The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
George Eliot · a novel in eight books · seventy chapters, nearly every one under an epigraph · issued by Blackwood in eight monthly books, February to September 1876, then in four volumes the same year; scored as the whole novel, both its strands, as one work · read from knowledge; no text in hand, quoted only where its words are certain
Mode
Novel of manners and of vocation in two strands; a marriage plot refused and a story of origins, in one work
Mythos
Moses raised in a stranger’s house and drawn to his people by a rescue from the river; Elijah’s mantle passed to Elisha; the Lamia at the gaming table; Hermione’s statue that will not come to life
Phase
From the roulette table at Leubronn, back a year to Offendene and forward through a marriage, a drowning off Genoa, a mother’s revelation and a prophet’s death, to a departure for the East, from September 1864 to 1866
Presentation
Fiction; seventy chapters in eight books, nearly every chapter under an epigraph, many in Eliot’s own verse or prose; told out of order, beginning in the middle; a narrator who analyses motive inside the sentence
Register
From the satiric comedy of Offendene, Diplow and the archery meetings, through the dread of a marriage carried on in silences, to the prophetic idealism of Mordecai’s last chapters
Scale
Two households in ruin, a marriage anatomised, a landed estate and its entail, the artist’s vocation, Jewish London from the pawnshop to the visionary, and Europe from Leubronn to Genoa
Governing Proposition
A young woman whose family is ruined marries a man she fears, knowing what she sells; a young man raised as an English gentleman, ignorant of his birth, rescues a girl from the river, finds her brother, a dying visionary, and learns from his mother that he was born a Jew. The two lives meet in him, her confessor and the visionary’s disciple. The wager of the novel is that a self with no loyalty larger than its own wants can be measured only against a self that finds one, and that a form with two centres, moving its centre away from its heroine, can teach her what the book teaches: that she is not the centre.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The novel opens on a question and a gaze. “Was she beautiful or not beautiful?” (ch. 1): the scene is the roulette table in the gaming rooms of Leubronn in September 1864, where Gwendolen Harleth plays under the gaze of Daniel Deronda. The book’s question of judging and being judged is set at its first word. The first chapter stands under an epigraph that states the book’s method, “Men can do nothing without the make-believe of a beginning”, and the beginning is a make-believe indeed: the first two chapters are set in the present, and the next run back a year, to Gwendolen’s coming to Offendene.
The novel was issued by William Blackwood and Sons in eight monthly books, February to September 1876, then in four volumes the same year. It is Eliot’s last novel: seventy chapters in eight books, nearly every chapter under an epigraph, many of them Eliot’s own verse or prose. The unit scored is the whole novel as published, both its strands, as one work. The fifth book is named for Mordecai; the first four are weighted to Gwendolen, and the last four divide more evenly between her and Deronda.
Two strands run through it. Gwendolen’s: her family’s ruin, her marriage to Henleigh Mallinger Grandcourt, his drowning off Genoa. Deronda’s: his rescue of Mirah Lapidoth, his search for her brother, his meeting with Mordecai, and the discovery from his mother, the Princess Halm-Eberstein, once the singer Alcharisi, that he was born a Jew. They meet in Deronda, who is Gwendolen’s confessor and Mordecai’s disciple. The opening at Leubronn is the knot of the whole: a stranger’s eye on a woman who has not yet learned that other eyes are centres too.
Movement II
Gwendolen comes to Offendene with her mother, Mrs Davilow, and the comedy of the neighbourhood closes round her: the Gascoignes and Mr Gascoigne’s prudence, the archery meetings, the Arrowpoints and their heiress. The prose here is Eliot at her best, the analysis of motive moving inside a sentence from narrator to character and back. The comedy is satire, and Gwendolen is its spoiled and brilliant centre, sure of her own will.
Under the comedy runs fear. At Offendene a dead face is hidden behind a panel, and she is in terror of it; in a tableau from The Winter’s Tale she screams. Hermione’s statue is the woman who comes to life; Gwendolen is the statue that will not. The book makes its first disclosure here: her terror is the ground of her egoism and not its opposite. The self that must be the centre is a self that dreads what lies outside it.
Then the family is ruined. Gwendolen hopes for the stage, and Klesmer’s verdict on those hopes strips her: the artist’s vocation, which the Alcharisi and Mirah will each embody, is exactly what she does not have. The choice that is left is a marriage. She knows, through Lydia Glasher, what that marriage would mean, and she makes it to save her mother from poverty. The economics of a woman’s choice are set out with no softening: she knows what she sells.
