In between writing Middlemarch (1872) and her final novel, Daniel Deronda (1876), George Eliot recorded in her notebook that she wanted her fiction to explore “great turning points” in history by depicting “in detail” not only “the various steps by which a political or social change was reached” but also “the pathos, the heroism often accompanying the decay and final struggle of old systems, which has not had its share of tragic commemoration” (Essays 402). Indeed, by writing Daniel Deronda, the only one of her novels set in her contemporary moment, Eliot seems intent on examining shifts, presumably incomplete ones, taking place during her life. The incomplete nature of change may be echoed in the novel's unusual bifurcation: famously, its two plots address the title character, Daniel Deronda, who searches for a way to serve humanity, and Gwendolen Harleth, a beautiful woman who must address the narcissism she has been encouraged to develop. Deronda's story traces his gradual discovery and acceptance of his Jewish heritage, while Gwendolen has a story line that is only indirectly related to Deronda: she suffers in a tragic marriage and only partially comes to terms with the position of femininity in late Victorian England. Many readers hope, or simply expect, that the two stories will be joined in Daniel and Gwendolen's romance and marriage. Dismayed, however, by a double plot where Deronda and Gwendolen have separate trajectories and endings without marriage, readers and critics have frequently commented on the plot's structural problems, often noting “the narrative disjunction” that is one of the novel's most prominent features (Levine 421).

Instead of Gwendolen and Daniel's marriage, the novel only reaches closure through three somewhat ambiguous relationships. At the end of the novel, Deronda appears caught up in two profoundly erotic but putatively chaste friendships – one with Gwendolen, the other with future brother-in-law Mordecai Cohen – and, ironically, one strikingly unsexual conjugal relationship with his intended bride, Mirah Lapidoth. Here, Daniel's choice of erotic objects does not seem primarily based on gender difference, as these interests are tied to both male and female objects, and the erotic seems distinct from the conjugal (and, perhaps, the physically sexual, as well). Instead of a love-interest clearly bringing narrative closure through the romance of the novel's two protagonists, the seemingly undefined roles that these three relationships play suggest the failure of heterosexual romance to structure the plot clearly. Yet, this failure of the romance plot has not sent critics to question fully the histories of gender and sexuality that Eliot depicts. Despite the uncertainty of the novel's relationships, critics discuss characters in the terms of modern sexuality, terms which the characters may not really fit. Thus, despite its ending, the novel becomes one that “manufacture[s] Daniel . . . as a normatively heterosexual male adult” (Dever 152) or one that confirms a modern sense of gender where women “are to be understood first and foremost as different from men” (Crosby 24). The disjuncture between twentieth-century terms and Eliot's novel may be telling: sexuality and gender may, themselves, be the subject of Eliot's detailed examination of an unfinished “turning point.”

Over the last several decades, the enormous amount of work in nineteenth-century constructions of sexuality and gender has led to a consensus about the broad outlines of this history. Yet, this broad framework, and the consensus around it, can blind us to a more detailed understanding of a very specific and vexed moment of change, the kind of moment that Eliot depicts. In nineteenth-century studies, one of the most famous precepts is Foucault's formulation, found in The History of Sexuality, Volume 1, that the “sodomite had been a temporary aberration; the homosexual was now a species” (43). In the 1990s, both Eve Sedgwick and David Halperin questioned the coherence of Foucault's divide between a pre-modern sodomy (as an act) and modern homosexuality (as an identity), where Sedgwick, for example, urged critics to see the “unrationalized coexistence” of sodomy and modern homosexuality in our own contemporary moment and its history.Footnote ¹ According to Sedgwick, the persistence both of “sodomy” and “homosexuality” is ultimately contradictory (or “unrationalized”), undermining any certainty about knowledge of sexuality. More recently, Dana Seitler has pushed such questioning further by arguing that “there is an aura which surrounds this work in the academy – an aura of certainty whereby histories of sexuality seem to have become banal” (87). Moreover, if an “aura of certainty” has colored our understanding of the history of homosexuality, such certainty similarly shapes our study of the history of sexuality in general: nineteenth-century texts have offered us a place where critics now inevitably find, in Foucault's words, sexuality's “solidification in its modern form” (110).

Twentieth-century definitions of sexuality are defined almost entirely in terms of gender and vice versa. For example, the assumptions suggested by the critical readings of Daniel Deronda cited above seem to suggest that this novel, even despite its ambiguity, ultimately conforms to the broader twentieth-century discourse that to be male (“normatively heterosexual male” [Dever 152]) is to sexually desire the feminine object, who exists as different from men because of her desire to be the object. Such a discourse, as I will later discuss, found its fullest expression at the start of the twentieth-century in Freud's invention of psychoanalysis, where the radical distinction between genders became virtually the only way to talk about sexuality. However, questioning the assumed connection between sexuality and gender – and, in particular, questioning how closely related the two distinct histories of sexuality and gender are – allows us a second look at the turning point that Eliot attempts to capture and, moreover, at the aura of certainty that characterizes these changes more generally.

In the History of Sexuality, Foucault describes a shift from an early-modern ethical self to the modern psychoanalytic self: with the ethical self, the individual is defined in terms of his or her ability to resist the passions and illicit acts and, in the modern, psychoanalytic model, the subject emerges through its necessarily endless quest to know its own desires, the meanings of which can never be easily seen or completely understood. Foucault thus describes a shift from the early modern focus on sexual acts (and the ability to resist such acts) to modernity's focus on sexuality's always uncertain meaning. Yet this shift is complicated by, even as it dovetails with, a second change, this one in the construction of gender. This second shift involves the transformation of an early-modern one-sex model of gender, where, as Thomas Laqueur has noted, women were seen as lesser than – not necessarily different from – men; such a model is supplanted by the modern two-sex model of gender, defined by the radical difference between the genders. Both modern sexuality and gender may have shared histories as responses to aristocratic honor: aristocratic honor was defined by an ability to control the passions, an ability that was connected to those characteristics that made the aristocratic male body the more perfect version of humanity, a version which was always in danger of deforming through effeminacy. Despite this shared history, the emergence of the two-sex model that Laqueur describes and the emergence of modern sexuality that Foucault describes have no certain relation to each other.Footnote ² Only in hindsight do these two shifts, when taken together, appear to culminate in the modern sense that sexuality and gender are inseparable. Yet, the fused nature of the two discourses, gender and sexuality, has only emerged gradually, tentatively, and fitfully. In the essay that follows, I argue that the awkwardly related plots that cause the “failure” of Eliot's novel to cohere relate to her “failure” to fuse sexuality and gender, a fusion that in historical terms cannot be assumed to have “always already” happened and can only be seen as the end point of a specific historical narrative, an end point that has not yet been reached at the moment of Eliot's novel. In Eliot, the difficulty arises because this history has reached not an end point but a moment of crisis and uncertain change.

