Daniel Deronda
Daniel Deronda is a novel by the British author George Eliot , first published in 1876. It is the last novel Eliot finished and the only one set in Victorian times . The novel is partly social satire, partly an examination of questions of conscience.
The novel is now considered a classic of the 19th century. In 2015, 82 international literary critics and scholars voted the novel together with Eliot's Roman Middlemarch as one of the most important British novels .
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Daniel Deronda consists of two different storylines, which are linked by the title character of the novel, the young Daniel Deronda.
At the end of August 1865, both Daniel Deronda and the young Gwendolen Harleth were guests in the (fictional) German city of Leubronn. Daniel finds himself drawn to the beautiful, selfish Gwendolen against his will. This loses all of its money in a game of roulette. The next day she received a letter from the UK in which her mother wrote that the family was financially ruined and that she had to return home. Gwendolen then puts a collar and considers whether she should risk the money she received again in order to increase her means. At that moment, a doorman brings her collar back to her and she realizes that Daniel Deronda saw her move it and buy it back for her.
The story of the two main characters is told in a flashback. A year earlier, Gwendolen's stepfather died and the family moved to a new area. There Gwendolen meets Henleigh Mallinger Grandcourt, an arrogant and cold-hearted man of great wealth. Initially open to his wooing for her hand, Gwendolen eludes him after she discovered that he not only has a lover, but that this relationship also resulted in several children, and travels to Leubronn.
Daniel Deronda was raised by the wealthy gentleman Sir Hugo Malinger. Like most of his entourage, Deronda is convinced that he is Sir Hugo's illegitimate son, even if there is no evidence of this. Eliot portrays Deronda as an intelligent, warm-hearted young man who just can't decide what to do with his life. This is also the reason for conflicts between Deronda and Sir Hugo, who hopes his foster child will turn to politics. In July 1865, Deronda rescued the young Jewish Mirah Lapidoth, who had tried to drown herself. He places her at a friend's house, where it turns out that Maria is a singer. She broke away from her father and came to London to find her mother and brother. Her father had once stolen her from her mother and forced her to join an acting company. Mirah has a good reason why she ran away from her father: he tried to sell her into prostitution. Deronda tries to help Mirah find her mother and brother and learns about the Jewish community in London. He feels increasingly drawn to Mirah and unsure about his feelings he joins Sir Hugo in Leubronn, where he then meets Gwendolyn.
In September 1865 Gwendolen returned to London. Her family's financial situation is desperate. For a short time she thinks about whether she should earn her living as governess in the future or whether she has enough talent to earn a living as a singer in the future. Eventually, however, she decides to marry Henleigh Grandcourt and thus protect her mother and sisters from a life of poverty. Contrary to what she had hoped, Henleigh leaves her little leeway to shape her own life. She is increasingly seeking advice from Daniel Deronda.
During his search for Mirah's family, Deronda met the Jewish visionary Mordecai, who is seriously ill with tuberculosis and who turns out to be Mirah's missing brother. Mordecai hopes that his Jewish community members will manage to maintain their identity and that one day they will be able to return to the Promised Land. Because his death is foreseeable, he also hopes that Daniel Deronda will become a representative of the Jews of London. Despite being fascinated by Mordecai, Deronda is reluctant to advocate a cause he has no personal connection to.
Meanwhile, Gwendolen suffers from a remorse because she provided her family financially with her marriage, but at the same time robbed Grandcourt's illegitimate children of their chance to inherit their father one day. Grandcourt is killed in a boating accident, and although Gwendolen made a futile attempt to save him from drowning, she feels guilty for his death. She meets Deronda again, for whom she has increasingly deeper feelings. He learned from his foster father that his mother was a famous Jewish singer. When he meets her, he learns that he is by no means Sir Hugo's illegitimate child. He emerged from his mother's marriage to a devout Jewish doctor. After his death, she entrusted her toddler Sir Hugo, a long-time admirer of her art, and asked him to raise her son as an English gentleman. Shaped by her rigid childhood in a strictly religious Jewish family, she made Sir Hugo promise that nothing should remind Daniel Deronda of his Jewish heritage. Now aware of his origins, Daniel Deronda feels strengthened in his love for Mirah and now actually sees himself as Mordecai's intellectual heir. Before his wedding, Deronda and Gwendolen meet again. Gwendolen is initially deeply upset that Deronda is going to marry Mirah, but it also becomes a turning point in her own life. She is determined to take her future into her own hands. On the wedding day, Gwendolen sends Deronda a “farewell letter” telling him that he has made her a better person. The novel ends with the death of Mordecai and the preparation of the young couple to set off east.