Movement III
On the wedding night Lydia Glasher’s letter arrives with the diamonds, and the diamonds are poisoned by it. It is among the heights of the book, and it opens a marriage carried on as a pure contest of wills. Grandcourt strikes no blow. His power is sadism refined into manners; the dialogue between him and his wife is the place where nothing is said and all is done. The book holds this domination in silences and courtesies, and the disclosure holds.
Gwendolen turns to Deronda as to a confessor. His rebukes to her carry weight because he is a man finding the loyalty she lacks; without his vocation they would be a clergyman’s. Their meetings are the seam of the novel, and the form depends on them: a self closed on itself is measured against a self opening to a people, and the measure is taken in one man’s sympathy.
Off Genoa Grandcourt drowns. The drowning is wished and granted, the last of Gwendolen’s myths, and her confession to Deronda afterward is the dreadful height of her half of the book. The book does not close her story in a marriage to the hero; it leaves her alone and changed, and her last letter closes her strand.
Movement IV
Deronda has been raised in Sir Hugo Mallinger’s house, ignorant of his birth. He lifts Mirah from the river, and the rescue draws him toward a people he does not know is his: the pattern is Moses’s, and the plot carries it. He looks for her brother through Jewish London, from the Cohens’ pawnshop to the working men’s club of thinkers at the Hand and Banner, and the book brings that life into the English novel as part of the nation, and not as caricature.
Mordecai waits on Blackfriars Bridge at sunset for the figure he has foreseen, and Deronda comes up the river toward him. It is the height of the Deronda strand. Mordecai hopes that his soul will pass into the younger man, a Kabbalistic transmigration, and the plot makes the hope its structure: Elijah’s mantle given to Elisha. The visionary at the Cohens’ proves to be Mirah’s brother, and here the joining of the strands shows its coincidence.
The charge against this half of the book is real and stays on the page. Much of it is expository; Mordecai speaks at a length the scenes do not compel, and his discourse is often flat where it aims highest; Mirah is drawn without the play of light Eliot gives her other figures; the narrator presses where the scene should show. That is the charge Leavis turned into surgery. It weighs on the bulk of the strand, not on its place in the design.
Movement V
The mother summons the son to Genoa, where Gwendolen is. She is the Princess Halm-Eberstein, once the singer Alcharisi, and in two interviews she tells him that he was born a Jew. They are among the greatest scenes Eliot wrote. The Alcharisi refused the roles of daughter and mother under her father’s law to have her art, and the book gives her her own argument and does not refute it.
She is the hinge of the double form. As the mother who refused her inheritance she is Gwendolen’s double, a woman who would not be what others required of her; as Deronda’s origin she is the inheritance he takes up. Only a book of two strands can make her both. Her revolt has its comic form in the Arrowpoints’ heiress marrying Klesmer against her parents, and Deronda’s inheritance its profane form in Grandcourt’s estate passed to his illegitimate son: one law of inheritance runs through the whole, though the two halves are written in two kinds of novel.
Mordecai dies when Deronda has taken up his charge, and Deronda leaves for the East. The book ends with a man’s departure and a prophet’s death, and the heroine of its first half is left in England, alone. It is the refusal of the marriage plot the opening seemed to promise, and the form’s last word: Gwendolen learns that she is not the centre because the novel has moved its centre away from her. The make-believe of the beginning, a stranger’s gaze at a gaming table, has become a self’s first knowledge that it is one among others.
Act III · The Twelve
The case against is famous: F. R. Leavis, in The Great Tradition (1948), proposed cutting the book in two and keeping a novel called Gwendolen Harleth. The subtraction fails on its own terms. Gwendolen’s is the story of a self with no larger loyalty than its wants, and the book measures her by a man who finds the loyalty she lacks; take his vocation away and his rebukes to her become a clergyman’s. The Alcharisi is Gwendolen’s double and Deronda’s origin at once, and only the double plot makes her both. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is bulk: much of the Jewish strand is expository, and Mordecai speaks at a length the scenes do not compel. The architecture is necessary; much of that bulk is not.
Score: 7.8 / 10
What the book uncovers holds as stated truth. The marriage of Gwendolen and Grandcourt is a pure contest of wills, a domination carried on in silences and courtesies with no blow struck: his power is sadism refined into manners, and her fear is shown to be the ground of her egoism and not its opposite. The economics of a woman’s choice: she marries to save her mother from poverty and knows, through Lydia Glasher and the diamonds, exactly what she sells. The Alcharisi, a woman of genius refusing the roles of daughter and mother under her father’s law, is given her own argument and not refuted. And Jewish life in London enters the English novel as part of the nation. Held below 9.0 because the Deronda strand discloses partly by assertion.
