Daniel as Possessed Individual

QUITE FREQUENTLY, the nineteenth-century individual is described as having political power because of the ownership of private property. C. B. Macpherson coined the term “possessive individual” to describe this type of entitled and propertied Victorian citizen. Possessive characters, who might well succeed in real life, because of their wealth and property, are not successful in Eliot's novel. The word “possessive,” for instance, fits well for such a character as Henleigh Grandcourt, who does not succeed but, rather, is mocked and drowned on his honeymoon. Eliot, instead, transfers the power of developed narrative subjectivity to those characters who are “possessed,” such as Daniel, who has a collective of others within his body. Eliot favors the possessed over the possessive in this novel as a corrective to the lack of parity in the Victorian public sphere. This development in the novel's depiction of political economy is specifically indebted to the popular mystical culture of the nineteenth century.

Gwendolen Harleth and Daniel Deronda begin as characters who appear similar. Both, because of their birth, have uncertain futures. Gwendolen, because of her gender and her family's financial straits, must consider marrying for money; the opening scene of the novel, in which she is engaged in gambling, foreshadows this destiny. Daniel has an uncertain future because he does not know who his parents are; therefore, he, too, is not in a direct line of inheritance. Insofar as their pasts have not set up their futures, Gwendolen and Daniel serve for Eliot as two characters with whom she can play out what identity may come to mean outside of fixed systems of inheritance, patrilineal descent, and marriage. Although they are seemingly alike at the beginning of the novel, Eliot portrays them making radically different economic decisions which, in turn, lead to their divergent fates in the novel. While Gwendolen remains part of a system of possessive individualism in this novel, Daniel becomes increasingly possessed. While Gwendolen's story is truncated, solitary, and disconnected, Daniel's story is more expansive, historical, and communal. Daniel's lack of real property does not become an “extinguisher” on his life in the novel, as it does for Gwendolen. Eliot presents him as operating under a different type of political economy through his full acceptance of the mystical elements of his religious and ethnic identity.

Eliot uses the character of Daniel Deronda as an allegorical figure who represents a new way of thinking about agency: possessed agency rather than autonomous agency. Unlike an “Exorcist-esque” plot in which possession equals non-autonomous victimhood for the host body, Daniel's possession equals greater agency and clarity of thought for him. To consider Eliot's characterization of the possessed is to widen the view of understanding how subjectivity functions in Victorian literature and culture, once the thick veil of liberal theory is lifted. Possessed individualism is a way of describing the changing consciousness of the individual. The individual can no longer be imagined or hypothesized to exist exclusively as a single, autonomous entity. The transnationalism of the nineteenth century increasingly questions the rugged individual, the pre-political individual, and the government-free individual. And, I argue, that with these imaginings, possessive individualism, by necessity, must also disappear as a singularly viable political theory. A new political theory, mystical in its provenance, appears. Possessed individualism allows for the actual workings of polity, which are inherently corporate: the individual can only be part of the body politic and cannot successfully exist in isolation. This possessed model of the individual looks very different from how the Western individual is typically understood in the nineteenth century through possessive individualism. Regenia Gagnier writes of Marx's essay “On the Jewish Question” that

Gagnier, in describing Marx's views is also elucidating the view that “property is the basis of human rights under capitalism–a theory that would later be elaborated as ‘possessive individualism”’ (Gagnier 75). In Daniel Deronda, Eliot makes particular comments on the Victorian political economy beyond a discourse linking property to rights at a time when social definitions and practices are in flux. This time of instability, as well as the relative merits of various competing political and social values (unity, autonomy, independence, interconnectedness), is reflected in the wobbly narrative of selfhood explored through the characterization of Daniel Deronda. He shows possessed individualism at work: he is an allegorical figure for a distinct type of political individual that Eliot explores in this novel.²

Daniel Deronda ends by Eliot's describing a kiss that constitutes a transmigration of souls. In the novel's final scene, the scholarly Jewish Ezra Mordecai

Ezra has no words for his sister but just for his brother-in-law into whom he has breathed his soul.³ Death is a “divine kiss” to Mordecai and metaphorically Mordecai has breathed his soul into Daniel.⁴

Death is the kiss that removes Mordecai from Daniel's eyes and places him in his soul. The ending is no surprise; the reader sees it coming hundreds of pages in advance. Even before Daniel knows his mother and his ethnicity, we know of his future through the vision of Mordecai. Chapter 38 begins:

