Victorian Fiction and the ''What If?

'' Theory: Heritage and Inheritance in Daniel Deronda Marion Helfer Wajngot Stockholm University Abstract The laws and the literature of a society both express and influence the attitudes and norms of its members. The law, however, has a conservative function, while literature can work to change opinions and, in the longer run, legal systems. This essay argues that legal discourse possesses an inherent narrative potential, giving rise to fictional stories that serve to investigate and expose the effects of particular laws. Like many other novels, George Eliots Daniel Deronda seems to construct its plot on the basis of the reiterated question But what if? exploring social and moral implications of inheritance law, in particular the principle of primogeniture. The two major strands of Eliots double plot, with Gwendolen Harleth and Daniel Deronda as the protagonists, together with the subplots involving a series of minor characters, embody four areas concerned with this theme: gambling; the duties that come with heritage; illegitimacy; and the conditions of women associated with a system based on privileging a male heir. By pressing the aesthetic effect of thematic recurrence as well as an element of readerly unease into the service of the ethical, this novel makes a powerful statement on the subject of inheritance. It may have contributed to social and political change, and counteracted the preserving effect of the law.

I
In the past decades, critics from Ian Watt to Kieran Dolin have explored the way fiction emulates the processes of legal procedures such as those of a court trial, and examined the dialectic relations between literature and law.1 While both the laws and the literature of a society express and influence the attitudes and norms of its members, the law seems to have a more conservative function, whereas literature can work to question and undermine prevalent attitudes, and thereby contribute to change. While acknowledging relations of causality in the effect of literature on the development of the legal system, this essay explores the opposite effect: laws giving rise to fiction like kernels out of which an infinite number of narratives may stem. Legal discourse has an inherent narrative potential2 in that each possible individual application of a law can give rise to a fictional story. George Eliots Daniel Deronda (1876) is one of many nineteenth-century novels that seem to be engendered out of the laws of inheritance or rather out of the legal practice of inheritance and wills that stemmed from the Common Laws endorsement of the primogeniture principle which had initially evolved out of the feudal system brought to England with the Norman Conquest. In Daniel Deronda, as in numerous other novels, this narrative potential is realized in more than one layer of the plot. The multiple stories that the novel comprises are built around one or two central issues that become a commentary on the law through presenting a spectrum of [End Page 29] situations to which it applies. It is as if Eliots novel, like many others, constructs its plots on the basis of the question, But what if? Each of these what ifs? pertains to a particular potential case that is latent in the law or legal practice. Novelists thus create fictional case studies which

explore specific potential consequences and social as well as moral implications of prevalent interpretations and applications of the law. The two major strands of Eliots double plot, with Gwendolen Harleth and Daniel Deronda as the protagonists, share a preoccupation with an inheritance issue that is based on privileging the male heir. In both plots, this theme serves as the trigger for action. From these two interrelated narratives, numerous minor ones branch off, each with a plot that is thematically related to them. The subplots or sub-narratives of the lives and problems of a series of minor characters embody various aspects of one or several of four areas of thematic concern: gambling, which is part of the action and also becomes a strong metaphor; the duty or vocation that to the mind of several of the characters comes with inheritance; the problematics of illegitimacy; and the conditions of women as associated with the prevalent system of inheritance. These issues are the common ground between Daniel Deronda and numerous other nineteenth-century works. In Victorian Conventions, John Reed names more than forty novels of this kind. We only need to consider the part played by inheritance in such well-known works as Wuthering Heights, Vanity Fair, David Copperfield, Bleak House, Our Mutual Friend, The Woman in White, The Moonstone, Felix Holt, or Henry Esmond in order to realize the proliferation of inheritance plots in Victorian fictional structures. While the preoccupation of literature with the transmission of material goods and spiritual knowledge between generations can be traced as far back as the Bible, it seems to be particularly prominent in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Reed discusses the inheritance motif in nineteenth-century fiction mainly in terms of a plot convenience, and as a way of either educating a lost heir to become more deserving or of pointing to more lasting rewards in a world to come (14345). Yet the more serious novels on his list (especially those written in the second half of the century), go far beyond the functional use of this tired convention (Reed 283): the topos of inheritance signals cultural patterns that the artistic community found gravely disturbing. A strand of criticism accompanies the representation of inheritance in Victorian novels. While plots are elegantly constructed around the topoi of birthright, entail, and usurpation, their ethical concerns are often opposed to the system. Daniel Deronda is one of many nineteenth-century [End Page 30] novels characterized by an ethical engagement with traditional wrongs through strategies that evoke the empathy of the reader, creating an emotional background for a rational reconsideration of social judgments and legal practices. Of more interest for plot construction than the actual right of the firstborn son to inherit the landed property and title of his father is often the possibility according to the 1540 Statute of Wills to disinherit such a son. However, the principle of primogeniture did not only remain the Common Law default rule in cases of intestacy but kept its place in common practice and attitudes, and in the construction of entails. The legal practice, originally part of the social power structure, was both a sign of and a reason for attitudes and thought patterns that became ingrained in society; in fiction, it served to shape the way plot constructions based on inheritance functioned in relation to ethical inquiry. The self-evident place that the idea of a rightful or natural heir held in the contemporary thought structure, and the assumptions about the connection between property, inheritance, and social stability, remained firm

