalusia —
“Moorish long ago” but in the late fifteenth century “Catholic is the trembling air” (203) —is
a world in which “God works by armies” (207), both at home and abroad, and the purging of
the Mosques “makes Christian bells,” “spurs,” and “swords” (217). Opposing the oppressive
policies but fearing the power o f the society’s leaders, most o f the secondary characters in
The Spanish Gypsy are new but uncommitted conversas to the Catholic faith; like the Jewish
innkeeper — a “[wjarranted Christian - else how to keep an inn,/ Which calling asks true
faith?” (210) —they convert not out o f conviction but out o f fear for their life and property. It
is in this context of fear and paranoia, that the Catholic leaders represented in the drama are
able to justify their greed, corruption and oppressive policies.
That Fedalma’s problematic relationship with the Catholic faith is initially rumoured
rather than shown through direct action emphasizes how the borderline individual
complicates the abilities o f the dominant cultural forces to exert their powers. O f Fedalma,
the common people say that “Father Marcos says she’ll not confess/And loves not holy
water” (227). Fedalma herself initially thinks rather than acts in a directly oppositional
manner to the church. For example, she knows that Father Isidor is “her enemy”;
She knew it and defied him; all her soul
Rounded and hardened in its separateness
When they encountered... (250-51)
In her sentiments, Fedalma is not unlike most individuals in the society who justifiably fear
and silently oppose the unrestrained powers o f the society’s leaders. She knows, as do others,
that Isidor to be the most tyrannical representative o f the upholders o f the Catholic faith. As

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the poet Juan speaks o f him, Isidor “ ’is known/From all the black herd round’”; “ ’he
seems less a man/ With struggling aims, than pure incarnate Will,/ Fit to subdue rebellious
nations’” (222). Because Fedalma is subject to suspicion and scrutiny, she shares the lot of
the common people and has an implicit sympathetic alliance with them. Though her love for
Don Silva is great, she identifies not with the upholders o f the Catholic faith, but with the
marginalized and persecuted people o f the common society.
Fedalma’s sympathy for the people, as we later learn, informs her desire to connect
with them more closely, as she does when she dances in the town square. Significantly,
however, Fedalma’s sympathy for the common people is only part o f the reason for her
dance. In Fedalma’s dance (which also marks her first appearance in the play), Eliot
appropriates Borrow’s descriptions o f gypsy woman to emphasize Fedalma’s inherent
“gypsy” characteristics. Borrow observes that, contrary to stereotype, gypsy women are freer
from licentiousness than “any race in the creation” (9). Throughout his study he highlights
the fidelity o f gypsies in marriage and within their social order, and while he notes that the
gypsy woman shares her culture’s love o f lawless independence (54), he concludes that there
are “perhaps no females on earth” who “are, and have ever been, more chaste in their own
persons, though at all times willing to encourage licentiousness in others, from a hope of
gain” (75), particularly through public dancing.
In her conception o f Fedalma’s dance, Eliot draws on Borrow’s observations o f both
the “licentiousness” o f the gypsy performance and the moral rectitude o f the dancer herself.
Having secretly left the palace (“to see the world”(265) as she later tells Don Silva), Fedalma
is drawn into the open Plaça by the increasing sound and tempo o f music that “must not be
wasted, but must rise/ As needed climax” (240). She parts the “fired”(241) crowd and

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proceeds to dance as an audience of Spaniards, Moors, and Jews alike watch in rapt
amazement. As her dance reaches its climax, they shout exultantly, “forgetting poverty/ In
the rich moment o f possessing her” (249). In a dance that combines “feeling and action into
one”; Fedalma is at once “ardently modest” and “sensuously pure”; she embodies “virgin
majesty” and “harmoniously bodied soul” (246). The paradoxical qualities that Eliot accords
her protagonist are somewhat in keeping with Borrow’s notes on the gypsy women and thus
seem to be a visible manifestation o f Fedalma’s inherent biological or racial heritage: as
Fedalma afterwards tells Don Silva, “I did not mean to dance” but “did the deed /Being
moved to do it” (265). Conversely, however, the purpose o f Fedalma’s dance differs
fundamentally from that o f the gypsy woman who dances outside her immediate social group
primarily for the purpose of material gain.
Fedalma’s dance, as she later attempts to explain it to Don Silva, had arisen out o f her
longing to intimately connect with and to be a representative of a larger community o f a free,
joyous, and sympathetic-minded people:
...The joy, the life
Around, within me, were one heaven: I longed
To blend them visibly: I longed to dance
Before the people - be as mounting flame
To all that burned within them! (265)
In many ways, Fedalma’s dance - both the actual performance and her own explanation o f its
meaning and significance - has important parallels to Eliot’s public performance in art.
Fedalma’s dance is at once an expression o f her inherent traits or talents as well as an attempt
to gain personal fulfillment outside the culturally and biologically ascribed codes o f feminine

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behaviour. Like Eliot’s fiction, Fedalma’s dance exemplifies how inherent talents and
cultural conditions can combine to create a calling that produces the highest form of artistic
expression - that is, one that inspires human connectedness and broad social sympathies.
Like Eliot’s art, Fedalma’s dance encourages a sympathetic, harmonious universal
experience, but in doing so must reflect or constitute the claims o f less privileged or
subordinate groups in the society.
Additionally, however, because the artist is a woman, the performance is yet subject
to the ambivalent interpretations and often distrustful criticism o f a patriarchal audience. As
Eliot’s personal experience had shown her, the revelation o f an unconventional woman
behind the art could forcefully disrupt patriarchal and cultural claims. In The Spanish Gvpsv.
Fedalma’s dance blurs the opposition between herself and others and sympathetically
connects her to a larger social group but also makes her unique character visible.. This
visibility comes at a price, as proves to be the case first when her dance o f joy is interrupted
by Zarca’s appearance, and second when it is questioned by Don Silva.
Fedalma’s dance, which begins with her inherent human desire to “blend” with a
larger community, is interrupted by the procession through the square o f the gypsy prisoners,
led by Zarca, and it is in the moment that she witnesses this procession that Fedalma’s
destiny changes: “her fate is sealed” (84) Fedalma finds herself held by Zarca’s gaze, which
seemed to her “the sadness o f the world/ Rebuking her [with]... sorrows unredeemed/ O f races
outcast, scorned, and wandering” (250) or, as she later recounts it, his gaze was one which
“spoke not hatred” but “bore the pain o f those who never could be saved” (283). However,
Fedalma does not speak to Zarca at this time. Rather, she returns to the palace where she is
set upon by Silva who has heard reports o f her performance in the Plaça. More dismayed

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than outraged, Silva upbraids Fedalma for her public display: “A maiden nurtured as rare
flowers are....flung yourself out on the dusty way/ For common eyes to see your beauty
soiled!” (265). Fedalma defends herself by expressing the restlessness that has always
haunted her: it is like the time Silva had instructed her “not to uncage the birds” : “I meant to
obey:/But in a moment something - something stronger,/ Forced me to let them out” (264).
She had felt a similar sentiment at the sight o f the chained gypsy prisoners: “O horrible,/ To
be in chains! Why, I with all my bliss/ have longed sometimes to fly and be at large”(274).
In opposing Silva, Fedalma opposes the cultural restraints on her inherent instincts.
But when Zarca comes to her later that same night and reveals to her that she is a gypsy, he
also rebukes her for the public display o f her “talents”; he is angered to have seen “The
daughter o f the Zincalo make sport/ For those who spit upon her people’s name” (297). Thus
Fedalma’s desire to express the joy she feels in life and her sympathy for others is opposed
by both her future husband and her father, by both the upholder o f cultural claims and of
biological claims on her womanhood. In both cases, it is an underlying patriarchal
interpretation that attempts to define and thus contain the expression o f Fedalma’s inherent
desires and talents. In this way, again, Fedalma serves as a parallel to Eliot herself, whose
literary talents and unique artistic expression were repeatedly challenged by patriarchal
critics wishing to uphold and maintain their position o f gender superiority.
By highlighting the patriarchal beliefs that underlie both the cultural and biological
claims o f gender and race, Eliot makes a salient point about the ways in which these claims,
while valid to the men who hold them, combine to challenge the borderline protagonist and
force her to react in a way that is not satisfactory to herself or to the ultimate goals o f either
claimant. Silva expects Fedalma to find fulfillment through love and marriage (which

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includes a restriction on her connection with the eommon people or a larger sympathetic
community). But while Fedalma herself desires personal fulfillment through love and
marriage, Don Silva’s claim on her is ultimately weaker than the claim that Zarca
subsequently makes on her, particularly when he speaks to her o f the gypsy “faith” :
Fedalma: {bitterly).

