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depicts through a hum of analysis, a kind of psychological paraphrase
that dramatizes impulse, whim, feeling, inhibition. It is Eliot who
speaks, her voice that we hear, but she is so close, both in sympathy and
irony, to Gwendolen that we can easily suppose we are "in" Gwendo–
len's consciousness. We come to know Gwendolen as a history of
reflection and confusion; we are privy to the evasions of her self, the
maneuvers of her will. Grandcourt, however, is done mainly from a
distance, through the pressure of his behavior on those near him. Eliot
is careful not to pretend to have tapped his inner being, for she knows
it is important to preserve a margin of opacity-if you wish, of mystery.
The important task of the novelist in creating a figure like Grandcourt
is not so much to explain him as to validate him: let the reader then
puzzle over what he signifies, whether he is even possible, so long as
there can be no doubt that he is
there.
(Deronda, by contrast, is
transparent, since in the scheme of the book he serves mostly as a
convenience, or inconvenience.) We know that Grandcourt is arrogant,
bored, intelligent-extremely intelligent; but we are not likely to make
the mistake of thinking we fully understand him.
Spider and fly meet: they must. At a country party, with Chinese
lanterns lighting up a conservatory, Grandcourt "languidly" asks
Gwendolen, "Do you like this sort of thing?" The next few sentences
strike a note to be repeated throughout the book:
If
the situation had been described to Gwendolen half an
hour before, she would have laughed heartily at it, and could only
have imagined herself returning a playful, satirical answer. But for
some mysterious reason-it was a mystery of which she had a faint
wondering consciousness-she dared not be satirical: she had begun
to
feel a wand over her that made her afraid of offending Grandcourt.
That "faint wondering consciousness" and the "mystery" behind
it will grow into Gwendolen's terror before her husband, the vibration
of what is felt as an inescapable submissiveness. George Eliot explores
this "mystery" but is too much the novelist simply to clear it up. Later
in their courtship, when it seems as if Gwendolen might refuse his
offer, we enter more deeply into Grandcourt's psychology:
At the moment his strongest wish was to be completely
master of this creature-this piquant combination of maidenliness
and mischief: that she knew things.which made her start away from
him, spurred him to triumph over that repugnance .. .
And a few pages later the full measure of Grandcourt's sadism is