In this narration of the visionary type, which is Eliot's first analysis of Mordecai in Book Five, Eliot forges a connection between physical and spiritual travel. Mordecai, as a visionary, “travels” to his conclusions. For him, to see a vision is to have a vision grow from a seed to a plant fed on the impressions of “second sight.” That is, he travels through spiritual vision and the vision he has is internal to his own body which is like the city of “hundred-gated Thebes.” He is, then, part of the physical plant of the idea of Israel. He is a visionary tourist through his “second sight.” This passage makes it unclear whether Mordecai will remain a “minim mammal” or grow into “ a great mental or social type”–a visionary elephant. (This is also a joking analogy that Eliot is making between Mordecai, the visionary elephant, and Member of Parliament, Laurence “the visionary” Oliphant—as will be discussed below.) The reader is asked to consider the possibility of Mordecai as an elephant visionary because this is the question that Daniel considers: “Mordecai['s]…figure had bitten itself into Deronda's mind as a new question” (528; ch. 38). Mordecai at this point in the novel is a plant, a city, and someone who bites Daniel's mind.

Mordecai is a conceptual city-plant-elephant-cabbalist-Israelite looking for a new body to replace his consumptive dying body. Eliot is paving the way here for a strange and yet efficacious concept that an individual can become a collective self, a community in one body. Mordecai is similar to other visionaries in that “the deed they would do starts up before them in complete shape.” Chapter 38, in fact, goes on to imply that the deed Mordecai would do is Daniel:

The “more beautiful, the stronger, the more executive self,” the one who will help out Mordecai, turns out to be Daniel Deronda. Mordecai's “half identifying” affection becomes a complete identification by the time Mordecai asks Daniel the rhetorical question: “Have I not breathed my soul into you?” (882; ch. 70). Daniel becomes the “something more ample than the second soul bestowed”: Mordecai's vision ultimately transforms Daniel through a “seed-like growth” from a “minim mammal” (touched upon like a finger on a tiny elephant in glove) to the “executive self”: “the deed” in “complete shape” is Deronda. “[Mordecai's] imagination had constructed another man” (530; ch. 38).⁵ Mordecai becomes spiritually incorporated into Daniel's physical body by first being a figure who bites itself into Daniel's mind and then later by being a figure who kisses Daniel on the lips in order to transmigrate his soul into Daniel's body. When Mordecai makes Daniel his “executive self,” they create a nationalist and ethnic Jewish community, but one which is located in a body, not a place. They, therefore, create a Jewish diaspora community. Mordecai is the only character who gets to the promised land when he breathes his vision into Deronda's body.

For Daniel, it is not “Uncle” Sir Hugo who forms his path as an aristocrat, nor is it studying the law that gives him vocation. Likewise, it is not his fate to be with Gwendolen, and his reunion with his mother does not lead to much beyond anger and revolt. Instead, it is Mordecai's spiritual will that leads to Daniel's individualism in much the same way that Grandcourt's testamentary will denies Gwendolen's individualism. Daniel becomes possessed. It is not a birth family, a guardian, or a marriage that is allowed to produce an heroic individual in this Eliot novel; it is, instead, religiously sanctioned imagination and imaginative possession which transmigrates Daniel into identity here. In fact, Deronda is an anagram for adorned, and Daniel does become the adorned and adored non-autonomous “executive self” for the Jewish community in this novel.

Daniel agrees to take on Mordecai's mission of traveling to the East because he has no independent choice to make in the matter. Mordecai slips into first person plural and then to third person plural and finally back to a second person address that incorporates all of Israel into Daniel's veins:

Deronda is not just any body to Mordecai; he is part of the same body: they have Israel in their veins. They quiver as one, and all their speech is understanding (they are already spoken for). They are leaves that quiver from a common stem (they are non-autonomous vegetation not autonomous animals) and they touch each other with invisible fibers. The language of “invisible fibres” borrows from the electric and magnetic language of nineteenth-century mesmerism and spiritualism. Daniel here becomes a materialization of the ghostly history of Israel. He cannot do otherwise in the novel (he is constantly described with an antinomian lack of free-will) because he is historical materialism. He is a character who is only partially individualized.⁶ He is not, like, for instance, Henleigh, an autonomous proprietor: he acts for and with Mordecai and the nation of Israel within. Israel is not a nation in a state, it is a diasporic nation located in Daniel's body. Daniel has far more ability to act as an agent than someone with no other one within: namely, the alienated Gwendolen whose story line unravels with the death of her husband and end of her marriage.

Daniel is also an incarnation of what has already occurred. Daniel, in fact, does not say a thing in response to Mordecai's comment: “Deronda sat perfectly still, but felt his face tingling. It was impossible either to deny or assent” (634; ch. 46). Eliot presents subjectivities that are not in history but are identical to history–a concept connected to the Kabbala, to Buddhism, and to Victorian spiritualism/mysticism.⁷

The kiss that ends Daniel Deronda is a rite de passage, allowing Mordecai's soul, through transmigration, to join Deronda's soul in Deronda's body. This kiss physically united souls that are already linked spiritually. It is not, then, just a symbolic act; it actually serves to transfer the title of Mordecai's agency and the life of Israel into Daniel's body within the religious rhetoric and logic of this novel.

