Daniel Deronda is George Eliot’s last novel and the only one set in the Victorian society that she knew intimately. An instant commercial success, it attracted both praise and censure upon its publication, in installments, in 1876. Since then, Daniel Deronda has become a critical conundrum, confusing some readers while winning others. Its juxtaposition of two intersecting plots of romantic and national destiny lends it a proto-modernist character, whereas its themes – racial and gender identity, love, art, and the philosophy of history and religion – contribute to its reputation as both “proto-feminist” and “proto-Zionist.” Literary scholars from Edward Said, through Terry Eagleton, to Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar have turned to Daniel Deronda to explore concepts like secular religion or the botched marriage plot, while TV adaptations have reveled in the novel’s multiple, glamorous locations: English rivers, grand continental hotels, and the Mediterranean Sea.
What might Daniel Deronda teach us about class, gender, religious, and national identity today? How was the novel received in Victorian England, and why has it consistently attracted the attention of prominent literary critics since its publication? How might contemporary readers react to its characters and the traumas that define them? And how does the novel fit into George Eliot’s life, literature, and philosophy of emotions? In this course, we will read the entire novel (~200 pages per week) to answer these questions and examine Eliot’s relationship with feminism, Judaism, classism, and their intersection.
