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Daniel Deronda
2024/25 Group Reads - Archive
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Daniel Deronda 2024: Week 05: Feb 4-10: Chapters 25-29
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At this point in time, I could not predict the future for Gwen and Grandcourt. They both view marriage as an interaction where one seeks to have the upperhand while fending your partner's (opponents'?) attempts to do the same. While, they appear to both be qualified to win any battle, they both seem to prefer a partner who is not a pushover, who stands up for themselves. While they seem even matched, even well-matched, Grandcourt has the upperhand because the law provides it. He can even have Gwendolyn institutionalized if he ever gets upset with the hand he's drawnI do know that I found satisfaction in seeing Gwendolyn and Daniel interact. As with Middlemarch, I enjoy books that have two protagonists, especially male and a female ones, that pursue their own storylines as it provides more plot to read. But I find I enjoy these books the most when the two major protagonists' storylines interact.
Whew! The scene where Gwendolen and Daniel meet is downright steamy by Victorian standards. Telling that Eliot chose an epigraph by Walt Whitman for the chapter—those two were clearly “singing the body electric.”And after all she found herself under an inward compulsion to notice him; everything else was automatic performance of an habitual part.
Her thoughts are the voice of an uneasy longing to be judged by Deronda with an unmixed admiration, and she feels that she had plunged into this mutual understanding.
Grandcourt’s kiss on the neck just before this meeting clearly awakened some scary feelings in her, so she was primed for this sudden, overwhelming attraction.
We get less of Deronda’s feelings or thoughts in the moment, and it may be that his ethical judgments may put a brake on attraction. But it seems like an explosive situation.
We certainly get a taste of what an unpleasant character Grandcourt is in the section, especially early on. His giving £500 to Gascoigne for Mrs. Davilow’s use seems like a trick to keep Gwendolen under control—I’d be surprised if he ever gave another penny for her support or the girls’ dowries. Throughout he doles out just enough in word and deed line to keep Gwendolen on the hook and not an inch more; she is surely in for an unpleasant shock once she is legally his. His treatment of her is likened to to breaking a horse.
I think Gwendolen is getting her first intimations that she’s in over her head, what with her nightmares and the image of being on a chariot moving at top speed and her question to her mother about men having children before marriage. Her mother is certainly negligent in not introducing her daughter to life’s seamier realities before marriage to a man of the world like Grandcourt. But in her own gentle way, Mrs. Davilow is using Gwendolen as much as Gwendolen and Grandcourt and Lush are using one another: she is accepting a clearly dangerous engagement because it makes her own life more secure. They are all blinded by self-interest.
Meanwhile, we get the clearest description yet of Deronda’s character: “Persons attracted him, as Hans Meyrick had done, in proportion to the possibility of his defending them, rescuing them, telling upon their lives with some sort of redeeming influence”—in short, he has what we call today a savior complex, with all the dubious virtue that term implies.
Mod
It's not clear to me how much of Grandcourt's character has been revealed to Gwendolen and her mother and family-we see it in his treatment of lush and the dog and his lack of money and his mistress, but other than the last item (which I don't think Gwendolen discussed with anyone else) does the family know of his personality and financial problems?
No, they don’t know the specifics, but Mrs. Davilow knows her daughter has concerns and she is making a deliberate choice not to look deeper. She has had every opportunity to understand that it’s not a love match but closes her eyes. When Gwendolen asks about men having children before marriage, she shies away from a subject that makes her uncomfortable when it’s her clear responsibility to introduce her daughter to the facts of life before marriage. Mr. Gascoigne forgoes the opportunity to explore Grandcourt’s finances by negotiating a settlement on Gwendolen—definitely an act of negligence on the part of someone in the position of guardian. None of the adults around her chooses to do due diligence about him, though he doesn’t present as an appealing personality in public settings. They choose to see him in the way that suits their best interests. So many derelictions of duty.
How would Uncle Gascoigne go about such an investigation of Grandcourt? I figured that he is a wealthy man and and an heir, what would he even be able to find out?I felt so much for Gwendolyn the night before and the day of the proposal, imagining myself in such a moral conundrum. Of course it's wrong but... Better that than to live in poverty... Would she dare to bring it up? (No...).
Ugh. I remempthe scenes from Gone with the Wind when Scarlett sews a dress made from green curtains in the hopes she can re-activate Rhett's admiration for her.
Isn't it Mrs. Davilow's job, now that Gwendolyn is engaged, to explain the birds and the bees to her daughter?