Daniel, as an “executive self,” represents all of Israel. His possessed individualism is an odd model for the nineteenth-century self insofar as, in England in the 1870s, one must own property and be male in order to vote. Property rights led to voting rights and possessions, in this way, led to power of civic participation. However, the nineteenth century is also filled with extensive and absurd variations from this rule. It is the century, in America, where one black man equals three-fifths of a white man. It is the century, in England, when parliamentary debate in the 1860s states that it is as ridiculous to say that woman is contained in the term man, as to say that cow is included in the term man. In other words, a century of representative democracy is marked by continual absurdities of both a mathematical and categorical nature. The mysticism of religion that is already supposed to transcend logic and rules is a theoretical equal to regulated political incommensurability. So, if thinking of mysticism politically seems absurd, of course it must, because the representative democracy of the nineteenth century is already logically absurd. To imagine Daniel's body as the property of Israel and of Mordecai means neither that Daniel is objectified nor that he is not an agent in this novel. Instead, through Eliot's mystically inflected characterization of Daniel Deronda, Eliot reworks the definition of an individual with agency. Partially she does this through the Jewish plot line of the novel, but she also does this by placing Judaism within the concept of Pantheism.

Judaism as Pantheism: Civilization Outside of the Nation-State Paradigm

IN PREPARATION FOR WRITING DANIEL DERONDA, George Eliot's notes indicate that she took different religio-philosophical trajectories (or potentially competing histories) and mapped them onto one another. Her novel seeks for what could be termed “social unification” or “the one-ness of creation” through the tenets of pantheism. Specifically she was influenced by Charles Bray's version of pantheism. In addressing the Kabbala in her notebooks, George Eliot translates Heinrich Hirsch Graetz's comments on the Kabbala:

In this note, George Eliot makes a universalizing gesture. Ideal potencies, pre-existing souls, transmigration, the effect of the humans on “the higher world,” she says, belong to neo-platonism, rather than to an ancient Jewish or new-philosophical tradition. Eliot collapses several mystical traditions into one another. One of these traditions is Pantheism.

The “possessed” in possessed individualism may be further specified by Pantheism.⁹

Charles Bray, the well-known Victorian free-thinker and philosopher, had been a friend of Eliot's since 1841, when Eliot and her father moved near Coventry; there, she spent much time with the family of Charles Bray. Bray sent his book Illusion and Delusion (1873), a work which set about disproving spiritualism, to George Eliot and George Henry Lewes in the fall of 1873, in return for GHL's Problems of Life and Mind (1873), which would be published as a three-part series: The Foundation of a Creed, 1874; The Physical Basis of Mind, 1877; and The Study of Psychology (1879–80), which George Eliot finished after Lewes's death. The starting point of Lewes's Problems is the goal of moving metaphysics from the realm of religion to science (Irwin 17). Charles Bray similarly wants the “light of science” to be the standard by which the spiritual is assessed, arguing that “it will be found that all the…attributes or qualities ascribed to matter are attributes of mind and not of matter, and that the world itself is but an illusion and delusion–a great ghost or mental spectre” (Bray 4). He argues that metaphysicians formerly sought “to divide the qualities or properties of matter into primary and secondary” (primary properties belong to the object, and secondary properties to the observer) but that this distinction is false and that “all [properties] are equally dependent upon the action of the brain” (Bray 5–6).

Bray further argues that the way to increase aggregate well-being is not in the increase of wealth but through the genetic increase of the size of the brain (Bray 36). Bray is a proponent of mind over matter and advocates an eugenic approach to social change. Bray's concept of civilization's relying not on the increase of wealth but on the increase of brain is echoed in Daniel Deronda. The question of subjectivity, of what creates an identity, is a central one in Daniel Deronda. Certainly, Uncle Hugo's quip about Napoleon's just mot, “Je suis un ancêtre” does not satisfy Daniel or Eliot (Eliot 201; ch. 15). The novel goes to great lengths to uncover Daniel's biological roots, rather than charting a process of Daniel's independent economic progress (or “where he is going to”: even if this is Palestine). With this quest comes his cultural heritage. Daniel's increase in brain, to borrow Bray's model, occurs when his Jewish heritage, through the mind of Mordecai, transmigrates and moves into his body. Knowledge of cultural heritage becomes the preferred capital over property. In Bray's radical, evolutionary view of subjectivity and the world it creates, he notes that

The framework of materialism and absolute idealism, meeting in bodies that are part of the mind of God, constitutes Bray's addition to the field of metaphysics and also presents a theme that Daniel Deronda explores.¹⁰ In fact, Charles Bray's metaphysics also helps to delineate George Eliot's preferred type of individual in this novel, which can be described as a multiple personality order. Bray's metaphysical paradigm can be applied to the concept of transmigration and the type of individual Daniel may be: “We are part of all the forces around, and in direct and immediate connection with them, and but partially individualized. As star can act on star, at immeasurable distances, so can one mind upon another within more limited bounds, when such minds are en-rapport” (Bray 31–32).

