Epilogue: Historical Consciousness and the Intellectual

Abstract

National consciousness, Eliot believes, is the medium of the individual mind. The word ‘medium’ can mean both a ‘[pervading] or enveloping substance … one’s environment, conditions of life’ and an ‘intermediate agency, means, instrument or channel’ (OED). It is when national consciousness is understood in both these senses that Deronda can develop and realize his cultural ambition. To re-create through reforming existing tradition defines the vital role that Eliot sets for the Jewish national leaders, unsatisfactory though their oft-criticized characterization may be. This is to say that the reviving capacity of Jewish communal memory relies primarily on ‘a number of distinct selves capable of social communication’.¹ In many ways, Mordecai and Deronda are the true bearers of their national heritage, and perhaps the only individuals within the fictional Jewish community who are in the position to shape or reshape it. Their commitment takes the form of ‘action, choice, resolved memory’, what may ‘help to will our own better future’ (DD, 42:499). Daniel Deronda thus continues Eliot’s lifelong exploration into the propensities and potentialities of individuals vis-à-vis communal traditions by which they are inexorably determined — what Comte calls ‘[the] organization of the reaction of will against Necessity’ (GEN, I, 170).

We must be patient with the inevitable makeshift of our human thinking, whether in its sum total or in the separate minds that have made the sum.

(George Eliot, DD, 41:478)