The male villain as domestic tyrant in Daniel Deronda: Victorian masculinities and the cultural context of George Eliot's novel.(Critical Essay)

In her capacity as "Belles Lettres" reviewer for the "Contemporary Literature" section of the Westminster, Marianne Evans--who later adopted the pseudonym George Eliot and became one of the most popular and influential British novelists of the 19th century--passed over the poet's reputed "obscurity" and published a favorable review of Robert Browning's Men and Women in January 1856. Later, Browning became a friend of Eliot and her companion George Lewes, occasionally visiting their Priory home after returning to England from Florence in 1862, when Eliot was completing Romola, her historical novel set in 15th-century Florence. The friendship, which grew in the mid-1860s, was undoubtedly encouraged by a shared fascination with the history of Renaissance Italy. Eliot was even given a private tour of Browning's "museum" dedicated to the memory of his deceased wife, the celebrated poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning. (1) Browning did not exert a major influence on Eliot's fiction, but of course she was familiar with his work, and I want to call attention to a brief allusion to one of his most popular poems in her last novel.

A collection of Browning's dramatic monologues, first published in 1842, contains poems that are still among the best known and most widely anthologized of his works. In particular, "My Last Duchess" remains a favorite: perhaps it is the most popular Victorian poem of all. Browning probably modeled this classic portrait of an aristocratic male domestic tyrant on Alfonso II, fifth and last duke of Ferrara (15331597), whose young bride Lucrezia died under mysterious circumstances in 1561. (2) In the original edition, the poem had been entitled "Italy" and paired with a companion poem, "France," which was later renamed "Count Gismond." Apparently Browning had meant to contrast what he took to be representative treatment of women in the two national traditions: as a mere possession or beautiful object in the first, as a vessel of innocence whose honor must be defended at all costs in the second.

Eliot's Daniel Deronda (serialized February-September, 1876), incorporates her own version of a tyrannous husband: Henleigh Grandcourt, a heartless and domineering English aristocrat who marries the beautiful but flawed heroine, Gwendolen Harleth. There can be no doubt that Browning's Duke was on her mind while she was writing the novel: she has Hans Meyrick, one of the characters in the novel, playfully refer to Grandcourt as "Duke Alphonso" in a letter he writes to the protagonist, Daniel Deronda (p. 708). However, when she was writing Deronda, Eliot was also very much aware of another tyrannous Italian husband portrayed by Browning, this one unambiguously identified with a late-17th-century historical figure (3) and developed in much greater depth: Guido Franceschini, the Florentine nobleman of depleted fortune who functions as the villain of The Ring and the Book (1868-1869). This is Browning's longest and most prestigious poem at more than 20 thousand lines, and it represents by far his most ambitious use of the dramatic monologue. The success of Browning's "masterpiece" in his late career helped to give him a status among English poets almost equal to that of Alfred Tennyson. In the U.S. it solidified his reputation as a great moral teacher and philosopher as well as poet. (4) However, though she and Lewes read Browning's long poem aloud to each other, Eliot was not favorably impressed by what she took to be Browning's overly elaborate treatment of a criminal trial (Karl, 1995; pp. 431-432, 445). Her critical comments (written to her publisher Blackwood in confidence, because of her acquaintance with the poet) suggest that she was not particularly sympathetic with Browning's insights into the psychology of his principal characters.

I take Eliot's characterization of the tyrannous husband as a key to understanding the construction of masculinities in her final--and most experimental and controversial--novel. After comparing her domestic tyrant with the better-known characters developed by Browning in order to help place her in the context of gender politics in mid-to-late Victorian literary culture, I will suggest ways in which a close look at her treatment of Grandcourt's masculinity elucidates the widely discussed theme of individual and national consciousness (5) in the novel and show how reading her novel in this context against contemporary works by Matthew Arnold, another important Victorian writer with similar concerns, helps us to understand Eliot's overall cultural vision, of which gender identity is one important component. Although it is a critical commonplace that Grandcourt represents for Eliot what she perceived to be the contemporary decadence of the English aristocracy, (6) in addition to his obvious role as tyrannous husband, his significance is rarely discussed in depth. I will argue that Eliot's use of Grandcourt as Gwendolen's mate and as foil to Daniel Deronda is more complex than is usually assumed.

GEORGE ELIOT'S CHARACTERIZATION OF THE TYRANNOUS HUSBAND COMPARED TO ROBERT BROWNING'S

In Browning's The Ring and the Book, Guido himself is allotted two long monologues, Books V and XI (out of a total of 12), nearly 4,500 lines of poetry in all, and, in addition, Book II, "Half Rome," presents the view of persons (representing probably the majority of Romans) who tend to justify Guido as an outraged husband whose (to them) reasonable and understandable motive in murdering his wife was to uphold his sense of honor. (She had run away from their home in Arezzo in the company of the priest Giuseppe Caponsacchi, who may have been her lover.) Now the literary form of the dramatic monologue as developed by Browning was interpreted by influential critics such as Robert Langbaum in the mid-20th century as a precursor to modernist, relativist literature in which the line between fact and fiction is blurred and the reader is invited to suspend moral judgment and identify with the voice of the speaker, whoever he or she may be. In the final quarter of the century, postmodernist critics concentrated on the "textualization of meaning" in the poem and the idea that all interpretation is inadequate or provisional (see, for example, Shaw, 1989; Slinn, 1989). Nevertheless, it is clear that Browning's Guido is intended to be seen as essentially corrupt and evil and equally certain that Pompilia is to be seen as essentially pure and good, although some Victorian readers and critics objected to Browning's characteristic, some would say morbid, fascination with probing the mind of an evil character (long a hallmark of his career). The statements of Browning's poet narrator make the fundamental moral judgments clear from the beginning in Book I and reiterate them in Book XII. The Pope, (7) apparently Browning's spokesman, despite his keen awareness of the multifariousness and mutability of the world and the fallibility of his Church and its representatives, amplifies and reinforces these judgments. In the final analysis, Browning's Pope makes his decision to deny Guido's pardon (thus assuring his imminent execution) intuitively: he will "call good good / And evil evil," (X, pp. 1878-1879) valorizing the fundamental insight of the technically improper but heroically chivalrous priest Guiseppe Caponsacchi, who thinks of his attempt to "rescue" the saintly Pompilia (whom he associates with the Madonna) from her oppressive husband as a holy mission. The aged Pope, who feels that he is near death, fears the future consequences of Enlightenment rationality and the demise of Christian heroism. His refusal to postpone Guido's execution may be his last, symbolic gesture toward God's truth, "for I may die this very night / And how should I dare die, this man let live?" (X, pp. 2126-2127).

Even more decisively, Browning controls the meaning of his poem by closely associating his narrative with the Andromeda myth and its "Christian cognate," the legend of St. George and the Dragon, (8) as William C. DeVane demonstrated in a 1947 article: