Real life was as interesting as ‘Sir Charles Grandison’ – Daniel Deronda's Real and Ideal

The second big innovation or experiment in Daniel Deronda is the one readers dislike so much, the joining of two stories written in discordant styles.  Last spring Levi Stahl and Maggie Bandur wrote an interesting series of pieces on the novel, put together as they were reading the book, in which they both follow the usual path (in fourteen detailed posts): delight at Eliot’s charming, ambiguous recasting of Emma followed by disillusion at the direction the Jewish part of the novel eventually takes, especially its wooden characters.  The word that they both use is “believe” – they do not believe in Deronda’s side of the novel, suggesting they in some way believe in Gwendolen Harleth’s side.

Stahl and Bandur are right, that one set of characters is lifelike and rounded (and fun) while another set – “We should stamp every possible world with the flatness of our own inanity” says Deronda in a not entirely unrelated context (Ch. 36).  Many readers respond: “You’re telling me!”  But I’ll argue that although “flat” is accurate, “inane” is not.  What looks at first like a failure of execution is in fact a success, but of concept.  Perhaps the concept is a failure.  I thought it worked all right.

Crudely, the marriage half of the novel is Realism, the Jewish half Idealism.  The former is English, the latter German.  Daniel Deronda is a fairy tale hero, the boy of dubious parentage who after trials discovers that he is a prince.  In one sense, I mean what he learns about his heritage, and in another I mean that although he is not actually a prince his mother turns out to be a princess, which, since I was on to the pattern by this point, was almost rubbing it on a little thick.

Deronda slips into fairy tale world when he rescues a princess (there are several instances where he crosses a threshold into Jewish Wonderland).  He gives her shelter in some kind of fairy cave, inhabited by Queen Mab – the fairy who presents the princess with the “tiny felt slippers” that are like “sheaths of buds.”  These slippers are too large for the princess, even though the fairies are themselves tiny, “all alike small, in due proportion with their miniature rooms…  All four, if they had been wax-work, might have been packed easily in a fashionable lad’s traveling trunk”  (Ch. 18).  That is one strange sentence.  But these characters, the Meyrick family, are meant to be a kind of wax-work. 

They so thoroughly accepted Deronda as an ideal, that when he was gone the youngest set to work, under the criticism of the two elder girls, to paint him as Prince Camaralzaman.  (Ch. 16)

They have moved to the Arabian Nights, but you see what I am talking about.  This is before we get to Mordecai, who a kind of philosophical or mystical Ideal.  Or see Chapter 37, in which the prince, princess, and little fairy women try to define the Ideal, but in aesthetic terms:

“If people have thought what is the most beautiful and the best thing, it must be true. It is always there.”

“Now, Mirah, what do you mean?” said Amy.

“I understand her,” said Deronda, coming to the rescue.  “It is a truth in thought though it may never have been carried out in action.  It lives as an idea.”

It is possible that this kind of scene is not well suited to the novel as we now think of it.  Try the long debate in the Philosopher’s Club, Ch. 42, for an even more dubious example.

I obviously have my own doubts about how some of this works, although I question specific scenes, not the notion of combining such clashing aesthetic ideas.  This was not my problem with Eliot.  I don’t actually believe in any of the characters.  They are all waxworks to me, some molded to fool the eye, some more abstract.  Eliot’s characterization in the Jewish Daniel Deronda is no different, in principle or execution than that in the idealist German fiction of Goethe, Stifter, or Hoffmann.  Mordecai and the fairy sisters are as well-rounded as the wizard and his snake daughters in The Golden Pot.

This would be the time to note the curious similarities between Hoffmann’s recurring musician Kapellmeister Johannes Kreisler and Daniel Deronda’s musician named Musical Instrument (Klesmer), both of whom are able to move between the real world and the magical world presumably somehow by means of their special status as musicians.

I don’t always enjoy what Eliot is doing with all this, but it is a bold move.

The post’s title is from Chapter 4.  The joke is that most readers now - almost all - would find Jane Austen's (and apparently Gwendolen Harleth's) favorite novel to be the most boring novel ever written.

Jane Eyre and the fairy folk - "Mademoiselle is a fairy," he said, whispering mysteriously

So I had known that Jane becomes a governess in the hire of a Romantic hero with a terrible secret. I hadn’t known that this Byronic man of action is convinced Jane is a fairy.

The stream of references to fairies and their kin is constant in Jane Eyre, from the first meeting of Jane and Rochester, all the way to the end. When they meet, Jane thinks of “a North-of-England spirit,” and Rochester soon after says that he also “thought unaccountably of fairy tales” (Ch. 13, 107). That’s during the strange, hilarious first conversation between Jane and Rochester, when he directly asks her if she was waiting for “the men in green,” and Jane answers in all seriousness that “The men in green forsook England a hundred years ago.” Poor Mrs. Fairfax “dropped her knitting... wondering what sort of talk this was.” Good question, Mrs. Fairfax.

Rochester never stops talking this way. That’s the key – it’s just Rochester. He calls Jane an elf, a sprite, a salamander. He calls himself an ogre and a ghoul. Jane doesn’t talk like this. Part of this is banter, part of it is self-concealment. Still. He can’t stop himself. Or Jane-the-narrator doesn’t let him – she’s the one telling the story.

A couple of red herrings are thrown in. Jane mentions Bluebeard in just the right spot (Ch. 11, 93) , although much too early for the first-time reader to understand it, so that’s really just Jane-the-narrator having her fun. The occasional reference to “the Vampyre” belongs in the “Gothic parody” box, not with the fairy stuff.

Every great writer creates fantasy worlds, our world seen through a creative prism, the best realists as much as the pure fantasists. In a so-called realistic novel, the reader typically accepts one major improbability, the possible but unlikely thing that generates the novel. Rochester is keeping a m*d*o*a*n in the a*t*c. Unlikely, though not impossible, and anyone who runs into such a thing, should write a book about it.

But the story of Jane Eyre has a second, completely coincidental, grosser improbability. Jane flees Rochester and lands amongst the least likely people in the entire world for her to meet. Isn’t this a terrible strain on the story?

Jane finds herself at a literal crossroads at the beginning of Chapter 28, in one of those odd passages where she switches to the present tense (“I am alone... I discover... I am absolutely destitute”). She doesn’t know where any of the four roads leads, or have any reason to take one over the other. Level-headed Jane surprises us all by picking path number five, not a path at all – she heads “straight into the heath”, which turns out to lead, on the third night of wandering, directly to her fairy family. To whom else would it lead? Put this way, it’s all perfectly logical. She finds her fairy cousins are teaching themselves German by means of Schiller’s The Robbers (1781), another 18th century book, and what that means, I have no clue. Maybe Brontë thought having them read the Brothers Grimm would be too blatant.

The same story can be told in endlessly different ways – characters, incident, and setting can be varied, but also style and imagery. It's those latter that distinguish the great work of art.