In her critique of the current studies in the history of sexuality, Seitler suggests that even “while we should accept as ‘axiomatic’ that by the early twentieth century homosexuality emerged as a different . . . category of identification” we should look out for “more stories to tell about how these identities were represented and understood, or ways in which they failed to perform coherently” (87). In examining this turning point, Eliot's novel includes several identities, all of which, in some sense, fail to perform coherently. The identities, which I briefly outline below, each represent a moment in the broader historical shifts that Foucault and Laqueur indicate; however, their placement in this history can only be seen in hindsight. To avoid the aura of certainty, we must see each of them as distinct, divorced from teleology, even as we see their place in that broader history: (1) Sir Hugo, Daniel's adoptive uncle, represents early-modern aristocratic control of the passions; (2) Mirah Lapidoth embodies mid-Victorian female sentimentality, an emotionally suffused self-denial that serves as an alternative to early-modernity's full control of the passions; (3) Gwendolen Harleth, has a proto-modern femininity that provokes the desire to know an unknowable sexuality; and (4) Deronda figures as the man of culture, whose emotionally suffused self-denial resembles female sentimentality but operates in the modern spheres of nation and race. Eliot's novel allows us to see, for example, how Victorian sentimentality is one recasting of aristocratic ideology and how the man of culture is, in turn, a recasting of Victorian sentimentality. Through a dialectical process, each form of identity continually builds on what comes before, without simply replacing the older model. Yet, as each new model emerges it necessarily invokes different foundational assumptions distinct from the assumptions that grounded the older model.

As Foucault points out in a discussion of subjectivity, each “specific moral act” refers “to a unified moral conduct” (Uses of Pleasure 28). In other words, every activity that is part of self-formulation – whether mental, emotional, physical – necessarily invokes a unified and broader paradigm of subjectivity that informs that specific activity. Because each change in what Foucault would call “practices of the self” (Uses of Pleasure 28) suggests a broader paradigm that exists behind that specific change, existent practices of the self, say “archaic” and “emergent ones,” are not simply different but contain divergent or even contradictory foundational assumptions, as well as shared ones. The model of change that Eliot's characters suggest, then, assumes that some element of unrationalized coexistence is always there. Moreover, the dialectical process also assumes the constant reformulation of practices of the self, working off of and against each other, and not larger shifts; these constant reformulations do not lead in any predictable or steady direction (even though in retrospect we can trace out, or construct, such narratives) but to identities whose fate is to fail, as they are constantly replaced by newer, emergent models. Not only, then, is “unrationalized coexistence” part of this process; so, too, is an incoherent or unpredictable model of change littered with identities that have yet to be absorbed into later ones or have yet to become simply unintelligible. However, if we take the broad historical view of these micro-changes, it suggests that the relation between sexuality and gender intensifies as each emergent practice of the self reformulates the connections among sexuality, gender, and ethics, bringing sexuality and gender closer and closer together.

Nonetheless, Eliot's refusal to tie sexuality and gender together, fully or finally, is perhaps more interesting and significant than this broad narrative is. Eliot's text suggests the persistence of practices of the self which seemed by her own moment to have already failed (such as the early modern ethics of desire embodied in Sir Hugo), but the text does more than this. Eliot's novel puts forth its own practice of the self, one that suggests an unrationalized coexistence of its own through the opaque desires of Deronda that draw him to Mirah, her brother Mordecai, and Gwendolen Harleth all at once and in contradictory ways. His desires, I argue, figure as a failed identity to twenty-first-century readers. In the history of gender and sexuality, however, his desires represent a lost moment where the recasting of gender that Deronda and the late-Victorian man of culture represent seems just about the final push that would transform an ethics of desire into modern sexuality. This is a tipping over that nonetheless remains incomplete as Eliot is unable, or unwilling, finally, to leave ethics behind and define gender only in terms of sexuality and vice versa (as modernity does). The resistance to this fusion that Deronda signals ultimately exposes, I argue, the unstable, shifting, and unpredictable relation that sexuality and gender have to each other, entering modernity at their own asynchronous pace and revealing the emergence of heterosexuality as tentative, uncertain, and belated, even as the twentieth century and modern sexuality's “certain” rise fast approaches.

Sir Hugo, the wealthy baronet who adopts and raises the young Deronda, represents the “heroic . . . final struggle of old systems” (Essays 402). Warning the adult Daniel about succumbing to the beautiful Gwendolen Harleth, “Sir Hugo looked at a letter without reading it, [and] he said, ‘I hope you are not playing with fire, Dan – you understand me’” (510; ch. 37). The fire Deronda may be playing with is female desire. Seemingly attuned to female lust, Sir Hugo had earlier warned Daniel “[y]ou are . . . a kind of Lovelace who will make the Clarissas run after you instead of you running after them” (409; ch. 32). Sir Hugo's vision of venal women chasing a susceptible Deronda suggests an early modern view of women as “more lustful in their appetites and more fickle in their attachment” (Stone 501–02); Sir Hugo sees “the libidinous woman of the one-sex world” (Harvey 102). In this version of patriarchy, women were not primarily positioned as men's natural “opposites” but placed lower in a hierarchy, possessing only “aberrant versions of a unitary male body” (McKeon 301). Women, like male youths and those of lower orders, are positioned as individuals less able to control passions and thus imperfect realizations of the idealized male aristocratic.

Although Sir Hugo warns Deronda regarding “the fire” with which the young man may be playing, he refuses to make explicit his suspicions about Deronda's relation to Gwendolen. While issuing this oblique warning, Sir Hugo also avoids eye contact with Deronda (he “looked at a letter without reading it”) and thus appears reluctant even to acknowledge the vague and guarded warning that he gives about “fire.” The emphasis on ethics, here, leads to Sir Hugo's self-censorship, and this censorship reflects a broad system in which, according to Foucault,

As Sir Hugo's eye movements suggest, the ethical must be made visible, the illicit disappear from sight. Here, desire is not an unknowable element whose hidden meaning must be uncovered. Rather, for Sir Hugo, desire is an uncomplicated force that renders all subjects, but women in particular, unable to meet a relatively universal standard emphasizing the control of the passions in both sexes; as such, desire calls upon the aristocratic patriarchy to police the world of the visible.