through the mid-eighteen hundreds, but in the second half of the century novels saw intensifying ethical objections to the prevalent system (Dolin 20 and passim). The plots of Emily Bronts Wuthering Heights (1847) and William Makepeace Thackerays Vanity Fair (1848), to take two of the best-known mid-century novels, hinge on inheritance and show primogeniture to be firmly established as a naturalized or internalized way of viewing the passage of material wealth and class identity from one generation to another. Nelly Deans analeptic narrative is framed by Lockwoods noticing, on his first visit to Wuthering Heights, the name Hareton Earnshaw and the year 1500 inscribed above the main entrance, and, towards the end of the novel, by his account of the young Hareton Earnshaw in 1803 being taught to read and enabled to decipher the script over the door that will tell him of his inherited right to the property. The final view of the three gravestones, with its emphasis on peacefulness, further accentuates the return of a seemingly necessary equilibrium.3 John Sutherland has suggested that the reason Catherines ghost haunts Heathcliff is that she wishes to stop him from writing his will and disinheriting the children of those who have injured him. In the last analysis, Sutherland writes, Catherine reverts to type: she is the [End Page 31] mistress, he the outsider at Wuthering Heights. He may have a share of her grave, but not the Earnshaws family house (67). Here as in all tales that involve a usurper place, position, and possession can only be usurped if the notion of rightful possession or heritage is firmly established. The idea of an accepted order of succession permeates the novel and the world it embodies, and comes to the fore when the lawyer speaks to Nelly of the natural heir, that is, Hareton Earnshaw (Bront 143). The natural heir echoes the nomenclature of the law, which often speaks of heirs of the body (Macpherson 6, 23n). Thus the reader is made to feel that Heathcliffs intrusion is unnatural, and that Haretons condition when he is bereft of his heritage, including his status in the neighborhood, is not only unjust but against nature. The death of Daniel Derondas Henleigh Grandcourt, who is at least as evil in his way as Heathcliff,4 similarly appeals to the readers sense of justice, but while Heathcliffs demise re-establishes the traditional system, the death of Grandcourt eliminates the male heir selected by the testator in conformity with primogeniture, in favor of Sir Hugos daughters. The double inheritance plot in Vanity Fair, with the many characters that contend for the fortune of Miss Crawley, and the double-edged cutting off of George Osborne from his fathers will, is part of the novels general exposure of the vanity of human wishes and actions. Although in the end Pitt Crawley inherits both his fathers title and estate and his aunts fortune in what appears to be a satirical fulfillment of the principle that leaves everything to the oldest brother, Vanity Fair does not seem to attack the inheritance system per se. In later novels, however, we can sense Thackerays increasing dissatisfaction with conventions of wealth and inheritance, and, in particular, with the established rule of primogeniture, which he associates with current political debates regarding aristocracy and meritocracy. This is most evident in Henry Esmond (1852), and perhaps even more so in its sequel, The Virginians (1859). In the latter novel, the absurdities of the system are pointedly treated through the twins George and Harry Warrington, born within an hour of each other. Through

their mothers snobbish sense of rank and precedence, which makes her insist that the younger brother give the older one all the deference due to a firstborn son, the novel highlights the systems privileging of the older brother as a serious impediment to brotherly love. What if, this novel seems to ask, what if there were a case of two brothers almost [End Page 32] exactly of the same age and we have a law that makes brothers envious and suspicious of each other to the extent that a younger son can be expected to rejoice in the death of his older brother, and an older brother to be unable to trust the good will of his junior? Raising such questions, the novel compels its reader to consider the effects of laws whose validity is taken for granted. As Bernard Harrison suggests, the peculiar value of literature in a culture such as ours, the thing which really does make it essential to a civilized society, is its power to act as a standing rebuke and irritant to the dominant paradigm of knowledge (4). The test cases that imply such criticism do their work as particular instances of potential effects of the law, demonstrated in the individuality of fictional lives, in contrast to the general and generally-accepted legal rulings.5 The what if? cases provide concrete features that may be new to the reader and that demand both emotional and rational responsiveness. A novel that is carefully structured around mutually illuminating cases, all of them being developments of a particular law or legal practice, allows an alert reader the intellectual pleasure of registering and integrating such correspondences. Yet another kind of pleasure arises from the readers emotional involvement with the characters and their fate. This combination of intellectual and emotional pleasure motivates an ethical response. Harrison emphasizes the quality of fiction that brings the reader into close proximity with the mind and emotions of another. These particularities may be said to provide the answers to the what if? questions. They bring the reader close to an otherwise inaccessible experience (Carroll 36162). It is through the close experience of the details of the moral and emotional lives of literary characters that readers may enter the phase that Harrison calls dangerous, one that entails a change in the readers habitual thoughts (34). Literature can do this by setting our familiar words sedulously against one another in unheard-of contexts, creating alternative possibilities of construal (Harrison 16), eliciting and re-shaping our emotions, and affecting our reason (see also Nussbaum 38). Marie-Laure Ryan suggests something similar in her comparison of the experience of virtual reality to that of reading. Both, she claims, can [End Page 33] lead to immersion: readers are caught up in a story and when they experience emotions for the characters, they do not relate to these characters as literary creations nor as semiotic constructs, but as possible human beings (117). The verisimilitude of the unfamiliar combined with the destabilization of habitual patterns of thought are central features of the what if mode in fiction. In Daniel Deronda, as in much nineteenth-century fiction, there is a pattern of particular cases that form such dangerous prompting towards new ways of thought, specifically on the issue of inheritance.