The Gypsies’ faith?

Men say they have none.
Zarca:

Oh, it is a faith
Taught by no priest, but by their beating hearts:
Faith to each other: the fidelity
O f fellow-wanderers in a desert place
Who share the same dire thirst, and therefore share
The scanty water: the fidelity
O f men whose pulses leap with kindred fire.
Who in the flash o f eyes, the clasp o f hands..
The speech that even in lying tells the truth
O f heritage inevitable as birth,
Nay, in the silent bodily presence feel
The mystie stirring o f a common life
Which makes the many one: fidelity
To the eonsecrating oath our sponsor Fate
Made through our infant breath when we were bom
The fellow-heirs o f that small island. Life,... (3 03)

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Whereas Silva can offer Fedalma love and comfort, Zarca’s claim is based on “a mystic
stirring o f a common life,” which speaks forcibly to her inchoate desire for freedom and
association with those who share this desire. She is awakened by a feeling o f sympathy or
fidelity with those whose share a bond o f a “heritage inevitable as birth.” Fedalma is moved
by Zarca’s claims not because, as he later tries to convince her, she was “bom to reign” or
that she is above “the petty round o f circumstance/That makes a woman’s lot” (309) but
because she cannot return to the happiness o f her life as a ward o f the Spanish court once she
learns of her true identity.
Because o f the circumstances o f her life and upbringing (her borderline position in
the doctrinal and oppressive Spanish society) Fedalma’s sympathies are expanded in such a
way that she is made all the more sensitive to the calling o f a higher, nobler social duty than
that which would be allowed in a marriage to Silva and its necessary corollary, the silent
acceptance of the dictates o f an oppressive and corrupt social system. In other words, her
acceptance o f the calling is not the result o f ambition but rather, as she later states, the
submission to an “unknown need” that had previously made her “restless even in [her] bliss”
(399). This “unknown need” is an inherent human need for freedom, individual expression,
and fulfillment within an existing social order. For Fedalma, the combined result of
biological determinants and her privileged protected and ultimately restricted position as a
ward of the dominant society lead to an ever-widening sympathy for others who are fettered
by oppressive social systems. However, this outward movement o f sympathy - now
dependent on Fedalma’s acceptance o f her father’s bond - brings with it further conflict.
Notably, Fedalma’s acceptance o f her father’s claim on her is characterized not by
humble submission nor by grand visions o f the larger good but rather by a concern as to

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whether her sacrifice will ultimately lead to an improvement in the gypsy lot, and most
interestingly, in the lot o f the gypsy women who experience the suffering o f their race most
keenly;
0 father, will the women of our tribe
Suffer as I do, in the years to come
When you have made them great in Africa?
Redeemed from ignorant ills only to feel
A conscious woe? Then - is it worth the pains?
Were it not better when we reach that shore
To raise a funeral-pile and perish all.
So closing up a myriad avenues
To misery yet unwrought? My soul is faint Will these sharp pangs buy any certain good? (313)
In this speech, Fedalma acknowledges the exodus o f the gypsies to a new homeland in Africa
may redeem the “ignorant ills” wrought by the oppressive Spanish regime, but without
necessarily relieving gypsy women from the oppression o f their own patriarchs. It is women
who ultimately pay the price for heroic deeds, yet without necessarily receiving their
benefits. Zarca responds with an evasive justification regarding the value o f the tragic hero:
Nay, never falter: no great deed is done
By falterers who ask for certainty.
No good is certain, but the steadfast mind.
The undivided will to seek the good:
‘Tis that compels the elements, and wrings

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A human music from the indifferent air.
The greatest gift the hero leaves his race
Is to have been a hero. Say we fail!
We feed the high tradition o f the world,
And leave our spirit in our children’s breasts. (313)
Zarca’s rhetoric is persuasive. It moves Fedalma to unclasp and throw down the belt of
jewels given to her by Don Silva and to renounce the yearnings o f ordinary womanhood.
Thus the tragic die is cast. In order to be an exceptional woman, Fedalma is compelled to
vanquish her feminine yearnings, and with them her “half-hearted” borderline condition:
Yes, say that we shall fail! I will not count
On aught but being faithful. I will take
This yearning self o f mine and strangle it.
I will not be half-hearted: never yet
Fedalma did aught with a wavering soul.
Die, my young -jo y - die, all my hungry hopes...
I will seek nothing but to shun base joy.
The saints were cowards who stood by to see
Christ crucified: they should have flung themselves
Upon the Roman spears, and died in vain The grandest death, to die in vain - for love
Greater than sways the forces o f the world!
That death shall be my bridegroom. I will wed
The curse that blights my people. Father, come! (314)

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Significantly, and in keeping with the outcomes o f classical tragedy, the choices
made by the heroine have tragic repercussions for other characters in the story: Don Silva
kills Zarca when her realizes that he has been deceived into abandoning his hereditary station
and his duty to protect his city. The murder o f Fedalma’s father by her lover aggravates
Fedalma’s ultimate tragedy: she can neither reunite with Don Silva nor can she abandon her
calling to lead the gypsy people to a new home. The Spanish G v p s v concludes with Fedalma
accepting the “sublimer pain’’ (398) o f leading the gypsy people to a new home. “Great
Fate,’’ she says, makes her “heiress o f this woe’’ (399). With the death o f her father, and
indications o f a gypsy mutiny afoot, Fedalma knows that the dream o f a homeland for the
gypsy race will likely die. She looks forward with “[n]o dread but clear assurance o f the end”
(448).

In a recent feminist reading o f The Spanish Gvpsv. James Krasner suggests that the
concluding events o f the poem are an analogue for the problematic status o f female literary
ambition in the nineteenth century (56). This reading is not inconsistent with the fact that in
The Spanish Gvpsv Eliot purposefully juxtaposes choices in which the heroine is damned no
matter which path she takes, that o f “ordinary womanhood (Life 3:32) or that o f fulfilling a
“great destiny” outside the bounds o f traditional womanhood. Significantly, however,
Fedalma does not choose freely, but rather is “chosen,” to pursue her ambitious endeavour.
As Eliot writes in her notes on the text, her heroine, as “a result o f foregoing hereditary
conditions” is “chosen to fulfill a great destinv”(Life 3:32). Fedalma’s ascension to a role of
social leadership is to be understood as a vocation, a calling, while the “foregoing hereditary
conditions” include a complex interplay o f her inherent, or “gypsy,” traits and the cultural

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conditions that force these traits to surface, to become visible. It is this visibility of
normative female difference, represented through Fedalma’s dance that is subject to
patriarchal censure.
As previously discussed in the introduction to this study, with the revelation o f the
woman behind the pseudonym, Eliot was exposed to gender-biased critiques o f her work that
were simultaneously laudatory and censorious. The Spanish Gvpsv was recognized at once
as an ambitious new foray into yet another male-dominated arena o f literary production and
many critics concurred with the reviewer of The Spectator who called it “undoubtedly much
the greatest poem o f any wide scope and on a plan o f any magnitude, which has ever
proceeded from a woman ” (qtd. in Haight 405). Other critics, however, could not reconcile
the heroic efforts o f the female protagonist to the tragic form of the work. This lack of
reconciliation is evident in several reviews that are peculiar in what seems to be a purposeful
misreading o f both the characters and Eliot’s thematic intentions.
Throughout the reviews, there are repeated claims that Don Silva is the “real” hero of
the drama, and these claims simultaneously refuse to view Fedalma’s plight sympathetically
or to accord her any heroic dimension. For example, The Westminster Review (July 1868)
recognizes that the work embodies contemporary themes but criticizes Eliot for failing to
show how “the aim o f all culture and all training should be to free us from the yoke of
authority” :
...in our opinion, the cultured Fedalma should live, and not the untutored
Zincala who pays the mere barbarian’s homage to authority. Submission is
noble; but there is something nobler than mere blind submission.” (189)

