Sympathy in Paralysis:

Self-Consciousness as Medium and Cognitive Processes

of Middling in George Eliots Daniel Deronda













Kristine Lu
Advisor: Professor James E. Adams
Senior Essay
8 April 2013


Lu 2

Acknowl edgments
The inspiration for this essay came in the glorious couple of months this summer during
which I dedicated myself solely to Daniel Deronda, the only piece of fiction I carried with me
those two months, reading and re-reading the 800-plus pages like I would good poetry, as is my
indulgence in leisure reading. I chanced upon the novel almost immediately after reading Lisa
Zunshines Why We Read Fiction, and this essay was born out of my desire to apply the
cognitive concepts presented by Zunshine to the astonishingly convoluted psychologies I got to
know very well in the course of my strenuous reading. It has since grown into a much larger
undertaking, but for my eye-opening, life-altering introduction to Zunshine I have Professor
Jenny Davidson to thank, whose Clarissa course and my final paper on Richardsons usages of
the dash quickly changed the way in which I approached long papers (or long anything, really).
For my fervent and lifelong adoration of George Eliots novels I am forever indebted to
Professor Nicholas Dames although George Eliot is only the tip of the iceberg on this front, as
my endnotes will further divulge. An enormous thank you to my advisor Professor James
Adams, for whose contagious excitement for and inexhaustible knowledge about Victorian
novels and history I am forever thankful, especially when it comes hand-in-hand with a well-
needed boost of paper-writing self-confidence and a tireless eye for editing. Thank you to
Professor Nicole Horejsi, whose Gothic Novel course introduced me to the concept of
narrative/romantic triangulation and whose incredible dedication to her students helped me
navigate the theoretical material surrounding it. Thank you also to Professor Erik Gray, whose
enlightening lecture on The Kraken unexpectedly inspired the concepts of middling and
stasis so central to my paper. And, of course, thank you to my roommate Marielle Torres for
putting up with my innumerable pre-sunrise writing sessions; Tiffany Zhou, whose cozy
dormitory and hospitable M.I.T. cohorts permitted me to take a needed psychological respite
from my ideas and the library; and Avery Library, for putting me up for endless hours of my own
simmering, simmering so that I could compose this essay without feeling too much like the
Lady of Shalott.
Finally, thank you to my parents, who will never stop imparting to me the importance of
overcoming difficulties cognitive, physical, or emotional, nor the necessity for sympathy towards
all living creatures and all feeling things. To them and the rest of my loving family, always so
sympathetic to my own reading compulsions, this paper is humbly dedicated.


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Life is Action. Mutual life is Consciousness in the wider sense. The actions of the organism are
many, various, but interconnected: some are unapparent, others are apparent; some are the
components of combined results not separately recognised; others are groups which seem
independent of each other.
George Henry Lewes, Problems of Life and Mind


I meant everything in the book to be related to everything else.
George Eliot, Letter from October 2, 1876





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Difficulty binds together the pages of Daniel Deronda. Most everything about the novel
is challenging, only least of which is the contentious Zionist subject at its center. Readers of the
serial had much complaint with Eliots final novel, its protracted length compounded with the
heaviness of its subject but a departure point for criticisms of repetition, overstraining of
attention, and, most famously, two divergent plot strands.
1
If reading Eliots dense prose is an
arduous task, writing it was infinitely moreso; Eliots mental and physical duress in the years of
completing Deronda included everything from depression to toothaches to kidney stones, to list
only a few.
2
But what exactly about Daniel Deronda makes its very existence so difficult? The
novel is not particularly long in Eliots oeuvre or in comparison to contemporaneous serials, and
Eliot already had the reassuring reputation from Middlemarchs success. Yet there is something
idiosyncratic in the narrative and readerly challenges of Daniel Deronda, and it has to do
fundamentally with the ways in which the novel as a form changed over the course of Eliots
career.
Tasked to synopsize Daniel Deronda, the average reader may have more difficulty than
expected, the cause of which is not so simple as F.R. Leavis might propose: It does not all come
down to a question of whom (Daniel Deronda vs. Gwendolen Harleth) the story is about.
3
In fact,
the novel is as much about its title character as it isnt about Daniel Deronda, or for that matter
Gwendolen Harleth; it is less about character action inasmuch as about character inaction. If the
main difficulty for the characters of Daniel Deronda is their paralysis from taking action and
effecting changes, then it is a conscious struggle that further manifests in every other aspect of
the novel, from Eliots exhausting composition to the elaborate formal devices she prefers to,
perhaps most importantly for this paper, the taxing experience of reading her final novel. Perhaps
what speaks best of George Eliots intentions in Daniel Deronda is that it is in her last novel, her
singular attempt to set a novel contemporaneously in Victorian society, that she chooses to


Lu 5
spotlight characters so deeply cerebral; Eliot thus turns towards the conflict of the mind,
laboriously dissecting scenes of moral and emotional tribulation confronted by each of her
cerebral characters and thus setting in action some of the most exciting psychological queries of
her era: those of perception, attention, cognition, and sensation. Thus, Daniel Deronda is a novel
shaped by the paralysis of consciousness, one that is largely occupied not with what action
occurs but how it is perceived. Eliot is particularly interested by the ways in which self-
awareness is shaped by intersubjectivity (the consciousness of anothers consciousness) and,
similarly, how individual consciousnesses are further mediated by the senses, particularly vision,
as is reflected in her narrative style. These dynamics present an alternative model for reader
participation, one in which the cognitive strain of entering and observing character consciousness
becomes the very process by which Eliots familiar moral preoccupations can affectively be
taught.

I. Middling in Daniel Deronda: A Formal Introduction
I saw my wish outside me: this is the only possible form of self-alienation possible for
consciousness in Eliot. [] One can recognize ones wish, and one can recognize its presence in
the world alongside other competing wishes and facts, and that is the best one can do.
Nicholas Dames, The Network of Nerves
Eliot herself recognizes that what she is asking her readers to do in Daniel Deronda is
uncomfortable and at times even counterintuitive. Readers are not trained to read for nonlinear,
entangled thought, which Eliot recognizes in the disappointment that her readers readily
vocalized: People in their eagerness about my characters are quite angry when their own
expectations are not fulfilled.
4
And this is true; as Andrew Miller exemplifies in his own
reading, the experience of reading is nothing but a study of intention, the intention to read, and
keep reading, an intention that must be continuously maintained [] Daniel must continually


Lu 6
solicit my commitment[.]
5
A readers initial frustration with the novel may be at least partially
attributed to how difficult it is to find Daniel having any intentions at all; particularly as the
novels title character, he embodies unproductive, if sympathetic, paralysis: It happened that the
very vividness of his impressions had often made him the more enigmatic to his friends, and had
contributed to an apparent indefiniteness in his sentiments. His early-wakened sensibility and
reflectiveness had developed into a many-sided sympathy, which threatened to hinder any
persistent course of action[.]
6

Indeed, Daniel Deronda the novel, just like its namesake character, lingers around what
can most simply be evaluated as middling points. The middle becomes an altogether crucial
device for the novel. Speaking purely of plot, the tension between Deronda and Gwendolen is
appropriately incited by Derondas compassionate middling/meddling in Gwendolens life the
prophetic moment in which he anonymously rescues a necklace that Gwendolen means to pawn
as retribution for her gambling debts as he later acknowledges to her (I seldom find I do any
good by my preaching. I might as well have kept from meddling.
7
). Despite contrasting
sentiments towards doing so, Deronda and Gwendolen also share middling positions in the
novel. Gwendolen middles between Grandcourt and her mother, between a true artist and a
pretty actress, between prima donna and pitiable widow. Daniel, by contrast, is suspended in a
state of inactive, contemplative middlingness for the majority of the novel. He remains in
disquieting ignorance about his past and is therefore uncertain about his future, be that with
Mordecai or in any other profession. He is a talented singer but refuses to pursue it, thinking the
singing profession beneath a gentlemans standing as his assumed paternity would designate
him, and thus can be only an admired amateur at best. He does not feel a need for income or
position, and therefore wastes a Cambridge education in charitable assistance to a friend.
8
The
novel is charged with examining the contrasts between their suspended states:


Lu 7
But if you are fond of music, it will always be worth while in private, for your
own delight. I make it a virtue to be content with my middlingness," said
Deronda, smiling; "it is always pardonable, so that one does not ask others to take
it for superiority."
"I cannot imitate you," said Gwendolen, recovering her tone of artificial vivacity.
"To be middling with me is another phrase for being dull. And the worst fault I
have to find with the world is, that it is dull.
9


Gwendolen, of course, cringes not only at the idea of not achieving an elevated standard, but
furthermore at the possibility that her middling talent may one day be confined behind the
banal eyes of a private parlor. Daniel, perhaps much like Eliot herself, is content in his middling
stasis, which, to the relief of the hyperactively self-conscious, does not require the judgment of
others. One of the defining factors of middling, particularly for both Daniel and Gwendolen, is a
self-consciousness that impedes the individual from fully realizing his or her ambitious pursuits,
a constant awareness of personal foibles that, in the act of constant over-analysis, are painfully
inflated until the very impulse to change or move away from the middle requires an external
force that the character does not often have available.
That is, self-consciousness by its nature also implies blindness, which Vanessa Ryans
book Thinking without Thinking investigates as a period intrigue. Ryan writes that Victorians,
though focused on minutely portraying the human psyche, were also fascinated with the ways in
which the mind remains opaque to itself and its narrators [] It is not so much human agency
that is crucial to these novels (the power of choice, the focus on strategic moves and moral
quandaries), but their engagement with what I am calling dynamicsthe interaction between
self and environment, which is not wholly agential or wholly conscious.
10
Curiously, then, even
the most omniscient of narrators a title for which Eliots narrators come foremost to mind
cannot entirely capture a fictional psyche. Instead, even in psychological narratives, there
remains a gap between the narrator and the characters described that remains unspoken within
the text itself; it is a gap that grows ever the more enlarged with the self-consciousness of the


Lu 8
narrator, the character thinking, or, at times, both, given that conscious thinking in Daniel
Deronda only further paralyzes the subject from any persistent course of action. In other
words, it is a gap created by the inescapable unconscious.
The unconscious was a subject of substantive query for the Victorians, for novelists and
especially for proto-psychotheorists of the time; innovative thinkers like Eliots partner George
Henry Lewes prolifically published on the influence of the unconscious upon conscious acts.
11

George Eliot, however, may not have felt it to be as convincing a force as consciousness, as this
repartee between herself and Herbert Spencer reveals: Commenting on his recently published
Social Statics, George Eliot said she was surprised to see no lines on [his] forehead. He
answered: I suppose it is because I am never puzzled, to which she exclaimed, O! thats the
most arrogant thing I ever heard uttered.
12
Of course, Spencers meaning was more nuanced;
he elaborates that [t]he conclusions, at which I have from time to time arrived [] have been
arrived at unawares [] the thinking done went on in this gradual, almost spontaneous way,
without strain. Spencer, echoing the periods belief that the mind is shaped by experience to
perform certain functions automatically or by habit,
13
argues that this mode of thinking without
conscious intention [] is more likely to yield true results, since [a]n effort to arrive
forthwith at some answer to a problem acts as a distorting factor in consciousness and causes
error.
14

