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PARTISAN REVIEW
The marriage then is the dramatized realization of modes of life,
systems of value, social relationships that George Eliot had come to
despise. No explicit political or social intent is at work here: George
Eliot was not an ideological novelist. But that she wrote with a strong
awareness of what her vision of society implied, there is no reason
to
doubt.
A glance at some of the subsidiary characters should reinforce this
opinion. Lush, Grandcourt's minion, the pleasure-loving dog he takes
pleasure in kicking, has not the slightest illusion about Grandcourt's
ways; he acquiesces in them to keep his creature comforts, as in other
circumstances he might bow to a party committee or a corporate board.
Sir Hugo Mallinger, Deronda's foster-father, is a good-natured, slack–
minded man whose "worldliness" consists in seeing much of the
world's ugliness for what it is, yet not at all discommoding himself in
behalf of a remedy. He forms no opposition to Grandcourt's values.
And Gascoigne, the Rector who is Gwendolen's uncle, is a man of
decency, but so conventional in his judgments, so acquiescent to the
powers that be, that he comes in effect to serve as an enabler of the
wretched marriage. He thinks of it
as a sort of public affair; perhaps there were ways in which it might
even strengthen the Establishment. To the Rector, whose father
(nobody would have suspected it, and nobody was told) had risen to
be a provincial com-dealer, aristocratic heirship resembled regal
heirship in excepting its possessor from the ordinary standard of
moral judgments. Grandcourt, the almost certain baronet, the prob–
able peer, was to be ranged with pu.blic personages, and was a match
to be accepted on broad general grounds national and ecclesiastical.
Precisely this passage has been cited by F. R. Leavis in order to
show that George Eliot regards the Rector as "a fine figure of a man"
and, what is more, that "there may be snobbery that isn't merely
ignoble" (what kind Leavis neglects to say). Aware, nevertheless, of
how bitingly sharp Eliot's style is here, Leavis adds: "There is
irony ... but this is not satire." Very well, we shall not quarrel about a
word.
It
is irony, but so severe it leaves nothing
to
the claim that the
Rector, in his not "merely ignoble" snobbery, serves as anything but an
accessary to a human violation.
No; the English side of
Daniel Deronda
projects a sweeping moral–
social criticism. The world of Grandcourt, to which Gwendolen
submits herself and
to
which her friends and relatives urge her to
submit herself, is "an empire of Fear," where the spirit is crushed by