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The reviewer concludes that in The Spanish Gypsy, “we feel, not the strong power of
man, but the force o f circumstance; not the freedom o f the human soul, and the unspeakable
blessings which flow from it, but only the crushing influence of fate” (190). Though
sympathetic to Fedalma, the reviewer fails or refuses to see the patriarchal claims that define
and limit her desires both inside and outside the community o f her upbringing, and hence
they fail to comprehend how her tragic fate is unavoidable.
The Atheneum reviewer finds Fedalma “a less human and less consistent character
than Don Silva.” In a more sexist vein, the reviewer objects to Fedalma’s sentiment o f “fealty
to her race —less a product o f nature than o f custom and education” as an abstract ideal
“which of all influences are usually the least capable o f defeating the mastery o f love over a
woman’s heart” (855). As a result, Fedalma’s sacrifice is implausible and unheroic and
“never.. .rises to the strength and dignity o f a tragic passion” (855). Similarly, The Nation
(1868) reviewer diminishes Fedalma’s character while praising Silva as “the hero o f the
poem.” Don Silva is a “generous nobleman” who exemplifies “the growth and fusion o f a
personal and egotistical consciousness in the sense o f generic and national honour, governed
and directed by his religion, his Christ, his patron saints, [and] his ancestors” (13). In
contrast, Fedalma is tritely summarized as a “very lovely and perfect creation” whose “filial
instincts” are “so irresistible that she surrenders herself to her new strange destiny” and
“wanders forth into outlawry” with “the beggarly Zincali” (13). In comparison to Don Silva,
“Fedalma, the plebeian, certainly suffers less” (14).
Ironically, many o f these reviews exemplify the very same patriarchal assumptions
that Eliot is contesting in her dramatic poem. Despite Eliot’s careful and detailed
considerations o f the corrupt nature of the cultural forces that operate on her protagonist.

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these Victorian reviews emphasize the belief that the mere fact o f Feldalma’s sex
relegates her to a less than heroic, and therefore less than tragic, position in the story. In other
words, they assume Fedalma would and should naturally choose the “lot” o f “ordinary
womanhood,”
In response to both the mixed and the more laudatory reviews o f The Spanish Gvpsv.
Eliot writes to her publisher just after the drama had been serially published:
I am vexed by the non-success o f the serial edition.. .[although] I have [also]
been of late quite astonished by the strengthening testimonies that have
happened to come to me, o f people who care about every one o f my books,
and continue to read them - especially young men, who are just the class I
care most to influence. (GEL 4:397)
In Middlemarch. the novel begun shortly after the 1868 publication o f The Spanish Gvpsv.
Eliot returns to the theme o f how patriarchal traditions influence and diminish the
significance o f a woman’s desire to fulfill a vocation that transcends the lot o f “ordinary
womanhood,” which o f course is a patriarchal notion in its own right. With its near­
contemporary setting, its multi-plot form and its complex web o f male and female
relationships, Middlemarch also speaks forcibly to the “young men” that Eliot hoped to
influence through her writing. Through her portrayals o f ideal young men (such as Tertius
Lydgate, whose ambitions are no less thwarted by tradition than the aspirations o f the novel’s
heroine Dorothea), Eliot challenges the traditions o f the English patriarchy even as she
portrays those traditions determining the conduct o f the male characters in the text. In her last
novel, Daniel Deronda Eliot challenges the tradition more radically still, and speaks even
more strongly to the “young men” she most sought to influence.

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Chapter Three: Daniel Deronda and The Hidden Jew
“Was she beautiful or not beautiful?” In the introductory sentence to the opening
scene of Eliot’s last novel Daniel Deronda. the reader’s gaze is directed by mysterious eyes at
the figure of a young Englishwoman, Gwendolen Harleth, at a gambling table in a resort
town of undisclosed location. Gwendolen’s concentration is interrupted and her luck changed
by the critical gaze of a young “dark-haired” man. She loses her money, the game ends and
the chapter concludes with her questions (giving voice to her perturbation, and perhaps to a
hidden desire): Who is that “ ‘dark-haired man?” ’ and ‘“ Is he an Englishman?” ’ (8-9).
From the outset, Daniel Deronda is premised on profound uncertainty - uncertainty of
character and action, place and time, subject and form. The story starts in médias res and the
initial questions posed by the story’s two main characters, Daniel Deronda and Gwendolen
Harleth, highlight concerns of physical appearance, moral and emotional ambivalenee, race,
class, gender and nationality that are not satisfactorily answered in the novel’s complex non­
linear form. The initial ambivalence that surrounds both Daniel and Gwendolen (ambivalence
about who they are and the circumstances that have brought them together) introduces the
reader to the thematic complexity o f the story to follow. As Barbara Hardy notes, Daniel
Deronda. like all of Eliot’s novels, “is a love-story, it is a profound psychological study in
human relationships and individual growth, it is a challenging moral argument, and it is an
analysis o f contemporary Victorian society.” But the novel is also marked by many “striking
new departures” ( 7 ) . As with The Spanish G v p s v . Daniel Deronda is an extended experiment
in both form and content. Specifically, Daniel Deronda is a conscious experimentation with
and subversion o f the established conventions o f the bildungsroman, the most popular form
of novel in Eliot’s time.

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According to Jerome Buckley in Season o f Youth, the bildungsroman is a “novel
of education” or “novel o f youth” (13) that traces the moral, psychological or social
development o f the main character (usually male) from youth to maturity. The
bildungsroman relates the progress o f a single individual within the broader whole o f an
established social order. It is a quest narrative in which the individual overcomes a series of
obstacles placed in the way o f his self-development. This dependence on an overarching
linear plot with a clear trajectory is a fundamentally bourgeois literary form that reflects the
circumstances o f the nineteenth century individual who is moved by need or opportunity to
rise above his initial class or origins, and whose progress moves toward an eventual
integration into the middle or upper classes. The bildungsroman also often includes
autobiographical elements and the author may rely on his or her own unique history, which
given the bildungsroman’s highly formulaic character, can lend an air o f reality to the
narrative. Because o f its emphasis on self-improvement and socialization the bildungsroman
can also be used as a form o f critique, as in Dickens’ Great Expectations (1861), that
encompasses both the failings o f the individual hero and o f his society.
In addition to the general purposes or uses o f the form, the English bildungsroman is
further distinguished by several more specific characteristics. First, the protagonist is most
often an orphan who begins the quest for his identity starting from childhood and proceeding
to adulthood through education and travel. Second, the protagonist typically travels from a
small town to London to find an occupation and to continue his search for identity. Third, it
is usually in London that the protagonist has an experience with love. Buckley notes that in
the English bildungsroman, there are “at least two love affairs or sexual encounters, one
debasing, one exalting” (17). It is the tension o f these love affairs in combination with the