Sir Hugo's emphasis on male homosocial bonds, his chivalrous concern for his wife and daughters, and his interest in familial alliance represent the patriarchal logic of early modern aristocratic virtue. Exhibiting an “ingrained care for what . . . belonged to his caste,” Sir Hugo's chief grievance in life is not so much the lack of a son but rather “the want of a son to inherit lands” (197; ch. 15). Moreover, Sir Hugo conceives of his attraction to Deronda in the terms of patriarchal lineage: “I couldn't have loved you better if you'd been my own – only I should have been better pleased with thinking of you always as the future master of the Abbey” (681; ch. 50). Here Sir Hugo's regrets evince displeasure at a world in which emotion (his homosocial bond with Deronda) does not match Deronda's status and thus his ability to inherit the Abbey. The desire for an heir suggests Foucault's early modern “deployment of alliance”: “a system of marriage, of fixation and development of kinship ties, of transmission of names and possessions” (History 106). Since wealth was conceived of as an “inert hoard” not likely to appreciate in value, it was, like status, seen as being preserved and transmitted through inheritance (Thompson 43). In this light, indulgence in the basic passions, such as lust, greed, and pride, which were “believed to feed on each other” (Hirschman 21), could disturb marriages of alliance or lead to the expenditure of what was basically conceived of as limited resources. Thus, for example, as I discuss above, Sir Hugo warns Deronda about an affair with Gwendolen (“playing with fire”) because it will disturb his delicate negotiations with Gwendolen's husband, Grandcourt, about the inheritance the baronet can leave to his family. Here, personal relationships are meant to conform to and strengthen the concerns of status; personal ties that disturb status are at the very least upsetting, as in Sir Hugo's love for Deronda, and at most illicit, as in Deronda's potential attraction to Gwendolen. In Sir Hugo's ideal world, the importance of a personal relationship, the dialectical engagement with the other, is supposed to dovetail with dictates of status.

One of the primary fears here is about desire, and in particular, the ability of female desire to disrupt the maintenance of status by cuckolding their husbands. As suggested above, one aspect of the system of alliance was the belief that women were more lustful and fickle than men. Stephen Orgel argues that in early modern culture “[w]omen are dangerous to men because sexual passion for women renders men effeminate: this is an age in which sexuality itself is mysogynistic” (14). In this world view, control of desire is masculine, while the lack of control makes men effeminate and characterizes women more generally. The different relations men and women have towards desire could be characterized as “difference in degree” rather than a “difference in kind,” since women are less able, not unable, to control the passions. Moreover, as Susan Amunsen has suggested, “English society was finely graded” by hierarchy and “hierarchies of class and gender were similar in many ways, and were assumed to be in harmony with each other,” even as this analogous relation between status and gender was often tested (3). Women's fickleness, as Laqueur has suggested, was part of the rationale for a lower position within the related hierarchies of gender and status.Footnote ³ For these reasons, the male homosocial sphere was often held up as the preferred site for emotionally powerful relationships. Sir Hugo's love for Deronda reveals the homoerotic nature of early-modern patriarchy. Since the Baronet “had been a bachelor till he was five-and-forty, he had always been regarded as a fascinating man of elegant tastes; what could be more natural, even according to the index of language, than that he should have a beautiful boy like the little Deronda to take care of?” (214; ch. 16). For Sir Hugo, the relationship between himself and Deronda reflects a homoeroticism founded on one man's patronage of a less powerful one and expressed through, in Alan Bray's words, “established social institutions . . . and generally this meant patriarchal institutions” (74). Daniel Juan Gil similarly argues that, like the Sir Hugo-Deronda relationship, in the sixteenth century, “intimacies . . . between men and men . . . are not seen as separate from the public world of impersonal ties. Rather, they are frequently celebrated, under the rubric of friendship, as fundamental pillars of social stability” (864). The relationship between Sir Hugo and Deronda evokes the fantasy of “an all-male world with only male homoerotic desire” (125) that Laqueur suggests came with intricate relations of male patron and client.

Sir Hugo's world view, an early modern ethics of desire that centered around the image of the idealized male aristocratic subject, came under pressure in the seventeenth century as individuals not of aristocratic birth began to claim an “inner virtue” that contrasted with a “corrupt aristocratic honor” (McKeon 313). According to Michael McKeon, this concept of “inner virtue” was “at first gender neutral” (313). One discourse that emerged from the challenge to aristocratic order, a discourse originally traced out by critics including Mary Poovey and Nancy Armstrong, repositioned the feminine in relation to the body and sentiment. The feminine relation to the body and sentiment was earlier seen as the cause of their reprobate fickleness; in contrast, in this new discourse women's sentimentality (defined as a bodily response) was increasingly linked to a putatively natural feminine virtue. (The gendering of virtue was a complex process which revealed changes in the very conception of gender, a process I will discuss more fully in relation to Deronda's ethical significance below.) Such a reevaluation of the relation between femininity and “inner virtue” is, nonetheless, embodied by Mirah Lapidoth, Eliot's rendering of the mid-Victorian figure of domestic sentimentality. Mirah's generous sentiments are, for example, defined by her “delicate, childlike beauty” (228; ch.17), an air of “helpless sorrow” (229; ch.17), and a “look . . . of wondering timidity” (234; ch.17), all of which serve to mark her as the unconscious, bodily incarnation of feminine virtue that only needs to be seen to be believed. As the poor, Jewish actress, Mirah's embodiment of virtue counters the archaic view of the idealized male aristocratic subject. Nevertheless, Mirah's role continues to invoke the earlier interest in ethics: her “childlike beauty” reminds us of her innocence, and, thus the significance of her character reminds us of earlier attempts (like those of Sir Hugo) to suture the ethical and the visible. Mirah represents what Eliot might label another “step” towards a great turning point in history, a step beyond Sir Walter's aristocratic ideology. Her differences with his “practices of the self” suggest an unrationalized coexistence of models. As part of such a dialectical recasting of early modern ethics, Mirah both reproduces the earlier link between ethics and the visible even as she challenges ideas about aristocratic honor, virtue, and masculinity.

When Mirah first appears in the novel, Deronda rows down the Thames and happens upon “a figure which might have been an impersonation of . . . misery”: “her eyes were fixed on the river with a look of immovable, statue-like despair” (227; ch. 17). He responds to this sight with “an outleap of interest and compassion,” suggesting the automatic connection between his vision of her and his knowledge of her virtue. As a poor, Jewish woman, however, Mirah also represents a mid-Victorian reaction against aristocratic status. The mid-Victorian sentimental thus indicates a major development in what Habermas has described as the shift from “a role identity” positioned within a continuum of rank and legal entitlements to a more modern “ego identity,” or self that has been created through a dialectical opposition to another subject (“Moral Development” 85). We see this dialectic, and its new power, in the relationship between Mirah and Deronda. In response to Deronda's interest, Mirah “looking around with a frightened glance, met Deronda's face” (227; ch. 17). Such eye contact and mutual recognition between individuals who are nonetheless deeply separated by circumstance and status suggest the mid-Victorian fusing of ego identity with the ethics of the visible.

