DURING THE LAST THREE-QUARTERS of a century of social thought, “gift theory” has provided a major alternative tradition to market-based theories of social organization. The impact of Marcel Mauss's The Gift (1924) has been broad and ongoing, both within the field of anthropology and in other disciplines as diverse as medical ethics and economics. Mauss presents gift-exchange as a fundamental social system that binds together a group, sets up means of exchange and intergroup relations between neighboring cultures before the formation of market economies, and subsists today in various forms despite the dominance of a market economy. In valorizing the ethics of a gift economy, Mauss assumes the opposition of gift to commodity, or of gift-exchange system to market exchange. Yet he also complicates such an opposition in showing how the gift economy functionally reproduces a market economy. Credit and interest, for instance, are implied by the logic and practice of gift exchange, and are not inventions of markets that rely on currency for exchange. But a telling distinction between archaic systems of gift exchange and modern markets lies in the strength and nature of the social system that emerges from a gift economy. For Mauss, it is (nostalgically) a system in which the collective predominates over individual interest, where custom and allegiance to clan dictate forms of exchange.

Cultural critics have sought to situate and explain the importance of Mauss's ideas and influence within the history of ideas of the last century or so. John Frow, for instance, notes how the opposition of gift to commodity has been “one of the most powerful and most illuminating ways of thinking about the pattern of relations between persons,” while the opposition of archaic to modern industrial society “turns out over and over again to be a form of mythical thinking in which the moment of rupture is endlessly repeated” (102). That is, as we have learned from Mauss, gifts involve calculation and interest, while commodities are “endowed with non-commodity meanings as they move through the moral economy of everyday life” (102). Vincent Pecora, in Households of the Soul, situates Mauss's work within a broader reaction against modern market economies and the apparent social change they entail, a reaction that often takes the form of a nostalgia for the noble household of antiquity, with its notions of limited need, rather than the unlimited desire characteristic of modern consumerism, and obligatory generosity, linked to codes of honor. Pecora locates this nostalgia in nineteenth-century anthropological thought as well as in that of Mauss and his successors, in idealist philosophy from Schiller and Kant to Derrida, and in Modernist aesthetics.

For Jacques Derrida, in Given Time, the obligations inherent in Mauss's gift-exchange undercut the gift itself. The gift is impossible in that the recognition of its “giftness” by the donor is already an anticipation of obligation.¹

Is this a concern with the ontology of the gift or with its ethics? The very opposition of gift to commodity may elide examination of its moral consequences by implying that the gift represents an ethically superior form of transfer of goods to commodity exchange. Frow recognizes the ambivalence of the gift as an ethical category since Mauss's work: “The gift therefore cannot and should not be conceived as an ethical category: it embodies no general principle of creativity, of generosity, of gratuitous reciprocality, or of sacrifice or loss. At best it is an ambivalent category, oscillating between the poles of generosity and calculation; but these are still ethical terms, whereas the forms of calculation and indebtedness that are set in motion in gift economies must be understood to be structural and prior to all ‘ethical’ forms” (124). Frow, in emphasizing that gifts are not things, but “transactions and social relations,” observes that “the gift economy is intimately bound up with the forms of the person as they are diversely constituted and as it constitutes them” (124). By the same token, the forms of the person and the meanings of the gift are necessarily determined by the social system or institution of which the event of the gift is a part.

If the meaning and action of the gift are contingent on the social systems of which it is a part, and the gift lacks a predetermined ethic outside such social systems, then it is not necessarily an ethically superior form of transference of goods to buying and selling, although it may seem to be so. There are, however, important distinctions between gift and commodity as social signifiers. In their potential for signification, there is asymmetry between the two forms: the commodity, by virtue of going to market, is stripped of personal or sentimental attachment; its exchange value overshadows the marks of former ownership. The gift, however, carries with it personal attachments, obligations, and often a clearly articulated symbolism. The relationship between the donor and recipient is always unequal, never in equilibrium, while, at the moment of negotiating a price, the relationship between buyer and seller is, at least in theory, balanced.

In sum, the gift sets in place a particular relationship or social bond between subjects which has meaning within a larger social network and the potential to structure future interactions. “Giftness” signifies the potential of the object to stand in for a whole slough of normative social relations which prescribe particular cultural and social practices, hence the power of the gift to shape social behavior and its work as a bond, as social glue.

In this article, I will suggest that George Eliot, steeped in both Victorian political economy and British classical evolutionary anthropology, saw the profound ethical ambivalence of the gift and explored its function within social systems in her last novel, Daniel Deronda (1876). She perceived as well the market's potential for inflicting hardship, and so explores relations between these two economies–of giving and receiving, and of buying and selling. She enacts this inquiry through her double plot, interrogating the function of wealth and generosity in both upper-class British society and in Judaic culture. Like Mauss, Eliot explores how seemingly discrete practices and customs fashion and support social structures. And, like Mauss and his forerunners in nineteenth-century philology, Eliot reveals the potency of the word's roots.²

Considerations of the effect of giving on social well-being–whether in the form of Poor Law debates or more general scrutiny of the ends of philanthropy–haunted nineteenth-century Britain. Eliot's own interest in the social role of giving is already prominent in Middlemarch. Dorothea Brooke would take every opportunity to better the condition of others through largesse, but her marriage to Casaubon limits her range of movement and thus the compass of her philanthropy. Casaubon himself is seen as generous initially because of his support of his impoverished second cousin, Will Ladislaw. But Ladislaw, feeling the weight of such a debt, decides to refuse future support. Indeed, Casaubon later invokes Ladislaw's debt to him to dissuade Ladislaw from a course of action he dislikes. Ladislaw equates such obligation with virtual slavery: “Obligation may be stretched till it is no better than a brand of slavery stamped on us when we were too young to know its meaning” (381–82; ch. 34). Clearly Eliot began to consider the two faces of the gift–generosity and control–already in Middlemarch.

