4 - Daniel Deronda, Impressions of Theophrastus Such, and the emergence of imperialism

Summary

… not only towards the Jews, but towards all oriental peoples with whom we English come in contact, a spirit of arrogance and contemptuous dictatorialness is observable which has become a national disgrace to us.

George Eliot to Harriet Beecher Stowe (GEL, 6:301)

In recent years, Daniel Deronda, once Eliot's least appreciated novel, has received a disproportionate share of critical attention. The reasons for this are fairly evident. “The Jewish half,” as F. R. Leavis famously defined it, is concerned with the notion of transforming a religious tradition of “return” into a modern Jewish nationalism. Its themes of unknown parentage, disinheritance, and cultural transmission acquired new appeal for late twentieth-century critics preoccupied with issues of national and racial identity. Its prescience about the establishment of a Jewish state has attracted critics who write about the immorality of British imperialism. Because criticism of Eliot's fiction relating to imperialism and colonialism consists primarily of post-colonial readings of Deronda, this chapter addresses a set of meta-critical issues about Daniel Deronda and the British empire. It demonstrates the fallacy of arguments that claim that Deronda, as Susan Meyer writes, displays “a disquieting continuity with imperialist ideology.”

For some critics, not merely the subject matter but the novel form itself makes all novels complicit in imperialism. Meyer believes that “most of the domestic fiction of nineteenth-century Britain ultimately affirms imperialist ideology.”