Daniel Deronda, even in its narrative form, is a novel that incessantly reflects upon its
own conscious intentions with what fiction can or should do. In her foundational narratological
text Transparent Minds, Dorrit Cohn identifies three main techniques by which fiction is
commonly narrated: 1) quoted monologue, the traditional direct quotation (i.e., [He thought:] I
am late); 2) narrated monologue, also known as free indirect speech or free indirect discourse
(i.e., He was late. Oh, how embarrassing!); 3) psycho-narration (He knew he was late). Each of


Lu 9
these techniques implies a different degree of interference by the omniscient narrator, and while
most narrative scholars focus primarily on the second category and its effect on the narrators
control of the narrative, it is not the primary mode of George Eliots narration in Daniel
Deronda. She does liberally utilize free indirect discourse, but perhaps more remarkable is the
fact that she doesnt use it as much as she could have; in a novel so thoroughly interior,
Derondas narrator does not often permit the readers direct, unimpeded access into the
characters thoughts. Eliots primary mode of narration is a subcategory of the psycho-narration
identified by Cohn; instead of the monotonous and minimally descriptive he/she thought,
however, Eliot frequently prefers the passive he/she was conscious of. Notably, her choice of
psycho-narration is clumsier and more removed than psycho-narration typically is by Cohns
standards: Eliots syntax shifts emphasis to the state of mind by nominalizing the mental activity
and making it, rather than the object of perception, the subject of her sentence (i.e., But what
engrossed her feeling, what filled her imagination now, was the panorama of her immediate
future,
15
as opposed to the panorama [] engrossed her); at other times, she altogether delays
the self-consciousness in the act of realization until after the fact (he found himself feeling).
Eliots removed psycho-narration contributes an entire new layer of unconscious
complexity to her characters, one that truly can only be examined by an external reader. This, I
will argue, is the purpose for which the reader must experience difficulty in reading Daniel
Deronda: His or her sustained engagement with the text becomes absolutely crucial to
understanding the very processes of mind and sympathy that are central to the story of the novel.
Thus, I would like to propose a model by which we can read Daniel Deronda with the
perspicacity that such a daunting task requires. Hereby referred to as the Readers Triangle, it
involves a triangulation of three major components:
1. A self-consciously conscious and therefore myopic character


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2. An omniscient and yet frequently self-conscious narrator
3. The middling reader, empowered to have the only mind that does not have
to be consistently self-conscious, as long as it remains active and cognizant in
the reading act
While triangulated models of thinking have been utilized by cognitive literary theorists like Lisa
Zunshine and Blakey Vermeule to scrutinize the effect of third-layer levels of intentionality (A
was thinking about what B was thinking about what A was thinking about what B was
thinking)
16
, what I am proposing is not necessarily how cognitive triangulation works within the
novel but rather outside the novel. It is a curious hybrid, then, of both romantic triangulations
vis--vis Ren Girard
17
and Zunshines three-way model of mind-reading, the foundations of
both of which will be discussed further in this paper. Rather, I am proposing that Daniel
Deronda, being a particularly self-conscious novel, calls specifically for a reader-participatory
triangle. Spencers insight about the distorting effect of consciousness pertinently applies to
the overactive self-consciousness in both Eliots characters and her narrator, thereby demarcating
a very particular position that Eliots reader must fill. Hovering between a fully narrated psycho-
monologue and free indirect discourse, Eliots narrator strikes a delicate balance between
character conscious and unconsciousness through the narrators direct connection to the reader.
This process may better be understood by the Figure 1 on the following page.


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If we return to the concept of middling as loosely adapted to a triangulated structure, the
reader, in direct communication with the narrator, operates the narrators insights about the
characters consciousness as itself the object of note (i.e., she was conscious of instead of she
thought) to better interpret the thinking character. The narrator relies upon the readers
acknowledgment that conscious thoughts la Spencer can only reveal so much, and thus places
less emphasis on the content of the thoughts themselves. More useful is the self-consciousness of
a thought and its effect on the characters subsequent thought and actions thereby the emphasis
not on she thought, but she was conscious of. For example, consider the following passage
from the first chapter of the novel:
The inward debate which she raised in Deronda gave to his eyes a growing
expression of scrutiny, tending farther and farther away from the glow of mingled
undefined sensibilities forming admiration. [] The sylph was a winner; and as
her taper fingers, delicately gloved in pale-gray, were adjusting the coins which
had been pushed toward her in order to pass them back again to the winning point,
she looked round her with a survey too markedly cold and neutral not to have in it
a little of that nature which we call art concealing an inward exultation.
18



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What do we learn from Daniels inward debate? From the immediately preceding paragraph,
Daniel reveals that his first thought when his eyes fell on this scene (emphasis mine) was one
of boredom, but that suddenly he felt the moment become dramatic [when his] attention was
arrested by the vision of Gwendolen. That he consciously acknowledges his dramatic
deliberation in this scene reveals already a capriciousness to his thoughts which may be captured
with as little or as much attention as his passing fancies suit him. But his inward debate is more
fundamentally of a deeper consciousness: a consciousness of Gwendolens consciousness, or
what within her gives her nature [that] which we call art concealing an inward exultation. In all
of this, the narrator maintains her omniscient grasp over the entire sequence, in a manner that
could arguably be considered problematic why do we call Gwendolens nature art
concealing an inward exultation? The narrators own self-consciousness of her need to
sympathize with the readers thoughts guides the reader through the tumultuous task of
navigating individual consciousnesses, which can quickly become exhausting and disorienting,
and furthermore, may encourage an interpretation of the characters unfavorable to Eliots greater
artistic goals.
Thus, the readers interpretive act in Daniel Deronda is one guided by the narrators
psycho-narration. While much of the novel exists in the self-consciousness of Eliots characters,
the third-person narration suggests to the reader that what he or she is doing is in fact reading
generalizations about human nature, for, according to Dorrit Cohn, [t]he presence of a vocal
authorial narrator, unable to refrain from embedding his characters private thoughts in his own
generalizations about human nature, [reveals that he is] far more interested in his own
commentary than in the meditations these events may release within his characters [] In
pronouncedly authorial narration, then, the inner life of an individual character becomes a
sounding-board for general truths about human nature.
19
As indicated in Figure 1, the psycho-


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narration requires a specific directionality to the triangle; the act of interpretation with a
consciously active narrator makes the triangle in fact an unbalanced one, since psycho-narration
inherently implies a degree of narrational didacticism, certainly not permitting the readers
relationship with character thoughts to be as unchecked as it would be in a later stream of
consciousness. This may also be strategic on Eliots part towards championing a particular
moral-artistic cause; the sympathetic power of the Readers Triangle and therefore its inherent
imbalances will further be discussed in a later section of this paper. First, in continuation of the
formal analysis of the passage just quoted, we will closely investigate the beginning scene of
Daniel Deronda to comprehend the minute details of Eliots narrative style that make Deronda
such a middling, conscientious, and thinking novel, which therefore greatly affect the readers
ability to participate in the text.

II. What it means to begin: A Closer Look
Let thy chief terror be of thine own soul:
There, mid the throng of hurrying desires []
George Eliot, epigraph to the novel

George Eliot was distressed by the act of beginning. George Henry Lewes, Eliots
common-law partner, wrote to her publisher John Blackwood on January 17, 1874, describing
Eliots persistent and work-halting headaches: [S]he simmers and simmers, despairs and
despairs, believes she can never do anything again worth doingOnce let her begin and she will
go of her own impulse.
20
It seems natural, then, that the beginning of Daniel Deronda is not the
beginning. The first sentence of the novels first paragraph is not just in media res of the novels
action (the first scene between Daniel and Gwendolen occurs in late August 1865 before the
novel breaks to examine the separate histories of Daniel and Gwendolen prior to meeting one
other), but middles within even the introductory scene itself, an advantage that is only possible


Lu 14
for the psychological novel. Derondas real first thought is not related by the narrator until the
novels third page: Derondas first thought when his eyes fell on this scene of dull, gas-
poisoned absorption was that the gambling of Spanish shepherd-boys had seemed to him more
enviable.
21
This even exceeds the approximation of Dorrit Cohn, who proposes, Many novels
that use the narrated monologue as the predominant technique for rendering their characters
consciousness start from a neutral and objective narrative stancetypically the description of a
specific site or situationand only gradually, often by way of minimal exposition, narrow their
focus to the figural mind.
22
By Cohns evaluation, the narrated beginning of a novel that
prioritizes the psychologies of its characters should begin at Derondas third paragraph: It was
near four oclock on a September day, so that the atmosphere was well-brewed to a visible haze.
There was deep stillness []
23

But Eliot conspicuously denies these conventional beginnings in favor of a more
interrogatory one, comprised of questions that prescribe the narrative and sensory style of Eliots
narration throughout the remainder of the novel:
Was she beautiful or not beautiful? and what was the secret of form or expression
which gave the dynamic quality to her glance? Was the good or the evil genius
dominant in those beams? Probably the evil; else why was the effect that of unrest
rather than of undisturbed charm? Why was the wish to look again felt as coercion
and not as a longing in which the whole being consents?
24


The first sentence is affectingly dissociated: Was she beautiful or not beautiful? and what was
the secret of form or expression which gave the dynamic quality to [Gwendolens] glance?
25

Eliot does not provide a source for this complex thought, leaving the reader perplexed as to what
mode of narration is utilized at the novels outset. Instead, the reader knows only that whomever
this voice belongs to aims towards a specific purpose: to know someone by looking at someones
glance. And because the precious secret of form or expression lies entirely behind the
dynamic quality to her glance, Gwendolens haunting gaze extends into the mind of the viewer,