Contemporary history
The sudden loss of wealth that Gwendolen Harleth's family suffered is not a narrative trick by Eliot, but based on real events. In Great Britain, between 1820 and 1850, numerous families whose income came from capital investments lost their wealth literally overnight to corporate bankruptcies and bank failures. This constant threat only eased with the Limited Liability Act of 1855 , which changed liability issues in the event of bankruptcies. More typical than a sudden change in the financial situation, however, would have been a gradual erosion of family wealth, which forced women to look for gainful employment.
Gwendolen Harleth considers taking up the profession of governess , but then rejects this option and prefers to marry Henleigh Grandcourt. This is due to the difficult social position of women who pursued this profession. The governesses who were employed by middle-class families in Great Britain around the middle of the 19th century were usually not distinguished from their employer by their social background, but only by their financial resources. However, working as governess had a negative impact on the social status of the women who practiced it: an essential characteristic of a middle-class citizen was that she did not work. Jane Austen brings this dilemma to the point in her novel Emma (1816) by contrasting the wealthy Emma Woodhouse with the destitute Jane Fairfax. Both are extremely cultured young women: Jane Fairfax is even superior to Emma Woodhouse in all the skills that characterize a lady. She thus represents the ideal of a lady, unlike the financially independent Emma Woodhouse, the assumption of a governess position and thus a path that must end in old youth and poverty seems inevitable for her. The contemporary Lady Elizabeth Eastlake commented on this in an article in the Quarterly Review , noting that there is no other group of employees so systematically replenished by the misfortune of families. The broad space that governance activity occupied in the public debate in Great Britain, especially in the economically turbulent decades around the middle of the 19th century and played in the English literature of that time, is therefore not only seen by historians as an outgrowth of empathy for women who had to fall back on this profession, but also as an expression of the economic uncertainty of this class.
Adaptations
The novel Daniel Deronda has been adapted several times for the stage, film and television. As early as 1921 there was a silent film directed by Walter Courtney Roden and Reginald Fox took on one of the leading roles. A television series based on this novel was broadcast on the British broadcaster BBC One between November 23 and December 7, 2002 . Directed by Tom Hooper and starring Hugh Dancy as Daniel Deronda, Romola Garai as Gwendolen Harleth, Hugh Bonneville as Henleigh Grandcourt and Jodhi May as Mirah Lapidoth.
The novel has also been adapted several times for the stage. One of the most famous performances is a theater production that was staged in Manchester in the 1960s and in which Vanessa Redgrave played Gwendolen Harleth.
literature
- Margaret Drabble (Editor): The Oxford Companion to English Literature , Oxford University Press, Oxford 1985.
Single receipts
- ^ The Guardian: The best British novel of all times - have international critics found it? , accessed February 7, 2016
- ↑ Kathryn Hughes: The Victorian Governess . The Hambledon Press, London 1993, ISBN 1-85285-002-7 , p. 28.
- ↑ Kathryn Hughes: The Victorian Governess . The Hambledon Press, London 1993, ISBN 1-85285-002-7 , p. 29.
- ↑ Cecilia Wadsö Lecaros: The Victorian Governess Novel . Lund University Press, Lund 2001, ISBN 91-7966-577-2 , pp. 20 and 21.
- ↑ Kathryn Hughes: The Victorian Governess . The Hambledon Press, London 1993, ISBN 1-85285-002-7 , p. 4.
- ↑ Ruth Brandon: Other People's Daughters - The Life and Times of the Governess. Phoenix, London 2008, ISBN 978-0-7538-2576-1 , p. 13.
- ^ Broughton and Symes: The Governess - An Anthology . 1997, p. 9.
- ↑ Daniel Deronda . British Film Institute. Retrieved February 6, 2016.
- ^ Rachael Low, The History of the British Film: 1918-1929 . Allen & Unwin, 1971, ISBN 0047910216 , pp. 138, 354.