In Daniel Deronda gifts have highly overdetermined meanings, carrying much of the symbolic freight of the novel. An act, gift-giving effects (and represents) change in the status of persons and alters interpersonal relationships. When discrete gifts are viewed within the broader context of related themes–family support, charity, and inheritance–it becomes clear that Eliot's examination of the ethics of generosity is integral to her interrogation of culture and the means of cultural continuity. Giving, however, does not stand in simple opposition to selling, but in a more complicated set of relationships. Gifts temporarily become commodities by being pawned, but are almost all ultimately redeemed. Gwendolen Harleth, the heroine of the British plot, “sells” herself through marriage, but as her payment is necessarily in gifts, the consequences of this act are compounded by ancient notions of social bondage and indebtedness, making it more than simply an act of self-commodification.³

Even gambling, with its parallel in commercial speculation, is the stuff of hunches and instincts rather than a process of cool-headed calculation. In effect, the villain of this novel is less the rational self-interested creature begot of nineteenth-century commercial society than a more ancient beast reveling in power and control through archaic mechanisms.

The first prominent gift of the novel is a redemption: Daniel Deronda, without Gwendolen's consent or knowledge, redeems⁴

the turquoise necklace that she has pawned after her losses the previous evening at roulette and returns it to her. Her choice of this necklace is significant: its three turquoises “had belonged to a chain once her father's; but she had never known her father; and the necklace was in all respects the ornament she could most conveniently part with” (15; ch. 2). Just as pawning the necklace represents Gwendolen's lack of affection for her unknown father, so the return at some level functions as a rebuff to this devalorization of the father. The gift has thus a double iteration: as an immediate gift as well as an inheritance from the father. In a curious parallel, later in the story, Daniel, a character presumably less in need of redemption, will also temporarily pawn a diamond ring that he subsequently discovers belonged to his unknown, long-dead father; in bringing the ring to his newly discovered mother, he recovers his patrimony. As Arjun Appadurai observes, “[t]he diversion of commodities from specified paths is always a sign of creativity or crisis” and “always carries a risky and morally ambiguous aura” (26–27). Gwendolen's pawning the necklace is a clear sign of financial crisis. Yet, since her first thought was to use the money to win at roulette and so rescue her family from impending destitution, pawning the necklace also involves creativity, resulting in her first self-fashioning as a producer of income for her family. Daniel's mother's choice to keep his ancestral chest from him as well as knowledge of his parentage and ancestry is similarly risky. Her “diversion” is a direct and conscious assault on paternal inheritance and so plays out the thematic of patriarchal subversion that is tacit in Gwendolen's pawning of her turquoise necklace earlier in the novel. Daniel's mother, of course, had become a successful producer of wealth, an actress and singer, through distancing herself and her son from the patriarchal inheritance, but finally fails to maintain this break. Ironically, by pawning his father's ring, Daniel gains knowledge of Judaic culture through his association with Mordecai that prepares him for the eventual revelation that he is a Jew and enables him to embrace his patrimony.

But, to return to Daniel's gift to Gwendolen, even without consciousness of sinning against her father, she understands the rebuke implied in the redemption of the necklace. Daniel has a packet delivered to Gwendolen, containing the necklace, wrapped in his handkerchief with a corner ripped off, to get rid of the identifying “mark.” Like most significant gifts in the novel, it is accompanied by a note: “A stranger who has found Miss Harleth's necklace returns it to her with the hope that she will not again risk the loss of it” (15–16; ch. 2). Gwendolen immediately guesses that her unknown benefactor is Daniel, for he had watched her as she gambled, and seemed to disapprove. But in his gift, he had “taken an unpardonable liberty” (16; ch. 2)–for, as Benveniste argues (Derrida 78–82), giving involves taking. In this sense, Daniel thrusts Gwendolen into a position where she could not directly return the gift:

Clearly, Gwendolen understands Daniel's gift as an oppressive act, constituting a link between them that she resents, and that she is powerless to refuse because the act of refusal would acknowledge the gift.

Daniel's gift, then, is an assertion of paternal authority (although he is ignorant of this link), and a warning against risk-taking as improper conduct for a woman. In accordance with the novel's representation of gambling, Daniel's warning has further resonance. For Gwendolen's later marriage to Grandcourt is figured as her great gamble, her wedding a re-creation of her experience at the roulette table: “she felt herself standing at the game of life with many eyes upon her, daring everything to win much–or if to lose, still with éclat and a sense of importance” (326–27; ch. 31). This act, too, is motivated by her desire to become a source of income for her family, but since it takes another social form, that of a wedding, it conjures a return to the gift cycle: “gift” is the Old English word for “payment for a wife,” and “gifts” in Old English means “wedding” (OED). Daniel's gift makes Gwendolen feel oppressed by a social order that she comprehends, her indebtedness to her benefactor, yet she will soon be oppressed by the Law of the Father in a way that she does not yet comprehend.⁵

Having read Henry Sumner Maine's influential Ancient Law, which traces the evolution of the rule of the father, “patria potestas,” under ancient Roman law into the rule of the husband under British law, Eliot was well aware of theories of an archaic origin for Victorian patriarchy, an order enforced through the ritual and the symbolic (Beer, George Eliot 139–40; Eliot, Middlemarch Notebooks 204–07). And it is this rule of the husband that becomes the central instrument of oppression in the novel.