From the first, the difference between subject and object in Deronda and Mirah's relationship is ambiguous: as cited above, when Deronda first sees her “her eyes were fixed on the river with a look of immovable, statue-like despair” (emphasis my own). He is the subject looking at her looking, which suggests from a certain perspective that she, too, is a subject observing an object. Even the word “look” (“a look of immovable . . . despair”) highlights this ambiguity: such a description seems to characterize Deronda's observations of his object, here Mirah's expression, and, simultaneously, the way in which Mirah looks at the river, which here serves as her object. We have an observer, Deronda, observing another observer, Mirah: Mirah is both object and subject here. The uncertainty in the positions of subject and object escalates significantly as the encounter continues. While Deronda sees Mirah as a “statue” and thus reduces her to an object, Mirah rather than responding to his sympathy quickly inverts this dynamic. First, rather than Mirah running away, she placidly returns his glance: “[i]t was but a couple of moments, but that seems a long while for two people to look straight at each other” (228; ch. 17). Moreover, the look she responds with does not plead her case or announce her desire. Instead it was a “look [that] was something like that of a fawn or other gentle animal before it turns to run away” (227–28; ch. 17). After she returns his glance, Mirah, with “no blush, no special alarm” (228; ch. 17); in “the next instant turned and walked away” (228; ch. 17). As she is described here, Mirah seems not so much consumed with fear as unable to comprehend his interest. Deronda's “outleap of interest and compassion towards her” appears impotent because it makes little immediate impression on the uncomprehending “fawn.” Indeed, Mirah's suffering becomes more touching, more pathetic, by virtue of the fact that she is “only half conscious of her surroundings” and unable to comprehend his sympathy. Here, Mirah corresponds with other figures of sentimentality whose very innocence seems to make them resistant to the patriarchal sympathy they nonetheless elicit: the dying child who begs his family not to worry since he is going to a better place, the ignored daughter who seeks her father's forgiveness, the endangered woman who is afraid of troubling the Victorian man, and so on. Deronda, disappointed, is left only to “linger and watch” (228; ch. 17) helplessly several moments more. Now it is Deronda who seems “statue-like” and frozen in place. Here, then, sentimentality seems defined by the queasiness, the sense of vertigo engendered, when objects of sympathy repel or leave unacknowledged sympathy offered, turning the spectator into an object of their timid gaze.

Such interactions heighten the importance of visual forms of knowledge. Because the sentimental object does not acknowledge his or her own pain, desires, or needs, such emotion is only available to others. Any discussion of these emotions, then, relies on the visible and requires a subject who watches the sentimental object. Victorian sentimentality, according to Wendy Lesser, is defined by a dynamic in which “emotion can only be generated from outside the creatures experiencing the sad events” (196). Moreover, the need for visible guarantors of virtue like Mirah reminds us of the appeal made by the narrative voice of Dickens's Dombey and Son (1848) who pleads “for a good spirit who would take the house-tops off, with a more potent and benignant hand than the lame demon in the tale, and show a Christian people what dark shapes issue from amidst their homes” (738; ch. 46). Rather than suggesting what exists beyond the visible (as psychoanalysis would do), such sentimentality, like the earlier discourse of censorship, hopes to make ethics, knowledge, and visibility compatible. The Victorian model confirms that Mirah and Deronda are, indeed, ethical and good. In contrast, however, the intersubjective relations of modern sexuality lead not to the certainty of ethical meaning but undermine such certainty: as modern psychoanalysts such as Lacan conceive of the sexual encounter, neither partner can ever successfully confirm the gendered identity they seek to shore up through their dialectic with Other.

This mid-Victorian dynamic assumes a historically specific relation to gender. In this model, the Victorian man most often requires the presence of, and identification with, figures of child-like and or feminine domesticity, a Florence Dombey or a Little Dorrit – or, for that matter, a dying Paul Dombey or Tiny Tim – in order to experience virtue fully. At this point in the history of gender, it is difficult to separate fully “difference of kind” from “difference of degree.” In contrast to the past, women's control of desire in the nineteenth century has an automatic quality to it that suggests women are different-in-kind from men. Men's need to achieve the position of self-abnegating, sentimental object, and inability to do so more than momentarily, places women in a position of ethical superiority, even as such superiority, now feminine, is itself dubious in relation to the economic power found in a putatively free market, now distinct from ethical concerns.

Yet, the “difference of degree” model does not disappear all at once. For the queasy vertigo of sentimentality to work, adult men need to be able to inhabit, even if momentarily, the position of the abject Other: they need to be the helpless object of the other's sympathy, concern, and interest. The position of the individual who objectifies by looking and the object thus objectified must be open, even momentarily, to reversals. In addition to the possibility of reversal, the very notion of ethical superiority reveals a “mode of subjectivation” that indicates a unified ethics of desire for both men and women: women can't be “better” if there is not some universal code that applies both to men and women. Such reversals and comparisons fit together logically. Seeing the difference between subject and object in terms of virtue, and not consistently and fully in terms of gender, allows for momentary inversions of the positions of subject and object, a central experience of mid-Victorian desire and a practice of the self that is distinct from modern heterosexuality. However, by the end of the nineteenth century, the need for, and possibility of, access to the position of self-abnegating object that sentimentality provides for men wanes. John Tosh argues that as the Victorian era drew to a close, the idea that “a man's relations within the home were those ‘which most shrewdly test his manhood,’ . . . was out of touch with mainstream opinion. Late Victorian manliness was a public, even military, code, to be exercised among men” (A Man's Place 189). The decreasing dependence of men on the home and the sentimental object who resides there, and increasing dependence on other men to define their masculinity, indicate growing gender incommensurability that psychoanalysis later enshrines in its twentieth century model of heterosexuality.Footnote ⁴

While the novel uses Mirah to invoke the feminine sentimental, Eliot's text recognizes the fading appeal of sentimentality, indicating that sentimentality alone is no longer a compelling alternative to the early modern deployment of alliance represented by Sir Hugo. When Mirah entertains her hosts, the Meyricks, by reading to them as they engage in their sewing, painting, and drawing, the narrative voice tells us that Mirah thus serves as a model “for a title-page vignette, symbolizing a fair public absorbed in the successive volumes of the Family Tea-table” (538; ch. 39). Eliot gives us a typical scene of sentimental domesticity that would fit remarkably well in any Dickens novel, even as the narrator's own reference to the typical “title-page vignette” suggests the clichéd nature of such a scene. Eliot's narration of this scene refers to the constructed, artificial, and commercially successful nature of sentimental images like this one. According to Monica Cohen, “part of the scene's very appeal derives from its ironic disclosure of its own artifice . . . In this it resembles a nineteenth-century version of what Marc Miller identifies as television advertisements of today as a preemptive irony that co-opts all skeptical postures” (335). In its auto-irony, the narrative voice seems to acknowledge the campiness – and thus the already clichéd nature – of Mirah's visual appeal. Moreover, Eliot also calls into the question the reliance on the visual image itself that defines Victorian sentimentality, thus undermining what Armstrong has identified as a mid-Victorian understanding that “equated seeing with knowing and made visual information the basis for the intelligibility of a verbal narrative” (7). Here, Eliot seems to admit the old-fashioned appeal of a character like Mirah whose visual presence seemed to guarantee their virtue.