II

Since its publication in 1876, Daniel Deronda has been read as two stories in one book. As late as 1998 Lisabeth During called it an internally split novel (68). However, in reference to a similar statement in a contemporary review, George Eliot herself wrote to a friend: I meant everything in the book to be related to everything else there (1955: 290). While it is true that Gwendolen Harleth has next to no contact with Derondas Jewish world, the novel achieves a certain unity through its concern with heritage in both parts of its plot, and through the related concern with the position of women in a social and legal system governed by the principle of primogeniture. Harold Fisch discusses the relation between the Gwendolen Harleth and Daniel Deronda parts of the novel in terms of irony. Gwendolens little life, private, personal, and domestic, is ironically set against the events of the larger world of politics, countries, and peoples in which Daniel plans to find his place (349), and a contrast is established between property, central to the English part of the plot, and spiritual heritage, central to the Jewish part. In terms of the inheritance motif, this distinction concerns family land and wealth as opposed to the collective heritage of the individual as part of a people or a nation. However, the split between the private and the public does not follow the English/Jewish axis. Whenever the notions of duty and vocation (see, among others, Toker 11630) go beyond the concerns of domestic life, they are organized on the basis of gender. They are reserved for men and related to heritage in both the English and the Jewish plotlines. In his centenary essay on Daniel Deronda, H. M Daleski discusses the novels imaginative unity of conception in terms of analogous situations: the opening chapter begins a series of occurrences of the motif of the forsaken child and the motif of pawning and redeeming that [End Page 34] will run through the novel as a whole (6869). In his analysis Daleski links these motifs to the theme of loss of inheritance (75) the owning and disowning of his title. But George Eliot, like other authors of her time, employed the theme to raise specific questions concerning the effects of contemporary inheritance practices: in Daniel Deronda these include the public duties that accompany the inheritance of landed property, the social exclusion and suffering of an illegitimate child, the political significance of the problems of a rich heiress, acceptance of spiritual leadership as a heritage, as well as the ethical implications of the gambling motif all of which she associated with an outdated system of inheritance that excluded and marginalized both men and women. In Daniel Deronda, the specific outcome of the prevalent legal customs reflected in the ill-advised will of the father of Derondas guardian, Sir Hugo Mallinger, is that Sir Hugo only has a life interest in his property: in the absence of a male heir, at his death everything will go to his nephew, Henleigh Grandcourt. The second inheritance plot, which concerns the heritage of Daniel Deronda (who grows up believing that he is Sir Hugos nephew, and later that he is his illegitimate son), also hinges on the privileged position of the male heir. When Deronda is finally revealed to be the son of a Jewish opera singer, the spiritual heritage of his maternal grandfather, which his mother has kept from him, seems to be antithetical to the material inheritance central to the Mallinger plot. However, the two plotlines have parallel thematic implications: for both Mr. Charisi, Derondas grandfather, and Sir Hugo heritage is linked to duty, and to the responsibility of transmitting heritage.

Of these two major test cases, the one concerning the inheritance of Sir Hugo Mallingers estates can be seen as modeled on the situation of the Bennet family in Jane Austens Pride and Prejudice (1813). In both novels the central property is entailed in such a way that at the death of the present holder, who has only daughters, the estate will go to the nephew or cousin, the next male in line. The ill-advised testators in both cases (just like the old uncle in Austens 1811 Sense and Sensibility) follow the principle of primogeniture, as does common law in default of a will. Daniel Deronda can thus be read as a psychological and ethical comment on legal issues that Pride and Prejudice treats differently. It may also be seen as one in a series of narrative comments on legal conditions that germinate out of the law itself. Both novels also depict the excited speculation that accompanies the arrival of a bachelor of independent means in a country neighborhood, evoking the sense of the narrowness of the gentry society. The following paragraph from Daniel Deronda, describing the [End Page 35] anticipation of Henleigh Grandcourts arrival at Diplow, is reminiscent of the well-known opening of Pride and Prejudice: Some readers of this history will doubtless regard it as incredible that people should construct matrimonial prospects on the mere report that a bachelor of good fortune and possibilities was coming within reach, and will reject the statement as a mere outflow of gall. . . . [T]he history in its present stage concerns only a few people in a corner of Wessex whose reputation, however, was unimpeached, and who, I am in the proud position of being able to state, were all on visiting terms with persons of rank. (1984: 76 [ch. 9]) Not only the content, but also the satirical tone seems to echo the earlier novel, with its underlying serious implications about the crucial significance of matrimony for women. The need to be on a constant look-out for matrimonial prospects is of course the result of the gentrys dwindling resources and of a system of inheritance that effectively excludes women. However, within the male world of patrilineal inheritance and entailment, the novels indicate a strong link between land and social obligations: land law, rather than marriage or class, is the ground upon which Austen works out the ways in which persons are, and ought to be, connected to others. Ultimately entailment is less interesting to her for the way it manages material relations than for the way it imagines ethical ones; but the link between ethics and the law is not, therefore, merely allegorical. What is entailed in Pride and Prejudice is an argument about short- and long-term obligations: an argument on behalf of a model of obligation whose durability and impersonality, whose extension through time and social space, is enabled by the technology at once conceptual and historical of entailment. (Macpherson 2) Like that of Pride and Prejudice, the plot of Daniel Deronda hinges on the principle of primogeniture and its mechanics; the notion of obligations closely linked to the concepts of inheritance and landed property underlies the ethical vision of both