Lu 15
who reveals, by the last sentence of the first paragraph, a compulsion to demystify that
unspeakable quality about Gwendolen has sparked the action of the entire novel: the wish to
look felt as coercion and not as a longing in which the whole being consents. The plot is thus
not only driven forward but in many ways coerced by an immediacy of consciousness a
desire to wholly comprehend another being simply by watching his or her actions.
If something in this interpretation of the first scene feels dj vu, it is because the novels
increasing dependence upon the impulse to know someone by looking is a feeling that should
naturally resonate with the reader. For the reader, a compulsion to see through foreign eyes and
pierce the consciousness of anothers being constitutes the whole delight of fiction reading. As
we know from contemporary cognitive literary scholars like Blakey Vermeuele and Lisa
Zunshine, amongst many others who have followed in the vein of critics like Cohn, the pleasure
in reading derives from discovering the secrets of private consciousness, of suspend[ing] our
disbelief [to give back] large doses of really juicy social information, information that would be
too costly, dangerous, or difficult for us to extract from the world on our own.
26
The first scene
of Daniel Deronda seems nonetheless to struggle with this impulse. How, when, and for which
occasions is it appropriate to engage in that which is known as mind-reading, a term used in
cognitive psychology to describe our species-specific evolved desire to explain peoples
behavior in terms of their thoughts, feelings, beliefs, and desires
27
? Another look at the novels
first paragraph reveals that the instinct to mind-read in fact holds ethical concerns.
At this moment in the plot, when Daniel does not know Gwendolen well enough at all
other than by the perspicacity of his observant eye, he cannot know whether the good or the evil
genius [is] dominant in Gwendolen, particularly if [s]he who raise[s] these questions in Daniel
Derondas mind was occupied in gambling. Daniels instinctive recoil to the morally dubious
pursuit (two pages later, immediately preceding his first thought,: There was a certain


Lu 16
uniform negativeness of expression which had the effect of a mask as if they had all eaten of
some root that for the time compelled the brains of each to the same narrow monotony of action
[that convinced Deronda that] Rousseau might be justified in maintaining that art and science
had done a poor service to mankind
28
) seems to have found a rare caveat in Gwendolen
(suddenly he felt the moment become dramatic. His attention was arrested by a young lady),
and thereby Gwendolen presents a crucial challenge to his honed mind-reading capability. For as
soon as his attention was arrested by Gwendolen, George Eliot reveals that we are no longer in
a natural mode of observation, but instead an idiosyncratically self-conscious one. As I will later
explain, this self-awareness of potentially making an error in the mind-reading exercise that
should be automatic when navigating a social environment
29
becomes an indispensable mode by
which Eliot means to show Daniel as a character who grows in the novel, if not actively, then at
least cognitively.
Similarly, Gwendolen being the object of Daniels attention is particularly telling for
Eliots larger goals in the novel. Eliot would have been very well aware of the psychological
implications of attention. Lewes dedicated a great deal of energy in his magnum opus The
Problems of Life and Mind to the study of consciousness as affected by attention; to him, a
reflex of Attention must be excited, otherwise no sensation is felt.
30
And through the investment
of attention, one further becomes conscious of ones actions, so that realizing that Daniel is
thinking about Gwendolen thinking teaches the reader that something much more complex is
affecting Eliots writing in this novel. The novel and author are foremost paralyzed by the self-
consciousness of mind-reading, for they are ceaselessly aware of the problems it presents when
theory of mind inevitably makes mistakes. This would have been very important to Eliot and her
contemporaries; as with many nineteenth-century novels, crafted with sympathetic purposes in
mind, fellow-feelingsympathys hoped-for resultnames a dynamic relation between


Lu 17
readers and represented mental states.
31
Adela Pinch notes that what the reading of
psychologically realistic novels teaches best is not the omniscient access to transparent minds,
but rather how hard the novels actually work to portray the ordinary, often erroneous thinking
we do of others whose mind remain (thankfully) opaque. The goal, then, of nineteenth century
novels, and arguably particularly of George Eliots, would be to exhibit where thinking and
knowing are frequently disaggregated, the former taking place, happily, without the latter.
32

Eliots objectives are thus driven forward by consciousness and, particularly, a self-
awareness by the characters of their individual consciousnesses. With the comprehension that
beginning is an intensely interpretive act, Eliot relies instead on showing how action occurs
instead of focusing solely on the action itself. She responds to a particular trend in her
contemporaries in doing so, for, as Vanessa Ryan explains,
Novelists during [the Victorian] period drew on new explanations of mind-body
interaction to examine how we experience our minds, how experience relates to
our behavior and questions of responsibility, how we can gain control over our
mental reflexes, and how fiction plays a special role in understanding and training
our minds [] Victorian novelists turn from the story of how the mind actually
works to plots that show how we experience our consciousness. These novelists
focus not just on how the mind does work, but also on how it seems to work, and
how we ought to make it work. They are in many ways less interested in the
content of the mind (whether sensations or thoughts), or even in answering the
question of what the mind may be, than they are in behavior and in the subjective
experience of thinking.
33


Plotting out Gwendolens actions from the very start of her decisions as a heroine to the novel
would be obsequious, then, to an older mode of writing, and therefore a previous mode of
reading. Eliot does not so much care what Gwendolen does as how what she does affects others,
particularly Daniel Deronda, the embodied moral force in thought, action, and sympathy within
the novel.
The reasons for this are twofold. Firstly, the reader realizes from the novels outset that
identities in this novel are uniquely intertwined, the mark of a special type of psychological


Lu 18
novel called complexly intersubjective by George Butte in his seminal book on
intersubjectivity, or the consciousness of others consciousnesses.
34
Daniel is equally defined by
the consciousness of his own thinking as well as his consciousness of Gwendolens impenetrable
thoughts. This dance of subjects, in which the separate selves, these centers of perceiving
identity of Gwendolen and Daniel are set into the novels motion together, the very first scene
being a prolonged delineation of the various gazes and thoughts exchanged by one regarding the
other, demonstrates Buttes argument about 19
th
century narratives:
We can usefully describe the fundamental components of this intersubjectivity as
the body and the gaze of one subject and of the other(s), and then the consequent
appropriations negotiated among these consciousnesses and intentionalities,
appropriations that the gaze, the body, and their discourses enact. This process of
negotiation and embodiment is an enactment of power, and its agenda can be
shame or espousal, humiliation and supervision, or mutuality and the passion of
generosity.
35


Those who have read Daniel Deronda quickly recognize that Buttes concluding catalogue of
dichotomies seem uncannily precise descriptions for Daniel and Gwendolens various stages of
amity throughout the course of the novel. More practically, then, by this logic, the reader will
gradually accept Gwendolens increasing significance in the novel, perhaps even echoing
Leaviss sentiment that the novel could just as easily have been or even be improved by using
Gwendolen Harleth as its title character. But Daniel, with his early-wakened sensibility and
reflectiveness [and] many-sided sympathy serves as the perfect archetype for Eliots moral
conduct; Gwendolen never truly can displace the novels natural bias towards Deronda. After all,
it is from Daniels viewpoint that the novels initial question was the good or the evil genius
dominant in those beams? is proffered after observing Gwendolens gambling. The very act of
thinking it consciously Deronda as we have said being perfectly aware that this arresting
young lady was sparking in him not only questions but an inward debate
36
immediately
positions Daniel as moral adjudicator in the plot, someone with enough self-reflection and


Lu 19
forethought to question the ethics of gambling. From this point forward, the reader is primed
with the expectation (until it can be disproven, that is) that Daniel properly represents Eliots
ethics. Gwendolen, associated with her vivid narrative origins in the midst of dubious gambling,
is then the secondary counterpart who, by theories of intersubjectivity as posited by Butte, gains
from her negotiations of Daniels sympathetic, intersubjective thoughts. Eliot thus
demonstrates that carefully raising these questions in ones mind, be it Daniels or the readers,
is precisely the way one begins, or rather, the way one ought to begin, as implicated by the
contemporary impulse to show the subjective experience of thinking.

III. The Feeling of Self-Consciousness: Self-Consciousness as Medium
There must accompany this agitation a central reaction:--a reflex of Attention must be excited,
otherwise no sensation is felt. Not only so, there must be an act of discernment, of classification of
like and unlike, a distinguishing of one group of neural units from the others, before we can feel this
sensation.
George Henry Lewes, The Problems of Life and Mind

Daniel Derondas characters feel self-consciousness. As demonstrated in the beginning
passages already examined, characters are well aware of their thoughts and moreso of their
feelings as influenced and affected by those surrounding them; self-consciousness is thus
conveyed by feeling the external, social world. Lewes seemed to believe that, in fact, the two
were indistinguishable:
Assuredly it is a crass absurdity to exhibit Thought as a mode of Sensation, when
Sensation is postulated as a bodily state, and Thought as a mental state, but this
absurdity vanishes directly we postulate that Sensation is a mental state under the
same aspect that Thought is a mental state; and that under the obverse aspect both
are bodily states. In other words, both are functional activities of the sentient
organism, involving the same structural conditions, the same laws of reaction, and
differing only in the different proportions in which their elementary factors are
combined.
37




Lu 20
Lewes defines Consciousness (the synonym of Cognition) by the two factors of Feeling and
Discrimination, then discerns Discrimination, requisite to Thought, as relative intensity, the
momentary predominance of one thrill over all the simultaneous thrills.
38

Thinking, then, derives from attention in feeling and in sensation, a conjecture that is
borne throughout Eliots accounts of self-consciousness in Deronda. Character consciousness
derives from consciousness of sensation; for example, Gwendolen fixates upon those who see
her, and her obsessive monitoring of others observations powerfully affects her own
consciousness. This section will consider the senses as mediation another kind of middling
for thought and thereby narrative in Daniel Deronda, and examine the ways in which George
Eliot is not merely interested in the act of consciousness, but furthermore the ways in which self-
consciousness is socially affected, thereby developing quite separately from that which might be
considered self-reflection. The metaphors and formal devices analyzed will become increasingly
important in later examinations of Eliots sympathetic teachings, which are mediated by and thus
must conform to her characters hyperactive sensory understanding of their worlds.
The senses are differentiated on a spectrum of their effectiveness to self-conscious
reflection in Daniel Deronda; with an emphasis particularly on sight, hearing, and touch, the
novel suggests that characters perceive the external world through varying degrees of
psychological remove, in which some senses will permit a more inhibited cognitive reception of
stimuli whereas others will be more instinctive and belay a genuine reaction. This paper will
specifically examine the mediating effect of sight on consciousness, and briefly contrast it to the
functions of hearing and touch within the novel.
While the sense of sight is a recurring affective device across Eliots oeuvre, in Daniel
Deronda it achieves a heightened effect when compounded with the novels preoccupations of
character interiority and self-consciousness. This can most succinctly be explained by a tenet of


Lu 21
evolutionary biology that humans are most developed in their visual sense. Lewes bemoans as
much in writing that psychological theory has been disadvantaged by the visual predominance,
which has led to the universal explanation of mental processes by the analogy of vision. What
we cannot see clearly we are supposed not to think accurately. All that cannot be presented in
images, is by most writers said to be unthinkable, inconceivable, and by almost all writers
regarded as inexact, uncertain.
39
Despite his slight disgruntlement, Lewes admits that [t]he eye
is the measure [] the eye detects the chief relations as well as objects. It is the intellectual
sense
40
(emphasis his). Paradoxically, if the human sense of vision is most developed and
comprehensive of the senses, it then also becomes the most myopic to attention; as Lewes
continues,
Systematic observation is an intellectual process of a high order, very different
from seeing. It directs the current of impressions according to some preconceived
purpose, and directs attention to the impressions themselves rather than to their
interpretations [] To observe mentally we fix in the same way one series of
feelings, and disregard all those not congruent with the series. There is more or
less sense of Effort in this act, and by it we become conscious of the act.
41