Yet when Deronda ruminates on his encounter, it becomes clear that the inversion of the position of subject and object that the exchange of glances allowed, itself, can no longer be sustained. Recalling his interaction with Mirah, Deronda questions his own, initial “outleap of interest and compassion” (228; ch.17). As he examines his own motivations, he “smile[s] at his own share in the prejudice that interesting faces must have interesting adventures” (228; ch.17). Significantly, the term “interest” shifts connotation in this scene. Originally, “interest” pairs well with “compassion” (the “outleap of interest and compassion”). As he second-guesses himself, “interesting faces” suggests his own fantasies that might lead him to “obtrude his interest upon her” (228; ch. 17; my emphasis). In this last formulation, “interest” no longer seems as compatible with compassion as it had been a few sentences earlier. Here, “interest” seems to connote desire. Compelled by this (second) kind of interest, “He had no right to linger and watch her” (228; ch. 17). Here, Deronda comes to a realization that he is inescapably the subject of desire; his “interest” is tainted by desire that is not compatible with visually mediated identification. As the scene progresses, the differences between the subject who desires and the object desired are hardening – and hardening along lines of gender. This hardening happens so that Deronda's identification with the object, and the reversals of position between subject and object that define mid-Victorian sentimentality, seem not only unethical but ultimately impossible. At the same time, the visible – rather than confirming the ethics of the beautiful object (here, Mirah) – now throws into questions the ethics of the viewer, making beauty's meaning or value ultimately unknowable. In contrast, Dickens's mid-century characters such as Arthur Clenham or even Paul Dombey, Sr., never question the ethics of allowing their gaze to linger on the objects of their pity. Indeed, the ethical thrust of Dickens is to encourage Dombey to meet Florence Dombey's “speaking eyes, [which were] more earnest and pathetic in their voiceless speech than all the orators in the world, and impeaching him more nearly in their mute address” (586).

Even as his relations to Mirah do not guarantee virtue, Deronda's ethical path shifts. When Deronda examines a gallery of portraits of Sir Hugo's ancestors, Eliot creates a moment in the text that reveals the dramatic nature of the shift from male aristocratic identity to “culture” as it is embodied by Deronda. Here, Eliot invokes “culture” as a body of knowledge and patterns of thought that represent humanity's “best” even as they are related to a particular national heritage and are transmitted through interpersonal relationships that foster intellectual engagement, ties of sympathy, and aesthetic appreciation. The young Daniel finds himself between “two rows of these descendants, direct and collateral, females of the male line, and males of the female” (204; ch. 16), paintings that tell the story of the Mallinger genealogical heritage in images, showing each generation of the dynastic line “till the line ended with Sir Hugo and his younger brother Henleigh” (204; ch. 16). This dynastic line becomes enervated since Sir Hugo has no son to inherit his estate. Daniel, however, interrupts this genealogy: “in the nephew Daniel Deronda the family faces of various types, seen on the walls of the gallery, found no reflex” (205; ch. 16). The narrative voice now pauses, shifting from retelling the diachronic history of the Mallingers to articulating its own synchronic relation – or the synchronic relation of a fictive “artist” – with the beauty of Daniel:

The ability of Daniel's captivating looks to serve as a confirmation of virtue precisely replicates the role of Mirah's “delicate, childlike beauty” (228; ch. 17). This image of masculine beauty suggests the deeply homoerotic possibilities of this vision of culture, possibilities that will be played out in Daniel's mediated “marriage” to Mordecai. The sight of the boy's face reminds us of past cultural achievements, and, in so reminding us, spurs us on to recreate or surpass those achievements. Echoing Arnold's definition of culture as the “best that has been thought and known in the world” (426), Eliot describes Deronda's desirable, youthful visage as a guarantor of virtue. Like Mirah (and in contrast with Gwendolen), we never wonder what Deronda's noble face means. The visible (“seen his face thoroughly meeting yours”) allows us to know what is ethical (“human creatures had done nobly”). Ethics and aesthetics, then, come through a reflective relation to the past, in which we find the best that there has been, and we struggle, as Arnold would say, to make it “prevail” (495). In this equation of the visible and the ethical under the name of culture, Eliot, is again like Arnold, for whom, as Amanda Anderson points out, “Hellenism provides a contemplative relation to perfection, a self-reflective desire to ‘see things as they really are’” (43). In this description of the sight of Deronda's visage, we see the pre-Freudian epistemology that emphasizes a specular mode of knowledge.

The shift from the story told by the paintings on the wall to the knowledge inspired by Deronda suggests the transformation from a form of power that resided in aristocratic lineage and status (as recorded in the paintings) to a form of power embedded in synchronic relation between men and defined by a reflective or self-conscious relation to cultural heritage. Culture differs from kinship and lineage since culture embraces not simply one's specific family but an abstract historical past of the nation or even humanity at large. In doing so, the transition from kinship to culture enacts what Benedict Anderson has called an imagined community: while it is possible to know one's lineage through several centuries, it is impossible to know the community of your nation that existed several centuries ago (Anderson 6). With the ascent of culture, no longer did homoerotic relations between men strictly conform to hierarchies of status and follow the transmission of wealth. Culture was deeply infused with an element of the personal divorced from status, elements such as the inspiring beauty of the young Deronda, for example. By bringing a new sense of the personal into relations between men, culture in turn reshapes these relationships.

One way Deronda signals his participation in this discourse is through his relation to literature and education. Deronda is motivated by a love of history left unsatisfied by his education:

Specifically Deronda feels his interests “diverging more and more from the track marked out by the standards of examination”:

Sir Hugo, in contrast, believes that education should simply give a man “a passport in life” (217; ch. 16), and he has little interest in either excessive retention or thorough understanding since “it's hardly worth while” for a man “to . . . be able to spin . . . out pages of the Greek dramatists at any verse you'll give him as a cue” (215–16; ch. 16). Where Sir Hugo sees the university as another site for the sort of homosocial bonding that could be used to foster networks of political and social power, Deronda has a reflective and passive nature that fosters a relation to a cultural heritage that has to do with a practice of self-realization and not the explicit and self-interested exercise of power.

Through its comments on Deronda's education, Eliot's text implicitly comments on discussions about culture, discussions which were, at the time of Eliot's writing, creating upheavals in the curriculum of Oxford and Cambridge. Through the efforts of such scholars as George Grote and Benjamin Jowett, the curriculum shifted away from the study of Roman militarism towards Hellenistic texts, which became a grounding point for the Victorian idea of “culture” that celebrated democratic ideals and intellectual freedom. By focusing on the putatively transcendental values embodied in Greek democracy, Jowett, the leader of such reforms, could then “in turn appeal to this ‘greatest inspired writing’ as evidence that his plans for transforming Oxford into a school for national and imperial leaders were similarly disinterested,” guaranteeing that “Oxford liberals had not turned aside from the pursuit of transcendental truth” (Dowling 72). Such Victorians as Jowett, Grote, and Arnold saw in ancient Greece transcendent values of an intellectual freedom that emphasized individual creativity. This transformation then linked a disinterested relation to cultural heritage (here, Greek democratic traditions) to a professional interest in the state, ideal for students who would eventually join the governmental classes both in Britain and its colonies. In other words, students were now encouraged to ask questions such as: what had “human creatures had done nobly in time past, and might do more nobly in time to come?” – the kind of questions Deronda's young face inspires. Such questions were to lead to the kind of “free growth” that Deronda sees in his pursuit of his boyish love of history. Rather than a direct interest in power, students were encouraged to think about their individual and personal relation to the inspired writing of classical Greek culture. In Deronda's case, culture is radically disinterested, since the novel suggests that no one would have anything to gain by claiming to be Jewish. More generally, however, by replacing property, culture gave an ethical thrust to the integration of middle-class men into the civic elite, allowing identity to move from a role identity based on status to an ego identity based on a self-reflective relation to a set of texts.

