Reviewing Ruth Wisse’s online course on the great Victorian novelist’s Daniel Deronda, Ian Lindquist writes:
It is important to have an expert guide for this novel, which, however familiar [its themes are] to our times, is also intricate and extraordinarily subtle. . . . While Wisse prepares viewers for her lectures, Eliot throws readers into the deep end. Daniel Deronda opens with a splendid picture of its protagonist. Gwendolen Harleth desires above all else to distinguish herself, to raise herself above the common herd. Yet we quickly learn that Gwendolen, whose beauty and bearing elevate her above her female peers, lacks the foresight and self-control to guide herself. For all her youthful confidence, she is visited in her private moments by a terror of isolation. . . .
To compound this problem, Gwendolen’s circumstances allow her to determine her own destiny and path through life—she is a “new woman,” in Wisse’s phrase, free of the customs that bound previous generations. And yet, her private moments of terror remind the reader that there is an awful emptiness in the lack of custom and social support built into inherited tradition. Sensitive readers will discern a significant challenge in this freedom, and sense that Gwendolen’s predicament is not unlike the predicament many young people face in our own times. Inherited custom is a burden, but it is also a directing force.
[The title character], by contrast, yearns for communion with those around him. Early on, Daniel sacrifices his own studies in order to help a wounded friend obtain a scholarship to college. His ambition, unlike Gwendolen’s, is marked by a desire to emulate the heroes of past ages. He does not wish to be an autonomous individual, determining his fate all by himself. . . .
Gwendolen and Daniel are like exiles in a foreign land, cut off from inherited custom and the guidance that comes with it. They are not in a position to discover their cultural and familial inheritance, a discovery that is a feature—perhaps an essential feature—of life. The rootlessness they experience as a result is disorienting. This “dislocation,” as Wisse puts it, is a feature of our times, too.
Read more on Washington Free Beacon: http://freebeacon.com/culture/george-eliot-daniel-deronda/