Abstract
The concluding words of the last chapter are of course uttered by an expatriate. Like so many of James’s ‘Europeans’, Madame Merle is in fact American. It is true that his early international novel The American tends to polarise Americans and Europeans, innocence and Old-Worldliness; but thereafter the famous ‘international theme’ blurs many such distinctions. James is clearly fascinated by the expatriate’s attraction to an antecedent culture: by the way he makes it a mode for his own life, but, also, very centrally, by the choice involved in adopting it.
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Notes
Martin Buber, I and Thou, tr. Walter Kaufmann (Edinburgh: T. and T. Clark, 1970) p. 54.
William Baker, George Eliot and Judaism (Salzburg: Universität Salzburg, 1975). My own sketchy account is much indebted to Baker’s detailed work. See also Graham Handley, Introduction to the Clarendon Edition of Daniel Deronda.
Gillian Beer, Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Fiction (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983).
Ludwig Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, tr. Marian Evans [George Eliot], 2nd edn (London: Trübner, 1881) p. 112.
Cecil Roth, A History of the Jews (New York: Schocken, 1970) ch. 29.
See ibid., book v; and, on earlier developments, Michael A. Meyer, The Origins of the Modern Jew: Jewish Identity and European Culture in Germany, 1749–1824 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1967).
Jean-Paul Sartre, Anti-Semite and Jew, tr. George J. Becker (New York: Schocken, 1965) pp. 78–9.
Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism and Humanism, tr. Philip Mairet (London: Eyre Methuen, 1973) p. 55.
Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, tr. Hazel E. Barnes (New York: Philosophical Library, [1985]) p. 440.
For a discussion of Daniel Deronda and existentialism, see Jean Sudrann, ‘Daniel Deronda and the Landscape of Exile’, English Literary History, XXXVII (1970) pp. 433–55.
Compare F. R. Leavis on the novel’s ‘fairly neatly separable masses’ — The Great Tradition (Harmondsworth: Pelican, 1972) p. 97 — with Maurice Beebe, ‘“Visions are Creators”: The Unity of Daniel Deronda’, Boston University Studies in English, I (1955) pp. 166–77,
and David R. Carroll, ‘The Unity of Daniel Deronda’, Essays in Criticism, IX (1959) pp. 369–80.
Louis Jacobs, A Jewish Theology (New York: Behrman House, 1973).
G. H. Lewes, Problems of Life and Mind. First Series: The Foundations of a Creed, 2 vols (London: Trübner, 1874–5) I, pp. 144–5; cited in Shuttleworth, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Science, p. 20.
G. H. Lewes, Problems of Life and Mind. Third Series, 2 vols (London: Trübner, 1879) II, p. 365; cited in Shuttleworth, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Science, p. 20.
G. H. Lewes, ‘Spiritualism and Materialism’, Fortnightly Review, n.s., XIX (1876) p. 716; cited in Shuttleworth, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Science, p. 20.
William James, ‘The Dilemma of Determinism’, in The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979) p. 117.
S. L. Goldberg, ‘Morality and Literature; with some Reflections on Daniel Deronda’, in Critical Review, XXII (1980) pp. 3–20 (quotation from p. 5).
See Dorrit Cohn, Transparent Minds: Narrative Modes for Presenting Consciousness in Fiction (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978) ch. 3.
Ernest Jones, Sigmund Freud: Life and Work, 3 vols (London: Hogarth Press, 1953–7) I, p. 191.
Lionel Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity (London: Oxford University Press, 1972).
Julius Guttmann, Philosophies of Judaism, tr. D. W. Silverman (New York: Schocken, 1973) pp. 143–4.
Harold Bloom, Kabbalah and Criticism (New York: Continuum, 1983) and The Breaking of the Vessels; Gershom Scholem, ‘Kabbalah’, in Encyclopaedia Judaica.
Cynthia Chase, ‘The Decomposition of the Elephants: Double-Reading Daniel Deronda’, in PMLA, XCIII, no. 2 (Mar 1978) pp. 215–27.
Lionel Trilling, Speaking of Literature and Society, ed. Diana Trilling (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982) p. 75.
Edgar Rosenberg, From Shylock to Svengali: Jewish Stereotypes in English Fiction (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1960) p. 152.
Wolfgang Iser, The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978).
Christian D. Ginsburg, The Kabbalah: Its Doctrines, Development, and Literature (London: George Routledge and Sons, 1925) p. 112.
The title of Tony Tanner’s well-known article, repr. in Tony Tanner (ed.), Henry James: Modern Judgements (London: Macmillan, 1968).
Umberto Eco, A Theory of Semiotics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1979).
T. S. Eliot, ‘In Memory’, Little Review, V, no. 4 (Aug 1918) p. 46.
See Dorothea Krook, The Ordeal of Consciousness in Henry James (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1962);
Stephen Donadio, Nietzsche, Henry James, and the Artistic Will (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978);
William Gass, Fiction and the Figures of Life (New York: Knopf, 1970);
J. H. Raleigh, ‘Henry James: The Poetics of Empiricism’, in Tanner (ed.), Henry James: Modern Judgements; Armstrong, The Phenomenology of Henry James; and Richard A. Hocks, Henry James and Pragmatic Thought: A Study in the Relationship between the Philosophy of William James and the Literature of Henry James (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1974). Other influences on James’s views were clearly the transcendentalists, the Puritans and their successors, and the French Naturalists.
For a general introduction to William James’s life and thought, see Ralph Barton Perry, The Thought and Character of William James (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1935).
Henry James, The Notebooks of Henry James, ed. F. O. Matthiessen and Kenneth B. Murdock (New York: Oxford University Press, 1947) p. 15.
Ruth Bernard Yeazell, Language and Knowledge in the Late Novels of Henry James (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976) ch. 2.
This account is indebted to Robert Liddell’s The Novels of George Eliot (London: Duckworth, 1977).
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© 1986 Richard Freadman
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Freadman, R. (1986). Choice: Daniel Deronda and The Portrait of a Lady. In: Eliot, James and the Fictional Self. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-18444-6_4
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