works. While characters like Fitzwilliam Darcy and Sir Hugo Mallinger acknowledge and live according to the special responsibility that the ownership of land imposes, the detrimental effects of primogeniture apparent in Eliots novel spell out what is more implicitly felt in Austens work. That the obligations of entailment are not always met, while other obligations remain unacknowledged, [End Page 36] becomes evident in the metonymic chains of narrative in Daniel Deronda. This central test case, then, involves the application of primogeniture to the Mallinger estates through the will of Sir Hugos father, involving the disinheriting of Sir Hugos daughters, the expectations of his nephew Henleigh Grandcourt, and the further complications regarding the status of Grandcourts mistress and illegitimate children. The narrator links Sir Hugos irritation with his nephew with his concern for his family: In no case could Grandcourt have been a nephew after his own heart; but as the presumptive heir to the Mallinger estates he was the sign and embodiment of a chief grievance in the baronets life the want of a son to inherit the lands, in no portion of which had he himself more than a life-interest. . . [not even] Diplow, where Sir Hugo had lived and hunted through many a season in his younger years, and where his wife and daughters ought to have been able to retire after his death. (134 [ch. 15]) The chief grievance in the baronets life is the result of his fathers ill-advised will in favor of Grandcourt, who comes short not only as a person, but more particularly as the heir to great landed estates, with the responsibilities that accompany them. This grievance is at the bottom of several of the strands of the narrative: Sir Hugos efforts to buy Diplow, which bring Daniel into contact with Grandcourt and Gwendolen, Lady Mallingers feelings of inadequacy as a mother of daughters, and Daniels believing himself to be Sir Hugos illegitimate son. Sir Hugos own attitude to the responsibilities of a landowner is evident in his words to Daniel: I couldnt have loved you better if youd been my own only I should have been better pleased with thinking of you always as the future master of the Abbey instead of my fine nephew; and then you would have seen it necessary for you to take a political line (531 [ch. 50]). This assumption regarding the political obligations of the great landowner is at that point less self-evident than it used to be. Although not a Tory in his politics, Sir Hugo still embodies the principle that made his father formulate his will in such a way as to ensure that property, and thereby power, is concentrated in the hands of a few men. Sir Hugos strong wishes for Deronda to take on political work are ineffective exactly because Daniel is not an English landowner, and the duty to be involved with ruling the nation does not devolve on him in the same way. Sir Hugo is not particularly worried about blood and ancestry (he quotes Napoleon: Je serais un anctre (138 [ch. 15]), but if he had been able to make Daniel his heir, it would have been an obvious duty for the [End Page 37] younger man to enter politics and to have been at [his] elbow and pulling with [him] (149 [ch. 16]). Sir Hugos opinion of the importance of that kind of involvement is seconded by Mr. Gascoigne, Gwendolens uncle, while it is carefully made clear that Grandcourt, the heir, is not in parliament (470).

