I take my title from a comment by Mordecai in the 'Hand and Banner' discussion. He argues that "the sons of Judah have to choose that God may again choose them" (538). This question of chosenness connects with our discussions on Tuesday, our Kaufmann reading for today, and with larger questions of how race, religion, inheritance, history, nation, and desire are related to agency in the novel.
Consider these broad suggestions/questions for discussion either here or in class.
1) Does Kaufmann's reading of the relation between Jewishness and Englishness change how we might read this same relation in Deronda (the novel) and in Deronda the character? More broadly, what impact does the discourse of Jewish nationality have on our conversation about the anxieties / fantasies about the cosmopolitan / unassimilable Jew within the British state?
2) We briefly discussed the relationship between Jewishness and biological (specifically maternal) ties in the last class. First, think about whether, in today's reading, we see that discourse deployed and for what purpose. Second, think about the moment Sir Hugo reveals he is not Deronda's father. what do you make of the description by the narrator: "After a silence in which Deronda felt like one whose creed is gone before he has religiously embraced another, the baronet said..." How is inheritance figured here? Does the idea of "religiously embrac[ing]" a "creed" suggest a kind of agency while also aligning it with circumstances (birth) outside one's control?
3) "And Gwendolen"? Eliot asks at the beginning of Ch. 45 (echoing her line in Middlemarch, "But why always Dorthea"). What do you make of how agency and ethics are related in Gwendolyn's conversations with Deronda. I'm specifically thinking of pp. 563. On a related note, the (inevitable) disconnect between Gwendolen's projected sense of her importance to Deronda (as well as Grandcourt's level of knowledge) and her actual importance to him and the development of the plot also brings up problems of agency and control. See the narrator's discussion of projection on p. 547. But, also think about how the novel theorizes Grandcourt's power and Gwendolen's own control (or lack thereof) of her own desires and fantasies, as well as how she represents that control (see 606).
4) Broadly related to agency is the question of national aspiration, but I want you to be thinking about the relationship among history, chosenness, choice, inheritance, and national identity. Moreover please think about the way in which the nation and the body are often linked by Mordecai. What kinds of embodiments and re-embodiments does this novel imagine? We'll talk more too about the way assimilation and difference are figured in that conversation.
That's all for now!
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In response to your first question, Dan, it seems like Kaufman's identification that the Jewish and English discourses are "intertwined and overlapping" does something to the way we read the novel (obviously)—especially if we're thinking about it in postcolonial terms. I'm thinking specifically about Fredric Jameson's claim in "Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism" that "[a]ll third-world texts are necessarily ... allegorical." More directly, Jameson states that "they are to be read as ... national allegories, even when, or perhaps I should say, particularly when their forms develop out of predominantly western machineries of representation, such as the novel." Now, this notion gets muddied in a text that is not a 'third-world' text; however, the way Leavis breaks the text in two seems to suggest that he reads the novel as one part English and one part 'third-world' (possibly?). To bring this back around, Kaufman's suggesting that we *must* read it as a novel. This seems to make sense; after all, it is a novel. In that case, the first section and the [o]ther section must be coupled, making it something of a national allegory—only the original First World Country is one being allegorized.
ReplyDeleteI think a type of Shelley's necessarianism, which is essentially determinism, is significant in all life "choices" in this novel. There is a creepy allusion to Shelley coming up.
ReplyDeleteAlso about embodiment, Eliot quotes Heine discussing Swedenborg in her essay. Swedenborg wrote about a New Jerusalem and was really big on ideal intersubjectivity. I don't have my Swedenborg notes here, but E.Barrett Browning describes Swedenborg's central doctrine,"Anthropomorphism, universal in application"
My simple, simplistic answers: 1.Deronda’s Jewishness might be nested in his Britishness, as long as he comes back.
2.Does this determinism stem from the surrounding society instead of his birth? In the narrator’s eyes being able to choose one’s religion seems to be a matter of agency within society, not a matter of agency against biology, but in Deronda’s eyes it might be biologically determined, especially since he is missing his biological parents.
3.Gwendolen gives her agency to Deronda (was this said in class? ).
4.Spirituality is grounded in particularity, since Zion doesn’t exist yet—Mordecai sees potentiality and Jewish spirituality embodied in Deronda.