Thus Daniel's gift, marked by language, functions as language by virtue of its symbolic and ritual nature, as do all the prominent gifts of the novel. As an heirloom, the necklace's value is affective and ritual; as Daniel's gift, it later serves as a vehicle of communication between Daniel and Gwendolen. Pecora astutely demonstrates Lacan's debt to Mauss in that the “order of language” is a gift economy: “The signifier is not conceived other than as an object circulating in a gift economy, in which the nom du père (non du père) occupies the position of the magical supplement propelling the gift from giver to receiver” (261).

Indeed, Daniel's gift enacts the hau, as operative in the social world of Eliot's novel as in the Maori culture described by Mauss: “What imposes obligation in the present received and exchanged, is the fact that the thing received is not inactive. Even when it has been abandoned by the giver, it still possesses something of him” (Mauss, The Gift 11–12). The turquoise necklace, the paternal remembrance and sign of remonstrance from Daniel, is the one ornament from Gwendolen's “casket” that she would later keep from being sold when her family has lost their fortune: “‘Don't sell the necklace, mamma,’ she added, a new feeling having come over her about that rescue of it which had formerly been so offensive. ‘No, dear, no; it was made out of your dear father's chain’” (255; ch. 24). Yet her desire to keep it is inexplicable to herself: “But the movement of mind which led her to keep the necklace, to fold it up in the handkerchief, and rise to put it in her nécessaire, where she had first placed it when it had been returned to her, was more peculiar, and what would be called less reasonable. It came from that streak of superstition in her which attached itself both to her confidence and her terror–a superstition which lingers in an intense personality even in spite of theory and science; any dread or hope for self being stronger than all reasons for or against it” (257; ch. 24). Eliot's narrator, then, explicitly ties the action of this gift to reservoirs of superstition and emotion within Gwendolen that she does not understand, a sort of unconscious, as I will presently discuss. Later in the novel, when Gwendolen deeply regrets her marriage to Henleigh Grandcourt, she wears the necklace wrapped around her wrist as a message to Daniel that she acknowledges his gift and desires his guidance. Grandcourt observes this gesture and rebukes her for it. As her husband, he is able to dictate her choice of jewels, winning in the rivalry of gifts by displacing Daniel's (and her father's) gift, a reminder of the evolution of power traced by Maine.

It is this marriage to Grandcourt that becomes the site for Eliot's investigation of the “poison” (“Gift”) in the gift. The theme becomes explicit in his gift of his mother's diamonds on their wedding night. This gift has two donors: Grandcourt and the wronged woman, Lydia Glasher, his long-term mistress, to whom he had long ago “confided” the diamonds, but now “necessarily wished to have them for his wife” (314–15; ch. 30). Lydia, who had hoped to prevent this marriage by revealing her existence and the existence of her four children to Gwendolen, insists on sending the diamonds herself to Gwendolen, refusing to relinquish them directly to Grandcourt when he demands them back. In this respect, she is a sort of surrogate donor, having never actually owned the diamonds (or married the man), but having temporarily possessed both. (That possession does not imply legal ownership in the Western sense is typical of gifts in a system of gift exchange: they are meant to be passed on eventually, according to Mauss [The Gift 24]. So Lydia's action could be characterized as a dark parody of a familial gift.) As a result, Gwendolen receives the diamonds accompanied by a note which seems like an “adder” to Gwendolen: “These diamonds, which were once given with ardent love to Lydia Glasher, she passes on to you. You have broken your word to her, that you might possess what was hers.… Shall you like to stand before your husband with these diamonds on you, and these words of mine in his thoughts and yours? Will he think you have any right to complain when he has made you miserable? You took him with your eyes open. The willing wrong you have done me will be your curse” (330; ch. 31). Her words thus initiate the action of the “gift”: “Truly here were poisoned gems, and the poison had entered into this poor young creature” (331; ch. 31).⁶

Gwendolen responds to the fruits and terms of her contract with a double iteration of terror: she is “spell-bound” by Lydia's words and shrieks repeatedly “with hysterical violence” when her new husband enters the room. Grandcourt wonders, “Was it a fit of madness?” (331; ch. 31) and so Eliot again seems to indicate the surfacing of a form of the unconscious.

Thus the gift that represents the marriage, and the elevated social position of being Grandcourt's wife (replacing his mother) also signifies the poison that infects the marriage. At one level, this poison is Gwendolen's knowledge that she has married a man already entangled in another relationship. But as the novel progresses, her fate seems overdetermined– as much the product of an archaic institution as that of a guilty conscience. This gift realizes the Old English meaning of “payment for a wife” as well as the Old High German one. It is language–the emergence of the roots of a word as a curse–that renders Gwendolen wordless and hysterical, both after reading the letter and seeing her new husband when he subsequently enters the room.⁷

While Gwendolen has sold herself to Grandcourt in part to support her family in their destitution, victims of a commercial collapse, the consequences of this act reveal the poison potential in Victorian marriage as an institution structured by power relations of a much earlier era.