Even as the category of “gentleman,” to which Sir Hugo responded powerfully, continued to have important social meaning, the requirements of the role became contradictory as the “emphasis on leisure, explicit in earlier formulations, persisted in the nineteenth century – but potentially at the expense of the middle-class husband's commitment to work. The two demands, for leisure and production, were at odds” (Dellamora 197). “Gentleman” then contains a contradiction in an effort to suture aristocratic and middle-class masculine identity and to bring middle-class men into Britain's elite without making such change explicit. Culture, and Oxford's new curriculum, was one way to finesse this contradiction through its ability to combine professional “interest” with the “disinterested” appreciation of history and society. Such questions of power give masculinity a significantly different history and chronology from that of femininity.

In mid-Victorian sentimentality, women and children refused the compassion of men, allowing these men to experience the position of suffering object. In Eliot, the new masculinity recreates this dynamic, now between adult men. Just as Deronda, like Mirah, had served as a visible guarantor of truth and beauty, Daniel now looks for his own guarantor, “a friend he imagined” (527; ch. 37). He finds his ideal companion when he meets Mordecai, later revealed to be Mirah's brother, and in “ten minutes the two men . . . felt themselves alone in the small gas-lit bookshop and turned face to face, each baring his head from an instinctive feeling that they wished to see each other fully” (552; ch. 40). In the rhetoric of sentimental suffering, we learn that along with his “yearning consumptive glance,” Mordecai's expression recalls “something of the slowly dying mother's look when her loved one visits her bedside, and the flickering power of gladness leaps out of her as she says ‘My boy!’” (553; ch. 40). Though suffering intensely, Mordecai's expression also reveals “the hopefulness which is often the beneficent illusion of consumptive patients, [which] was in Mordecai wholly diverted from the prospect of bodily recovery and carried into the current of this yearning for transmission” (528; ch 38). This “illusion” which marks Moredecai's refusal to acknowledge his own suffering becomes a “hopefulness” as it is “diverted” into Deronda: “the more beautiful, the stronger, the more executive self [that] took shape in his mind” (530; ch. 38). Mordecai leaves sympathy unacknowledged, turning Deronda into his “beautiful” object. In turn, Deronda – as when Mirah's gratitude leaves him speechless – experiences the discomforting powerlessness of being positioned as an object of other's desires: “there spread within him not only a compassionate dread of discouraging this fellow-man who urged a prayer as one in the last agony, but also the opposing dread of fatally feeding an illusion” (558; ch. 40). Deronda's interest is once again refused, and, as with Mirah, he once again feels paralyzed, but this time through the discourse of culture, which clearly resembles mid-Victorian sentimentality. Deronda and Mordecai can play out the relations of mid-Victorian sentimentality now under the name of culture: a relationship where vision and ethics are linked and given a sentimental thrust when the subject, Deronda, and the object he pities quickly reverse positions as the object, here Mordecai, unselfconsciously refuses the sympathy of the other.

Here, then, the novel suggests the link between an emergent male identity and an earlier, mid Victorian-female sentimentality, a sentimentality, as I argue above, that Eliot portrays as outdated. Suggesting the wider significance of this link, Lauren Goodlad points out that the virtues of the domestic, self-sacrifice and emotional succor, were appropriated by professional men in a search for cultural legitimacy in Victorian England. Goodlad argues that if “capitalist ideology depended upon the myth of virtuous feminine self-sacrifice in order (symbolically) to curb capitalist excesses and mask contradictions, then male professionals may be seen to have waged their own struggle for status and power by aligning themselves with the domestic ideal” (163). For Deronda, his relationship to culture, and his relationship to his ideal “friend” Mordecai, allows nation builders, even Jewish nation builders like himself, to appropriate the dynamics of sentimentality to justify their own work and to embody the dynamics of sentimentality to greater effect than the old-fashioned Mirah is able to do. If male professionals attempt to appropriate the “domestic ideal” consonant with middle-class masculinity, then to see Daniel as having a “feminine socialization,” as Sarah Gates and other critics do, is to make assumptions about what counts as femininity that appear more stable than history allows (708). What Goodlad does not comment on is the simultaneous need, precisely in light of the indistinguishability of the man of professional interest and feminine domesticity, for professional men to then distinguish themselves from the middle class women with whom they share so much.Footnote ⁵ Deronda, himself seems poised to make just such a move: when Mrs. Meyrick makes a claim for the special place of the domestic woman, Deronda bristles. Mrs. Meyrick comments that a “mother hears something like a lisp in her children's talk to the very last. Their words are not just what everybody else says, though they may be spelt the same” (424; ch. 32), Deronda is quick to protest and to question women's exclusive claims to emotional relations: “Is not that the way with friendship too? . . . We must not let mothers be too arrogant” (424; ch. 32). Such a need to distinguish the professional, male elite from the earlier model of female domesticity, here rendered selfish, fits in with the on-going debates over the gendered location of virtue that, as I suggest above, stretch back to the seventeenth century.

Eliot's novel suggests a co-optation of the power of female sentimentality now for men and under the name of culture: a specular relation between self and other that insures ethics. Such a co-optation itself has historical roots and makes a telling comment about gender definition. The “inner virtue” that is increasingly coded feminine during the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth century originally emerged as a gender neutral alternative to male aristocratic honor. Once virtue was linked to gender, masculinity could also claim, sometimes from femininity, the newly positive sphere of sentimentality as part of the struggles for power and position in which men and women engaged. Such a struggle is suggested, for example, by Claudia Johnson's discussion of the success of the late eighteenth-century man of feeling, who “having taken over once-feminine attributes” (12) then “recoded [them] as masculine” (14) and thus left “women without a distinct gender site” (11). Nonetheless, these struggles often still echoed with the older hierarchical notion of gender difference since they suggested that men or women be judged in relation to a more universal, ethical standard to which everyone should strive. Deronda's character, I argue, represents not normative heterosexuality but another instance of the recurring co-optation of sentimentality, here taking place through a discourse of “culture.”