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“education” the hero receives in London that ultimately, often painfully, leads the
protagonist to reconcile himself to “the sort o f accommodation to the modem world he can
honestly make” (17). Ultimately, the protagonist’s struggle to find identity brings him back
to the country home where he initially began developing his character and where he is often
successfully and proudly reintegrated into society.
In her feminist reading o f Daniel Deronda. Kristin Brady argues that “Eliot’s focus on
a female as well as a male child fundamentally alters the conventional plot o f personal
development and vocation” o f Bildungsroman: “while the [conventional] Bildungsroman
traces the process by whieh the boy discovers his professional role within patriarehy, in
presenting the girl’s quest for identity it can only expose her exclusion from the same power
structure” (94). With its dual plot line and doubling o f protagonists, Daniel Deronda ean be
read as a study in the contrasting quests o f its male and female protagonists. However, a
reading which focuses on Gwendolen’s story as most disruptive o f bildungsroman
eonvention tends to detraet emphasis away from Daniel’s uniquely unconventional story —
the “racial” story —that was most unsettling to Eliot’s contemporaries and continues to be a
problem to modem students o f Eliot’s last novel. As noted in the introduction to this study,
Victorian critics were intrigued by Eliot’s portrayal o f Gwendolen Harleth and her English
eounterparts, but were highly unsettled by Eliot’s emphasis on the Jewish characters and plot.
Most significantly, many o f Eliot’s contemporaries denounced Eliot’s conclusion in which
Daniel, the eponymous eharacter, embraees his Jewish heritage and effectually tums his back
on the English society o f his upbringing.
Fundamentally, it is Eliot’s use o f “Jewishness” in Daniel Deronda that dismpts the
conventional English bildungsroman and with it the cultural beliefs on which the form is

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premised. Through her use o f Jewishness as the inherent and culturally-reproduced
condition of her borderline protagonist, Eliot offers a scathing critique o f the biological and
cultural claims used within her society to uphold white, English, male supremacy. Focusing
on how Eliot uses Daniel and his Jewishness to both uphold and transgress the conventions
of the English bildungsroman illustrates the complexity o f her radical experiment in form and
content. This experiment, however, is wrought with tension. As the ubiquitous but
ambivalent racial “other” in Victorian England, the Jew could neither be opposed nor
contained in purely oppositional terms. Eliot’s experiment with the bildungsroman form
emphasizes this difficulty o f containment. The borderline position o f her protagonist is such
that he cannot fit into established conventional forms, including the bildungsroman, and thus
must continue his search for identity outside the teleological and parochial bounds o f English
social institutions.
As noted above, the bildungsroman is a highly formulaic and therefore a highly
restrictive and conservative literary form. By presenting a different form o f development, one
concerned with changing the society in which the individual is to be integrated, rather than
merely developing the individual himself, Eliot necessarily had to adapt, indeed transform,
the conventions of the bildungsroman. Significantly, starting from Daniel’s orphan condition
up until his final departure from the society o f his upbringing, Eliot appropriates only to
subvert almost every external element o f the English bildungsroman. By taking the story
somewhat out o f its non-linear progression and following Daniel’s development from youth
to maturity, from English to Jewish, one sees more clearly how Eliot blurs and complicates
the biological and cultural determinants that operate on her protagonist and how these
combined forces could work to create an exceptional and morally superior character, one

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who comprises an ideal o f sympathy on behalf of others and a sure sense o f his own
primacy. It is this type of ideal that was the end goal o f the bildungsroman hero, and the ideal
of an English gentleman, the station from which the revelation o f Daniel’s racial heritage
ultimately excludes him.
Like the hero o f the conventional bildungsroman, Daniel is an orphan but an orphan
raised as a gentleman. Thus, unlike the working class hero o f Great Expectations. Daniel
does not have to struggle to attain a comfortable station in life and English society does not
offer him any opportunities he does not already enjoy. Daniel’s orphan experience is
primarily one o f contentment and privilege. As a ward o f Sir Hugo, a member o f the country
gentry and a man who was “always cheerful and indulgent,” Daniel’s early experience was
“very delightful” (140). Sheltered from the larger ills o f the world and tutored privately in
his home, Daniel does not begin to question his social position until, as a thirteen-year old
boy, he reflects on his identity by contemplating familiar literary conventions:
Having read Shakespeare as well as a great deal o f history, he could have
talked with the wisdom o f a bookish child about men who were bom out o f
wedlock and were held unfortunate in consequence, being under
disadvantages which required them to be a sort o f heroes if they were to work
themselves up to an equal standing with their legally bom brothers. But he had
never brought such knowledge into any association with his own lot, which
had been too easy for him ever to think about it - until this moment when
there had darted into his mind with the magic of quick comparison, the
possibility that here was the secret o f his own birth, and that the man whom he
called uncle was really his father.” (141)

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With this unsettling possibility about his “lot,” Daniel becomes increasingly sensitive to
any hints that his prospects are inconsistent with his understanding o f the kind o f stories
English gentleman tell about themselves. Thus he reacts with keen sensitivity to Sir Hugo’s
light-hearted comment that with his fine singing voice, he may become a great singer.
Daniel’s tastes for the privileges o f being a gentlemen “were altogether in keeping with his
nurture” and “now the lad had been stung to the quick by the idea that his uncle - perhaps his
father - thought o f a career for him which was totally unlike his own, and which he knew
very well was not thought of among possible destinations for the sons o f English gentlemen”
(143-144). Thus only slowly does Daniel begin to question whether the stereotypical
destinations for English gentlemen are appropriate to him, in large part because by most
indications thus far, he is an English gentleman.
But the seeds of doubt have been sown. These doubts, which arise in part from his
reflecting on the possibility o f his illegitimacy, have a profound influence on his character.
Incidents following the revelation o f possible illegitimacy emphasize how Daniel’s
characteristic sympathy for others is both an inherent condition and one that arises from the
circumstances o f his upbringing. These characteristics, with their feminine associations,
contribute to Daniel’s growing sympathy for the plight o f the ill-fortuned:
The sense o f an entailed disadvantage - the deformed foot doubtfully hidden
by the shoe, makes a restlessly active spiritual yeast, and easily turns a selfcentred, 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 o f fellowship and makes the imagination
tender. Daniel’s early-wakened susceptibility, charged at first with ready

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indignation and resistant pride, had given a bias to his conscience, a
sympathy with certain ills, and a tension o f resolve in certain directions, which
marked him off from other youths much more than any talents he possessed.
(148-149)
Daniel’s sense of “entailed disadvantage” is clear (among other things, his rights to
inherit are, o f course, “entailed” by the principle o f primogeniture), but by virtue o f his sex
he is also substantially privileged. As a male ward in a wealthy home he is sent off to get an
education worthy o f the son o f an Englishman. However, Daniel’s “tension o f resolve in
certain directions” also unsettles the value he places on his conventional education. Although
Daniel attends both Eton and Cambridge, at Cambridge he reproaches himself for having
been attracted to the conventional advantages o f English education and he is tempted to ask
Sir Hugo to let him quit the University to pursue studies abroad: “He longed now to have the
sort o f apprenticeship to life which would not shape him to definitely, and rob him o f the
choice that might come from a free growth” (153). The decision to leave Cambridge is made
for him, however, after the assistance he gives a friend causes him to forsake his own studies.
Eliot thus makes it clear that the typical path o f development for an English gentleman with
its conventional education and accomplishments is itself an obstacle obstructing Daniel’s true
path.
Consistent with the conventions o f the bildungsroman, Daniel travels to London
where, against those same conventions, he lives comfortably on a generous "baehelor’s
income” (149). Like the more conventional hero, Daniel is moved by the need and
opportunity to rise above his initial class or origins o f Englishman; however, it is a moral

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ascension he seeks and the movement toward such ascension is premised on sympathy for
others who share his plight rather than on the ambitious desire for increased rank or privilege.
The “education” he receives in London thus begins with a compassionate gesture on
his part, for it is in London, that he becomes involved with Mirah, a young Jewess, after
saving her from her attempted suicide by drowning. Similar to the opening scene o f the
novel, Daniel’s chance meeting with Mirah displays a mysterious tension based on questions
o f physical appearance and o f race. Initially, Daniel assumes that the black robed figure near
the river’s edge is a prostitute, one of those “poorly-dressed, melancholy woman [who] are
common sights” (159) in London. However, when he is close enough to see her face he is
captivated by her “delicate, childlike beauty” (159). On speaking to her, M irah’s foreign
accent betrays a cultural otherness. Daniel asks Mirah if she is English. M irah’s answer - “I
am English-born. But I am a Jewess” (164) - parallels Daniel’s own as yet undiscovered
identity. In addition to being a Jewess, we learn that Mirah is a woman o f unblemished moral
character, or as Mrs. Meyrick learns from Daniel, “ ’a Jewess, but quite refined’” (169). This
qualified comment reflects the prejudice o f Daniel’s English upbringing as well as his
sympathetic tendencies.
Mirah is in London on a quest o f her own. Having escaped her exploitative father, she
is searching for her mother, from whom she was separated at a very young age. Learning of
M irah’s unfortunate circumstances and o f her search, Daniel’s interest in her plight is
aroused: “Something in his own experience caused Mirah’s search after her mother to lay
hold with peculiar force on his imagination” (175) and “roused his mind to a closer survey of
details” (176) surrounding the lives o f contemporary Jews. This leads him into the Jewish
quarters o f London, and, subsequently, into the homes, hearts and minds o f the novel’s

