Reasserting moral boundaries: representations of fame in George Eliot's Daniel Deronda

Graduation date: 2017Celebrity culture is part of a long history of fame, but the modern celebrity individual came into focus in the nineteenth century. The first part of this thesis distinguishes modern celebrity – including its morality – from other types of fame, explores the intersection of celebrity and gender through the figure of the female literary celebrity, and discusses George Eliot’s desire to control her public persona in Victorian celebrity culture. Previous scholarship has paid little attention to celebrity in Eliot’s fiction, so the second part of this thesis provides a close reading of Eliot’s last novel, Daniel Deronda (1876), as a means of attending to the connections between fame, artistic endeavor, and morality. I use Tom Mole’s three pillars of the celebrity apparatus (individual, industry, and audience) as a framework and reveal how the novel consistently relies on historically famed performers to help orient the reader. I read Daniel Deronda’s negative representation of pursuing art for the sake of celebrity as a reassertion of the same attitude that Eliot first established in her essay “Silly Novels by Lady Novelists” twenty years prior. However, those twenty years cover Eliot’s increasing popularity as an author, thus necessitating her need to defend her motivation for continuing to write and publish. Therefore, Daniel Deronda also offers the additional assertion that renown is morally acceptable, a qualification that legitimizes Eliot’s fame while allowing her to still critique celebrity