Daniel and Mordecai are en-rapport, and Daniel is only “partially individualized.” Daniel remains, though, an effective agent, while not an autonomous agent. Some of Daniel's freedom disappears with the knowledge of his bond to Mordecai and Israel. As Daniel explains to Gwendolen, “the idea that he is possessed with” makes “his task” his “duty” (Eliot 875; ch. 69). Bray utilizes a quotation from Spinoza to make a consonant point about the illusory nature of freewill: “‘Human liberty, of which all boast,’ says Spinoza, ‘consists solely in this, that man is conscious of his will, and unconscious of the causes by which it is determined’” (Bray 35). Daniel's actualization as a person comes when he becomes not only acquainted but also identified with the causes that determine his will.¹¹

He is forever in touch with the Mordecai within. Conversely, Gwendolen continues to think herself free throughout much of the novel without considering that she is not determining her own will but being instead conscripted by Henleigh Grandcourt's will, both personal and testamentary.

Eliot and Bray both foreground the physicality of identity and identification through their discussions of shared bodies and souls– characters are not autonomous agents or proprietors. Bray explains this lack of autonomy in terms of people's being located in the unconscious extremities of God's body. He writes,

In Bray's lengthy analogy and description of consciousness, Victorians are mere matter “in the extremities” of God's body. This view presents extra-human organizational networks subsuming the individual. Eliot presents the same concept with Daniel: his will turns automatic when Mordecai and Israel inhabit him. Stronger volitions overtake him, and his body becomes an extreme outpost of an idea.

Bray helps to read Deronda in the following terms: 1. If there is really no matter, then the logical conclusion is that the category of property (material possessions) becomes illusory and unimportant, and 2. If property is unimportant (because illusory), then a model of subjectivity predicated on possessive individualism becomes invalid. (Gwendolen, then, can never be happy marrying for property and power not only because the title is not transferred to her in the will but also because the power of property does not exist in a real sense.) This is to argue like a Victorian man of letters, though. This is to argue like Charles Bray. All the same, Eliot does argue like Charles Bray. She, at times, makes these two assumptions in presenting Daniel and Gwendolen. Eliot favors, in this novel, a world where imagination has more power than property. Eliot perhaps says it best through a typical Gwendolen comment: “‘Imagination is often truer than fact,’ said Gwendolen, decisively, though she could no more have explained these glib words than if they had been Coptic or Etruscan” (76; ch. 5). Coptic and Etruscan were but two of the ancient languages that represented partially known cultures in which Victorians were obsessively interested–making the additional joke that, in representing cultures, imagination plays a bigger role than fact for Eliot.

One way to describe Daniel Deronda is to say that, if a character is the aggregate of a person's perceptions, then this novel explores what happens when aggregate, competing perceptions/world views keep colliding even when they are a part of the same nervous system. Bray writes, “The world, however, as we conceive it, is created by the peculiar constitution of the nervous system…. There is not one world, then, but thousands of worlds, as each creature creates its own, and all made out of the same stuff, which is not matter, but mind. What we call MATTER is an illusion and delusion” (7). Interacting characters, then, in common spaces in the novel, potentially can be viewed through Eliot's reading in “metaphysics” as not cohabiting the same real world, but as cohabiting competing ideal worlds. Through this lens, Daniel may be understood as an allegory for possessed individualism.

Eliot also plays with the possibility of sharing ideal worlds. Bray and Eliot's common link is a belief in collective identity. In fact, Bray ends his Pantheistic essay with the concept that a person is just a phenomenally changing part of the noumenal mind of God:

Eliot presents “one great nervous system” in this novel that replaces a system within which she is nervous (namely, an English national center)– she is writing realism about a universe that is a very big body and has a mind of its own. Characters overlap, and the individual is not at the center of her psychological studies: aggregate characters are. Daniel is not singular; instead he has a collective identity, a multiple personality order or civic polity constituted of Mordecai, medieval scholars (Kabbalists), and Israel.

