Eliot’s final novel is a philosophical meditation on the nature of love, duty, and religion. The flawed heroine of the story is Gwendolen, a flighty beauty, who thinks a little too highly of herself, “That she was to be married some time or other she would have felt obliged to admit; and that her marriage would not be of a middling kind, such as most girls were contented with, she felt quickly, unargumentatively sure. But her thoughts never dwelt on marriage as a fulfillment of her ambition; the dramas in which she imagined herself a heroine were not wrought up to that close. To be very much sued or hopelessly sighed for as a bride was indeed an indispensable and agreeable guarantee of womanly power; but to become a wife and wear all the domestic fetters of that condition, was on the whole a vexatious necessity. Her observation of matrimony had inclined her to think it rather a dreary state.”
The eponymous hero of the novel Eliot describes thus, Daniel Deronda “was moved by an affectionateness such as we are apt to call feminine, disposing him to yield in ordinary details, while he had a certain inflexibility of judgment, an independence of opinion, held to be rightfully masculine…. True, when a young man has a fine person, no eccentricity of manners, the education of a gentleman, and a present income, it is not customary to feel a prying curiosity about his way of thinking, or his peculiar tastes.”
Wise beyond his years, Deronda ends up being a mentor, advisor, and confidante to more than one of his contemporaries. He advises one, “Look on other lives besides your own. See what their troubles are, and how they are borne. Try to care about something in this vast world besides the gratification of small selfish desires. Try to care for what is best in thought and action—something that is good apart from the accidents of your own lot.” Later, he again advises, “That is the bitterest of all—to wear the yoke of our own wrongdoing. But if you submitted to that, as men submit to maiming or a lifelong incurable disease?—and made the unalterable wrong a reason for more effort towards a good that may do something to counterbalance the evil? One who has committed irremediable errors may be scourged by that consciousness into a higher course than is common.”
The plot of this novel allows Eliot wide breath for philosophical and psychological digressions on the nature of humanity, “In the wonderful mixtures of our nature there is a feeling distinct from that exclusive passionate love of which some men and women (by no means all) are capable, which yet is not the same with friendship, nor with a merely benevolent regard, whether admiring or compassionate: a man, say—for it is a man who is here concerned—hardly represents to himself this shade of feeling towards a woman more nearly than in the words, ‘I should have loved her, if —:’ the ‘if’ covering some prior growth in the inclinations, or else some circumstances which have made an inward prohibitory law as a stay against the emotions ready to quiver out of balance.” Later, Deronda, himself, concludes, “We must find our duties in what comes to us, not in what we imagine might have been.”
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