A good example of this is in the human reading process itself, which consists of pauses,
fixations, and uneven leaps every ten letters, called saccades.
42
To completely attend to
seeing something means necessarily neglecting the majority of what may be available within the
sphere of vision; it is, as Lewes explains, a volitional reflex to intellectually prioritize some
over a few.
The same thing happens, then, when characters in Daniel Deronda attempt to read
other characters; George Eliot, as is her wont, translates this psychological insight into a formal
one, stressing the anxiety caused by a myopic eye on social misrepresentation. As we have
already started to see in the beginning scene, character consciousness most frequently travels
through sight i.e., Character A sees Character B, thinks about Character B looking at Character


Lu 22
A, and finally thinks about Character B thinking about Character A. In other words, it is the most
middling of the senses, and is also the most socially lucrative of the senses. This means that sight
the ways of viewing, the things that can or cannot be seen garners particular social capital
within the novel, because it is through sight that social knowledge travels. Perhaps the best
example of this is Gwendolens guiles entrapping Grandcourt upon their initial introduction:
It was in her mind now that she would probably after all not have the least trouble
about him: perhaps he had looked at her without any particular admiration, and
was too much used to everything in the world to think of her as more than one of
the girls who were invited in that part of the country. Of course! It was ridiculous
of elders to entertain notions about what a man would do, without having seen
him even through a telescope.
43


Here, the focus is not only on Gwendolens self-consciousness (It was in her mind now that she
would probably after all not have the least trouble about him, the word probably propelling the
sentence into a liminal territory between omniscient narration and idiosyncratic character voice),
but also her responsiveness to social distinctions: Grandcourts looki[ing] at her without any
particular admiration communicates to Gwendolen both his superior social class as well as her
own superiority to the ridiculous elders who, unlike her, havent looked at Grandcourt closely
enough to know him.
Gwendolens reaction to Grandcourts looking further reveals the power struggle inherent
in the act of looking at someone or something. If to see is to know and to know is to be powerful,
then one gains domination in a relationship by controlling what can be seen:
Gwendolen did not turn her eyes on him; it seemed to her a long while that she
was first blushing, and then turning pale, but to Grandcourt's rate of judgment she
answered soon enough, with the lightest flute-tone and a careless movement of
the head, "Oh, I am not sure that I want to be taken care of: if I chose to risk
breaking my neck, I should like to be at liberty to do it."
She checked her horse as she spoke, and turned in her saddle, looking toward the
advancing carriage. Her eyes swept across Grandcourt as she made this
movement, but there was no language in them to correct the carelessness of her
reply. At that very moment she was aware that she was risking somethingnot


Lu 23
her neck, but the possibility of finally checking Grandcourt's advances, and she
did not feel contented with the possibility.
"Damn her!" thought Grandcourt, as he too checked his horse. He was not a
wordy thinker, and this explosive phrase stood for mixed impressions which
eloquent interpreters might have expanded into some sentences full of an irritated
sense that he was being mystified, and a determination that this girl should not
make a fool of him.
44


As this sequence demonstrates, looking also becomes the catalyst for thinking about the other
persons thoughts, which Grandcourt is particularly averse to doing; the tension of the scene
escalates (especially through access to Grandcourts thoughts) because Grandcourt must abdicate
some of his own power by trying to possess a new mind in guessing a strangers thoughts. Of
course, as their relationship intensifies, Grandcourt quickly masters the rules to Gwendolens
game and immediately manipulates her vulnerable self-consciousness:
Here Gwendolen suddenly turned her head and looked full at Grandcourt, whose eyes she
had felt to be upon her throughout their conversation. She was wondering what the effect of
looking at him would be on herself rather than on him.
He stood perfectly still, half a yard or more away from her; and it flashed through her mind
what a sort of lotus-eater's stupor had begun in him and was taking possession of her. Then
he said
"Are you as uncertain about yourself as you make others about you?"
"I am quite uncertain about myself; I don't know how uncertain others may be."
"And you wish them to understand that you don't care?" said Grandcourt, with a touch of
new hardness in his tone.
"I did not say that," Gwendolen replied, hesitatingly, and turning her eyes away whipped the
rhododendron bush again. She wished she were on horseback that she might set off on a
canter.
45
(Emphasis mine)

Indeed, Gwendolens weakness derives from her pride in her appearance, and she is therefore
perpetually concerned with how others may see her (She was wondering what the effect []
would be on herself). It is a self-directed external gaze; she means to control how others
conceive her by controlling how they perceive her. Unfortunately, in a moment of rare unfiltered
transparency thanks to Grandcourts signature lotus-eaters stupor, which simultaneously
immobilizes his listener into a numbed apathy while granting him full access into the most


Lu 24
vulnerable regions of the unconscious, Gwendolen reveals that she does not understand so much
about herself (I am quite uncertain about myself). Nonetheless, she refuses to allow others to
detect this vulnerability, quickly turning her eyes away and enacting violence on the physical
world to offset the infringement of Grandcourts penetrating gaze. But this is all the more a futile
exercise given the previously discussed shortsightedness inherent to focused human vision.
Gwendolen, obsessively venturing to preempt the thoughts of those looking at her, is prone more
than most to misinterpretation; in her persistent effort to attract the eyes of others, Gwendolen
fatally falters, as she prophetically demonstrates in the first scene of the novel: [S]he was in that
mood of defiance in which the mind loses sight of any end beyond the satisfaction of enraged
resistance; and with the puerile stupidity of a dominant impulse includes luck among its objects
of defiance.
46
Too preoccupied with performing to a preconceived faade, Gwendolens greatest
weakness is ironically when it is her own mind that loses sight of everything except her self-
conscious fixation with measuring up to a perceived ideal, in fact a dualistic taxation (at once in
concealing whatever may be the underlying ego and at once striving towards a social projection)
that only leaves herself vulnerable to the perniciousness of scheming minds watching her. It is, in
short, a failure of egotism, for in her attempt to become socially valuable by controlling the
external gaze, Gwendolen fails to realize that, as Adela Pinch points out, thinking about others
is revealed to be [] most social when it is least omniscient, and most wrong.
47

Grandcourts authority over his to-be suffering wife arrives the minute he discerns this
weakness; Gwendolens self-consciousness in losing psychological control always results in
anxiety to regain it with even greater firmness than before, whether that means staving off
others influence over her own or, as can potently be seen later in a wrought scene with music
aficionado Herr Klesmer, simply preventing to reveal the extent of her inner vulnerability:


Lu 25
Gwendolen turned pink and pale during this speech. Her pride had felt a terrible
knife-edge, and the last sentence only made the smart keener. She was conscious
of appearing moved, and tried to escape from her weakness by suddenly walking
to a seat and pointing out a chair to Klesmer. He did not take it, but turned a little
in order to face her and leaned against the piano. At that moment she wished that
she had not sent for him: this first experience of being taken on some other
ground than that of her social rank and her beauty was becoming bitter to her.
Klesmer, preoccupied with a serious purpose, went on without change of tone.
"Now, what sort of issue might be fairly expected from all this self-denial? You
would ask that. It is right that your eyes should be open to it. I will tell you
truthfully. This issue would be uncertain, and, most probably, would not be worth
much."

At these relentless words Klesmer put out his lip and looked through his
spectacles with the air of a monster impenetrable by beauty.
Gwendolen's eyes began to burn, but the dread of showing weakness urged her to
added self-control.
48


This conference, Gwendolens first experience of being taken on some other ground than that of
her social rank and her beauty, marks the climactic capitulation of Gwendolens self-resolve.
Klesmers critical artists eyes are impenetrable by beauty, truthful to unmask self-denial,
and undistracted by Gwendolens maneuvers to deviate the penetrating gaze ([h]e did not take
[the chair Gwendolen offered him], but turned a little in order to face her). He thus coerces
Gwendolens self-integrity by forestalling her attempts to present a perfect, unaffected faade
(She was conscious of appearing moved [; her] eyes began to burn) and exposing her
weaknesses with the unswerving knife-edge of truth. Klesmers humbling acquaintance
preempts Gwendolens later consternation of the equally discriminating Deronda, whom
suddenly she realizes, being again of this breed impenetrable by beauty, can perhaps serve an
entirely different purpose, one that she has never experienced:
And always among the images that drove her back to submission was Deronda.
The idea of herself separated from her husband, gave Deronda a changed,
perturbing, painful place in her consciousness: instinctively she felt that the
separation would be from him too, and in the prospective vision of herself as a
solitary, dubiously-regarded woman, she felt some tingling bashfulness at the
remembrance of her behavior towards him. The association of Deronda with a


Lu 26
dubious position for herself was intolerable. And what would he say if he knew
everything?
49


With Daniel, Gwendolen is most vulnerable because, as with Herr Klesmer, he makes her self-
conscious of her own self-consciousness, self-aware of her conscience, and, hardly to be
expected considering her proclivities to control others gazes, self-reflective. With Daniel as the
chief example, self-reflection in the novel is identified with conscientiousness and authorial
predilection; unsurprisingly, Eliot prioritizes characters who can exhibit this matured, and very
different, kind of self-consciousness. After all, there is a subtle similarity in the vocabulary of
sight and that of Eliots ethics: We can only gain sympathy with a properly directed sense of
vision, an eye directed towards the perspectives of others, as best articulated by Iris Murdoch:
If we attend to the more complex regions which lie outside actions and
choices we see moral differences as differences of understanding (and after all,
to view them so is as old as moral philosophy itself), more or less extensive and
important, which may show openly or privately as differences of story or
metaphor or as differences of moral vocabulary betokening different ranges and
ramifications of moral concept. Here communication of a new moral concept
cannot necessarily be achieved by specification of factual criteria open to any
observer . . . but may involve the communication of a completely new, possibly
far-reaching and coherent, vision; and it is surely true that we cannot always
understand other peoples moral concepts.
50


Murdoch here appeals to both the vocabulary of fictional narrative (story, metaphor) and the
vocabulary of vision (a completely new, possibly far-reaching and coherent, vision) to
underscore the possibilities for sympathy to be communicated through a new medium, one which
requires the inspired imagination of literary reading (in which one cares for ones characters, as
purported by Blakey Vermeule) not only to apprehend anothers factual criteria lying in the
neater realms of actions and choices, but to adopt a new vision which acknowledges the fact
that full sympathy, to always understand other peoples moral concepts, is not consistently
possible. What can be done, as suggested by Murdoch and by Andrew Miller, is to hone this
adoption of perspective, to see situations in that distinctive way which defines others in