Gwendolens marriage to Grandcourt brings her into the plot of the Mallinger estates, and it is through her that the ethical aspects of many of the other test cases are woven into the narrative. While Gwendolen herself, immobilized in her position as Grandcourts wife, seems to epitomize female suffering and subjugation, various aspects of her situation and its relation to legal conditions are reflected in the lives and emotions of the other women characters: Lady Mallinger, Lydia Glasher, Mirah Lapidoth, Leonora Alcharisi, Mrs. Davilow, and to some extent the Arrowpoint women all struggle with their gendered role, rebelling or submitting to it in various ways. As a pendant, perhaps, we see Hans Meyericks mother and sisters, busy, content, and superlatively good. Gwendolens and Grandcourts marriage is shaped by her knowledge of the existence of his mistress and four illegitimate children, and by her broken promise to Lydia Glasher not to interfere with [her] wishes (128 [ch. 14]). When the two women meet, in the period of Grandcourts courtship, Gwendolen is struck by the claims of his illegitimate family and by the moral dubiousness of marrying a man with such a history but perhaps even more by Lydias person and the desperation of her appearance: it was as if some ghastly vision had come to her in a dream and said I am a womans life (128 [ch. 14]). This vision is echoed through the novel, as Gwendolen becomes less and less the mistress of her own fate. This process begins in the opening chapters, when Gwendolen, having left England for Leubronn in order to avoid Grandcourt, is confronted with the first event in the novel that is connected to inheritance. She finds out that her mother has lost the entire fortune inherited from her father through a bad investment. While obviously a plot device, Gwendolens struggle with her familys unexpected poverty is made to feed into the thematic concerns with womens lives and conditions, first through Mrs. Davilows complete inability to act for herself and her daughters in order to improve their situation. Before she finally accepts Grandcourt, Gwendolen looks around desperately for options that may allow her to avoid going out as a governess. Her turning to Herr Klesmer, the musician, to find out if she could make a career on the stage, becomes the first in a series of recurring stories about the singers vocation for a woman. The [End Page 38] obstacles to an independent course for women are highlighted through these metonymic chains. The cases of Gwendolen, who is not talented enough; Mirah, who nearly turns into a prostitute; and the one successful woman actress, Leonora Alcharisi, who sacrifices her relationship with her son in order to pursue her singing career, show that although music is a possible career for some, even for those endowed with the necessary talent the price of success is high, and a further case is made concerning socially-determined gender limitations. Gwendolens failure to find a way of providing for herself leads to her accepting Grandcourt in spite of what she knows about him. The detailed account of her growing remorse and anguish after this decision is what brings the reader to feel for the spoiled and self-willed young girl. One of George Eliots strong points is her ability to muster the readers sympathy for the less worthy characters and to make it clear that even their experience is grounds for a reconsideration of conventional judgments. While making it apparent that Gwendolens saving grace, her love and concern for her mother, is not operating at the moment of her great choice, the novel still enlists the readers empathy on behalf of this selfishly naive character. Gwendolens lack of real choice in the episode of the marriage proposal is subtly

demonstrated by the way she believes that she is going to refuse Grandcourt only to find herself accepting him. This lack of control echoes her mothers failure to do anything at all for herself and her daughters. The spectral image of Lydia Glasher as a womans life seems to haunt the novel in the shape of women who can do very little to direct the course of their own lives. One of the few women in the novel who do have power over their own destiny is Catherine Arrowpoint, whose story is an inverted reflection of Gwendolens. While the penniless Gwendolen is induced to accept a husband she does not love, and who is not eligible for her in ethical terms, Miss Arrowpoints parents want to dictate her choice of a husband because she is the heiress to a great fortune. Daleski associates her character with the motif of disowned children because her parents threaten to disinherit her if she insists on marrying Klesmer (75). Her case, however, also belongs to the novels exploration of the social consequences of inheritance practices: the woman is viewed as a means of placing inheritance rather than as an agent in her own right. Her parents manipulations demonstrate the tendency to work against contemporary sociopolitical changes through marriages between the landed gentry and members of the trading class. Yet when her father wants to persuade her not to marry Klesmer with the suggestion that the wealth she is to inherit [End Page 39] requires her to think of the nation and the public good the sharp Miss Arrowpoint retorts: Why is it to be expected of an heiress that she should carry the property gained in trade into the hands of a certain class? That seems to me a ridiculous mish-mash of superannuated customs and false ambition. I should call it a public evil. People had better make a new sort of public good by changing their ambitions. (211 [ch. 22]) The sympathy for Miss Arrowpoint built up in the preceding chapters contributes to a readerly acceptance of the destabilization of an established paradigm of which the principle of primogeniture is a part. She is ready to sacrifice her birthright for her love rather than be used to boost the waning fortunes of a nobleman, but her comment also shows an insightful rebellion against principles that have outlived their relevance in a society where the relations between money and rank are in a process of change. Gwendolen believes that her ability to manage people will make it possible for her to shape her marriage according to her wishes, yet she will soon be more like Lydia Glasher than Catherine Arrowpoint lacking control over her life. She becomes more and more preoccupied with Lydia and her children. Her story is connected to Daniels not only on the level of the plot but also thematically, through the concern with the status of illegitimate children. The wording of Daniels objection to gambling, our gain is anothers loss (28485) comes to her mind several times in relation to the wrong she perceives herself as having done to Lydia and her children: her gain in marrying Grandcourt is their loss (353, 382, 386). Indeed, Lydia Glasher says: Mr Grandcourt ought to marry me. He ought to make that boy his heir (128). Lydias life gamble has been founded on Grandcourts willingness to marry her, but her stakes have been higher than Gwendolens, since for her, loss has meant life as a fallen woman outside normal social intercourse.