The complexity and heterodoxy of Eliot's religious research and views refigure the novel's politics. Her depiction of Judaism in this novel is unique because Eliot imagines Judaism subsumed by a bigger category of Eastern pantheistic world religions, as opposed to solely imagining it within its own traditional terms. At base, Daniel Deronda is a novel, a fictional account, and even major religious traditions depicted with novels can be uniquely fictionalized. Eliot models Judaism on Eastern as well as Western religious traditions, from Pantheism to neo-Platonism. Eliot scarcely seems to uphold England as a political ideal for anyone, including the English. Her ideas also do not uphold the Western political model of possessive individualism, or uphold distinctly Western religious traditions over Eastern ones.

Proto-Zionism or Post-Nationalism?

PALESTINE IS OSTENSIBLY where Daniel will go next at the end of the novel which serves as a metaphor for the way in which Daniel's body, like Palestine, is a place that can be colonized. In this way, possessed individualism is modeled after colonization. Yet, this is a colonialism with a difference. The Jewish plot in Daniel Deronda is not actually about desiring a nation as much as it is about a desire for community, interconnections between individuals, and a definition for agency that– surprisingly–does not include autonomy. A lack of autonomy may also signal the removal of a desire for dominion, which is the state ownership of a territory.

Frequently literary critics discuss the proto-Zionism in this novel as a desire for nation and for exclusion of otherness. However, the impulse behind the Jewish plot in Daniel Deronda may also be read as an attempt to move beyond the concept of nation, and its narrow concerns, in favor of embracing individual and community identities that are more collective, less competitive, and not based on desiring a nation located in a state. What if the proto-Zionism in this novel is actually neither about a nation-making desire of European Jews to colonize Palestine nor about an impulse to exclude Jews from Western Europe?¹²

Wondering if proto-Zionism can equal an inclusive versus exclusionary plan is fairly counter-intuitive in examining the scholarship concerning the Jewish question, genre, and gender in Daniel Deronda, a novel commonly accepted as dealing with Daniel's discovery of Jewish heritage and his desire to colonize Palestine with European Jews. For instance, Edward W. Said, in “Zionism from the Standpoint of Its Victims,” writes of Eliot's Daniel Deronda that

Said further sees Eliot as in favor of a project of replicating England elsewhere and upholding the values of European ideas, noting that “Eliot was indifferent to races who could not be assimilated to European ideas” (22). Similarly, Susan Meyer writes, “Despite the feminist and anti-imperialist nuances that can be found at various points in the novel, and despite its moments of genuine interest in the Jews, when this novel comes to its closure it reinforces gender and race hierarchies and firmly draws national boundaries” (Meyer 733–582). Meyer finds the proto-Zionism in the novel to be primarily an impulse to exclude Jews from England and to reinforce traditionally subordinate roles for women.

Michael Ragussis, however, argues persuasively of Daniel Deronda that it is Eliot's “attempt…to expose English anti-Semitism and to celebrate Judaic culture,” going on to note that Eliot was favorably impressed by Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin as she was “preparing for her own depiction of national life and national disgrace. In Daniel Deronda Eliot transforms Stowe's depiction of the American disgrace of slavery into the English disgrace of anti-Semitism. Eliot wrote to Stowe in 1876, ‘not only towards the Jews, but towards all oriental peoples with whom we English come in contact, a spirit of arrogance and contemptuous dictatorialness is observable which has become a national disgrace to us’” (Ragussis 265, 267). The working of the influence of Stowe upon Eliot, as demonstrated by Ragussis, certainly provides a powerful counter-argument to Said and Meyer. It indicates Eliot's opposition to colonialism as a national practice.

Eliot's treatment of colonization (Daniel's body is colonized, but a trip to Palestine is elided) is different from other actual Victorian plans for Palestinian colonization, a topic widely discussed in the 1870s.¹³

Eliot's treatment of colonization suggests that her proto-Zionism might be a version of the post-national: a vision for polity potentially free from a zeal for exclusionary politics.¹⁴ It is here important to recall that for Eliot, Judaism is closely aligned with other communal mystical systems, even beyond Bray's Pantheism, as the following reference in Eliot's correspondence will show. Archeologists and cartographers, working on site in Palestine, were sending information back to England. George Eliot followed these accounts of exploration and Biblical archeology in Palestine in the 1870s and of planned colonizations. She knew of the career, for instance, of former M. P. Laurence Oliphant. In 1867, in New York, Oliphant had joined a curious spiritualist group, a virtual sex cult, led by an ex-Swedenborgian minister Thomas Lake Harris. Called the New Life, the cult moved to Santa Rosa, California, in 1875. This group explored the concept of spiritual correspondences (having an invisible lover cohabiting one's body–a concept invoking transmigration) and sought a promised land. Oliphant was also working on an economic and spiritual project of colonizing Palestine with European Jews–the same topic that Eliot explores in Daniel Deronda.¹⁵ Both Oliphant's plans and Harris's share a common Christian overlay of the utopian and imperialist project of building a new Eden.