Lu 27
idiosyncratic circumstances, in order to carefully learn the complicated cognitive process of
sympathy.
Thus, for Gwendolen, self-reflection is a learning process, mostly as it requires detaching
from a previously engrained self-definition. As Sally Shuttleworth explains, Gwendolens self-
image as a commander of social role stems from a view of society and the self which ignores all
divisive possibilities.
51
Shuttleworth argues that there is a linguistic basis for Gwendolens self-
deception, which is that Gwendolen, in clinging to the idea of free will, has fallen victim to the
theory of causality implicit in the social conventions of language. By this view, further
expounded upon by James Sully, there is an unconsciously self-divisive force in the social usage
of language, one which unveils a deeper lack of individual autonomy when identity cannot be
linguistically disconnected from the society with which it uses language to communicate.
52

Gwendolens own self-surrender is notably a case also of surrendering language, her loss of
power being a direct consequence of her dark and consuming secret:
Gwendolen felt herself stricken. She was conscious of having received so much,
that her sense of command was checked [] She had not consented in ignorance,
and all she could say now would be a confession that she had not been ignorant.
Her right to explanation was gone. All she had to do now was to adjust herself, so
that the spikes of that unwilling penance which conscience imposed should not
gall her. With a sort of mental shiver, she resolutely changed her mental attitude.
There had been a little pause, during which she had not turned away her eyes[.]
53


Gwendolen conceding self-command and, equally, self-possession to Grandcourt is both
psychological and linguistic in a consciousness that [h]er right to explanation was gone.
Curiously, the relationship between Gwendolen and Grandcourt has always been exempted from
the influence of words, for the subtly-varied drama between man and woman is often such as
can hardly be rendered in words.
54
Consider in fact their very first meeting, one of the most
memorable passages of the novel:


Lu 28
Attempts at description are stupid: who can all at once describe a human being?
even when he is presented to us we only begin that knowledge of his appearance
which must be completed by innumerable impressions under differing
circumstances. We recognize the alphabet; we are not sure of the language. I am
only mentioning the point that Gwendolen saw by the light of a prepared contrast
in the first minutes of her meeting with Grandcourt: they were summed up in the
words, "He is not ridiculous." But forthwith Lord Brackenshaw was gone, and
what is called conversation had begun, the first and constant element in it being
that Grandcourt looked at Gwendolen persistently with a slightly exploring gaze,
but without change of expression, while she only occasionally looked at him with
a flash of observation a little softened by coquetry. Also, after her answers there
was a longer or shorter pause before he spoke again.
55

Instead, for her visually inclined characters and in Eliots own writing of the story, a different
kind of language conveys thought beyond that which is possibly expressed in linguistic cues. As
has been emphasized several times, vision is not the most trustworthy of devices, but it is
nonetheless the most dramatic; Daniel Derondas narrator depends upon the subtle drama of
directed gazes as the middling state by which most of the psycho-narration and free indirect
discourse in the novel must pass through. Since looking compels thinking and especially excites
ones theory of mind, vision and the changing gaze are, in fact, the driving forces behind story in
the narrative. Well quickly return again to the very first moment of drama in the novel perhaps
the most dramatic moment in the novel but this time with specific attention to the complicated
dance between thoughts and gazes:
At one moment [Daniels thoughts] followed the movements of the figure [] and
the next they returned to the face which, at present unaffected by beholders, was
directed steadily toward the game. The sylph was a winner; and as her taper
fingers, delicately gloved in pale-gray, were adjusting the coins which had been
pushed toward her in order to pass them back again to the winning point, she
looked round her with a survey too markedly cold and neutral not to have in it a
little of that nature which we call art concealing an inward exultation.

But in the course of that survey her eyes met Deronda's, and instead of averting
them as she would have desired to do, she was unpleasantly conscious that they
were arrestedhow long? The darting sense that he was measuring her and
looking down on her as an inferior, that he was of different quality from the
human dross around her, that he felt himself in a region outside and above her,
and was examining her as a specimen of a lower order, roused a tingling


Lu 29
resentment which stretched the moment with conflict. It did not bring the blood to
her cheeks, but it sent it away from her lips. She controlled herself by the help of
an inward defiance, and without other sign of emotion than this lip-paleness
turned to her play. But Deronda's gaze seemed to have acted as an evil eye.
56

(Emphasis mine)

The drama of this opening scene entirely relies on a delicate balance of free indirect discourse to
psycho-narration in order to introduce the affected dynamic between Daniel and Gwendolen as
the novel proceeds. As my italicization shows, a linear comprehension follows the change of
gaze from one character to another as access into character consciousness. From the omniscient
narration of Daniels thoughts about Gwendolen [a]t one moment they followed the
movements of the figure the narration immediately shifts into his free indirect discourse
The sylph was a winner before relinquishing again to the omniscient narrator, who now, as
though following Daniels gaze, naturally begins describing Gwendolens point of view. With
How long?, we enter into Gwendolens mind, and the rest of the chapter and for a substantial
number of chapters following, the narrative remains with Gwendolen.
Contrast this with the arguably even more dramatic narrative examining vision as a
reciprocal force:
But she had no sooner said this than some consciousness arrested her, and
involuntarily she turned her eyes toward Deronda, who oddly enough had taken
off his felt hat and stood holding it before him as if they had entered a room or an
actual church. He, like others, happened to be looking at her, and their eyes met
to her intense vexation, for it seemed to her that by looking at him she had
betrayed the reference of her thoughts, and she felt herself blushing: she
exaggerated the impression that even Sir Hugo as well as Deronda would have of
her bad taste in referring to the possession of anything at the Abbey: as for
Deronda, she had probably made him despise her. Her annoyance at what she
imagined to be the obviousness of her confusion robbed her of her usual facility in
carrying it off by playful speech, and turning up her face to look at the roof, she
wheeled away in that attitude. If any had noticed her blush as significant, they had
certainly not interpreted it by the secret windings and recesses of her feeling. A
blush is no language: only a dubious flag-signal which may mean either of two
contradictories. Deronda alone had a faint guess at some part of her feeling; but
while he was observing her he was himself under observation.


Lu 30
"Do you take off your hat to horses?" said Grandcourt, with a slight sneer.
"Why not?" said Deronda, covering himself. He had really taken off the hat
automatically, and if he had been an ugly man might doubtless have done so with
impunity; ugliness having naturally the air of involuntary exposure, and beauty, of
display.
57


This passage again captures self-consciousness as it automatically occurs under the effect of
observation, but consider the multi-sourcing of narrated thought here. We begin with
Gwendolens consciousness, then follow her self-consciousness as it morphs under the
observation, then quickly enter into a universal consciousness (A blush is no language) before
briefly siding with Daniels internal feeling before it is itself curtailed by the sense of being
watched by the entirely un-self-conscious Grandcourt. What occurs here is a mapping of drama
as it transfers amongst individual consciousnesses of gazes and the tension amongst characters
that can best be communicated by the secret language in what is attended to by each
idiosyncratic eye.
Vision, however, is not the only sensation subject to cognitive mediation. While it is the
one preferred as a narrative device, it certainly is not the most virtuous in Eliots view; as the
previous pages have shown, it is most subject to a kind of removed social exchange that leaves
the observation of gazes most vulnerable to misinterpretation. Fittingly, then, the novel, even
with its plethora of performers, actresses, and musicians, may be obsessed with beauty, but is
certainly not fooled by it. Eliot contrasts the technique of visual thinking as described above
with more immediate forms of sensation: particularly, touching and hearing. These two senses
become increasingly intertwined and sometimes even conflated when discriminating truth in a
novel paralyzed by self-consciousness.
Music in Deronda possesses a particularly potent force of truthfulness, beyond the
traditionally realist manner [] with a purely social signification meant to place character like
dress or speech habit, but [as] a means by which the deepest questions of aesthetic reception, or


Lu 31
human receptivity in general, are thought out.
58
This is especially noticeable as sound gradually
adopts the features of touch, in which conscious reflection can only occur after the fact of
cognitive penetration:
In Deronda's ear the strain was for the moment a continuance of Gwendolen's
pleadinga painful urging of something vague and difficult, irreconcilable with
pressing conditions, and yet cruel to resist. However strange the mixture in her of
a resolute pride and a precocious air of knowing the world, with a precipitate,
guileless indiscretion, he was quite sure now that the mixture existed. Sir Hugo's
hints had made him alive to dangers that his own disposition might have
neglected; but that Gwendolen's reliance on him was unvisited by any dream of
his being a man who could misinterpret her was as manifest as morning, and
made an appeal which wrestled with his sense of present dangers, and with his
foreboding of a growing incompatible claim on him in her mind [] It was as if
he had a vision of himself besought with outstretched arms and cries, while he
was caught by the waves and compelled to mount the vessel bound for a far-off
coast. That was the strain of excited feeling in him that went along with the notes
of Mirah's song; but when it ceased he moved from his seat with the reflection
that he had been falling into an exaggeration of his own importance, and a
ridiculous readiness to accept Gwendolen's view of himself, as if he could really
have any decisive power over her.
59

If it is not less self-conscious a sense than sight, then sound is certainly more uncontrolled and,
therefore, in many ways more unconscious. Derondas vision of himself besought with
outstretched arms and cries can only occur with the strain of excited feeling in him that went
along with the notes of Mirahs song. As soon as the music ends, he moved from his seat with
the reflection that he had been falling into an exaggeration of his own importance, his self-
consciousness once again nullifying the profound and very accurate insight that music had
divulged to him: that indeed Deronda does have the most decisive power over Gwendolen and
that she in fact is stretching her desperate arms out towards him.
This passage further underscores how much vision is truly a middling component by
which deeper insight, feeling, and unconsciousness travels; but, as is often the case with Daniel,
sight is not liberating in fact, quite the opposite. The image of Gwendolen stretching her arms
towards him from a forsaken shore
60
reappears in the final chapters of the novel, in which


Lu 32
Gwendolen turned her eyes on him [and] Deronda felt the look convey to him the urgency of
his duty. He is able to change his conscious weight of anxiety [in] his words at that moment
into speech of the most genuine and affecting kind (contrasted, then, to Grandcourts possessive
and apathetic speech) that metaphorically transforms into the very sensation that Gwendolen has
not mastered and has, in fact, spent the entire novel being very timid of touch: The words
were like the touch of a miraculous hand to Gwendolen. Mingled emotions streamed through her
frame with a strength that seemed the beginning of a new existence, having some new powers or
other which stirred in her vaguely.
61
Indeed, for all of her Venus-like beauty, Gwendolen recoils
most from the agony of an impassioned caress; while having no objection to be adored []
turn[ing] her eyes on him with calm mercilessness, Gwendolen always manages to avoid
dramatic contact,
62
as can perhaps most embarrassingly be seen in the unfortunate case of Rex
Gascoigne:
He tried to take her hand, but she hastily eluded his grasp and moved to the other
end of the hearth, facing him.
"Pray don't make love to me! I hate it!" she looked at him fiercely.
Rex turned pale and was silent, but could not take his eyes off her, and the
impetus was not yet exhausted that made hers dart death at him.
63


By the end of the novel, however, likely not minimally an effect of her failed, cold
marriage to Grandcourt, Gwendolens reaction to touch has shifted dramatically:
Her hands, which had been so tightly clenched some minutes before, were now
helplessly relaxed and trembling on the arm of her chair. Her quivering lips
remained parted as she ceased speaking. Deronda could not answer; he was
obliged to look away. He took one of her hands, and clasped it as if they were
going to walk together like two children: it was the only way in which he could
answer, "I will not forsake you." And all the while he felt as if he were putting his
name to a blank paper which might be filled up terribly. Their attitude, his
adverted face with its expression of a suffering which he was solemnly resolved
to undergo, might have told half the truth of the situation to a beholder who had
suddenly entered.