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Jewish characters. It is in the course of this search that Daniel acquires an education in
the living conditions and religion of the Jewish community in Victorian London. As a
product o f his society, however, his views are initially characterized by general disinterest
and unreflective prejudice. These prejudices are apparent in the following description of
Daniel as he embarks on a search for M irah’s mother:
In spite o f his strong tendency to side with the objects o f prejudice, and in
general with those who got the worst o f it, his interest had never been
practically drawn towards existing Jews, and the facts he knew about them,
whether they walked conspicuous in fine apparel or lurked in by-streets, were
chiefly of the sort most repugnant to him. O f learned and accomplished Jews
he took it for granted that they had dropped their religion, and wished to be
merged in the people o f their native lands.. ..Daniel could not escape (who
can?) knowing ugly stories o f Jewish characteristics and occupations; and
though one o f his favourite protests was against the severance o f past and
present history, he was like others who shared his protest, in never having
cared to reach any more special conclusions about actual Jews than that they
retained the virtues and vices o f a long-oppressed race. (176)
Daniel’s mental images o f London’s Jews also includes such stereotypes as “a hawk-eyed
woman, rough-headed and unwashed, cheapening a hungry girl’s last bit o f finery” or “a
young Jew talkative and familiar, willing to show his acquaintance with gentlemen’s tastes,
and not fastidious in any transactions with which they would favour him” (177). Such
stereotypical views were common among Eliot’s contemporaries and the fact that the Jewish

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population was increasing at the time o f Eliot’s writing did not console a conservative and
xenophobic society.
Between 1850 and 1900, the Jewish population in London rose from around 35,000 to
180,00 (Landow 1) and as a result, Jews became viewed as “daily present in society and
demanding access into a bourgeois life” (Difference. Gilman 35). Given long-held, deeprooted prejudices, demands for access to many civic roles still met with resistance. As late as
1869, Queen Victoria objected to “a Jew being made a Peer’”; it was 1873 before universities
were opened “to men o f all faiths on equal terms”; and it was only in 1878, two years after
the publication o f Daniel Deronda. that Jews were permitted to hold the highest government
and university offices. Also, in the ten years leading up to the publication o f Daniel Deronda.
an influx o f Eastern European Jews into England caused an outbreak o f racism that was
related, in large part, to a widespread belief that the heavy investment losses suffered by
speculators during the period were related to the manipulations o f Jewish financiers, an event
touched upon in Daniel Deronda with Mrs. Davilow’s investment loss and the family’s
subsequent financial ruin (Baker 125).
Daniel’s ensuing “quest” for Mirah’s mother reflects both his lack o f knowledge of
his heritage but also a salient and paradoxical feature o f the Victorian Jew - his ubiquity and
his invisibility. Although readily recognizable in Jewish neighbourhoods, in shops marked
with a family name, and in the synagogues o f London, once outside o f these locales a Jew
could go undetected in the large city and could thus become as invisible to Englishmen as
Daniel’s own heritage remains hidden from himself.
Daniel’s hidden Jewishness is a feature that Eliot plays upon to blur and subvert a
perceived physiological basis o f difference between Englishmen and Jews. Daniel has been

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raised an Englishman, and while it has been pointed out that most people “would guess,
without being told, that there was foreign blood in his veins”(218), in his early years nobody
speculates that he may indeed be Jewish. Instead, Daniel’s difference from English society
rests primarily on the mystery or ambiguity o f his birth - in other words, solely on culturally
ascribed notions o f “otherness.” Although other members o f the English gentry assume
Daniel is Sir Hugo’s illegitimate son, the possibility is not discussed openly in polite circles.
Rather, as Mrs. Davilow tactfully tells Gwendolen, Daniel’s circumstances are such that “ ’he
is under some disadvantage’” : although he is “ ’well received’,” “ ‘[h]e does not inherit
property, and is not o f any consequence in the world’” (282). In this way, Daniel, by nature
of his circumstances, embodies the condition o f the modem Jewish male - that is, a man
admitted into dominant English society, but without being entitled to the full benefits that
accompany admittance.
Curiously, although none o f the English characters suspect that Daniel is Jewish,
Jewish characters —Mordecai in the Jewish bookshop in London (327) and Kalonymos in a
synagogue in Frankfurt (253) —approach Daniel to ask him if he is not in fact a Jew.
Notably, physiological descriptions of Daniel and of many o f the other Jewish characters are
often purposefully left open to interpretation. Upon entering a Jewish pawnshop, Daniel
recognizes the face o f its proprietor, Ezra Cohen, as “unmistakably Jewish” (323) but further
details are withheld. Similarly, when Daniel meets Mordecai shortly thereafter he sees at
once “a finely typical Jewish face” (326); apart from Mordecai’s “crisp black hair,” however,
there are no other more visible or outward markers o f his person given. Rather, Daniel’s
description rests on the “intensity o f expression” (326) on Mordecai’s face. Thus, Eliot’s
descriptions in these cases consistently raise specters o f essentialist difference just as they

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simultaneously deny them.
Daniel’s experience in London again contrasts with the conventions o f the English
bildungsroman. Typically, the hero traveling to London expects to find opportunities to
continue his education or opportunities for employment, but finds squalor and poverty
instead. This discovery results in “disenchantment more alarming and decisive than any
dissatisfaction with the narrowness o f provincial life” (Buckley 20). Daniel, to the contrary,
is not disenchanted but sympathetically and intellectually challenged by his experience. He
begins to acquire a sharper sense o f purpose and belonging in his growing circle o f Jewish
acquaintance. Thus he begins to embark on his true path at precisely the point where a
conventional hero begins to realize that he may have been diverted from his own.
Despite his growing affection and respect for his new circle o f Jewish friends,
however, Daniel continues to remain attached to the provincial society o f his upbringing and
it is shortly after he leaves Mirah in the care of friends in London that he goes to the
continent with Sir Hugo and sees Gwendolen at the roulette table. It is through the characters
o f Mirah and Gwendolen that Eliot represents the romantic interests —“one exalting, one
debasing” (Buckley 17) —o f the conventional bildungsroman but with the English cultural
stereotypes reversed: Mirah, the despairing and suicidal Jewess, is portrayed as a woman of
unblemished moral character, while the beautiful and high-spirited Gwendolen is portrayed
as, “having an inborn energy o f egoistic desire”. (32) Again, there is a blurring o f external or
visible and culturally ascribed points of reference.
Daniel’s romantic feelings toward Mirah are tempered by a sense o f honour
compounded by his belief in her vulnerable condition (192), and he therefore assumes the
role o f her guardian rather than lover. Although the relationship between Daniel and