How else would she find this out... I doubt cousin Anne or neighbor Miss Appleton (? the one who has fallen in love with the musician) have explained the... Facts of Life to her.
Mrs. Davilow seems quite intimidated by her own daughter.
Frances wrote: "Does the novel still read like a romantic novel of love and marriage, or is there another undercurrent felt by the reader?."Eliot did not write 'romantic novels of love and marriage', so I have expected something more from the beginning. I am often reminded of Middlemarch: to my mind, both are novels about ambition and one's goal in life. In Middlemarch, the 'grand' ambitions were present from the beginning, but are for the most part frustrated (Dorothea, Lydgate), so I am curious what will happen here - with protagonists who have no clear ambitions (yet).
’ Omitting the cigar, you might have imagined him a portrait by Moroni, who would have rendered wonderfully the impenetrable gaze and air of distinction; and a portrait by that great master would have been quite as lively a companion as Grandcourt was disposed to be.’I looked for a Moroni portrait that best fitted Grandcourt and whittled it down to these three. Putting to one side the hair colour, I have my favourite.
I thoroughly enjoyed this section. There was a great deal of tension in the proposal scenes and some spark between Deronda and Gwendolen, but my favourite scenes continue to be the nasty conversations between Grandcourt and Lush. What a pair of characters.One thing I very much enjoy is how we the readers are able to watch Gwendolen walk into this trap, with just enough information to suspect she will be made very, very miserable once she no longer has the power to withhold something from him.
At the same time, I found Gwendolen's dark night of the soul convincing, as she rationalizes herself out of positions she was previously firm on. Her choice is part-selfish, part-altruism and part attraction (she seems attracted to Grandcourt's coldness, in keeping with her general shrinking from most men).
Abigail, I'm curious about your last comment on Mr Gascoigne. As I understand it, he should be negotiating some fixed income settled on Gwendolen?
I think it is in this section where the novel really begins. Before these chapters it had all seemed introductory, but now, with Gwendolen finally meeting Deronda and agreeing to marry Grandcourt, the fireworks have been lit and the fuses are slowly burning.As Abigail mentioned, Gwendolen’s reaction to Deronda was nothing short of electric, or maybe electro-magnetic. Her attraction to him was irresistible, wherever he was, whatever he was doing whilst at Diplow.
’ Why did she care so much about the opinion of this man who was "nothing of any consequence"? She had no time to find the reason—she was too much engaged in caring…
…….. "I wonder what he thinks of me, really? He must have felt interested in me, else he would not have sent me my necklace. I wonder what he thinks of my marriage? What notions has he to make him so grave about things? Why is he come to Diplow?" These questions ran in her mind as the voice of an uneasy longing to be judged by Deronda with unmixed admiration—a longing which had had its seed in her first resentment at his critical glance.’
This sounds much more than physical attraction, more like a type of love that Gwendolen has never experienced before and therefore can’t understand. Yes, I think Gwendolen has fallen in love with Deronda shortly after accepting Grandcourt for a husband, but she is confused and hardly aware of it.
Even Gwendolen’s comparison of the voices of the two men point towards it.
’ His (Deronda’s) voice, heard now for the first time, was to Grandcourt's toneless drawl, which had been in her ears every day, as the deep notes of a violoncello to the broken discourse of poultry and other lazy gentry in the afternoon sunshine. ‘
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7j_f4...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZG3Nl...
Both Grandcourt’s and Gwendolen’s reasons for marrying were of a worrying kind for their future. Gwendolen had momentarily tried to convince herself that it was for ‘mama’s sake,’ but she knew full well the real reasons were for the thrills of riding Criterion and the other trappings of luxury. And her promise to Mrs. Glasher was just thrown out of the window, like most of her other principles, when Grandcourt came, sat and stared at her.
Grandcourt’s reasons were even worse.
’ He meant to be master of a woman who would have liked to master him, and who perhaps would have been capable of mastering another man.’
I thought that his plan was to treat her like one of his dogs. But no, it would be like one of his horses.
’ She had been brought to accept him in spite of everything—brought to kneel down like a horse under training for the arena, though she might have an objection to it all the while. On the whole, Grandcourt got more pleasure out of this notion than he could have done out of winning a girl of whom he was sure that she had a strong inclination for him personally.’
So Grandcourt's intention was to break her in like some frisky filly to his ways and expectations. Well, Gwendolen will certainly put up a fight, but is she heading into a maelstrom far worse than the one she left behind?