That grasp was an entirely new experience to Gwendolen: she had never before
had from any man a sign of tenderness which her own being had needed, and she


Lu 33
interpreted its powerful effect on her into a promise of inexhaustible patience and
constancy. The stream of renewed strength made it possible for her to go on as
she had begunwith that fitful, wandering confession where the sameness of
experience seems to nullify the sense of time or of order in events. She began
again in a fragmentary way
"All sorts of contrivances in my mindbut all so difficult. And I fought against
themI was terrified at them[.]
64


Gwendolen is so affected by Daniels touch in this dramatic scene that Andrew Miller has
remarked, Gwendolen doesnt want her hand released, [Daniels] touch exchanged for the
uplifting nearness of mind that might come with correspondence.
65
Indeed, Derondas physical
touch has so wholly transformed her that she seems to prioritize the immediacy of touch above
all other modes of interaction, including her cherished command of vision: If she had paid her
eyes the slightest attention, even the rudimentary attention held by a beholder who had suddenly
entered, she would quickly have recognized Daniels feeling as he was obliged to look away.
In these last moments of dramatic exchange between student and pupil, what Gwendolen has
learned is a new mode of comprehension, a consciousness that is not so reliant upon vision or,
transitively, self-consciousness. Instead, the true mark of Derondas influence teaches her to use
her senses or, as he sometimes calls it, her sensibility like she does vision, but to a more
productive end: We are not always in a state of strong emotion, he says, and when we are
calm we can use our memories and gradually change the bias of our fear, as we do our tastes.
Take your fear as a safeguard. It is like quickness of hearing. It may make consequences
passionately present to you. Try to take hold of your sensibility, and use it as if it were a faculty,
like vision.
66

In fact, what Daniel is gradually attempting to teach Gwendolen is a very special kind of
new feeling: the feeling of sympathy.




Lu 34
IV. Transfers of Sympathy: Learning in the Readers Triangle
Death is coming to me as the divine kiss which is both parting and reunionwhich takes me from
your bodily eyes and gives me full presence in your soul. Where thou goest, Daniel, I shall go. Is it
not begun? Have I not breathed my soul into you? We shall live together."
Daniel Deronda, Chapter 79

If the plot of Daniel Deronda is hampered by the paralysis of the characters self-
consciousness, then its propelling force is none other than George Eliots quintessential
preoccupation with sympathy. Sympathy is truly the defining center of the reading experience of
Daniel Deronda, perhaps even moreso than in Eliots other novels, for it is the thread by which
increasingly disparate parts are made, quite effectively, to connect. Eliot emphatically stated, in a
letter from October 2, 1876, I meant everything in the book to be related to everything else,
and there is no more conspicuous thematic seam to the novels forays into religious philosophy,
musical aestheticism, romance, and its wide cast of eccentric characters than the one moral duty
to which George Eliot felt her artistry bound. Even time in Daniel Deronda corresponds to
attempts in this quest to achieve an apotheosis of understanding:
If you have any reason for not indulging a wish to speak to a fair woman, it is a
bad plan to look long at her back: the wish to see what it screens becomes the
stronger. There may be a very sweet smile on the other side. Deronda ended by
going to the end of the small table, at right angles to Gwendolen's position, but
before he could speak she had turned on him no smile, but such an appealing look
of sadness, so utterly different from the chill effort of her recognition at table, that
his speech was checked. For what was an appreciative space of time to both,
though the observation of others could not have measured it, they looked at each
othershe seeming to take the deep rest of confession, he with an answering
depth of sympathy that neutralized all other feelings.
67

With Daniel Deronda, George Eliot means to capture the process of sympathy. Vision,
insofar as it mediates between two separate consciousnesses for example, Gwendolen with her
deep rest of confession, and Daniel with an answering depth of sympathy when mutually
reciprocated between two characters enables sympathetic understanding that is equally as
conscious as it is feeling. Looking at one another with a candor that halts even time demonstrates


Lu 35
the full force of understanding, which seems indeed to be the catalyst for the novels hyperactive
compulsion to look: If you have any reason for not indulging a wish to speak to a fair woman, it
is a bad plan to look long at her back: the wish to see what it screens becomes the stronger. There
may be a very sweet smile on the other side. This universal dictum is an effective lesson that
encapsulates the purpose of vision in Deronda and Gwendolens relationship as it matures from
the novels outset. Vision is hyperactive as a teaching mechanism by which separate conjectures
of mind-reading through visual observation, accurate or not, aggregately become the process by
which true sympathy between two individuals can be conveyed. In other words, it takes both
Deronda and Gwendolen months of mutual scrutiny, from the moment they first set eyes on each
other (the reason for which the novel in fact must begin where it does, as, then, the catalyst for
potential sympathy) before their gazes can transcend the inhibitions of self-consciousness.
Sympathy is also the justification for Eliots predominating psycho-narration. With
frequent omniscient interjections like the one above and conscientious thought-sourcing (he
thought), even to levels of extra remove (he was conscious of), the narrator purposely inserts
herself in the Readers Triangle in order to empower the reader with the affective experience of
sympathy in the novel. Eliots levels of remove, in conjunction with her penchant for
intentionality and intersubjectivity (again, that means she thinks about him thinking about her
or she watches him looking at her looking at him) all combine to make Daniel Deronda into a
text didactic primarily through its narratology. As Rae Greiner explains, George Eliots
sympathy comes from a knowledge that is not complete: Eliot is dealing with a difficult truth,
that sympathy operates by way of figures rather than facts and is fed less by knowledge than by
gaps in knowledge, things we cannot (or dont want to) experience firsthand. And though
identification can mean many things besides an exact identification between self and other, there
are throughout Eliots work strong indications that the most powerfully moral sympathy arises in


Lu 36
relation to those whose separateness remains at least partially intact.
68
This separateness
remain[ing] at least partially intact in Daniel Deronda comes in the form of the narrators self-
consciousness that there is or there should be no way, even for an omniscient narrator, to
perfectly access the thoughts of her characters. Doing so would be misrepresentative, the farthest
from any sort of realism, and furthermore would be unproductive to a lesson of sympathy. This is
the reason why Gwendolen, even in her most vulnerable, illuminating interactions with Deronda,
is kept at such remove; as Gwendolen becomes more knowable to Deronda and dependent upon
his presence, he gently pushes her away with proportionate force. French philosopher Maurice
Merleau-Ponty, whose theories comprise the bulk of George Buttes analysis of intersubjectivity,
conceives of this separation as a wall, one which is built together [between us and others], each
putting his stone in the niche left by the others.
69
As Butte further explains, the paradox of the
wall the deep and human psychological desire to know another, completely and fully is
that the completed structure has no space to generate desire and narrative; yet completion
seems to be the goal, the smoothing of a surface without a niche.
70
One redeeming way of
understanding this would be that separateness prevents narcissism and confusion and clarifies
intersubjective experience, which is perhaps the case with Gwendolen and Deronda as well;
despite her increasing attempts to have him always near with a neuroticism that could, to an
uninformed eye, be misconstrued as evidence of romantic desire, Daniel remains very much
apart from Gwendolen. He himself is self-conscious of this separation, which is why in the
previously excerpted passage he must avert his eyes in order to express the constancy of his
sympathy. His responsibility is not to be with her forever nor to be her Platonic epipsyche, but to
wean her away from the narcissism of perfect sympathy into the active, externalized sympathy of
a reformed, feeling self.


Lu 37
But perhaps more importantly, separateness constitutes one of the pleasures of reading,
particularly of reading George Eliot, empowering the reader to learn, in the process of reading
the novel, the moral lesson imparted. Eliot thus prioritizes narrative distance precisely the
distance the reader can bring to his or her page in active engagement with the text as a physical
object, in order to demonstrate the learning of sympathy, as Greiner acknowledges: Form
proves a training ground for sympathetic detachment, guiding readers to take on a variety of
perspectives they need not fully inhabit. Mortifications of various kinds fall to those denied the
capacity to stand back. Eliots portrayal of characters bereft of sympathy, who havent the power
to give or receive it, suggests that fellowship with others depends on our being able to think
along with them without falling helplessly susceptible their thoughts.
71
If her characters can,
la Vanessa Ryan, sometimes be observed as unthinking and hermeneutically more accessible for
it, then Eliots great fear is for her reader to be equally unthinking. In this way, Greiner remarks,
Eliots brand of sympathy contrasts most clearly with those of her contemporaries:
Eliots portrayal of characters bereft of sympathy, who havent the power to give
or receive it, suggests that fellowship with others depends on our being able to
think along with them without falling helplessly susceptible their thoughts [sic].
In that class of characters who seem most like her in their narrating and authorial
prowess, yet least like (or liked by) her in their deficit of fellow-feeling, Eliot
critiqued a proposition fundamental to the literary realism of her time: that
sympathy flows from unimpeded access into other minds rather than resulting
from the difficult thinking taking place in the gap that separates them from us.
72


In fact, the reader is deliberately prevented from becoming merely a passive counterpart
to the novel. The Readers Triangle between the narrator and the fictional character is not an
equilateral one; much more work ends up as the responsibility of a cooperative reader than the
merely escape-seeking voyeur may undertake. As Greiner illuminates, the unconscious reader
should not expect sympathy [to flow] from unimpeded access into the minds of Gwendolen or
Deronda. So, the readers relationship with character is already more strained in Daniel Deronda


Lu 38
than it would be in another novel. What we are doing when we read about one character thinking
about another character thinking is considering what we, as readers, are ourselves doing in
consenting to the cognitive effect of the novel. These characters are themselves readers, good or
bad, of other characters so as to teach us not only the pleasure of reading, in placing ourselves in
the novels universe, but furthermore the mechanism of reading, in observing the characters
mind-read and critiquing their propensity to do so.
This is the reason for which James Sully found such scientific merit in George Eliots
work. According to Vanessa Ryan,
For Sully, then, it was not so much the relative representational power of fiction
over scientific discoursethe idea that novelists are better at describing the
mindbut rather the special nature of reading, which made the mind conscious of
its own cognitive processes, that made fiction valuable for a psychologist []
Sully largely circumvented the question of whether fiction offered an accurate
mimesis of the mind by turning his attention to the nature of fiction and its
particular effects. Sully thus attended not just to the content of George Eliots
novels, but also to their formal features and their effect on the mind of the reader
[] Sully recognized the strong didactic nature of fiction, acknowledging that
George Eliot had often been discussed as a discoverer and enforcer of moral truth
rather than as an artist [] The works of George Eliot, Sully claimed, must
always in the eyes of the psychologist . . . possess a high value by reason of their
large scientific insight into character and life (378). Sully was keen in his essay
to convey that George Eliot was a moral teacher (390) not by any explicit
assertions of ethical doctrine, but by means of a subtle sympathetic contact of
the readers mind with her own.
73