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Gwendolen represents a significant and mutual attraction, they meet on only a few
occasions. These meetings have a profound effect on Gwendolen, and Daniel comes to
assume the role o f her confessor and moral guide. Although Daniel is attracted to
Gwendolen, by nature o f his mysterious birth he feels himself “in no way free” to pursue this
attraction romantically (138). Thus, in contrast to the conventional bildungsroman, Daniel
does not learn about himself through romantic adventure, but rather holds off romantic
entanglement until he knows the truth about his birth.
While Daniel struggles to determine his identity, Gwendolen marries Grandcourt.
Whereas M irah’s innocent virtue makes Daniel feel protective, Grandcourt eventually makes
Gwendolen contemplate homicide. Grandcourt is in many ways Daniel’s character foil;
however, his character is also drawn to suggest more than mere individual failings. His
existence is symptomatic o f a larger social decline and degeneracy. As Marc Wohlfarth
remarks, Grandcourt is “one o f the first great decadent figures in English literature” (192), an
appraisal that associates him with the same scientific discourse that reduces women and
“lower races” by certain physiological and psychological traits. As with the study o f sex and
“race,” the study o f decadence was also “obsessed with the body,” and Wohlfarth points out
how Eliot “followed the scientific model o f physiological decadence in drawing
Grandcourt;” his “baldness, sallow complexion, and drawl all testify to the inner worm of
degeneration” and together comprise “a perfect example o f a decadent hermeneutics of
absolute legibility: appearance and underlying reality speak o f each other in transparent
mirroring” (192). This “hermeneutics o f absolute legibility” is also played out on the
character o f Daniel. In contrast to Grandcourt’s physical and moral unattractiveness, Daniel
is portrayed as a “beautiful” man with full head o f dark hair, an upright carriage and a “fine

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harmonious unspoiled face” (271). In other words, Daniel’s moral rectitude is mirrored in
his physical attractiveness.
In both body as well as in mind, Eliot intends Daniel to represent something o f a
utopian ideal of manhood. Daniel’s physical beauty is the external manifestation of the inner
balance o f female emotion with masculine rectitude. This ideal is illustrated in descriptions
o f Daniel as young man. In his relations with Sir Hugo, for example, we are told that though
Daniel “was moved by affectionateness such as we are apt to call feminine, disposing him to
yield in ordinary details” he yet had “a certain inflexibility o f judgement, an independence of
opinion, held to be rightfully masculine” (271). As a man o f twenty-six, he embodies
“refinement with force.” In physiological terms he has a “lithe powerful frame” and “firm
gravity” o f face, “thoroughly terrestrial and manly; but still o f a kind to raise belief in a
human dignity which can afford to acknowledge poor relations” (157-158).
The stated ideal o f “refinement with force,” o f a kind and charitable nature in one so
“terrestrial and manly,” is meant to serve as an important contrast to Grandcourt who, strictly
by the privileges accorded him at birth, has become the model o f the English gentleman.
Grandcourt is well pedigreed and is the first male in line to inherit Sir Hugo’s property.
Outwardly, by way o f dress and leisurely pursuits (notably, horseback riding and hunting),
Grandcourt is even more of the blue-blooded English gentleman. While this “type” is
decidedly unattractive to Eliot, it is one that is upheld, albeit with some reservations, by the
larger society. Generally, the provincial circle o f Diplow people feel about Grandcourt much
as Gwendolen does - he is a man o f “cold and distinguished manners” (93), or as the narrator
concurs “formidable - a handsome lizard o f a hitherto unknown species, not o f the lively,
darting kind,” a “splendid specimen” who “looked like an heir” (115). Unlike Daniel,

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Grandcourt is also devoid of human sympathy and compassion, especially for his “poor
relations” which include Lydia Glasher, the mother o f his three illegitimate children, and
later Gwendolen, her mother and her four sisters. The financial support that he does give to
these families is given out o f obligation and as an exercise o f power, rather than out o f any
intrinsic sense of compassion or concern for the well being o f others.
As a man with “the courage and confidence that belong to domination” (582),
Grandcourt is a caricature o f the ideal type that the hero o f the traditional English
bildungsroman is supposed to evolve into and thus he exemplifies why the form must be
transformed: its object is a creature o f decline and corruption. Notably, in his relations with
Lydia Glasher (his discarded mistress) and with Gwendolen, both o f who continue to act
against his will but with a subtlety and cunning that matches his own, Grandcourt feels a
gnawing sense o f “imperfect mastery” (297). As Kate Flint points out, Grandcourt's reasons
for marrying Gwendolen are written in a forceful language o f mastery and domination, which
reveals “not the desires,” but “the anxieties o f masculinity” (175). While this sense of
imperfect mastery is most evident in Grandcourt, it also finds subtler forms o f expression in
the novel’s secondary characters - notably in the kindly fathers who are trapped by the very
notions they uphold. Sir Hugo, for example, is uneasy about what the future holds for his
wife and female children, who stand to suffer financially because o f discriminatory
inheritance laws that favour male children. Similarly, Gascoigne encourages Gwendolen’s
marriage to Grandcourt, despite his knowledge o f Grandcourt s past, largely because he
would like to be free from the responsibility o f taking financial care o f his sister,
Gwendolen’s mother and her four daughters. Eliot uses the failures o f these male “guardians”
to fulfill their responsibilities toward the less advantaged and vulnerable to represent the

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failure o f English society as a whole — a failure she contrasts with the norms prevalent in
the London Jewish community of the story.
Eliot’s notebooks and journals for Daniel Deronda show that she had an extensive
knowledge and command o f the depth and range o f Jewish history and religion. In his
authoritative study George Eliot and Judaism. William Baker shows how Eliot uses Judaism
to call attention to a religion which is the root of Christian faith and to develop in Daniel
Deronda such themes as universal sympathy and spiritual assistance - themes deep-rooted in
Kabalistic ideas of “rebirth of the soul,” “redemption of weak spirits” and “transmigration of
souls” (160). More importantly, there is a clear connection between Daniel’s Jewish roots,
his feminine qualities, and his respect for women. Amanda Anderson notes the connection
when she writes;
Eliot’s ambivalent attitude toward deracinated cosmopolitanism emerges in
her treatment o f Daniel’s highly attuned sympathetic imagination. Uncertain
social position as an adopted and assumed illegitimate son o f Sir Hugo is seen
to promote his imaginative sympathy for all the disinherited and unprivileged,
and espeeially for women in distress. (45)
But although Daniel may possess a Jewish heritage and feminine sensitivity, Eliot makes it
clear that he also remains an English gentleman. The essential value o f these dual sources of
virtue lies in the extent to which they serve to temper one another (as a kind o f action and
reaction between refinement and force). This mutual tempering is definitive o f the borderline
character and it is evident in Daniel’s reaction upon first confronting his mother, the
monstrous Alcharisi - a character who represents something akin to the Jewish equivalent of
Grandcourt.

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Once a famous opera singer but now aged and terminally ill, it is the Alcharisi
who calls Daniel to her to reveals his racial heritage. Approaching the meeting with the
idealist vision o f a happy reunion between long-estranged mother and son, his hopes are
quickly shattered by both the words and gestures o f his mother. The Alcharisi’s very first
words to him —“ ’You are a beautiful ereature.... I knew you would be’” (535) —are
followed by a kiss on “each cheek,” like “a greeting between royalties.” In a “colder tone,”
she adds “ ’I am your mother. But you can have no love for m e’” (536). Upon what he
perceives as his mother’s invitation to observe her more closely, Daniel feels that she is
“remarkable-looking” but her “worn beauty had a strangeness in it as if she were not quite a
human mother” but rather “a Melusina, who had ties with some world which is independent
o f ours”(536). A melusina is a female monster, a serpent from the waist down, and thus this
characterization strongly parallels Eliot’s description o f Grandcourt as a “formidable” but
“handsome lizard o f a hitherto unknown species” (115). The Alcharisi’s next words to
Deronda are more monstrous still:
“I did not wish you to be bom. I parted with you willingly. When your father
died, I resolved that I would have no more ties, but such as I could free myself
from.” (543).
The Alcharisi’s lack o f compassion for her son parallels Grandcourt’s lack o f compassion
towards others generally, but to have called her son to her, only to reject him a second time is
all the more monstrous and speaks to the extremity o f the Aleharisi’s detachment from
fundamental human relations.