Lydias isolation, jealousy, and sense of powerlessness are convincingly depicted in the scene where Grandcourt tells her that she must give up his family diamonds because he wants to give them to his bride. Her inner rage and the necessity to suppress it is yet another expression of the need for women to adapt to a situation where men set the rules, including those related to inheritance. Lydias powerlessness against the cause of her misery, Grandcourt, makes her turn against Gwendolen and send her a cruel letter with the diamonds, amplifying the young girls agony at having profited by anothers loss. [End Page 40] Gwendolens sense of having wronged Lydia blends with her sense of the unworthiness of marrying a man who, she knows, has a mistress and children. Curiously, she seems to see Grandcourts guilt only as it is reflected in herself. When she finally finds out that he has known of her knowledge all along, this strikes her as a revelation that ought to bring shame not on him, but on herself. She seems to have internalized the dominant double standard. When Gwendolen finds out that Daniel is generally assumed to be Sir Hugos illegitimate son, she connects him in her mind with Mrs. Glasher and her son: [s]he, whose unquestioning 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 (283 [ch. 29]). Like the reader, Gwendolen focuses less on the principle itself than on a familiar specific case: she associates the wrong done to Grandcourts illegitimate family, especially little Henleigh, with the presumed wrong done to Daniel, whom she believes to be excluded from his paternal inheritance: with only a little difference in events he might have been as important as Grandcourt, nay her imagination inevitably went in that direction might have held the very estates which Grandcourt was to have. But now, Deronda would probably some day see her mistress of the Abbey at Topping, see her bearing the title which would have been his own wifes. . . . What she had now heard about Deronda seemed to her imagination to throw him into one group with Mrs Glasher and her children. (28283 [ch. 29]). Gwendolen sees herself as guilty in relation to Deronda, although she has no responsibility for what she believes to be his disadvantaged place in the chain of inheritance. Daniel himself, when at length he finds out about Mrs. Glasher, perceives the analogy with his own situation and feels hurt exactly as Gwendolen, with her newborn moral sensibility, has imagined: He thought he saw clearly enough now why Sir Hugo had never dropped any hint of this affair to him; and immediately the image of this Mrs Glasher became painfully associated with his own hidden birth (372 [ch. 36]). Thus, part of the metonymic linking of the novels thematic concerns is performed by the characters themselves. The poignancy of illegitimacy for an individual child is brought to the fore through Daniels early suspicions of the secret of his own birth. Having once formed the suspicion that he is Sir Hugos son, Deronda has to live with the idea that he has been dispossessed (Daleski 77). The case of little Henleigh Grandcourt, whom the reader only sees at a distance, [End Page 41] is given emotional and ethical depth

through the case of Deronda, who has not been wronged, at least not in this way, but whose own acute experience made him alive to the form of injury which might affect the un-avowed children and their mother (372 [ch. 36]). His critique of politics and concern for individuals is directly dependent on his own supposed family position outside the system of inheritance; and his sensitivity to the emotions and experiences of others takes the shape of a strong sense of responsibility and a readiness to act for others Hans Meyerick, Mirah, Gwendolen. In his relationship with Mordecai sympathy is a catalyst of a radical change: the essentially realist narrative of Daniel Deronda is interrupted by Mordecais excessive and seemingly irrational demand on Daniel. This demand requires a response that is qualitatively distinct from Daniels sympathetic care for Mirah and Gwendolen, for it entails an ethical leap of faith (Hollander 77). It seems, indeed, as if Daniels response to Mordecai is in a mysterious way linked to his Jewish heritage, which is revealed when his commitment to Mordecai is already taking shape. On the other hand, his sense of sympathy and responsibility is already there, and the revelation of his heritage may be seen as a channeling of these qualities into action in the public sphere. Gwendolens mother suggests that Daniels status as an illegitimate son means that He does not inherit the property, and he is not of any consequence in the world (282 [ch. 29]). Gwendolen thinks that, had matters been more just, Daniel might have been as important as Grandcourt, but the reader does not have to accept this estimate of worth. Men of consequence can be expected to take actions that will have consequences, as do men who are politically involved. Grandcourt does not bother about duty or politics, while Daniel, the novel suggests, will eventually act in ways that are of consequence for the Jewish people. In the meantime, however, the sense of being an outsider has a deterrent effect on Daniels wishes to extend his sense of responsibility beyond the personal: Many of us complain that half our birthright is sharp duty: Deronda was more inclined to complain that he was robbed of this half; yet he accused himself, as he would have accused another, of being weakly self-conscious and wanting in resolve. He was the reverse of that type painted for us in Faulconbridge and Edmund of Gloster, whose coarse ambition for personal success is inflamed by a defiance of accidental disadvantages. (402 [ch. 37]) The contrast between Deronda and the type of the villainous illegitimate son who is motivated by defiant ambition serves to emphasize the inner [End Page 42] clash between a sense of duty and the lack of a specific direction in which to channel it. This wanting in resolve is a result of Daniels sense of not belonging. Yet, by the time Grandcourts death makes it possible for Sir Hugo to manage his estates according to his wishes, Deronda has already received his own heritage, and with it an interest in a different set of politics and political struggle. Already before his own Jewish identity is revealed to him as a form of belonging, Derondas relation to Mordecai differs from his ethical response to others: [Mordecais] claim, indeed, considered in what is called a rational way, might seem justifiably dismissed as illusory and even preposterous; but it was precisely what turned Mordecais hold on him from an appeal to his ready sympathy into a clutch on his struggling conscience