Eliots moral teaching is thus as much a formal one, conveyed by the structures of her narrative
and the readers experience of reading them, as it is one based in her stories and characters. Thus,
it is important to turn now to the readers experience of Daniel Derondas formal features in
order to discover where in this experience can be found Eliots constructive lessons of sympathy.
If the reader cannot indulge in direct engagement with character psychology without the
distancing separation of self-consciousness and multi-intentionality, then neither is he or she
meant to find much comfort in the omniscient narrator. Instead of being directly told the lessons


Lu 39
of sympathy that we are supposed to glean, as is significantly the more ubiquitous technique in
Middlemarch (take the famous pier-glass passage, for example), the narrator in Daniel Deronda
is less an omniscient pedagogue and more merely a mediating other. According to Dorrit Cohn,
we see here the evidence of a larger historical trend towards a new figure-oriented conception of
the novel:
The historical development of the novel clearly bears out the old-fashioned
narrators self-preservative instinct: with the growing interest in the problems of
individual psychology, the audible narrator disappears from the fictional world
[] a fully developed figural consciousness siphons away the emotional and
intellectual energy formerly lodged in the expansive narrator. Even when he
passes from center stage, the narrator continues to narrate, becoming the neutral
but indispensable accessory to figure-oriented narration. It is therefore no
coincidence that those writers who first insisted on the removal of vociferous
narrators from fictionnotably Flaubert and Henry Jameswere also the
creators of fictional minds with previously unparalleled depth and complexity.
74


Eliots narrator in Daniel Deronda reflects a necessity dictated by the evolution of the novel
towards a new kind of narrator, one who does not so readily depend upon a one-direction,
didactic relationship with the reader.
Instead, Derondas narrator performs a peculiarly active role as she directly engages the
reader, making this relationship a potentially responsive one. As Andrew Miller perceptively
notes, the narrator uses second-person perspective to invite the reader directly into the text (see,
for instance, the previously quoted passage on pg. 411 (If you have any reason for not indulging
a wish to speak to a fair woman []); at other times, the narrator uses the first-person plural
(we) to implicate that the reader already participates in the broader aims of the novel. By
Raimond Gaitas argument, this is done so as to rouse ethical deliberation: The public character
[of serious ethical thinking] is best conceived as an engagement between the first and second
person, rather than between the first and third.
75
The narrators usage of the pronoun you, a
direct and effective initiation of triangulated reading, is then supposed to be a method for


Lu 40
teaching the ethics of sympathy; as Miller puts it, the second person doesnt eclipse[] other
perspectives but [] coordinates them.
76
The third- and first-person perspectives are
pedagogically valuable enough, but for what might be called the extra-moral motivation for
following the ethics set out by something as impersonal as letters on a page, the author must rely
on successful engagement of the second-person to convey that this the situations laid out here
on the page by the third-person perspective or the commitments generated in the first person,
say, by the narrator are directly relevant to the reader him- or herself.
77
This is particularly
convincing because Daniel Derondas narrator, consistent with the rest of the text, is a very self-
conscious one, making the reader all the more conscientious of the narrators attempts to mind-
read the reader, appealing sympathetically for a particular reaction.
Here is a passage that particularly demonstrates the narrators self-directing of reader
response:
To say that Deronda was romantic would be to misrepresent him; but under his
calm and somewhat self-repressed exterior there was a fervor which made him
easily find poetry and romance among the events of every-day life. And perhaps
poetry and romance are as plentiful as ever in the world except for those
phlegmatic natures who I suspect would in any age have regarded them as a dull
form of erroneous thinking. [] Derondas thinking went on in rapid images of
what might be [] Excuse him: his mind was not apt to run spontaneously into
insulting ideas, or to practise a form of wit which identifies Moses with the
advertisement sheet [] It was the habit of his mind to connect dread with
unknown parentage, and in this case as well as his own there was enough to make
the connection reasonable.
78


The narrator is at once self-conscious of her own actions To say that Deronda was romantic
would be to misrepresent him and self-conscious about her understanding of human nature
perhaps poetry and romance are as plentiful as ever in the world except for those phlegmatic
natures who I suspect would in any age have regarded them as a dull form of erroneous
thinking. But perhaps more strangely, the narrator is equally self-conscious for Deronda as she
is for the reader: She apologizes for Deronda in what she identifies as his mental foible, an


Lu 41
insight that seems almost singular to the omniscient narrator (for it is not clear whether or not
Daniel himself is aware of this habit of his mind), and yet does so in the imperative Excuse
him as though assuming the reader will, without the narrators interference, be wont to
misrepresent Daniel in characterizing him as romantic or unjust. But the reader is meant to take
note of this excuse him, a direct second-person appeal in line with Millers argument,
especially insofar as it follows the narrators self-conscious remonstrance in the passages first
line. Though one begins to wonder, is the narrator herself afraid to call Deronda romantic in her
representation of him, or is she more concerned that we as readers will think this and
misrepresent him in our minds? When the second-person perspective is introduced into the
novel, everyone, including the reader, is liable to fault; the narrator illuminates the possibility of
reading misrepresentation in order to underscore the multi-participation necessary to an active
mode of learning.
Perhaps, then, the reader reading Daniel Deronda the novel may be in an analogous
position to Gwendolen being taught by Daniel Deronda the character. After all, Eliot in Deronda
states that it is the beings closest to us, whether in love or hate, [that] are often virtually our
interpreters of the world, and some feather-headed gentleman or lady whom in passing we regret
to take as legal tender for a human being may be acting as a melancholy theory of life in the
minds of those who live with himlike a piece of yellow and wavy glass that distorts form and
makes colour an affliction.
79
Even in his infamous critique of the novel, Henry James reveals
that such a close engagement with the text is the most enjoyable perhaps the only agreeable
way to endure the protracted reading experience of Daniel Deronda:
A book like Daniel Deronda becomes part of ones life; one lives in it, or
alongside of it. I dont hesitate to say that I have been living in this one for the last
eight months. It is such a complete world George Eliot builds up; it is so vast, so
much-embracing! It has such a firm earth and such an ethereal sky. You can turn
into it and lose yourself in it.
80



Lu 42

We should realize that this is the way in which Eliot understands not only the best mode of
reading available to her readers, but also of learning. As Miller explains, Victorians knew that
reading was supposed to be an engrossing act, something comparable to friendship, sacrifice, or
even marriage.
81
How better to describe the relationship between Gwendolen and Deronda? He is
at once mentor, friend, spirit companion, lover, and husband to Gwendolen, with teacher being
first and foremost. Similarly are the readers to George Eliots final novel meant to consider the
novel a being[] closest to us, an experience of varying consciousnesses meant to be felt and
lived through its cognitive mimesis. If Daniel Deronda is the capturing of mind and self-
consciousness, so is reading, and the greatest difficulty to reading the novel is negotiating what
degree of separation is possible or appropriate for a book that was meant to be difficultly
engrossing.
The triangulation amongst reader, character, and narrator is indeed one loosely based on
some of the more familiar varieties of narrative triangles, particularly those of subject-model-
object character desire seminally proposed by Ren Girard, in which the subjects desire for a
certain object is provoked by the commensurate desire by another individual, the model, for
that same object.
82
However, the Readers Triangle in Daniel Deronda paradoxically relies upon
crucial elements of detachment and separation more or perhaps rather than desire. This idea is
perhaps best summarized in Figure 2, which also indicates the nature of the aforementioned
imbalance in the negotiations of the Readers Triangle:


Lu 43

Just as the reader desires to inhabit the world of the novel he or she is reading, Eliot denies the
reader this kind of intimacy by layering levels of consciousness; similarly, Eliots third-person
narrators, as Greiner characterizes, are often said to be securely removed from the fictional
worlds they describe, their perspectives frequently shift[ing] between modes of detachment and
desire.
83
But this distancing provides only more motivation: The reader, in his or her desire to
overcome detachment, must grow even closer to the text, insert him or herself in it, in order to
understand the affect of this narrational struggle. Feeling and the work done by feeling is,
according to Wolfgang Isers seminal work on reader response, the essential component of a
successful novel:
Rhetoric, if it is to be successful, needs a clearly formulated purpose, but the new
province of writing that Fielding is trying to open up to his readers is in the
nature of a promise, and it can only rouse the expectations necessary for its
efficacy if it is not set out in words. The reader must be made to feel for himself


Lu 44
the new meaning of the novel. To do this he must actively participate in bringing
out the meaning and this participation is an essential precondition for
communication between the author and the reader. Rhetoric, then, may be a
guiding influence to help the reader produce the meaning of the text, but his
participation is something that goes far beyond the scope of this influence.
84


The readers experience in Daniel Deronda, in this manner, hinges on one that is nearly spiritual;
as Deronda says to Gwendolen, Take the present suffering as a painful letting in of light []
You are conscious of more beyond the round of your own inclinations you know more of the
way in which your life presses on others, and their life on yours.
85
Miller aptly describes this
transfiguration of the book its conversion from heavy material conditions and into the spiritual
[as being] concurrent with a transfiguration of the reader, vitalizing that which must have been
dead, giving sight where there was blindness, baptizing us into an experience not of something
new, exactly, but of what we have always seen, the ordinary now rendered brighter and
deeper.
86
The challenge of reading a novel that is so difficult in its many ways is in the very
experience of finding a way to overcome difficulty, and the very real cognitive lessons,
especially as identified by individuals like James Sully, that doing so will allow the empowered
reader to learn.
This does not mean that reading is the solution to everything. George Eliot firmly
reminds us that it would be false to attempt at worldliness merely by consuming as many books
as possible. The authors self-consciousness, as weve touched upon in examining George Eliots
own difficult writing process in Daniel Deronda, is in recognizing that artistic representation is a
chosen act and interpretation even moreso, colored by the biases of the writer and the
circumstances of the reader. Daniel Deronda itself offers a careful lesson in this very problem of
reading:
Gwendolen's uncontrolled reading, though consisting chiefly in what are called
pictures of life, had somehow not prepared her for this encounter with reality. Is
that surprising? It is to be believed that attendance at the opra bouffe in the


Lu 45
present day would not leave men's minds entirely without shock, if the manners
observed there with some applause were suddenly to start up in their own
families. Perspective, as its inventor remarked, is a beautiful thing. What horrors
of damp huts, where human beings languish, may not become picturesque through
aerial distance! What hymning of cancerous vices may we not languish over as
sublimest art in the safe remoteness of a strange language and artificial phrase!
Yet we keep a repugnance to rheumatism and other painful effects when
presented incur personal experience.
87