Trev wrote: "This sounds much more than physical attraction, more like a type of love that Gwendolen has never experienced before and therefore can’t understand. "I wonder whether I would call it 'love' at this point: I rather think it's a kind of fascination; this is the first man Gwendolen meets who is outside her mostly deprecative view of men in general, someone who seems to be 'more' and beyond her understanding. - Love, I think, is one of the possible reactions to such a fascination (she is almost as likely to start hating him at this point)
btw - thank you, Trev, for the portraits. These men paid Moroni to paint them, which means they had no problem with looking cold, arrogant and disdainful. They must have seen it as a desirable quality in themselves - just as Grandcourt does. The outward resemblance does not matter as much here as the similarity of personalities.
I don't find rich men generally have a problem with looking cold, arrogant and disdainful in pictures!
Emily wrote: "Abigail, I’m curious about your comment on Mr. Gascoigne..."When a woman and man of this class agreed to marry, it was typical for the parents of the bride to provide a dowry, a cash sum or possibly an invested sum of money that earned a fixed interest. That money would be under the groom’s control, though there might be additional money from an inheritance that the bride might be able to use. In return, the father of the bride would expect to have all the groom’s finances laid out and they would negotiate what money the bride would recrive as income and what she would inherit if her husband predeceased her. (If they were rich enough, this would be done through intermediaries.) Since Gwendolen has no father, that role should have been assumed by Gascoigne. But he makes the (feeble, to my mind) excuse that since Gwendolen is now penniless and there is no dowry (not that there ever was), it would be inappropriate to ask that Grandcourt settle money on her. Basically, he chooses to take the optimistic view that Grandcourt must love her because he proposed after knowing she had nothing, so he goes on blind trust that Grandcourt will provide for her. But it’s extraordinarily rash to do that because Gwendolen will be utterly dependent on Grandcourt’s charity, with no recourse if he tires of her.
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Oh Trev you cracked me up with the c&c videos, thank you!
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I like how the human tendency to betray our principles for an easier life shows up. And we also like to find an unselfish reason to support what we already want to do, like Gwendolen saying she is doing this for her mother.
The "I have to marry money to save my property/family" trope comes up in a lot of Regency and Victorian romances. It featured in the TV series of Sanditon. Then there is the surprisingly humorous book by Edith Wharton, The Glimpses of the Moon, where a young couple wants to be together, but they are both poor. They agree they will get married so that they can live for a while off the wedding presents and invitations for stays with their friends. Then when one of them gets a better offer, they will divorce. It doesn't quite work out that way.
… her dread of wrong-doing, which was vague, it was true, and aloof from the daily details of her life, but not the less strong. Whatever was accepted as consistent with being a lady she had no scruple about; but from the dim region of what was called disgraceful, wrong, guilty, she shrunk with mingled pride and terror; and even apart from shame, her feeling would have made her place any deliberate injury of another in the region of guilt.I felt that this is an essential passage about Gwendolen: she has a kind of conscience beneath all her self-centred mannerisms, a dull, under-developed feeling of right and wrong. It is overwritten by more practical considerations, and replaced by ‘what others would say’ in this context, but it emerges here - for the first time? - and I am curious to see how it develops. There is a little more to Gwendolen than the ’spoiled child’.
Robin P wrote: "My understanding is that 19th century marriage between property owners didn't necessarily have anything to do with love or fidelity, either before or after marriage. At least in this case, Grandcou..."I enjoyed the The Glimpses of the Moon, as I have enjoyed many novels by Edith Wharton ( and Trollope by the way.)
Abigail, I liked the way you explained the financial aspect of an impending marriage and I agree with you about how badly her uncle has let Gwendolen down. From now on she needs all the help she can get . My only addition would be that there were usually solicitors/lawyers involved from both sides who perused the finances of each party and agreed the settlements. Maybe that is yet to come as it was often a conditional aspect of the engagement contract. The big financial issue for me is that Gwendolen thinks Grandcourt is rich enough to give her everything she wants, but we know otherwise.
sabagrey wrote: "Trev wrote: "This sounds much more than physical attraction, more like a type of love that Gwendolen has never experienced before and therefore can’t understand. "I wonder whether I would call it..."
You could be right and I may also be a bit premature, but it was her total preoccupation with him that led me to that conclusion. Grandcourt paled into insignificance for her when he was around.
Mod
sabagrey wrote: "… her dread of wrong-doing, which was vague, it was true, and aloof from the daily details of her life, but not the less strong. ………. I felt that this is an essential passage about Gwendolen: she has a kind of conscience beneath all her self-centred mannerisms, a dull, under-developed feeling of right and wrong.."