(436 [ch. 41]). Hollander claims that this relation signifies another kind of response to alterity: Here, the tension between the ethical and the rational is clearly articulated; because it is irrational, Mordecais appeal can only be adequately acknowledged by an ethical response which exceeds mere rationality or sympathy (85). I would suggest that Derondas struggling conscience is also an effect of his exposure to the values of Sir Hugo, who links his wish that Deronda take a political line with his wish that he could make Deronda his heir (531 [ch. 50]). As Hollander also suggests, the knowledge about his heritage is what Daniel finally needs to be able to channel his empathy and sense of responsibility for others into a practical and public activity. It is, Hollander claims, his mothers brief letter that marks a second important shift in the novel, from the tentative exploration of the ethical, to the historical and realist questions of origin, inheritance, and resolution (86). The affirmation of Daniels Jewish heritage is thus what provides him with the kind of focus which makes political action possible. When his identity is finally revealed to him, and he is assured that he will be given the chest with his grandfathers papers, his own immediate response is in terms of duty, and this, we may presume, is prompted by the influence of Sir Hugo, as well as that of Mordecai. When Daniel responds to his mothers narrative, he does so in terms that echo those of Sir Hugo: And now, you have restored me my inheritance events have brought a fuller restitution than you could have made you have been saved from robbing my people of my service and me of my duty (567 [ch. 53]). Using words such as duty and service, he sets them within a frame of reference that allows for a sense of destiny. The two major plot lines both reach their climax in Genoa, where Grandcourt brings Gwendolen to get her away from Daniels company [End Page 43] in London, and where Daniel goes to see his mother for the first time, neither of them knowing of the others plans. Again, the narrative touches on all aspects of the inheritance theme. Although previously Daniel did not even know whether his mother was alive, the doubts about his heritage have never really concerned its material aspect (he is told by Sir Hugo that he has a yearly income of 700 pounds, and it is now understood that the capital comes from his father). By allowing Daniel his financial inheritance with such facility, Eliot indicates that this is not where the problem lies. His mother mentions proudly yet perfunctorily that she has given Daniel his fathers fortune and made Sir Hugo the trustee. What she does spend time and pain on is her account of her dealings with the spiritual heritage devolving from Daniels maternal grandfather. She honestly tells her son that she asked sir Hugo to take him to England and bring him up as an English gentleman, because she wanted to pursue her career as a singer and did not want to be encumbered with a child; we may take it for granted that she is as honest when she also says that she believed it would be to her sons advantage that she separated him from a heritage that for her had meant only subjection and bondage. As a woman, she could have no active part in the public aspect of the transmission of that heritage, but could only be a makeshift link between the generations before and after her, through her domestic role as daughter and mother (541 [ch. 51]). She tells Daniel that his grandfather never thought of his daughter except as an instrument (567 [ch. 53]). The melodrama of Leonoras confession to her son makes it less easy for the reader to respond to her plight than to the more subdued, but no less intense confession of Gwendolens suffering to Daniel, as she describes her guilt about her husbands death.

Yet, there are clear thematic parallels between these two narratives. The dispositions of Grandcourts will, revealed after the fatal accident at Genoa, demonstrate not only that he can humiliate Gwendolen even after his death, but also that she is just another of the makeshift links between one generation of men and the next. In his will, Grandcourt settles his estate on his illegitimate son in case his wife bears no son. As Grandcourts wife, Gwendolen is expected to produce the next heir, otherwise she loses the position and money the marriage has brought her. The tables are turned, and an obvious parallel is created between Lydia Glashers earlier situation, banned to Gadsmere, and what Gwendolen ends up with in Grandcourts will. Gwendolen, it seems, is less upset by these dispositions than is Sir Hugo; indeed, she is satisfied that the wrong done to her husbands son is now rectified. [End Page 44] Grandcourts premature death a plot resolution with a particular thematic resonance is first anticipated when Mrs. Arrowpoint, in a discussion of Grandcourt as the heir to Sir Hugos property, gives voice to the dictum it is ill calculating on successions (125 [ch. 14]). This point is part of the discussion of the vanity of hopes for material heritage; Alain Jumeau suggests that Grandcourts dispossession of Gwendolen opens up a route for her moral regeneration (30). The reader, who has watched her prolonged grappling with guilt and relief both the relief of no longer being bound to her husband, and that of no longer depriving his illegitimate family of their right may feel more like Sir Hugo in estimating the effects of the will of the dead on the living. However, Eliot quickly makes it clear that the passing of any human being has more complex effects than relief. Gwendolen, who has wished for her husbands death, is now snared in a new tangle of guilt, stricken by complex emotions partly shared with the reader through her confession to Daniel. Both when she seems to win and when she finally loses the gamble of her life, Gwendolen loses much more than she realized was at stake, but perhaps wins in terms of an ethical attitude to others. When Gwendolen and Daniel meet for the last time, neither of them has anything to do with the succession of the Mallinger estates. Their contacts with it have served to develop a moral sensibility in each of them. Inheritance, the source of the many thematically linked narratives in the novel, has a unifying function in Daniel Deronda, one that makes the aesthetic pleasure of reading one with the ethical experience of the characters. By pressing the aesthetic effect of thematic recurrence as well as an element of readerly unease into the service of the ethical this novel makes a powerful statement in the public debate on the subject of inheritance: in the longer run, it may have contributed to social change, adding to the concerted appeal of narratives engendered by primogeniture and challenging the legitimacy of this concept under changing socio-political conditions. Daniel Deronda is one of the narratives that have counteracted the preserving effect of the law, working towards a change of standards and an updated codification of altered norms.

