"Safely to their own borders": proto-Zionism, feminism, and nationalism in 'Daniel Deronda.' (George Eliot's novel)

When twentieth-century literary critics take issue with the representation of the Jews in George Eliot's Daniel Deronda (1876), it tends to be because they find the Jewish characters sentimentalized and overly idealized. A critic like Deborah Heller, who briefly mentions the stereotypical greed associated with a few of the minor Jewish characters, is anomalous in describing the novel, even in such a relatively minor way, as anti-semitic.(1) Jews contemporary with George Eliot also seem to have felt that they were represented positively in the novel: in comparison with the blatant anti-semitism of other contemporary novels, Eliot's treatment of Judaism was described by David Kaufmann in 1888 as a "glorious exaltation." And, also in the 1880s, four Russian Jewish leaders translated Daniel Deronda into Hebrew and appended to it their own Zionist writings.(2) Since that time, the novel's Zionist appeal has been celebrated as exceptionally sympathetic to the Jews with near unanimity, although Edward Said has pointed out the ways in which it manifests absolute indifference to the fate of the indigenous population of Palestine.(3) But when Daniel Deronda is considered within the context of Jewish aspirations in the 1870s, before the crucial switch in Jewish orientation after the pogroms in Russia in the 1880s, the Zionist agenda of the novel emerges as distinctly problematic, not only for the inhabitants of Palestine, but for the Jews as well. The British gentile proto-Zionist activity of the mid-nineteenth century, predecessor to the movement named "Zionism" by Jews in the 1890s, was something of which the Jews of the time were, with reason, suspicious. In order to understand the full implications of the proto-Zionism of Daniel Deronda, it is necessary both to situate the novel within its historical context and to attend to the complex figurative function of "race" in George Eliot's fiction.

George Eliot's heroines tend to have a discontent with their lot which is expressed through metaphors of anomalous ethnicity. In her "Notes on The Spanish Gypsy and Tragedy in General," Eliot alludes to using "marks of race" to represent a woman's tragic disjunction with "the ordinary lot of womanhood," and this figurative strategy is apparent in her fiction.(4) Maggie Tulliver, whose brown skin and rebellious refusal to act like a little lady cause her English relatives to describe her as a gypsy or a mulatto, attempts to flee the constraints of her society by joining a transient band of gypsies. Similarly, as Fedalma, in The Spanish Gypsy, begins to feel constrained by her betrothal to a Spanish nobleman, she discovers that her destiny is instead to join her new-found gypsy people as their queen and lead them out of Spain to a homeland in Africa. In Daniel Deronda Gwendolen Harleth expresses discontent with the narrowness of her lot as a young woman in terms which recall Maggie and Fedalma's attempted escapes to other people, other lands. Gwendolen "would rather emigrate than be a governess"; she would like not to marry but to "go to be a queen in the East"; she dreamed, as a child, of "sailing away into a world where people were not forced to live with any one they did not like."(5) But in Eliot's last novel it is a man, not a woman, who discovers that he belongs to another race; it is Daniel Deronda, not Gwendolen, who sails away, at the end of the novel, in order to found an alternate homeland.

This shift takes place in Daniel Deronda, I will contend, because in her last novel Eliot is trying to resolve the tension between self-fulfillment and fulfillment of a societal role that has created the discontentment in her heroines' lives. But the novel creates a solution by suppressing the awareness that such a conflict is a particular problem for women. In order to resolve this tension, Daniel Deronda displaces the conflict between self and society, and the mark of "alien" race that signifies it, onto a man. Gwendolen's desire for freedom and escape is displaced onto Deronda in the form of his new-found Jewishness; and within the community of the Jews, self-fulfillment and social duty are represented as continuous through the ethos of "transmission" and "divine Unity." This solution to the problem of women's independent selfhood is very tenuous, and various voices in the novel make it clear that the problem has been displaced rather than solved: the women in the novel are shown to have insurmountable difficulties with the ethos of selfless transmission. But despite these opposing voices, the general impulse of the novel is to re-establish social hierarchies, to restore men and women to their traditional social roles. The proto-Zionism of the novel is the central metaphor through which Eliot simultaneously expunges female impulses to transgress social boundaries and expunges those who penetrate England's national boundaries. The novel ultimately does with the Jews, the non-English race with its submerged connection to female selfhood, precisely what it does with female transgressiveness: it firmly ushers both out of the English world of the novel, it returns those who have strayed and transgressed, it removes them, in the euphemistic language of the novel, "safely to their own borders."

The first allusions to contact between the English and "other" races occur in the Gwendolen plot. The narrator repeatedly uses metaphors of imperialism to describe Gwendolen's interactions with her family and her plans for the future. Over her sisters and mother Gwendolen has a "domestic empire" (36), and when she imagines the life ahead of her she thinks "other people allowed themselves to be made slaves of . . . it was not to be so with her" (34). When Grandcourt renews his suit she feels that she is regaining "a sort of empire over her own life" (271), and she speaks to him, while they are engaged, with "playful imperiousness" (309). But the language in which the narrator describes Gwendolen's relationship with Grandcourt gradually makes clear that, much as she may want empire and envision Grandcourt declaring himself her "slave" (85), it is Gwendolen, in this relationship, like Maggie and Fedalma, who is in the position of the oppressed race.(6)

Gwendolen's identification with a persecuted race begins on the day that she and Grandcourt first see each other. Grandcourt chooses her, among all the other women at the archery meeting, to have himself introduced to, and the narrator comments: "Pre-eminence is sweet to those who love it, even under mediocre circumstances: perhaps it is not quite mythical that a slave has been proud to be bought first . . ." (90). The implications of this foreboding comment become clear when the narrative returns to Gwendolen's story seven weeks after her marriage. The narrator reminds us that Gwendolen had desired to "win empire" over her husband: "Gwendolen's will had seemed imperious in its small girlish sway" (394). But the situation is reversed immediately after marriage and Gwendolen's receipt of the letter from Mrs. Glasher: "With the reading of that letter had begun her husband's empire of fear" (395). It is Gwendolen, not Grandcourt, who is subject to another's empire; it is Gwendolen, not Grandcourt, whom the narrator compares to a slave.

The novel's figurative identification of Gwendolen with oppressed races reaches its climax shortly before Grandcourt's death. Grandcourt has just sneeringly derided Gwendolen's faith in Deronda. and told her that she will soon get herself talked of among men in a way she will not like if she continues to express interest in him in public:

He knew the force of is own words. If this white-handed man with