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“Duteous Bonds”: Daniel Deronda and the 1870 Naturalization Act

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 September 2022

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Abstract

This essay reads George Eliot's Daniel Deronda (1876) in dialogue with mid-Victorian debates on British nationality law, illuminating the larger questions of nationality and community that Eliot considered throughout her career. The 1860s, the decade in which the novel is set, witnessed a transformation in the law of subjecthood that culminated in the Naturalization Act (1870). In the lead up to the act, officials reconsidered the doctrine of “indelible allegiance” and debated whether and how the legal status of a subject should reflect an individual's choice and commitments. In the novel, Eliot approaches these issues by examining nationality as an individual experience in addition to a philosophical issue. For example, although both Sir Hugo Mallinger and Mordecai Cohen are British subjects, Mordecai's identity as a Jew conflicts with his legal status—to his great distress. Eliot uses Mordecai's proposal for a Jewish state to engage with an alternative form of national identity: one in which legal identity aligns with cultural and ethnic indices. In tackling these issues, Eliot exposes the complications and contradictions of national identity, showing how nationality law functions as a battleground for larger conflicts over the fate of nationality, both in Britain and beyond.

Type
Research Article
Information
Victorian Literature and Culture , Volume 50 , Issue 3 , Fall 2022 , pp. 489 - 519
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Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

I would like to thank the VLC referees for their thoughtful comments. Earlier versions of this essay were presented at the 2017 NAVSA/AVSA conference in Florence, Italy, and appeared in my dissertation.

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