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In the complex litany that follows, the Alcharisi bitterly relays the story o f how
she rejected her racial heritage. As she tells Daniel, the racial inheritance o f the Jews is a
“bondage” from which she sought to release him:
“What better could the most loving mother have done? I relieved you from
the bondage of having been bom a Jew.” (537)
While this claim fires Daniel “with an intolerance that seemed foreign to him” he recovers
“his fuller se lf’ to listen to one “who with the signs o f suffering in her frame was now
exerting herself to tell him of a past which was not his alone but also hers” (538).
In the most pointed attack on the oppressive notions o f biological determinism — and
specifically the idea that women do not have the same capacity for eminence as men —the
Alcharisi argues fiercely against the idea that “ ‘Every woman is supposed to have the same
set o f motives, or else to be a monster’ ” (539). Devoid o f the moderating emotions herself,
she appeals to the sympathy of her son:
“You are not a woman. You may try—but you can never imagine what it is to
have a man’s force o f genius in you, and yet to suffer the slavery o f being a
girl. To have a pattern cut out— ‘this is the Jewish woman; this is what you
must be; this is what you are wanted for; a woman’s heart must be o f such a
size and no larger, else it must be pressed small, like Chinese feet; her
happiness is to be made as cakes are, by a fixed receipt.’ That was what my
father wanted. He wished I had been a son; he cared for me as a makeshift
link. His heart was set on his Judaism. He hated that Jewish women should be
thought o f by the Christian world as a sort o f ware to make public singers and

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actresses of. As if we were not the more enviable for that! That is a chance
o f escaping from bondage.” (541)
Daniel experiences a range o f emotions as he listens to his mother, but most marked
is the reversal o f gender-appropriate responses. In the first scene, Daniel feels himself
“changing colour like a girl” and “trembling” in her presence, and though his emotions move
between of distaste and repulsion, Daniel’s more feminine instincts prevail. He feels
“oneness with the sufferer,” his “soul was absorbed in the anguish o f compassion” and “[h]is
pity made a flood o f forgiveness within him” (547). By the time he parts with her, “[I]t
seemed that all the woman lacking in her was present in him” (566).
Significantly, in keeping with the autobiographical element o f the conventional
bildungsroman, the Alcharisi’s comments reflect certain critical issues in Eliot’s own artistic
career. Like Eliot, the Alcharisi is a female artist whose rise to eminence had been brought
about by daring rejections and perceivably “monstrous” breaches o f patriarchal notions and
conventions. As Eliot had done in her own life, the Alcharisi first breaks bonds with her
father and religion o f her father, then through an unconventional marriage effectively severs
family ties and pursues a successful and eminent artistic career. The Alcharisi claims that her
‘“ nature gave [her] a charter’” - through her voiee and artistic genius - to “ ‘be something
more than a mere daughter and mother’” (570). Eliot’s “nature” or talent also gave her a
“charter” to exceed feminine expectations. However, the fictional story diverges sharply
from Eliot’s autobiography in so much as the Alcharisi explicitly refuses to attribute any
value to moderating human emotions - notably love and affection. As the Alcharisi tells
Daniel in their parting scene, ‘“ [i]t is a talent to love - 1 lacked it’” (571).

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Eliot, while breaching many culturally-ascribed feminine conventions, yet clung to
her affections as “the best gift” women have (Life 3:19). In doing so, she was rewarded both
in her relationship with Lewes and through her art which expresses her affections through a
sympathetic imagination. In contrast, the Alcharisi’s rejection o f her female affections or
moderating emotions ultimately lead to her bitter demise. Once her beauty is faded and her
voice is lost, the Alcharisi is reduced to trading on her reputation in order to enter into a
marriage of convenience with a wealthy man. Thus, a lifetime animated by emotional
detachment culminates in the very sort o f bondage she sought to escape.
Daniel’s meetings with his mother can be read as consistent with, but also a critical
commentary on, the conventional hero’s experience in London. Unlike the Alcharisi,
however, Daniel does not want to be entirely free from “bondage” if that means forsaking the
possibility of incorporating himself into a larger social whole. As he declares to Mordecai at
the end o f the novel:
Since I began to read and know, I have always longed for som e.. .captainship,
which would come to me as a duty, and not be striven for as a personal prize.
You have raised the idea o f such a task for me - to bind our race together in
spite o f heresy. You have said to me - ‘Our religion united us before it divided
us - it make us a people before it made Rabbanites and Karaites. I mean to try
what can be done with that union - 1 mean to work in our spirit. Failure will
not be ignoble, but it would be ignoble for me not to try. (642)
A social or corporate “duty” is o f greater value, to Daniel, than a “personal prize.”
Furthermore, the idea of “captainship” in this case (as in Fedalma’s case in The Spanish
Gypsy) is without the reward - either that o f fame or promise, or even hope, o f success. Yet

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to Daniel, this “duteous bond” feels “better than freedom” (637) because he is “no longer
wandering in the mazes of impartial sympathy”; instead, there is the sense o f a “noble
partiality” and “the closer fellowship that makes sympathy practical” (637).
Daniel’s final speech recapitulates the longing o f Fedalma, but with a difference. As
noted earlier, Daniel’s experience in London is not a disappointment; rather, it marks the
beginning o f his real education into his Jewish community and heritage. In Daniel Deronda.
the disenchantment experienced by the conventional bildungsroman hero in London is
displaced onto Daniel’s meetings with his mother. The Alcharisi represents something
greater and more modem than the city; she represents “cosmopolitanism.” As Amanda
Anderson notes, “the dangers o f cosmopolitanism are played out through the character of
[the Alcharisi]”; a “willfully cosmopolitan woman who has renounced her cultural heritage,
the Alcharisi represents for Eliot the more extreme dangers of modem detachment” (52).
The Alcharisi makes her way into the ranks o f the upper classes by leaving her
family, religion, and race behind. While Daniel is made a member o f the hegemonic class
stmcture by virtue o f his sex and his adoption into Sir Hugo’s home, the Alcharisi rises into
the upper class by willfully separating herself from her Jewish roots and by purposefully
disregarding established norms o f feminine behaviour. The dangers o f “modem detachment”
embodied by the Alcharisi are the dangers that result from individuals pursuing their
individual interests without regard for the law o f their traditional community, which of
course is what the bildungsroman hero does (in varying degrees) as he embarks on his quest
for “development.” The nightmare o f bourgeois individualism is realized in the squalor and
poverty o f the very cities that bildungsroman heroes inevitably gravitate toward and

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eventually flee. But the city is precisely where emotionally untethered individuals like the
Alcharisi flourish. The Alcharisi embodies the extreme danger o f this flourishing.
Grandcourt, on the other hand, is the embodiment o f the English gentry - the landed
aristocrat. He stands to the Alcharisi as thesis to anti-thesis. Whereas the Alcharisi strives to
escape the patriarchal law and restrictions o f her Jewish community by making her own way
in the cosmopolitan capital cities o f Europe, Grandcourt lives by entailed advantage. He is
the dead hand o f primogeniture, the decadent parasite. It is through the use o f these extreme
character types that Eliot ultimately undermines the bildungsroman form entirely. Together,
the Alcharisi and Grandcourt represent the polarities that Eliot rejects: a decadent corruption
of traditional values and the emotional sterility o f an untethered modernity.
Were the Alcharisi English, she would be Gwendolen, but with more natural talent
and far less naivete. Or to make the same point in a different way, the Alcharisi is what
Fedalma would have become had she renounced the claims o f both Zarca and Don Silva. The
difference between the “career” o f the Alcharisi and the “fate” o f Fedalma reflects the
difference between the tragic form o f The Spanish Gvpsv and the bildungsroman form of
Daniel Deronda. Daniel is not forced to choose between the “valid claims” o f his virtuous
English gentry upbringing and his virtuous Jewish forbears; rather, Eliot treats these two
claims dialectically and presents Daniel as their synthesis. He is a new kind o f man designed
to embody the best o f both traditions. Thus, as he tells his mother in their last interview, he
cannot simply abandon his English upbringing and education:

