Knowledge: Middlemarch and The Golden Bowl

Abstract

The theme of choice in Daniel Deronda and The Portrait of a Lady is much complicated by the problem of personal displacement; for a displaced person, be it an unwitting Jew or an expatriate American, must often choose at a certain self-conscious remove from coercive or consoling cultural norms. This may mean that no clear guidance emerges from a dominant traditional perspective on conduct; that narratives linking the youthful and adult, or the public and private, personality are absent or insufficient; or, in a more general sense, that certain fundamental assumptions about the authority of the individual moral agent cease to obtain. Choices thus become either impossibly opaque or a matter of isolated and anxious existential self-determination. In George Eliot’s ‘Jewish novel’ the prescriptive spiritual continuity of Judaism must be revealed before Deronda can choose; Isabel Archer, by contrast, marries into an indefinite exile which dictates that she must largely make unaided choices. The expatriate, poised between a native and an adopted culture, may invoke the categorical imperative and do what seems appropriate on a rough scale of general moral propriety, but it is a wintry prospect, especially if your husband is constitutionally incapable of the Kantian sense of conscience.