Eliot's editor, John Blackwood, in a letter dated August 8, 1879, wrote, “Oliphant writes to me from our embassy at Constantinople. He has been all over Syria and Palestine and sends me some of the first fruits in a M.S. article to be followed by others and also by a book. You and he and Disraeli are all I fancy working to one end” (Blackwood qtd. in Haight 7: 192). What could this “one end,” toward which they are all working, be in John Blackwood's fancy? Zionism? Colonizing Palestine? An imagined utopia? Cosmopolitanism? Projects are, of course, imaginings with tangible impacts. Blackwood's remarkable claim of a common goal between M. P. Oliphant, Prime Minister and novelist Disraeli, and Eliot deserves further attention, especially in light of the odd beliefs of the spiritualist cult, the New Life, of which Oliphant was a member.

The ex-Swedenborgian minister, Thomas Lake Harris claimed that he could create a new mode of enlightened breathing, “open respiration,” in his adherents and that he was God's only emissary here on earth. Membership in this spiritualist group was one of Laurence Oliphant's prompts in a plan to colonize Palestine. Returning to the epigraph of this essay, colonization is presented as filling up the open space of the body. This visionary type of colonization is described as the member of the “Sisterhood in the New Life,” who continues her journal entry:

Similar to the minim mammal visionary quotation from Eliot, with the tiny elephant adjacent to a finger in a glove, this also presents an intriguing account of tiny visionary suburbanite colonists living within the body. Thomas Lake Harris has told this woman that two-in-ones, fays, can settle in bodies, build house in bodies, plant fruit trees in bodies– expand space in bodies. This is an urban style of transmigration of souls, a non-biological model of reproduction, and a model of colonization. A “Two-in-one” (wherever it may have been previously) finds entrance to the body, builds a house, and “then little baby fays would be born”– presumably from the single two-in-one rather than from a couple of two-in-ones: spontaneous generation. Or, as one reader put it, “This is a self-pollinating hermaphroditic vision.”¹⁶

The Sister's model of planned community provides a concept of utopian colonization. It is only after others started to live within the Sister that she developed a group and state identity in her spacious body. So, too, with Daniel, who also could be described as a “Two-in-one.” Once Mordecai breathes his soul into Daniel, Daniel has an identity and a purpose: traveling to the East. The Sister in the New Life becomes a fay city-state or polis just as Daniel Deronda becomes an Israel-satellite with Mordecai's soul and the life of Israel nested in his body.

What does it mean to have a place inhabit a person? For Daniel Deronda it is as Mordecai tells him: “The life of Israel is in your veins” (Eliot 634; ch. 46). Daniel's Jewish identity is about a place (the nation of Israel) embodying his person. This makes the notion of Israel, as it pertains to Daniel, a nation of diaspora.¹⁷

Having a place inhabit a person also means that a possessed person's agency is distinct from a singular autonomous agency and that any plans he or she may have– including colonizing–are mediated by having had one's own body colonized. Having a place inhabit a person means that for such a one he or she is always mediating and being mediated by a variety of allegiances. For instance, since Daniel knows that his will is not his own, it means also that his identity is self-reflexive. His actions may be both more intentional and more responsible, resulting in his agency having less of a damaging effect on others.

Unlike the way we may understand object relations from Hegel or Lacan (there is a single individuated self; there is an other), the knowledge of their others, for both the Sister and for Daniel, does not lead to a greater sense of their separateness and self-actualization; at least, not in the way we understand self-actualization. Rather, the possessed understand themselves primarily through a semi-invisible group identity. The utopian Sister's account and Daniel's trajectory toward the East are not dissimilar to the plans that Western millenialist visionaries, starting in the 1860s, had for Palestine. For instance, the first modern Western European cartographer of Palestine, Claude Conder, about whom Blackwood wrote to George Eliot, notes the existence of Western spiritualist colonies in Palestine set up by American Mormons in the 1860s and by the Temple Society (millenialist German Lutherans) in the 1870s. Conder, in a description of a Haifa Temple Society settlement, writes,

These clean, pleasant German utopians are not markedly unlike the Sister's exquisitely dressed finger tip fairy (except they are much bigger). They inhabit an idealized Holy Land (in Palestine) in a similarly incoherent spatio-temporal relation to their surroundings. I include Conder's depiction of Western utopian colonists in Haifa because the utopians who stay in the West and keep the topos within their bodies seem to be much less intrusive than the utopians who move to Palestine and view the indigenous population as not entitled to their own homeland. Conder finds the German Temple society preferable to, and about to supersede, the presumably more indigenous “dirty, squalid, lying Fellahin” in Haifa. Eliot's characters, unlike these colonists, never get farther than the Mediterranean. Eliot favors her Deronda characters when they are possessed and not when they are being possessive. Imagining a place at a distance or placing a nation or community within an individual (as is the novelistic project with Daniel) has lower environmental impact than packing up all of the “felt wideawakes” and moving to Palestine. Imagination is a more genuinely permeable colonization.