I had that passage underlined also, along with this…
’ These obvious, futile thoughts of what might have been, made a new epoch for Gwendolen. She, whose unquestionable habit it had been to take the best that came to her for less than her own claim, had now to see the position which tempted her in a new light, as a hard, unfair exclusion of others.’
She was thinking about Deronda and his claim to Grandcourt’s inheritance. But this new way of thinking, this chink of light was Gwendolen caring about the plight of others and revealing her conscience. There is a possibility that Gwendolen can develop kindness and empathy.
Mod
I'm a bit mystified at the lack of sympathy for Gwendolen's change in fortune. I didn't find her position all that enviable before, being of a certain class but with no independence within it. Now she's sliding out of that class. Most of us today would be pretty unhappy to slide out of our current social sphere, even if it didn't entail starving to death. And as a woman, her options on what to do now are pretty limited.I expect quite a few people, faced with this choice, would talk themselves into accepting Grandcourt.
I’m not sure it’s so much a lack of sympathy for her change of fortune as it is a lack of sympathy for her attitudes toward others, which make it harder to care for her as a person. Eliot is certainly doing a good job of complicating our reactions to her, however.
Mod
Then there are books like Snobs by Julian Fellowes, where the well-bred heroine leaves her rich fiancee to go off with the starving artist, only to find it's not so romantic in daily life.
Robin P wrote: "It reminded me of The Group, where a young woman realizes how much easier her life could be if she marries a doctor, in spite of all her determination to be independent. Or in a TV ex..."There is someone with a similar character to Gwendolen’s in The Claverings by Anthony Trollope. If you have read it, you probably know who I mean.
Mod
I've read a lot of Trollope but I don't think I've read that one.
I think I know who you mean, Trev. While reading the Claverings I was reminded of Gwendolen.
The paragraph where Grandcourt thinks of a horse that has been made to kneel is not only disgusting but completely confirms his twisted disdain for women and the likelihood that he will abuse Gwendolen as necessary to gain mastery over her. He is a snake. Lush may not be much better, but I wonder if he will ultimately have his revenge on Grandcourt in some devastating way (or maybe I just hope that happens). I also agree that both Mr. Gascoigne and Mrs. Davilow are neglecting Gwendolen’s best interests. He is likely glad to have the burden taken off his shoulders, and she is once again not willing to cross her commanding daughter. Gwendolen continues to exhibit remarkable naïveté in her ideas about marriage, and her spark of attraction to DeRonda should complicate things marvelously! One thing I’ve noticed in this section is that Gwendolen’s half-sisters are totally unimportant in the story and rarely mentioned. I have never noticed that in any other Eliot novel.
Nancy wrote: "Gwendolen’s half-sisters are totally unimportant in the story and rarely mentioned. ."Thank you for pointing this out. Eliot shows us these girls only from Gwendolen's (and maybe in part also her mother's) viewpoint: 'superfluous', Gwendolen thinks at one point. She is also clearly her mother's favourite. Poor girls.
I've read and enjoyed The Glimpses of the Moon, The Group and The Claverings. I guess that means I should read Snobs by Julian Fellowes.Fellowes is a big Wharton and Trollope fan. I have watched two of Fellowes' TV shows that have Wharton influences, The Gilded Age and Downton Abbey, along with his TV adaptation of Trollope's Doctor Thorne. I don't know what he thinks of Mary McCarthy though.
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The Readers Review: Literature from 1714 to 1910
Books mentioned in this topic
Doctor Thorne (other topics)The Glimpses of the Moon (other topics)
The Group (other topics)
Snobs (other topics)
The Claverings (other topics)
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Authors mentioned in this topic
Julian Fellowes (other topics)Julian Fellowes (other topics)
This section seems to be primarily to watch the engagement play out, and to learn of what its repercussions may be on a number of peripheral characters as well-the rest of the family at Offendene, Lush, Sir Hugo and Deronda himself.
This section presents several points of view of the unfolding engagement. What is your sense of Grandcourt at this time? He presents as superficial and not particularly in love, so why does he choose a penniless woman when he is clearly in need of money? Grandcourt also seems immensely skilled at pleasing Gwendolen- moderating his shows of affection, bringing her her own horse and riding with her regularly, and supporting her mother and sisters. How do you think this will play out after the wedding?
Deronda and Gwendolen are formally introduced for the first time. How does this turn out? Does the novel still read like a romantic novel of love and marriage, or is there another undercurrent felt by the reader?
Please share your thoughts on this section.