One of the most compelling readings of exchange in Daniel Deronda is Catherine Gallagher's article, “George Eliot and Daniel Deronda: The Prostitute and the Jewish Question.” But Gallagher does not distinguish market exchange from gifts. She observes that Daniel's return of the necklace “could easily be seen as the valorization of genealogy over exchange,” but argues instead that Daniel is himself involved with exchanges that “make him a more formidable version of the usurer,” having increased Gwendolen's indebtedness by giving the usurer his inflated price and putting Gwendolen in his, Daniel's, debt (50). Gallagher concludes: “If Daniel redeems anyone in this exchange, he redeems the pawnbroker, whose profits are realized and whose debts are canceled. And that is in summary the plot of the whole novel: a young man who thinks he has a mission to save wayward women turns out to have a mission to save a nation of usurers” (50). But the pawnbroker's ticket has not the affective or social meaning of Daniel's note because it is the sign of a market transaction in all its true anonymity, not the poorly disguised anonymity of Daniel's gesture which places Gwendolen in the double-bind of suspecting the identity of her benefactor without the recourse of refusing the gift, and hence the debt. The pattern in this novel is for commodified objects to revert back to gift status, unleashing their power for social signification. As for Daniel's transactions with “a nation of usurers,” I will argue that Eliot works to defeat this stereotype by depicting Judaic traditions of generosity.

When Gallagher turns to the incident of the diamonds, she astutely reads the ironies involved: Lydia, whose love for Grandcourt was passionate, was the mistress, while Gwendolen's “lack of any but a financial motive for marrying Grandcourt, makes her the real whore and simultaneously denies her the whore's pleasure and freedom” (52). Exactly, but does this not make her instead the type of the unhappy wife, if we emphasize here the loss of freedom that accompanies this exchange? Among the chorus of voices denouncing the barbarism of Victorian marriage was J. S. Mill, who, in “The Subjection of Women” (1869), describes marriage as an atavistic institution whose raison d'être harks back to an earlier, pre-rational age when men dominated because of their greater strength. Custom, popular sentiment, and men's enjoyment of their dominance have preserved marriage as an archaic institution in which women remain in a “primitive state of slavery” (432) and are infantilized by their dependence on their husbands: “the wife's entire dependence on the husband, every privilege or pleasure she has being either his gift, or depending entirely on his will” (444). In other words, gifts to the wife are the marks of her bondage to her husband, synecdoches for her entire dependence upon him, her lack of freedom. When Grandcourt, knowing of her foreknowledge of his prior attachments, demands that she wear the diamonds, she imagines “[t]hat white hand of his which was touching his whisker was capable,…of clinging round her neck and threatening to throttle her; for her fear of him, mingling with the vague foreboding of some retributive calamity which hung about her life, had reached a superstitious point” (397; ch. 35). Her fear is palpable yet magnified by the “superstitious,” this node of indeterminacy in Gwendolen's consciousness. While her experience of marriage is marked by fears of an atavistic violence, she also comes to see quite clearly her social and legal bondage when she contemplates leaving her miserable marriage:

The diamonds, then, function as a sign of her subjection, the taming of will enforced by Grandcourt's rebukes when he judges her behavior unfitting of a wife, by her fears, and by her own realization of the constraints of the married state for women in the 1860s.⁸

If we compare for a moment these two powerful gifts–Daniel's return of the turquoises and Grandcourt's gift of the diamonds–we find a telling difference that ironically points to the power of the gift apart from the intention of the donor. Daniel's intention is communicated to Gwendolen in his note. Yet the usually manipulative Grandcourt makes his gift out of a sense of what is proper, and his desire that his wife have the expensive family diamonds, not his former mistress. Of course, Grandcourt comes to revel in the power over his wife that the diamonds represent, but the gift when made is not a Trojan horse. In Derrida's reading of the gift's impossibility, intentionality is crucial: “It cannot be gift as gift except by not being present as gift” (14). Of course, Derrida is thinking of the donor anticipating gratitude, not other intentions attached to the gift. But Grandcourt's case shows that, at the time of the gift, the intention of the donor may be secondary to the symbolic power of the gift. Not surprisingly, Derrida asserts that he departs from the anthropological tradition of the gift, hence, “from tradition itself” (13). But it is the gift's role within preexisting social structures, not as an individual's act, that makes it most powerful.

One complication of this reading of Gwendolen as the hapless victim of Victorian marriage, caught in a net of archaic customs and beliefs, is her own guilt and the figuring of her suffering as retribution, which both she and her confessor, Daniel, accept. Yet, what mitigates this reading is the inexorable nature of her marital bonds–that had she not known of Grandcourt's ex-mistress and illegitimate children, she still would have been caught without recourse in a marriage to an imperious and heartless husband. Eliot seems to want to allow Gwendolen some agency that the representation of marriage in the novel makes impossible. Had she no knowledge of Lydia, would her sin, instead, lie in her motivation to marry –a financial one, to save herself and her mother from poverty? Perhaps; but here Eliot has shown how limited her options for self-support were; after the composer Klesmer discourages her from a career as a singer and actress, her only other option is governess or teacher. Eliot's insistence on her guilt seems almost a screen for her powerlessness. By the same token, the figure of Gwendolen as gambler in marriage falters to the extent that marriage seals her fate and lets loose the Furies (331; ch. 31); gambling, after all, entails some uncertainty. But Gwendolen wins exactly what she anticipated: wealth and social position, which, nonetheless, constitutes her “last great gambling loss” (411; ch. 36). Lacking knowledge of the nature of marriage, Gwendolen does not foresee the misery of marriage to Grandcourt. Eliot early establishes a parallel between Gwendolen's gambling and the speculative investment that destroys her family's fortune. But as the narrative unfolds, this parallel weakens, as the inevitability of her entrapment becomes apparent.