Score: 8.8 / 10
The heights are of the first order and come most often in Gwendolen’s half: the opening at the roulette table under Deronda’s gaze; the panel at Offendene and the dead face behind it; Klesmer’s verdict on her hopes of the stage, which strips her; the wedding night, when Lydia Glasher’s letter and the poisoned diamonds arrive; the drowning off Genoa and the confession after it. The Deronda strand rises less often, but it rises: Mordecai waiting on Blackfriars Bridge at sunset for the figure he has foreseen, and Deronda coming up the river toward him; the two interviews with the Alcharisi in Genoa, among the greatest scenes Eliot wrote. Held at this figure because Mordecai’s discourse is often flat where it aims highest, and Mirah’s sweetness lowers every scene she governs.
Score: 8.5 / 10
The archetype is built, not evoked. Deronda’s story is Moses’s: a child of a people raised as a prince in a stranger’s house, Sir Hugo Mallinger’s, ignorant of his birth, drawn to his people by an act of rescue, Mirah lifted from the river, who learns his origin and leaves to lead them toward a land. The plot carries the pattern. Mordecai’s hope that his soul will pass into the younger man, a Kabbalistic transmigration, is Elijah’s mantle given to Elisha, and the plot enacts it: Mordecai dies when Deronda has taken up his charge. Gwendolen’s myths are lighter: the Lamia of the gaming epigraph, Hermione’s statue that will not come to life. Held below 9.0 because the Moses pattern is worked with some explicitness, and her myths stay evoked more than built.
Score: 8.6 / 10
The swerve is double and the cost was paid. An English domestic novel of manners in 1876 turns, at its height, to Jewish nationalism, with sympathy and with learning, and makes its hero a Jew who leaves England. Eliot’s readers resisted it, and the resistance, Leavis’s surgery included, has followed the book for a century and a half. The novel also refuses the marriage plot it seems to set up: Gwendolen, the heroine of the first half, is not married to the hero, and is left alone and changed, while the book ends with a man’s departure for the East and a prophet’s death. And the telling begins in the middle and turns back, a departure from Eliot’s own practice in Middlemarch. Held below the top because the stake is a turn of subject and of ending more than a reinvention of the novel’s means.
Score: 8.7 / 10
The double form is the instrument of the argument: a self closed on itself and a self opened to a people, told side by side and meeting in one man who serves both and belongs at last to one. Change the form to a single strand and the book cannot say what it says, that Gwendolen’s salvation lies in learning that she is not the centre, a lesson enacted by the book’s moving its centre away from her. The opening in the middle makes the form the knowledge as well: Gwendolen is judged by a stranger’s eye before she is known, as she will be judged. The epigraphs set each chapter in a wider frame of thought. Held at this figure because the joining of the strands is managed by sympathy and coincidence, and the seam shows.
Score: 8.4 / 10
The evidence of yield on return is long and varied. Henry James’s dialogue “Daniel Deronda: A Conversation” (1876) staged the quarrel over the book at once; Leavis’s division made it a crux of twentieth century criticism; feminist readings from the 1970s returned to the Alcharisi and to Gwendolen’s marriage; Edward Said’s The Question of Palestine (1979) read it from the side of the Palestinians; and studies of Victorian Jewish history and of Zionism have kept it in use. Each reading finds the book able to answer, and the Gwendolen chapters keep yielding on psychology at every return. Held below 9.0 because the Deronda strand yields mainly to historical and ideological inquiry, and less to rereading for its own sake.
Score: 8.8 / 10
The field is the English novel of the nineteenth century. The force is high: the book carries the English psychological novel further into dread and moral fear than any English novel before it, and puts Jewish history inside the English novel as a matter of vocation and not of caricature. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Henry James built The Portrait of a Lady (1881) in part on it, and Leavis’s argument that Isabel Archer descends from Gwendolen and Osmond from Grandcourt is generally accepted; the novel was read among early Zionists and cited in the movement’s literature; the novel of marriage as imprisonment owes it a share it shares with others. Held below the gate by a tenth because it did not redirect its field; it opened a line that few followed.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Weighed on form, presence and fabric over a century and a half. The form is whole: the text survives entire and unaltered. Presence is continuous: in print in the standard series, Penguin, Oxford World’s Classics and Everyman, taught in university courses in English and comparative literature, and adapted as a BBC serial in 2002. The surface is not fixed to its moment: the gaming table, the marriage market and the question of a people’s home have outlived the 1860s. It stands at the floor of its band and not above because its presence is narrower than Middlemarch’s or Anna Karenina’s: it is read much more in the academy than outside it, and its general readership has been shaped by the verdict that half the book may be skipped.