Works Cited
Austen, Jane. 2002 [1813]. Pride and Prejudice, ed. Vivien Jones. London: Penguin. Bakhtin, M. M. 1981.Forms of Time and Chronotope in the Novel. In The Dialogic Imagination, ed. Michael Holquist and Caryl Emerson. Trans. Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press, pp. 84258. [End Page 45]

Bront, Emily. 1990 [1847]. Wuthering Heights, ed. William M. Sale, Jr. and Richard J. Dunn. New York: Norton. Butler, Lance St. John. 1990. Truths Holy Sepulchre: George Eliot and the case of Daniel Deronda. In Victorian Doubt: Literary and Cultural Discourses. New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, pp. 13461. Carroll, Nol. 2000. Art and Ethical Criticism: An Overview of Recent Directions of Research. Ethics 110: 35087. Daleski, H. M. 1976. Owning and Disowning: The Unity of Daniel Deronda. In Daniel Deronda: A Centenary Symposium, ed. Alice Shalvi. Jerusalem: Jerusalem Academic Press, pp. 6785. Dolin, Kieran. 1999. Fiction and the Law: Legal Discourse in Victorian and Modernist Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. During, Lisabeth. 1998. The Concept of Dread: Sympathy and Ethics in Daniel Deronda. In Renegotiating Ethics in Literature, Philosophy, and Theory, ed. Jane Adamson, Richard Freadman, and David Parker. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 6583. Eliot, George. 1984 [1876]. Daniel Deronda, ed. Graham Handley. Oxford: Clarendon Press. . 1955. The George Eliot Letters. Ed. Gordon S. Haight. New Haven: Yale University Press, vol. VI. Fisch, Harold. 1965. Daniel Deronda or Gwendolen Harleth? Nineteenth-Century Fiction 19/4: 34556. Harrison, Bernard. 1991. Inconvenient Fictions: Literature and the Limits of Theory. New Haven: Yale University Press. Hollander, Rachel. 2005. Daniel Deronda and the Ethics of Alterity. Literature Interpretation Theory 16: 7599. Jumeau, Alain. 1985. Hritier et hritages dans Daniel Deronda. tudes Anglaises 38/1: 2435. Macpherson, Sandra. 2003. Rent to Own; or, Whats Entailed in Pride and Prejudice. Representations 82: 123. Nussbaum, Martha. 1990. Loves Knowledge. New York: Oxford University Press. Reed, John R. 1975. Victorian Conventions. Athens: Ohio University Press. Ryan, Marie-Laure. 1999. Immersion vs. Interactivity: Virtual Reality and Literary Theory. SubStance 28/2: 11037. Sanger, Charles Percy. The Structure of Wuthering Heights. Paper read to the Heretics, Cambridge University, rprt. in Bront, pp. 33136. Sternberg, Meir. 2007. How the Law-Code Tests Narrativity. Paper presented at the International Conference on Narrative, March 1518, Washington DC. Sutherland, John. 1977. Who Gets What in Heathcliffs Will? In Can Jane Eyre Be Happy? More Puzzles in Classic Fiction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 6467. [End Page 46] Toker, Leona. 2010. Towards the Ethics of Form in Fiction: Narratives of Cultural Remission. Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Watt, Ian. 1957. The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding. Berkeley: University of California Press. [End Page 47]

Footnotes

1. See Dolins survey in his introductory chapter (110), including an obvious reference to Bakhtin (1981, 124), who, like Watt (31), discusses the imitation in fiction of the revelatory and testimonial procedures of the law court. 2. Meir Sternberg (2007) has presented a similar idea, but with a focus on the narrativity of the law-code itself, particularly in Biblical law. 3. See Sanger for a discussion of the symmetrical genealogical patterns of Wuthering Heights. 4. Lance St John Butler, for instance, reads Grandcourt as an incarnation of the devil and Deronda himself as a Christ figure (13742). 5. The need for the particularity of fictional cases to open new perspectives of cognition to the attentive reader has been discussed by Martha Nussbaum: one point of the emphasis on perception is to show the ethical crudeness of moralities based exclusively on general rules, and to demand for ethics a much finer responsiveness to the concrete including features that have not been seen before and could not therefore have been housed in any antecedently built system of rules (37). Copyright 2012 The Johns Hopkins University Press