Gwendolen's choice not only determines her fate in ways she did not anticipate, but she is represented throughout the novel as a character who experiences moments of terror and superstition that baffle her and cause her to lose conscious control over her actions. This is an aspect of characterization that some critics have deemed proto-modernist. Gillian Beer, Sally Shuttleworth, and Eileen Sypher all remark upon the inchoate and indeterminate in Gwendolen's psyche. Shuttleworth demonstrates the influence of the “experimental” theory of scientific method, developed by Auguste Comte and Claude Bernard, and integrated into psychological theory by George Lewes, on character development. Eschewing “absolute truth” and simple empiricism for knowledge of “the relations of phenomena to one another” (Bernard, qtd. in Shuttleworth, Language of Science and Psychology 276), Bernard “developed Comte's earlier theories to produce a definition of life as a regulative process of interaction between an internal and an external milieu” (“Language of Science and Psychology,” 283). This conception of life forms the basis for Lewes's psychological theories of a discontinuity between consciousness and the operation of other unconscious, and contradictory streams within the mind (“Language of Science and Psychology,” 283–84).

If we look to Eliot's reading in evolutionary anthropology, we find a source for some of these streams that unsettle consciousness: “survivals,” a concept developed by Edward B. Tylor. Notes drawn from Tylor's Researches into the Early History of Mankind and the Development of Civilization (1865) and Primitive Culture: Researches into the Development of Mythology, Philosophy, Religion, Art and Custom (1871) appear in Eliot's Daniel Deronda notebooks. Jane Irwin, editor of George Eliot's Daniel Deronda Notebooks, draws on George Lewes's diary to affirm that “[b]etween 3 September and 14 November 1874, GE reread ‘Tylor Primitive Culture’, and on 15 November ‘Polly read over again the early chapters of Daniel Deronda’” (308). Reading through Primitive Culture, one is struck by how many of Daniel Deronda's prominent themes appear as examples of “survivals.”

Tylor defines “survivals” as “processes, customs, opinions, and so forth, which have been carried on by force of habit into a new state of society different from that in which they had their original home, and they thus remain as proofs and examples of an older condition of culture out of which a newer has been evolved” (1: 15). Survivals may include examples of “the serious business of ancient society” that has become the “sport of later generations,” “its serious belief” as “nursery folklore, while superseded habits of old-world life may be modified into new-world forms still powerful for good and evil” (1: 15). He notes that “most of what we call superstition is included within survival” (1: 15). While in earlier novels, Eliot tended to lodge superstition in her rural characters,⁹

remnants of an older England, in Daniel Deronda it is Gwendolen, raised for the most part abroad, “roving from one foreign watering-place or Parisian apartment to another,” (19; ch. 3) who suffers from fairly inexplicable bouts of superstition, a “liability of hers to fits of spiritual dread, though this fountain of awe within her had not found its way into connection with the religion taught her or with any human relations” (57; ch. 6).¹⁰ Not only is the very modern Gwendolen most susceptible to superstition, the sign of some “survival,” but many of the upper-class pastimes prominent in the novel, such as games of chance and archery, appear in Tylor's catalogue of survivals as well as laws central to the British aristocracy's hold on power, concerning primogeniture and real estate, and the denial of full civil rights to Jews until recently (2: 406). The narrator's comments on the changing role of archery in British culture refer explicitly to the notion of “survival”: It is this flattering recreation that allows Gwendolen to catch the eye of Grandcourt; weapons employed formerly for national defense are transformed into Cupid's arrows.

In a more sinister key, Tylor cites the superstition against saving a drowning man, recalling Gwendolen's hesitation to throw the drowning Grandcourt a line. Eliot was probably familiar with the example from Sir Walter Scott's novel, Pirate, given by Tylor: “When Sir Walter Scott, in the ‘Pirate,’ tells of Bryce the pedlar refusing to help Mordaunt to save the shipwrecked sailor from drowning, and even remonstrating with him on the rashness of such a deed, he states an old superstition of the Shetlanders. ‘Are you mad?’ says the pedlar; ‘you that have lived sae lang in Zetland, to risk the saving of a drowning man? Wot ye not, if you bring him to life again, he will be sure to do you some capital injury?’” (1: 97–98) Gwendolen suffers from exactly that fear, as she confesses to Daniel: “‘The rope!’ he [Grandcourt] called out in a voice–not his own–I hear it now–and I stooped for the rope–I felt I must–I felt sure he could swim, and he would come back whether or not, and I dreaded him. That was in my mind–he would come back” (648; ch. 56). Torn between her sense of how she should behave and her intense fear and dread of the drowning victim who did not sound like himself, Gwendolen hardly seems in control of her thoughts or her actions.

