The initial focus is on Gwendolen Harleth, a vivacious young woman who is staying with friends, gambling and generally enjoying time away from the constraints of her family. When casting around for a classic to read, I thought of this, George Eliot’s last book, about which I knew nothing beyond the title.ĭaniel Deronda opens in a casino in a resort town in Germany, and the first few chapters only mention the title character in passing.

I had previously only read Silas Marner by Eliot, in high school English, and while I had kind of liked parts of it, I recalled it as a bit of a slog (but then, a lot of 19th century fiction was and is a bit of a slog for me). I became a George Eliot fangirl after reading and loving Middlemarch a few years ago. Jennie B Reviews classic fiction / Historical fiction / Jews / Judaism / non-romance 9 Comments Being an Englishman is a “point of view,” a perspective to claim, to the possible exclusion of other nationalized ways of seeing landscapes both domestic and distant.FebruREVIEW: Daniel Deronda by George Eliot He wants to study abroad, because, he says, “I want to be an Englishman, but I want to understand other points of view” (155 bk. For Deronda himself, nationality itself is a kind of viewership. Motivated not by sex but by moral and political domination, this colonial gaze nationalizes viewership, and makes the landscape it imagines real. Colonial ambition itself can be understood as an ideological view of landscape as open to possession, a gaze on the territory of others that insists often violently on itself, to the exclusion of other political perspectives. 42): his nationalist vision transpires as a gaze upon a far-off place. Indeed, Mordecai's political dream of a Jewish national future involves “Looking towards a land” (454 bk. The national drama of the novel turns on the ideological meaning of gazing at landscape, as Daniel Deronda replaces one political perspective with another. George Eliot's Daniel Deronda (1876), a novel that spurred Zionism in Palestine, opens with a scene of watching and thus moves from a male gaze on a woman's body to a project of envisioning a new nation in a distant land.

Daniel deronda book