George Eliot's Ecumenical Jew, or, The Novel as Outdoor Temple

TLDR: In this article, the authors make a few tentative suggestions as to why George Eliot created Deronda the way she did, and they suggest that Kierkegaard can help us understand Deronda.

Abstract: Henry James asked rhetorically of Middlemarch: "If we write novels so, how shall we write History?"1 In her last novel, George Eliot took the historical model of Middlemarch one step further into the vatic or prophetic. Middlemarch had reached beyond "realism" into a highly articulated symbolic structure of what U. C. Knoepflmacher terms a "new reality" "fusing fact and myth."2 In Daniel Deronda George Eliot extended the meaning of myth into "Utopian pictures." In a sense, attempting to summarize the history of the Western world and adumbrate its future, showing how "processes . . . have been repeated again and again," she had reverted to the rather abstract formulation of her first novel, Scenes of Clerical Life.3 Deronda, to be sure, is no Amos Barton or Mr. Gilfil, but, as each of these characters had been created from a dogmatic standpoint, so also Deronda (as critics never tire of telling us) is as much a mouthpiece as dramatic character. James again observed acutely that George Eliot proceeds "from the abstract to the concrete," 4 and most critics agree that Deronda is inconcrete to the point of vapidity. Few of these critics have come up with suggestions as to why Eliot created Deronda the way she did.5 I would like to make a few tentative suggestions, and I'd like to begin with the idea that in Daniel Deronda Eliot's emotional life comes full circle. Its Evangelical origins are transformed into an attempted affirmative consummation of all her aspirations and hopes for mankind. In Daniel Deronda she tried to pull together the parts of a world that had been shattered when she lost her faith in transcendentalism, a loss that forced the burden of meaning on the individual mundane consciousness. George Eliot had never really reconciled herself to that loss, any more than she had reconciled herself to her original sin of disobeying her father and alienating her brother. Kierkegaard's roughly contemporary solution to the same problem of alienation was to elevate the absurd and the paradox against despair. Feuerbach's new form of secular religion, however, was more congenial to George Eliot's conservative-reforming intellect. And yet Kierkegaard can help us understand Deronda. In Fear and Trembling Kierkegaard says that "the ethical as such is