“UNMAPPED COUNTRY”: UNCOVERING HIDDEN WOUNDS IN DANIEL DERONDA

Extract

There is a great deal of unmapped country within us which would have to be taken into account in an explanation of our gusts and storms.

— George Eliot, Daniel Deronda

WITH THESE WORDS THE NARRATOR of George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda appears to invite readers to map Gwendolen Harleth’s psyche, to trace its history, the places it has been, and the events that appear to have been, whether voluntarily or involuntarily, erased from her memory. This passage is typical of the way that questions of identity in George Eliot’s last novel seem consistently to reflect emerging Victorian concepts of memory.

Probably as a direct result of the burgeoning interest in the positivist philosophy of Auguste Comte, we see at mid-century a general trend toward the empirical study of the mind according to the model used in the natural sciences: observation and taxonomical classification. Scientists thus observed the physical attributes and behaviors of individuals and then attempted to classify each within the larger species of humans and their behaviors. From this point, scientists would then speculate about the existence of general categories or even laws governing the functions of the mind. It comes as no surprise, then, that those writing most prolifically on physiology and psychology at mid-century also wrote important tracts about nature study: George Henry Lewes, Herbert Spencer, and John Stuart Mill among others. And, as other critics have noted before me, Eliot includes references to both types of science in her works.¹