Significantly, Dowling argues that masculine “culture” emerges most powerfully in the years between 1860 and 1880, “when culture finally replaced property as the qualifying characteristic of the civic elite” for men (61), placing this discourse almost a generation after Victorian female domesticity reached its zenith in the 1840s and 1850s (Poovey 18; Chase and Levenson 215–20). Culture is gendered male in part by its ties to higher education and the study of classical texts, and it allows masculinity to co-opt the “inner virtue” that Victorian sentimentality often gave to women. In addition, culture also gave the individual, middle-class male subject a specific racial or cultural identity, tying men to a new “imagined” national community (and to modern nationalism) even more explicitly and directly than women were tied to nation and race by Victorian sentimentality. As we will see with Gwendolen, one ramification of such a shift of linking masculinity to race and culture is to leave femininity, as it were, homeless, defined only, in a circular way, by its femaleness.

Now that culture has emerged as the site for a significant intersubjective relation, as it does in the novel, the men involved must belong to a specific group: Jewish men, English men, and so forth. For example, Deronda's attachment to Mordechai and his discovery of his Jewish heritage seem to limit Deronda's earlier “many sided sympathy” that originally attracted him to Gwendolen. Deronda's new identification with Mordecai and his new mission to found a Jewish homeland means that the impulse to rescue unrelated women like Gwendolen “could no longer determine his life” (835; ch. 65). In other words, the mid-Victorian emphasis on sympathy across class, cultural group, or gender becomes limited. Deronda's development seems to reflect a wider shift that Audrey Jaffe describes: a “Victorian cross-class sympathy” based on “visuality” that characterized the mid-nineteenth century is replaced, towards the end of the century, by what are “assertions of mysterious affinities between like-minded individuals” (22) who were necessarily part of “larger, corporate bodies such as nations, or categories of group identity” (23). Thus, cultural identification between men appears as one specialized offshoot of an earlier, more generalized, sentimentality.

Culture stands in a dialectical relationship to sentimentality: it incorporates part of sentimentality, the relation to the Other, but inevitably alters the landscape of desire and gender, too. The limitations “culture” placed on sympathy has other effects, and sentimentality seems to have another offshoot, one unacknowledged by Jaffe: an emergent modern desire. Even as Daniel severs his responsibility to Gwendolen in favor of his nation, the impulse to save her was still “present in him as . . . a painful quivering” (835; ch. 65). His lack of sympathy allows him to resist her appeals, yet some other, unnamed emotion, seems to emerge as the opposite of his cultural identifications: “The very strength of the bond, the certainty of the resolve, that kept him asunder from her, made him gaze at her lot apart with the more aching pity” (835; ch. 65). Here, it is the lack of cultural identification (“the certainty of the resolve, that kept him asunder from her”) that causes (“made”) him “gaze” at her. Eliot's use of “gaze,” “ache,” and, “quivering” hint that what Deronda now experiences as the opposite of identification with Gwendolen may be physical desire for her. (Such a move echoes Deronda's earlier attempt to separate out his initial “outleap of interest and compassion” [228; ch. 17] toward Mirah into two separate emotions of desire and identification, respectively.) As modernity approaches, sentimentality, in my estimation, hesitantly begins to bifurcate into two distinct parts: (1) an identification that is limited to a specific nation or people and (2) a physical, sexual, and gendered desire. Such a formulation reveals how modern sexuality is directly dependent upon emergent conceptions of race and nationality. It seems that the recasting of masculinity by culture is about to push ethics apart from sexuality by separating altruism, ethics, and compassion from the kind of ties that make men “quiver” for women. It may be about to do so, but it does not. The parting of Deronda and Gwendolen, described above, is itself proof that while culture changes the landscape, the terrain is not yet that of heterosexuality: Eliot does not yet fully separate identification and desire. Deronda cannot identify with the Jewish people and desire the feminine other as a purely gendered being, here represented by Gwendolen, at the same time. Even so, the novel has a dual, Gwendolen-and-Daniel, structure, where “the two so-called plots . . . lead to each other in an endless move, referring in different way to the same thing” (Herzog 55). This unresolved dualism suggests a deepened reification of gender difference and the modern two-body model of gender, a reification that nonetheless exists without a clear dynamic that would join the male and female plot. Such a reification of gender difference is reflected, for example, in the novel's famous opening scene, where Gwendolen draws Deronda's glance towards her, causing Deronda to wonder:

Here, the ethical and the aesthetic form two separate, equally unanswerable, questions. The uncertainty that Gwendolen embodies – beautiful or not, evil or not? – suggests a modern, psychoanalytic understanding of desire uncontrollably, even coercively, evoked by the object, here Gwendolen. In this paradigm, there is a heightened sense of gender opposition: woman stands as the unknowable object of an ever-pulsing, often hidden desire and thus signals her radical difference from the male subject. In turn, woman's unknowability positions desire itself as a force beyond our full understanding with a meaning that only exists, if at all, beyond the visible.

Claiming that Gwendolen is “the original literary hysteric” (115), Jacqueline Rose locates a fundamental shift in femininity in the passage of the Contagious Diseases Acts in the 1860s; such laws allowed police to arrest without evidence any woman suspected of prostitution in port towns. By requiring no evidence for arrest, the laws suggest that no certain list of behaviors or description of appearance in the laws could guide the police in their constant work to separate “good” from “bad.” Thus, aberrant female sexuality demands ever-present attention, and yet, even with this surveillance, female sexuality can never be fully known. As this idea becomes increasingly powerful, then, “[w]e have to discover the secret of sexual identity by other than visual means” (Armstrong 268). Thus, Deronda's initial assumption of Mirah's virtue, based on vision, which ultimately gives way to his subsequent revision and anxiety about this judgment reflect a wider, growing uncertainty, about female sexuality. Moreover, such uncertainty is reflected, too, in Gwendolen Harleth, who, the novel suggests, has suspect desires that lurk beneath the surface and require surveillance to be detected.

Gwendolen's desires appear to demand such surveillance since they are unknowable. When Deronda, for example, returns the necklace she has pawned, Gwendolen spurns such a sympathetic overture, assuming that it is a cruel acknowledgment of her suffering. She believes that “[h]e knew very well that he was entangling her in helpless humiliation: it was another way of smiling at her ironically, and taking the air of a supercilious mentor . . . No one had ever before attempted to treat her with irony and contempt” (49; ch. 2). Refusing sympathy, mutuality, and the other's identification with her, Gwendolen becomes unknowable and unreadable. Unlike Mirah, the sight of whom produces for Deronda a certain belief in her goodness, Gwendolen is a cipher whose meaning is illegible. Deronda cannot determine the ethical nature of her “glance.”