Score: 9.0 / 10
The prose of the Gwendolen chapters is Eliot at her best: the analysis of motive moving inside a sentence from narrator to character and back; the comedy of Mrs Davilow’s household and the Gascoignes; the dialogue of Gwendolen and Grandcourt, where nothing is said and all is done. The first line, “Was she beautiful or not beautiful?” (ch. 1), puts the book’s question of judging and being judged at the first word, and the first epigraph states its method. The handling of time across the first books is masterly. Charged: Mordecai’s speech is often stiff and long; Mirah is drawn without the play of light Eliot gives her other figures; the late books lean on coincidence; and in the Deronda strand the narrator’s commentary presses where it should show.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the satiric comedy of Offendene and Diplow, the archery meetings, the Arrowpoints, Mr Gascoigne’s prudence, and the prophetic idealism of Mordecai’s last chapters. One physics governs both in part: inheritance, what a person owes to the people and the past that made them, and whether the self will serve it or only itself. The Arrowpoints’ heiress marrying Klesmer against her parents is the comic form of the Alcharisi’s revolt; Grandcourt’s estate passed to his illegitimate son is the profane form of Deronda’s inheritance. But the registers do not fuse. The two halves are written as two kinds of novel, one tested by irony and the other mostly exempt from it, and the law holds at the level of idea more than of tone.
Score: 8.2 / 10
Held, not listed. Consciousness at its most minute: Gwendolen’s dread. The family as economy: Mrs Davilow’s ruin, the Gascoignes, the Meyricks, the Cohens. The landed class and its money: Sir Hugo, Grandcourt, the entail, the Arrowpoints’ fortune; gambling and finance. Art and the artist’s vocation: Klesmer, the Alcharisi, Mirah’s singing. Thought among working men at the Hand and Banner. Religion and law: Jewish observance and a father’s will. Nation and history: the English gentry and a scattered people’s hope of a home; and Europe from Leubronn to Genoa. The inheritance theme and the meeting of the strands bind them. Held below the top because labour, the land worked and the state appear chiefly at second hand, and the two halves are not fully joined.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.6 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Imperishable and The Encompassed at 9.0, then The Unconcealment and The Bottomless Well at 8.8. A text whole and continuously read for a century and a half; a structure that holds a woman’s dread, two ruined households, an entail, the artist’s vocation, Jewish London and a people’s hope of a home in one theme of inheritance; a disclosure of marriage as a contest of wills and of what a woman sells when she chooses; and a book argued over from James’s Conversation of 1876 to Said.
Limiting Dimension
The Inevitable at 7.8: the double architecture is necessary, but much of the Jewish strand is expository and Mordecai speaks at a length the scenes do not compel. Next above it, The Inner Law at 8.2, because the two halves are written as two kinds of novel and the law holds at the level of idea more than of tone; then The Living Form and Pressure on Tradition at 8.4, for a seam of coincidence between the strands and a reach that opened a line few followed.
The Necessity Cap clears at 7.8 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears: The Living Form at 8.4, The Made at 8.6, The Inner Law at 8.2, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet: The Imperishable at 9.0, The Unconcealment at 8.8, The Swerve at 8.7 and The Archetypal Deep at 8.6 clear the bar of 8.5, but Pressure on Tradition at 8.4 falls short by a tenth, since the book opened a line in the English novel and did not redirect the field. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis but The Encompassed falls below 7.8, against 7.5) and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 9.0. The aggregate, 8.6, holds the work in Tier IV of itself; the unmet gate would hold it there in any case.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda, her last novel, issued by William Blackwood and Sons in eight monthly books from February to September 1876 and in four volumes the same year: seventy chapters in eight books, nearly every chapter under an epigraph. The unit scored is the whole novel as published, both its strands, as one work. The work is in English, so no translation is in question. No text was in hand, nothing was measured on a text, and no quotation was checked against a file; the novel is quoted only where its words are certain, briefly: the first line of the first chapter and the epigraph that stands over it. Matters that could not be verified are not given, among them the titles of the eight books, the length of the novel in words, the words of Gwendolen’s confession after the drowning, the date of a Hebrew translation, and the date of one critical essay on Deronda’s origin. Citations are by chapter: ch. 1 is chapter 1.