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“The effect o f my education can never be done away with. The Christian
sympathies in which my mind was reared can never die out o f m e.. .but I
consider it my duty to identify with my hereditary people.” (566)
Similarly, in his interview with his grandfather’s friend Kalonymos, he insists
“I shall call myself a Jew. But I will not say that I shall profess to believe
exactly as my fathers have believed” (620).
Thus, Daniel’s sympathy extends to understanding the oppression suffered at the hand of
traditional patriarchies by women like the Alcharisi.
In so far as Daniel’s sympathy is irreducible, so also is his borderline condition and
thus he cannot be re-integrated into an existing society at the end o f the novel. Rather, the
possibility for integration is east into the future. The irreducible sympathy o f the borderline
character is thus tantamount to indeterminacy. Daniel cannot fully develop his identity
because the society needed for him to identify or incorporate himself into does not exist yet.
This condition marks the end o f the bildungsroman form; the form cannot contain its
protagonist anymore than the society o f landed English gentry could contain the aspirations
o f Jews and women without transforming its values and traditional way o f life. Individuals
can no longer be controlled from the grave, as it were, by entailed advantages and
disadvantages.
Unlike the tragic fate o f Fedalma in The Spanish G v p s v . Daniel’s fate outside of the
society o f his upbringing does not necessarily entail his suffering or a change in the way
that he understands his destiny to be unfolding. In the romantic idealism o f the story’s
conclusions, at least for Daniel, some aspects o f the conventional bildungsroman are
restored. As suggested by Kristin Brady, in contrast to the “dead hand” o f the father that

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tragically influences the lives and fates o f Fedalma and the Alcharisi, the “effect of
Mordecai's ‘dead hand’ on Daniel is different... precisely because the object o f his
projections is a fellow male”: additionally, in “accepting his own Judaism and embracing his
friend’s cause, Deronda - rather than repressing his own desire, like the women under such
paternal influences - guarantees for himself the two rewards of the male Bildungsroman:
marriage and vocation.” (181).
But while it is certainly the case that the patriarchal values are restored at the
individual level for Daniel, the related and over-arching social, national, and racial values
(upheld by both the English society within the novel and by Eliot’s contemporary
readership) are challenged. Daniel’s departure from England and his embrace, though
qualified, o f his little-known Jewish heritage was the cause o f general bewilderment and
affront for many of Eliot’s contemporaries. Eliot’s challenge to these conventional
expectations is consistent with her thematic intentions and her long-standing artistic
purposes as an “aesthetic teacher” through her fiction.
The social and psychological realism that was and remains much o f Eliot’s cause
celebre, is exemplified in the contemporary setting, situations, and characterizations in
Daniel Deronda and culminates in a necessary disruption o f existing class, gender, and racial
hierarchies. Eliot’s realism and her moral philosophy is one that emphasizes both social and
moral “truths.” Through the character o f Daniel, who by nature o f his borderline position
escapes the boundaries o f oppressive social, gender, and racial classifications, Eliot
illuminates the degenerative movement o f her society and consequently emphasizes a key
tenet o f her moral philosophy: the need for an ever-widening o f human sympathy to re­
direct a morally degenerative social system. In the conclusion o f Daniel Deronda. the

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essentialist and deterministic beliefs about non-English races ultimately turn in on
themselves. In creating an English-Jewish protagonist whose moral character exceeds that
o f his purely English counterparts, Eliot brings to life a contemporary subject who does not
nor cannot fit traditional literary forms and thus calls into question many o f the conventional
beliefs of her time.

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Conclusion
In between the publications o f The Spanish Gypsy (1868) and Daniel Deronda
(1876), Eliot’s letters, notes and journals are replete with references to the limits o f scientific
determinism in explaining or accounting for the mysteries o f human existence. Throughout
these writings, Eliot stresses the value o f art, which she refers to as “emotion blending with
thought” (Life 3:216), as an answer to the spiritual void left by rationalist and scientific
discourses on human development and, consequently, as a model for moral development in a
world that is becoming increasing more complicated and untethered from binding human
traditions. Many o f these writings appeared in the three-volume George Eliot: Life and
Letters, collected, edited and published by John Cross shortly after Eliot’s death in 1880.
Looking to these volumes for connections between the art and the artist, Victorian
readers o f Life and Letters were disillusioned by the mundane details o f Eliot’s daily
existence and domestic affairs which exemplified traditional and eonservative values
seemingly at odds with her unconventional life. Conversely, readers were shocked by the
doeumentation o f Eliot’s self-edueation in philosophy, art, linguistics and language. The
vast depth and breadth o f her reading and learning exposed her to be far more broad-minded,
well-read, intellectual and philosophical than anyone had imagined.
Significantly, the Victorian responses to Eliot’s personal and intellectual existence
are marked by a “reverence and reservation” similar to that with which many o f these same
critics had approached her fiction.

These responses thus again betray many masculine

anxieties about a woman whose intellectual and literary eminence exceeded that o f most

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men of the time, and readers of the Life often put forth gender-biased arguments which
attempted to label, contain, and thus reduce the quality and impact o f Eliot’s art. For
example, even the homage paid by Henry James (perhaps Eliot’s most admiring literary
critic) is underscored by patriarchal and masculinist interpretations o f her life and learning interpretations which lead him to qualify his final verdict on her fiction:
Her deep, strenuous, much-considering mind, of which the leading mark is
the capacity for a sort o f luminous brooding, fed upon the idea o f her
irregularity with an intensity which doubtless only her magnificent
intellectual activity and Lewes’s brilliancy and ingenuity kept from being
morbid. The fault o f most o f her work is the absence o f spontaneity, the
excess o f reflection; and by her action in 1854 (which seemed, superficially,
to be of the sort usually termed reckless) she committed herself to being
nothing if not reflective, to cultivating a kind of compensatory earnestness.
Her earnestness, her refined conscience, her exalted sense o f responsibility,
were colored by her peculiar position; they committed her to a plan o f life, of
study, in which the accidental, the unexpected, were too little allowed
fo r....If her relations with the world had been easier, in a word, her books
would have been less difficult” (CH 495).
As has been argued throughout this study, Eliot’s complex life and her “peculiar” position in
Victorian society, contribute to the difficulty o f her fiction. But in emphasizing Eliot’s
“irregularity,” her “absence o f spontaneity,” her indebtedness to Lewes, and her
“compensatory earnestness,” James reverts to an essentialist viewpoint and suggests that
despite Eliot’s magnificent intellect, she lacked the male “brilliancy and ingenuity”

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necessary to satisfactorily sustain her efforts. Thus, her “peculiar position” and “relations
with the world” are read to be detracting from her artistic greatness rather than augmenting
it.
In response and in contrast to the many Victorian essentialist readings o f Eliot’s life
and fiction, more recent Eliot scholars have suggested that we would not have Eliot’s
exciting, various, and progressively dynamic fiction had Eliot chosen a different life for
herself (i.e. one in which she accepted and adhered to a more conventional feminine role in
Victorian society). Eliot’s “borderline” position (as it has been referred to in this thesis) was
not one without emotional strain, but it was precisely the position out o f

which she

developed and honed her moral aesthetic and out o f which she created more difficult and
dynamic fiction such as The Spanish Gvpsv and Daniel Deronda.
Additionally, these later works are more difficult and experimental than her earlier
works not, as James would have it, because o f a “compensatory earnestness” but rather, as
has more recently been suggested by Barbara Hardy in her considerations o f Daniel
Deronda, “because [the] materials are complicatedly and truthfully close to realities”: Daniel
Deronda, in particular, is
.. .one o f those works o f art whose greatness is inextricably bound up with
imperfection. It touches the limits o f Victorian fiction, and its imaginative
courage (covering both art and vision) results in a certain strain and tension.”
(8)
Dorothea Barrett, in her 1998 study o f Eliot and her fiction, makes a similar point; “We
come to George Eliot not for perfect churches but for flawed cathedrals” (153).
The idea o f greatness bound with imperfection is one that Eliot herself understood

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and embraced. In an 1863 letter, Eliot acknowledged both the difficulty and the rewards
of her literary efforts:
.. .great, great facts have struggled to find a voice in me, and have only been
able to speak brokenly. That consciousness makes me cherish.. .that my work
has.. .that religious and moral sympathy with the historical life o f man which
is the larger half o f culture” (Life II: 286).
Such sentiments synthesize not only the struggle and uncertainty, the precariousness and
privilege, o f Eliot’s borderline position but also the underlying moral and social purpose of
her fiction.

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