A version of another “atrocious” survival, discussed by Tylor–“the rite of laying the foundations of a building on a human victim” (1: 88)– may explain Gwendolen's seemingly unwarranted fear of the dead face and fleeing figure depicted on the hidden panel in Offendene, where Gwendolen and her family resided after her stepfather's death. When the panel opens suddenly, Gwendolen experiences one of her fits of terror; indeed, the painted scene foreshadows her later experience of her husband's dead white face in the water. Yet, as she did not even know Grandcourt when she suffered the original fit, there is no cause-and-effect relation to explain her reaction, which suggests instead a buried and murky psychological substrate made up of superstition and uncannily prophetic fears.¹¹

Thus Eliot's familiarity with Tylor's notion of “survivals” suggests that the chaos and contradictions of Gwendolen's mental life and, more broadly, the contradictions and unreason of English culture and society may be explained, in part, by the power of remnants of archaic practices and institutions. Psychological inconsistencies, violations of the cause-and-effect of conventional realism thereby emerge as signs of a new, more complex, relational, but not fully knowable psyche for the individual and the “race.” Further, as Tylor explains, the power of some “survivals” resides in their assumption of a new raison d'être in the contemporary world. The evolution of bride-price or “gift” into the institution of Victorian marriage with all its rationales for the wife's dependency on the husband could surely have occurred to Eliot as an instance of an unfortunate “survival.” Her earlier note on Maine's work shows her thought moving in such a direction: “The modern position of women chiefly determined by barbarian elements” (Middlemarch Notebooks 205).

Tylor characterizes “civilization” as a sort of patchwork of palimpsests, a dynamic mix of elements originating in different eras:

Such a view of the present as a complex integration of many culturally diverse “pasts” was certainly attractive to Eliot as she both scrutinized the state of British civilization and studied the varied traditions of Jewish culture, focusing especially on those elements that helped Jews retain their sense of cultural and racial identity.¹² Tylor's layered view of British culture finds its material embodiment in Sir Hugo's Abbey, where the original chapel functions presently as the stable (381; ch. 35), the cloistered court is used for studying, and the library, “as warmly odorous as a private chapel in which the censers have been swinging,” (419; ch. 36) is where Gwendolen confesses her private sins to Daniel.¹³ Sir Hugo's theory of renovation included “reasons for not attempting to remedy the mixture of the undisguised modern with the antique–which in his opinion only made the place the more truly historical” (387; ch. 35). Sir Hugo thus tends the remnants of British history, yet the transformation of their functions provides evidence that the British aristocracy now worship their pastimes (horses, hunting) while outsiders like Daniel find the sacred in the library; knowledge provides the contemporary path to enlightenment and growth of conscience.

Thus the country estates of the aristocracy, the “noble” households of Eliot's time, which typically represent a kind of gift economy, are for Eliot objects of scrutiny rather than sources of nostalgia. Grandcourt's generosity towards Gwendolen's family is motivated both by his desire to persuade Gwendolen to marry him, and by concerns of social appearance: “Of course I was not going to let her live like a gamekeeper's mother,” he replies to Gwendolen when she acknowledges her family's debt to him (399; ch. 35). Grandcourt is aristocratic, not commercial; although he has debts, he doesn't marry the heiress, Catherine Arrowpoint, but chooses the penniless beauty.

As points of contrast, Eliot depicts other households whose structures represent different belief systems. Catherine Arrowpoint, for instance, insists on marrying the composer, Klesmer, despite her family's opposition, who would wed their wealth to some title. Catherine defends her choice, arguing that the exchange of fortune for title in marriage partakes of an older, outdated order; it is “a ridiculous mish-mash of superannuated customs and false ambition” (229; ch. 22) that clearly limits her freedom and prospect for happiness. Her desire to evade traditional social structures in imagining an alternative domestic order then is clearly critical of the dominance of the aristocratic order as a remnant of antiquated social structures.

A second alternative to the noble household appears in a situation available to a much broader spectrum of nineteenth-century women: the domestic order of the mostly feminine Meyrick home. In fact, composed of a widowed mother and three daughters when Hans, the son, was away, this household of meager means figures as the fate of Gwendolen's mother and sisters had she not “saved” them through her marriage to Grandcourt. Yet the Meyrick household is the epitome of domestic order:

Like Mauss's gifts, the value of the furnishings–their affective and cultural value–is explicitly distinguished from their market price.¹⁴ This house teaches history, unlike Sir Hugo's Abbey which embodies it, and lacks the marks of decline of the choir-cum-stable. Also in contradistinction to Sir Hugo, who declares “the rule of the pocket the best guide” to the limits of renovation (388; ch. 35), Mrs. Meyrick has undergone some privation to retain her husband's engravings. (Of course, to be fair to Sir Hugo, he has stinted in order to raise the 50,000 pounds to buy back the right to one of his residences from his heir, Grandcourt, in order that his family would have a house after his death. Even the paragon of aristocratic virtue suffers from a too rigid patriarchal order!) In other words, the value of things in this household exceeds market price, yet it is not the aristocratic estate that passes only to male heirs, but a domestic space epitomized by female independence. All the Meyricks–mother and daughters–are employed and thus independent of male patronage. It is here that Daniel brings Mirah, whom he has just rescued from the temptation of suicide. For the sake of Mirah's honor, Daniel realizes that he cannot openly support her, and it is here where she can regain her emotional bearings and eventually begin to support herself through singing lessons. Again, Daniel's generosity must be masked because of the bonds that it would imply, while Mirah herself has just fled the bondage of working for a father who intended to sell her to a rich patron.

