Grand and Vague Why is Daniel Deronda about The Jews?

\u27I am sure you are right to leave everything grand and vague\u27, George Eliot\u27s publisher wrote bemusedly to her about Daniel Deronda\u27s Zionism (Letters VI: 272). In his \u27Conversation\u27 on Daniel Deronda, Henry James too, like many contemporary and later readers, expresses his doubt and unease about the novel\u27s Zionist subject matter. Traditional interpretations of the Zionist subject matter in Daniel Deronda are not wholly satisfactory. It is often dismissed as vague and lacking in concreteness (Fisher 227; Bamber 421; Hochman 113-33; LiddellI82), or explained purely in biographical terms, which, while fascinating, do not reveal much about the function of the Jewish-Zionist material within the text itself (Haight 470-1; see also: Baker, al-Raheb, Levitt, Howe, Putzell-Korab). One of the most powerful interpretations of the Zionist material in Daniel Deronda is that offered by Elinor Shaffer in her \u27Kubla Khan\u27 and \u27The Fall of Jerusalem\u27. She suggests that Deronda\u27s Zionism must be understood in religious-philosophical terms. In Daniel Deronda, she argues, Eliot is recreating in modem, secular, and Feuerbachian terms the story of Christ (Shaffer 269). The novel is both a \u27life of Jesus\u27 and a critical, modem examination of that life (Shaffer 291). Shaffer\u27s interpretation is very powerful, but there are misleading emphases in it. Contrary to her arguments, the secular aspects of Deronda\u27s activities (national liberation, attaining a new breadth of social sympathy, and undermining an individualist ethic) are at least as important as the spiritual ones. Several critics see the function of the Zionist subject matter in Daniel Deronda to lie in a kind of unspecified radicalism which gestures vaguely beyond the contemporary British status quo. For example, Gillian Beer notes that \u27Daniel Deronda is a novel haunted by the future,\u27 and writes of the male protagonist that \u27He, like Gwendolen, is left on an uncertain edge of possibility\u27 at the novel\u27s close (Darwin\u27s Plots 181; George Eliot 227). (See also Shuttleworth [184].) Barbara Hardy expresses a complex judgement of Deronda\u27s Zionism, which sums up some of the critical comments noted above, but which also, in its suggestion that the text \u27implies a radical positive\u27, points to a possible significance of Zionism within the novel which this essay will explore in more detail (167)