Eliot cautions that we cannot be uncontrolled in our reading and learn from its substance as we
would learn, for instance, by imitating our mentors. The mimetic effect of fiction is not a lesson
in and of itself; reading for real life in metaphors can only obscure our perspective, for art is
subject to biases. If damp huts may at a distance become picturesque while rheumatism will
always be repugnant, then reading to learn a sympathetic perspective for realistic experience can
easily be problematic. Instead, what is crucially missing from this kind of reading is present in
another kind as demonstrated by Deronda:
When he took up a book to try and dull this urgency of inward vision, the printed
words were no more than a network through which he saw and heard everything
as clearly as beforesaw not only the actual events of two hours, but possibilities
of what had been and what might be which those events were enough to feed with
the warm blood of passionate hope and fear. Something in his own experience
caused Mirah's search after her mother to lay hold with peculiar force on his
imagination. The first prompting of sympathy was to aid her in her search []
But here the mixed feelings which belonged to Deronda's kindred experience
naturally transfused themselves into his anxiety on behalf of Mirah.
88

Reading is most effective when one does not entirely detach himself from the boundaries of his
or her own reality, even with the expansiveness of the novels vision. The reader, even with
exposure to the fantastical world described within the novel, will in actuality be unlikely to
participate in the damp huts, rheumatism, or anything else he or she encounters in fiction.
Instead, reading is meant to be a mapping of emotion and sympathy in encountering like
circumstances in our own lives Daniel recognizing the congruity between Mirahs search for
her mother and his own, for example. Eliot is not advocating escapism through reading we are


Lu 46
not meant, in other words, to fall in love with Daniel Deronda but is encouraging recognition
of like situations through which, perhaps somewhat egotistically, reading will prompt an
urgency of inward vision. Mikhael Bakhtin puts it another way:
Discourse lives, as it were, beyond itself, in a living impulse toward the object; if
we detach ourselves completely from this impulse all we have left is the naked
corpse of the word, from which we can learn nothing at all about the social
situation or the fate of a given word in life. To study the word as such, ignoring
the impulse that reaches out beyond it, is just as senseless as to study
psychological experience outside the context of that real life toward which it was
directed and by which it is determined.
89


Reading, we must be aware, is to teach us to think about how we feel, to ponder at the middling
effect of the words on a page, and to question the struggles of trying to attain perfect closeness
and not surmounting the cognitive and linguistic challenges left in front of us by a page of print.
To read is to be self-conscious of attention, to be disciplined in emotionality, and, especially for
Eliot, to be actively detached, and savor the challenge of never being fully able to have what it is
we desire most: perfect immersion. Daniel Deronda is a difficult book about suffering, but that is
only because it is by suffering that the reader most understands what it means to learn. Learning
means to always be apart; just like Deronda cannot stay with Gwendolen, Mordecai must die at
the end of the novel to make way for his echo in the purpose-renewed Daniel. The novel ends
with an excerpt from Miltons Samson Agonistes, itself the echo of an English poem on an Old
Testament theme.
90
By the end of Daniel Deronda, what matters most is the memory of once
having had been close enough to glean uninhibited understanding, the process of learning to do
so, and, most importantly, the isolation and individualism its ending demands. At its conclusion,
the reader having traversed the novel as mediator in media res from its beginning, middling
between narrator and character is only a means to begin to approach the novel. The ultimate
lesson learned is in appreciating the process, by which one incurs the lessons of sympathy and
carries them beyond the novels last pages. Just as the Old Testament resounds in Milton,


Lu 47
Mordecai lives as an echo in Deronda and Deronda as an echo in Gwendolen; the novel, then,
remains an echo in the consciousness of the reader, the memory of which will hopefully remind
him or her of the great rewards reaped after confronting extraordinary cognitive challenges.

Coda
Given the enormity of the novel and the logistical constraints of this essay, my project is
by no means exhaustive. Though it was developed with the specifications of Daniel Deronda in
mind, the Readers Triangle can effectively be applied to any work of fiction with a pronounced
psycho-narrator. Thus, a useful companion project would consider the Readers Triangle in other
George Eliot novels such as Middlemarch or Adam Bede, in which the narrator may be said to be
even more intrusive to the reading process. While adapting it as an interpretive model for other
novels, it would also be fruitful to reconsider how the Readers Triangle compares to related
models of triangulation such as Girards or Zunshines. Within the extensive scope of Daniel
Deronda, I would also have appreciated dedicating greater length to the examination of sensory
mediation in Daniel Deronda, as well as the ways in which time and history are presented as
their own kind of middling in Deronda (particularly when compared to the more communally
oriented Middlemarch). However, I hope that my paper presented a useful model towards
understanding the complex psychology of Daniel Deronda and its effect on the reader who
valiantly engages in such a harrowing task. It is my optimistic belief that every challenge meets
its corresponding reward, and the feeling of finishing Daniel Deronda can, if properly
considered, truly be a sympathetic lesson for careful, conscious attention to be exercised in
whichever book the reader undertakes next.


Lu 48
Notes

1
Dames, Nicholas. Physiology of the Novel : Reading, Neural Science, and the Form of
Victorian Fiction. Oxford, GBR: Oxford University Press, UK, 2007. p. 123-124
2
Cave, Terence. "Introduction." Introduction to Daniel Deronda, by George Eliot, ix-x. London:
Penguin Books, 1995.
3
Leavis, F. R. (1982). Gwendolen Harleth. London Review of Books,4(1), 10-12. Retrieved
from http://www.lrb.co.uk/v04/n01/fr-leavis/gwendolen-harleth.
4
Miller, Andrew H. The Burdens of Perfection: On Ethics and Reading in Nineteenth-century
British Literature. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008. p. 78.
5
Ibid., 78.
6
Eliot, George. Daniel Deronda. Edited by Terence Cave. London: Penguin Books, 1995. p. 364.
7
Ibid., 563.
8
Much of this is discussed in Daniel Deronda, Chapter XVI.
9
Deronda 411.
10
Ryan, Vanessa Lyndal. Thinking without Thinking in the Victorian Novel. Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 2012. 12-13.
11
For example, his exhaustive The Problems of Life and Mind.
12
Spencer, An Autobiography, vol. I, 462 (as quoted in Ryan).
13
Ryan 16.
14
Spencer, An Autobiography, 465 (as quoted in Ryan).
15
Deronda 261.
16
The most succinct and helpful explanation of the triangulated theory-of-mind, or three-way
mind-reading, can be found in Lisa Zunshines chapter of The Emergence of Mind.
17
See Girard, Ren. Deceit, Desire, and the Novel; Self and Other in Literary
Structure.Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1965.
18
Deronda 10.
19
Cohn, Dorrit. Transparent Minds: Narrative Modes for Presenting Consciousness in Fiction.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978. p. 23.
20
Letter from G.H. Lewes to Blackwood, January 17, 1874, as quoted in Terence Caves
Introduction.
21
Deronda 9.
22
Cohn 116.
23
Deronda 7.
24
Ibid., 7
25
Ibid., 7
26
Vermeule, Blakey. Why Do We Care about Literary Characters? Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 2010. p. 14.
27
Gopnik, Alison. "Theory of Mind." In The MIT Encyclopedia of the Cognitive Sciences, by
Robert A. Wilson and Frank C. Keil, 838-41. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999. (As referenced
in Zunshine).
28
Deronda 9.
29
Zunshine 6.
30
Lewes, George Henry. Problems of Life and Mind. Boston: Houghton, Osgood and, 1879.
265-266.


Lu 49

31
Greiner, Rae. Sympathetic Realism in Nineteenth-century British Fiction. Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 2012. p. 9.
32
Pinch, Adela. Thinking about Other People in Nineteenth-century British Writing. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2010. p. 144. (As quoted in Greiner 9).
33
Ryan1-2.
34
Butte, George. I Know That You Know That I Know: Narrating Subjects from Moll Flanders
to Marnie. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2004. 33-34.
35
Ibid., 27-28.
36
Deronda 7-10.
37
Lewes 266-267.
38
Lewes, George Henry. Problems of Life and Mind. Boston: Houghton, Osgood and, 1879. p.
183.
39
Lewes 358.
40
Ibid., 359.
41
Ibid., 187-188.
42
Dames 212.
43
Deronda 118
44
Ibid., 133.
45
Deronda 135-136.
46
Ibid., 11.
47
Pinch, Adela. Thinking about Other People in Nineteenth-century British Writing. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2010. p. 150. (As quoted in Greiner 9).
48
Deronda 256.
49
Ibid, 603-604. (check)
50
Murdoch, Iris. Vision and Choice in Morality. In Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on
Philosophy and Literature. New York: Alan Lane, 1998. 76 98. (As quoted in Miller 62)
51
Shuttleworth, Sally. George Eliot and Nineteenth-century Science: The Make-believe of a
Beginning. Cambridge [Cambridgeshire: Cambridge University Press, 1984. p. 185.
52
Ibid., 185.
53
Deronda 328.
54
Ibid., 423.
55
Ibid., 111.
56
Ibid., 10.
57
Ibid., 420.
58
Dames 128.
59
Deronda 564.
60
Ibid., 769.
61
Ibid.,769.
62
Ibid., 57.
63
Ibid., 81.
64
Deronda 691.
65
Miller 80.
66
Ibid., 452.
67
Ibid., 411.
68
Greiner 134-135.


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69
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Signs. [Evanston, Ill.]: Northwestern University Press, 1964. p. 19.
(As quoted in Butte 58).
70
Butte 29.
71
Greiner 139.
72
Ibid., 139-140
73
Vanessa L. Ryan. "Reading the Mind: From George Eliot's Fiction to James Sully's
Psychology."Journal of the History of Ideas 70, no. 4 (2009): 622. http://muse.jhu.edu/ (accessed
April 8, 2013).
74
Cohn 26.
75
Gaita, R. (1998). Renegotiating ethics in literature, philosophy, and theory (pp. 285) (J.
Adamson, R. Freadman, & D. Parker, Authors). Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press
(as quoted in Miller).
76
Miller 74.
77
Miller 74.
78
Deronda 205-207.
79
Deronda 626.
80
James, H. (1970). Partial portraits. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. p. 70.
81
Miller 77
82
See Girard Deceit, Desire, and the Novel
83
Greiner 27.
84
Iser, W. (1974). The implied reader: Patterns of communication in prose fiction from Bunyan
to Beckett. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. p. 30.
85
Deronda 452.
86
Miller 76-77.
87
Deronda 155.
88
Ibid., 205.
89
Bakhtin, M. M. (2000). Imagination: Four Essays. In M. McKeon (Ed.), Theory of the novel:
A historical approach (pp. 348). Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.
90
Cave, Notes to Chapter 70, pg. 847


















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