Turning to Eliot's representation of Judaic culture, the great cultural counter-balance to upper-class British society in Daniel Deronda, we find a positive version of the power of the gift. Debates over the success of this two-fold structure, or of the “Jewish plot,” have been a centerpiece of Daniel Deronda criticism since the novel's first appearance in serial form. While broadly embraced by Jewish intellectuals at the time–there is even a street in Tel Aviv named after George Eliot out of gratitude for this novel–recent critics have pointed to aspects of the novel that show Eliot's own anti-Semitic prejudices.¹⁵

But her representation of culturally dictated generosity in the Jewish community takes some of the worst stereotypes of Jews and turns them on their head.

It is especially Eliot's depiction of the Cohen household that has drawn charges of anti-Semitism. And it is this household about which Daniel is most mistaken in believing, or fearing, that Ezra Cohen, the pawnbroker, is Mirah's brother. Mordecai, the contemporary Jewish prophet, the epitome of spirituality and self-deprivation, turns out to be the right Ezra Cohen, but this discovery by Daniel hardly gets Eliot off the hook for her stereotype-ridden depiction of the Cohen family. As Michael Ragussis observes, every portrayal of a Jew in English literature since The Merchant of Venice must deal with the character of Shylock (115). Has Eliot simply countered the “bad” Jewish characters, the Shylocks, with the good, idealized Jewish saints, Mordecai and Mirah? Rather, if we look at the pawn-broking activity and the character of pawnbrokers in the novel within the larger context of Jewish history and traditions as sketched by Eliot, we may discern a strategic countering of the broadly held prejudices of her day.

The first pawnbroker of the novel is the one in Leubronn, about whom Gwendolen thinks: “these Jew pawnbrokers were so unscrupulous in taking advantage of Christians unfortunate at play” (15; ch. 2). Her thoughts are ironic in that she, in gambling both here and in her marriage, would gain from another's loss, according to Daniel's formulation of the evil inherent in gambling (309; ch. 29). But beyond any moral equivalence between Jewish and British sins, spiritual and cultural meanings of usury are worth noting.¹⁶

The crucial passages in the Old Testament concerning usury are Deuteronomy 23.19–20: In Eliot's Daniel Deronda notebooks, there appear two references to the Talmudic laws on usury (161, 359) with a footnote by the editor, Jane Irwin, explaining that “Deuteronomy xxiii, 19–20, was understood to mean that help to the needy should be given freely without demanding return or interest (then synonymous with usury); the Talmudic Rabbis held that the borrower did not even owe thanks for the loan” (359, n. 1). Moreover, throughout the notebooks, Eliot records numerous historical instances of self-sacrificing or charitable activities and traditions of almsgiving and support for the needy in the Jewish community.¹⁷ While Eliot's note, “The Talmudic laws about usury?” reveals little about her knowledge and intentions, she portrays the effects of these laws in the economy of the Cohen household. This Ezra Cohen, the pawnbroker, is a hard bargainer, and, according to Daniel's first impressions, “no shadow of a Suffering Race distinguished his vulgarity of soul from that of a prosperous pink-and-white huckster of the purest English lineage” (362; ch. 33). His son, too, a six-year-old version of himself, would “shwop” knives with Daniel only if it were clearly to his advantage (363; ch. 33). But eventually Daniel discovers that they support the dying Mordecai, and he begins to revise his opinion of them: “However unrefined their airs and speech might be, he was forced to admit some moral refinement in their treatment of the consumptive workman, whose mental distinction impressed them chiefly as a harmless, silent raving” (483; ch. 42). Mordecai recognizes that they “have the heart of the Israelite within them, though they are as the horse and the mule, without understanding beyond the narrow path they tread” (483; ch. 42). The Cohens support Mordecai, because he is a Jew in need, a “blessing” (482; ch. 42); they enact Deuteronomy 23.19–20, lending “upon usury” to strangers, but helping the needy within the Jewish community. Such charitable traditions within Jewish culture act to bind together the community, while also drawing a distinction between Jew and Gentile. While Grandcourt's support of his wife's mother and sisters is seen as “delicate liberality” (283; ch. 28) (like Casaubon's), and Sir Hugo warns Daniel against excessive generosity (“It will not do to give yourself to be melted down for the benefit of the tallow-trade; you must know where to find yourself” [168; ch. 16]), Daniel's discoveries lead to a redefinition of “the heart of the Israelite” as typically and culturally generous. Of course, Daniel himself, defined early in the novel by his penchant for self-sacrifice, finally discovers himself to be a Jew, and, indeed, “finds himself.”

But Mordecai sees in these community bonds a model for all “nations” replacing notions of competition with mutual enrichment among peoples:

In his debate about progress and development at the Hand and Banner, he argues that, through the Zionist dream of reviving the Jewish nation, the superstitions of Jews who have lost their consciousness of their religion and tradition may be replaced with knowledge of their cultural inheritance (493–94; ch. 42). And here Mordecai articulates a new function for the Jewish wealth that has been “envied” in the past: nation-building. Thus, in Mordecai's vision, the commercial class has a vital cultural role –redeeming the Promised Land literally from “debauched and paupered conquerors,” as if these “conquerors” only held it in pawn (496; ch. 42).