An inquiry into Eliot's political vision is implied by making these types of comparisons. If Eliot gives us an imaginary colonization, it is relevant to know what other, more typical imperialists, funded by the English government, who do not separate visionary from political plans, offer with their visions of colonization. Conder, in his Tent Work in Palestine, of 1878, feels that the purpose of the first map of Palestine, for which he was the principal surveyor, was to give the West remote access to Palestine.¹⁸

Conder writes, “Palestine is thus brought home to England, and the student may travel, in his study, over its weary roads and rugged hills without an ache, and may ford its dangerous streams, and pass through its malarious plains without discomfort” (Conder 1: xvi–xvii). Palestine, then, much like its role in Daniel Deronda, is designed for the English consumer who is a virtual traveler– it is presented as an imaginary destination: “Palestine is thus brought home to England” (1: xvi). This also provides a model of imperial absorption that foreshadows the British mandate over Palestine that fell on the heels of World War One.¹⁹ However, in this novel, Mordecai brings Israel into Daniel. Conder ends his work by reiterating the ideal dependence of Palestine on Western Europe. He writes: Conder presents Palestine as a space for economic ventures, a desert waiting to be economically and spiritually colonized by “some strong European power.” Conder is imagining a strong Western power that can replace the weak and decadent Ottoman empire, rehearsing a familiar geo-political stereotype. Although Eliot's novel ends with Daniel and Mirah headed to the East, the same imperialist tone that is present in Conder is not present in Eliot. Daniel Deronda, in part, chronicles Daniel Deronda's discovery of his Jewish ethnicity and his decision to take over Mordecai's planned pilgrimage to the East. But, by the novel's end, he never gets there, perhaps because George Eliot values Palestine as an idea that can come and embody her characters rather than as a realist's geographic place. Of course, Daniel does intend to get to the East as he tells Gwendolen, “‘The idea that I am possessed with is that of restoring a political existence to my people, making them a nation again, giving them a national centre, such as the English have, though they too are scattered over the face of the globe. That is a task which presents itself to me as a duty: I am resolved to begin it, however feebly. I am resolved to devote my life to it’” (875; ch. 69). Daniel is possessed with an idea–and a comparative political idea at that. He wants his people, who are scattered over the globe, like the English are, to have a national center and a political existence. Daniel's views are proto-Zionist in this regard, but Eliot does not seem to argue for a replicated English political system for Palestine. For one thing, she was well aware of the ways England had mistreated English Jews for hundreds of years (Irwin 85–87). For another, she was aware of women's disenfranchised status in England and how such a system disabled a character like Gwendolen. She saw the inequities of English economics and politics; her Victorian England was not a prototype for a new Jerusalem. It is somewhat easy to forget that Daniel, even after he takes on Mordecai's vision, remains an English citizen. Yet, he feels suddenly disenfranchised once he knows he is Jewish, in spite of his privilege, his gender, his English education, and his English citizenship. His statement that he desires for Jews to have a national center like the English do, is predicated on the assumption that English Jews, like himself, his wife Mirah, and the Cohen family, are precluded from participating in the English national center because they are Jewish. In this sense, a desire for a Jewish national center may have more to do with feeling alienated from English political participation than it does with the potentially exclusionary impulses of Zionism. Eliot's view on colonization, in this novel, is visionary, and the promised land remains, at the end of this novel, a vision.

The promised land's remaining a visionary place retains a very distinct politics from that of Zionism. “In an important essay informed by the history of the Jews and Israel in the twentieth century, Daniel Boyarin and Jonathan Boyarin have argued for a conception of Jewish identity that is based not on achieved nationhood but rather on unending diaspora,” writes Amanda Anderson. She continues, “Deeply suspicious of European models of nationhood and cultural identity, the Boyarins seek to define Judaism against what they construe as a somewhat monolithic Western Europe” (57). Anderson's presentation of the Boyarins' definition of Judaism as relying on unending diaspora, as opposed to relying on Zionism, is a dominant definition of Judaism in Daniel Deronda, as well. Anderson does a succinct job of explaining when and how ethnocentricity can be an ethically appropriate discourse, as opposed to an ethically problematic discourse, “For Boyarin and Boyarin, a ‘particular discourse of ethnocentricity is ethically appropriate only when the cultural identity is an embattled (or, at any rate, nonhegemonic) identity.’ Favoring a notion of cultural belonging based on generational connection rather than autochthony, the Boyarins see Zionism as a betrayal of the Jewish culture rather than its culmination” (57).²⁰

Following this line of thought, I argue that Judaism in Daniel Deronda looks distinct from the Zionism that seeks to colonize the space of Palestine, because it is bodies, rather than lands, that are being colonized. In this Eliot novel bodies are lands, and lands are ideas.