So the Jewish tradition of charity and almsgiving ultimately overshadows and negates the Shylock stereotype. Here heritage and tradition take on a positive role, and finally Daniel receives his familial and cultural inheritance–a form of gift-giving central to cultural continuity– literally in a chest. Daniel's inheritance is one that his mother, Leonora Hahn-Eberstein, would have denied him, just as she would have denied him a mother, herself, but the intercessor here–Joseph Kalonymos, a friend of her father–discovers Daniel and so sets in motion the events leading to her revelations and the transfer of the chest. Further, Kalonymos has stored the chest at a banking-house in Mainz, another indication of the role of material wealth to secure spiritual wealth for Judaism. Daniel brings the chest to Mordecai, who will serve as his teacher and guide to his own heritage, a role Mordecai had foreseen long before Daniel knew he was a Jew. So the social bonds, reinforced through gift and inheritance, guarantee the biological and cultural continuity of the “race.” But Eliot won't let the reader forget that even seemingly essential social practices have their victims, especially when the culture is a patriarchal one. For his mother, this cultural inheritance is imprisoning: the chest contained “things that were thrust on my mind that I might feel them like a wall around my life– my life that was growing like a tree” (594; ch. 51).

Thus if we look at systems of gift exchange as means of establishing and maintaining the bonds that unite particular classes, cultural groups, or even national groups, we see in the British upper class the potentially onerous nature of such bonds when institutionalized through marriage. In Judaic culture, we see the positive role of such bonds in uniting a people who have suffered the diaspora, and specifically we see how culturally dictated generosity may support the prophets, and implicitly the future of the Jewish people. But this culture, too, is patriarchal, and so Daniel's mother speaks of these bonds as “bondage”:

Here Daniel's mother, a renowned singer and actress, characterizes her choice as one between commercial and patriarchal society. She risks commodification in choosing financial independence and abandoning her place within her ancestral culture.

Benveniste has noted the etymological link between “to give” and “to take.” In the passage in which Daniel's mother describes the gift of her son to Sir Hugo, the interrelatedness of giving and taking, the impossibility of gift without reciprocation, becomes clear:

She asks for an unconditional favor–a gift in the form of service–then gives Sir Hugo a boy he “would pay money to have” (more so than he then knows, for when he marries, his wife bears no sons, and so the disagreeable Grandcourt, his brother's son, becomes his heir). So taking this boy is his gift to her, while Daniel is also a gift of great value in Sir Hugo's eyes. But her aim in giving him to an Englishman was to break all ties with her heritage, and so when Daniel exclaims, “Mother! take us all into your heart –the living and the dead.… Take my affection,” she replies, “I reject nothing, but I have nothing to give” (591; ch. 51). She wanted no reciprocation; Sir Hugo's service to her was meant to be unconditional. To resume a give-and-take, a reciprocation of love between herself and her son, would be to undo the choice that allowed her to free herself of her tradition and to become who she was. Yet, ironically she was unable to keep Daniel from reassuming his Jewish identity, and the fact that he was supported by his own familial fortune, not entirely by Sir Hugo, is a sign of Sir Hugo's incomplete gift in taking the child. It is worth noting, too, that her gift of her child, an effort to divorce him from his own ethnic heritage, is a transgression of social norms– not a reinforcement–and so it is ultimately undone.

Thus social bonds–fortified by inheritances, gifts between generations– create selves (Daniel as a Jew, Leonora as the Jewish woman) and inhibit the creation of other selves (the Alcharisi). Or, to quote Mauss, “it is not individuals but collectivities that impose obligations of exchange and contract upon each other” in a gift-exchange system (The Gift 5). The transformation of the Alcharisi from Jewish daughter and mother to performing artist represents female independence from the patriarchy, and significantly, Gwendolen considered the same career in order to avoid marriage to Grandcourt.¹⁸

In conclusion, in Daniel Deronda, George Eliot demonstrates the imbrication of gift and commercial economies in British and Judaic culture in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Familiar with recent anthropological thought, she employs the notion of “survivals” in Tylor's sense to demonstrate how practices that have lost their concrete or literal utility maintain a potent symbolic and ideological role in British culture. The roots of “gift”–bride-price and poison–are both active and rationalized within the social system she depicts. On the other hand, in her depiction of Jewish culture, the survival of charitable practices within the community, dictated by tradition and religion, helps the community survive. Here Eliot demonstrates how observation of age-old custom supports the culture's prophets, even when such prophets go unrecognized by the actual agents of generosity, and uses this custom to dislodge stereotypes of the overly commercial Jew. But even within this community, custom has its victims–women who desire self-definition and would free themselves from social and familial obligation. Thus a pattern emerges: within social systems where possession and control of the transfer of goods reside predominantly with a privileged group, as in patriarchal systems, gifts participate in the reinforcement of the status of that group and the power to control others through binding obligation. While Eliot recognizes the value of social bonds, she repeatedly represents this other face, social bondage. Gifts may be instances of individual generosity and community support, but they may also be occasions for the imposition of onerous social and psychological debt. And so there is finally no single ethic of the gift in Daniel Deronda, only gifts whose action may be ethical–or not.