Eliot's novel brings to light the contrast between a possessed individual and a possessive individual. Real empowerment, in Eliot's presentation of these characters, is not centered in an individual's having possession of property but in being conceptually possessed, for example, Daniel's kissable self who becomes an “executive self” (Eliot 530; ch. 38). Individualism need not be landed (or grounded); it is a collectively shared cultural/historical/political body that ends up being located in the person of Daniel Deronda–who has a Theban Mordecai within (527; ch. 38).

Conclusion

DANIEL AND GWENDOLEN both self-contain/represent incommensurate political systems. Both Daniel and Gwendolen represent themselves, to borrow Marx's definition of civil society, by what they do and who they are.²¹

While they are in different extremities of the same body, to borrow Bray's pantheistic vision, they have no necessary relation to one another because the identity that connects them is too large to be recognizable. Deronda is a realist novel that describes a very big system. They might not know they are in God's body, to take Bray somewhat seriously with his Pantheistic universality. To consider Marx seriously, is to imagine the way in which Daniel Deronda enacts the decentralization of the socio-political through embodiment. Kristin Ross says, in reference to Marx writing about Hegel, that: In this rubric, the political is released from a necessary tie to centralized governance and simply represents itself as a social production. In this model, history becomes multiple and not singular; it becomes decentralized; it moves away from the central nervous system of any given body (or nation) and out into the extremities. History becomes possessed with multiple personalities, and the political becomes a social production. The nation fades from view and something else, more complex and harder to define, takes its place–a certain type of new group formation and commentary. If socio-political power is decentralized and politics suppressed, then civic centers are moved into bodies that self-represent: possessed individualism, as is the case with Daniel.

Eliot's novel presents the conflict between possessed and possessive individualism remaining outside of a totalizing political schema. This narrative is marked by partialness, interstices, silences, and contingencies. Her characterization fascinates because it suggests that a big, tangled skein may be at the center of the individual and at the center of historical narrative.

Daniel Deronda, in some ways, is analogous to Middlemarch; both chart life in a small town (or body) over the course of a few years or decades. Interestingly, we have a fascinating, vital, possessive individual (sans voice), Gwendolen, stuck in a genre that does not privilege her economic organization. No Bildungsroman for her–no diachronic narrative of her winnings or even of her irregular, growth-enhancing fortunes–but only an unpleasantly fitting genre, like a shoe two sizes too small. George Eliot, in this novel, does not seem concerned with having one vital personality in one body–better to put two in one–such as with Daniel. When, at the end of the novel, Gwendolen claims that it “will be better for her having known” Daniel, she may be partly right, if she means knowing him structurally. Just knowing him does her no good because there is no more room in Daniel's body. But if she thinks in terms of insinuation, knowing him could become a model for absorbing others–a little here a little there; couple with a new soul in another body–and realize that, in the particular and in combination, is the only way that political representation may come. Why not imagine the structure of the body as one of plural self-representation–as the space for civic polity? In depicting the transmigration of Israel into Daniel's body, Eliot also proffers the reader a possessed type of individualism.

The only way Eliot's characters in this novel can be successful is when they serve as outposts for the ideas of invisible communities, narratives, and pasts. Eliot is writing a new type of realism, not just the careful description of the psychological functions of a closed community, as she does in Middlemarch. Rather, she is writing realism about an extra-personal, pantheistic system. Each character is a tiny working in the mind of a large, invisible central system. Because her characters overlap and meld or disappear, the individual, either in tragic straits or triumphant circumstances, is not at the center of Eliot's psychological studies, aggregate characters are. These aggregate characters people a post-Nationalist civilization that is not grounded in nation-states but in bodies.

The whole text in its fragmentation is like a new history/telling of modern political economy. This novel gives the reader the chance to look anew at concepts like possessive individualism and the private individual. Eliot ultimately favors possession over possessiveness in a plot so radical that the reader can view an invisible sphere subsuming the divide between the public and the private sphere. Through the Jewish plot, Eliot tells the stories of competing political logics. The mystical, for Eliot, comes out on top. Characters are not integral and whole: they are partially imprinted, partially effaced, and ultimately fragmented to be remade. For Eliot, in Daniel Deronda, the individual does not provide the key to interiority; the combination of all the characters and their grand, invisible, extrasensory, combined agency does.