The mid-Victorian domestic ideal posited the “angel in the house” and the prostitute as the two poles of femininity that must be carefully navigated. In contrast, psychoanalytic modernity makes such careful navigation impossible since femininity is a cover for, and inseparable from, women's tendency towards sexuality; the aberrant inhabits the normative. Gwendolyn's urbane flippancy further suggests such unknowability. She says to Grandcourt, for example, “I hope you have not left off all follies, because I practice a great many” (146; ch. 11). Gwendolen's follies represent desires – but “follies” suggests desires so insignificant that they remain unspecified. The flip side of Gwedolen's follies are her claims to boredom, an attitude that similarly suggests she wants something but cannot commit herself to any specific desire. Gwendolen states flatly that “I am always bored” (42; ch. 1) and declares to Grandcourt: “We women can't go in search of adventures . . . We are brought up like flowers, to look as pretty as we can, and be dull without complaining. That is my notion about the plants: they are often bored, and that is the reason some of them have got poisonous” (171; ch. 13). Boredom registers desire, but desire that can only be seen as an unspecifiable wish for something different, virtually anything. Emanating unnameable desires and proud isolation, Eliot's diva positions herself as the opposite of an earlier mid-Victorian sentimentality whose suffering attracted the other to it.

Just as Deronda begins to doubt his ability to ever escape being the (male) subject of desire, Gwendolen steadfastly positions herself as feminine object of desire in a way so as to admit no change in her position. She thus obeys the logic of an identity that is radically defined by gender difference, positioning herself as the egoistic object of male desire with ruthless persistence. Gwendolen's narcissism, at first cultivated by her mother, comes to be the basis for her later relationships with men. Spoiled by her family, Gwendolen “naturally found it difficult to think her own pleasure less important than others made it, and when it was positively thwarted felt an astonished resentment . . .” (53; ch. 3). Mary Wilson Carpenter argues that “[i]n the words of Lacan's theory, she lives in the belief that she herself is the Phallus, for she is what her mother desires” (7). While unable to articulate her own desires, Gwendolen is nonetheless deeply aware of her power as an object of desire to attract the attention of others: “the perfect movement of her fine form was certainly a pleasant thing to behold . . . She was the central object of that pretty picture, and everyone present must gaze at her. That was enough: she herself was determined to see nobody in particular, or to turn her eyes in any way . . .” (141; ch. 10). Gwendolen senses her inability to desire when she despairs “I shall never love anybody. I can't love people. I hate them” (115; ch. 7). Despite her momentary outbursts of despair, the lack of specific desires – signified by her boredom – assures her status as “the central object of that pretty picture.” Unlike Mirah, who looks back at Deronda, Gwendolen here refuses to return the other's glances for “she herself was determined to see nobody in particular.” By raising the question “what does woman want?,” she preserves her status as object and provokes others to look at her. The surveillance of Gwendolen suggests a new attention to the individual's status as subject or object of desire in contrast to a fading emphasis on the individual's ability, or lack thereof, to control desire.

Thus, Gwendolen represents a proto-heterosexual femininity that, in Seitler's words, “fails to perform coherently” since it cannot be successfully joined to a heterosexual male, and the novel suggests that the invention of the modern femininity cannot be equated with the invention of modern sexuality in its entirety. Bringing masculinity and femininity into the same discourse of desire is beset with difficulties: if Deronda's “culture” seems to be the latest, and possibly last, product to be launched under the brand-name of “ethics,” femininity faces a different problem. In the latest struggle over the location of virtue, Deronda's cultural identity leaves Gwendolen's modern femininity increasingly unmoored, since it is tied neither to ethics nor specifically to a modern national identity. This profound alienation from ethics is perhaps acknowledged in Gwendolen's last meeting with Deronda, where she is described as feeling

If Gwendolen begins to feel the smallness of her place in a larger world, she does not, as her last letter to Deronda indicates, know how to make sense of that place. In her last communication with Deronda, she states a determination to “be one of the best of women, who make others glad that they were born. I do not yet see how that can be, but you know better than I” (882; ch. 70). In the several decades after the publication of this novel, Gwendolen's model of unmoored femininity will solidify as a modern femininity that lacks any meaning other than its radical difference from the male subject, a model of gender difference that is ultimately enshrined in psychoanalytic thought.

The power given to Gwendolen's embodiment of the modern female Other, even as she cannot be the center of Daniel's narrative (and vice versa), suggests that Mirah is lacking in comparison. Mirah and Daniel's marriage does not provide full narrative closure and no longer seems to depict desire as accurately or fully as their marriage might have in an earlier mid-Victorian novel. Mirah, for example, responds to her marriage with “sober gladness,” and, rather than Deronda's intense relationship with Gwendolen causing Mirah to feel jealous, she

Indeed, the last lines of the book describe not so much the happy couple as the happy couple with Mordecai between them: “He sank back gently into his chair, and did not speak again. But it was some hours before he had ceased to breathe, with Mirah's and Deronda's arms around him” (883; ch. 70). From the perspective of a contemporary reader, one who sees desire in the terms of modern heterosexuality, Deronda seems to want to fuse his Jewish identity with his sexual desire: does he desire Mirah because she is a woman or because she is Jewish? According to Annabel Herzog, for example, Deronda “cannot dissociate his growing sexual inclination from his growing Jewish identity” (51). And the final scene of the novel, with the newly betrothed couple, Daniel and Mirah, standing with their arms around the expired body of Mordecai, seems to bear out this “inability” to dissociate sexuality (and the relation to Mirah) from his relation to culture (and thus to Mordecai). But, of course, this is much like saying that figures of female sentimentality are unable to “dissociate” their sexuality from their relation to domestic realm. Both mid-Victorian sentimentality and late Victorian culture, each claiming virtue as a characteristic of femininity or masculinity, respectively, see intersubjective relations as inseparable from ethics (domesticity or culture) in ways that prevent modern sexuality from emerging as a distinct dynamic, one that is unrelated to questions of virtue, sympathy, and altruism.

The disjunctures between masculine and feminine relations to desire exist because gender and sexuality have not always been part of a fused discourse. In hindsight, we can suggest that the competition between male and female models of virtue continually heightens a sense of gender difference so that when questions of virtue and ethics are deemed obsolete or secondary, gender opposition becomes the only way of thinking about sexual activity. However, such a narrative could only be seen in hindsight. Deronda's masculinity reflects a shift that comes after mid-Victorian feminine sentimentality where masculinity co-opts “inner virtue” through an interest in culture. In a sense, Deronda brings masculinity up-to-date, reinvigorating it with ethical significance that aristocratic masculinity had lost, only to come up with a new masculinity that, itself, seems almost already dated. Even as culture's co-optation of sentimentality's “inner virtue” represents a shift away from mid-Victorian culture, it does not yet fully embody modernity since it continues to rely on the visible. As Deronda moves from early modern aristocratic virtue to Victorian inner virtue, masculinity thus remains one step behind Gwendolen's unknowable femininity: Gwendolen's femininity is clearly on the trajectory away from ethics towards modern sexuality. In 1895, the trial of Oscar Wilde definitively linked male identity to potentially hidden sexual impulses; as this happened, male identity was brought into a modern discourse of desire along with women, women like Gwendolen Harleth. Prior to this moment, however, masculine sexuality can be placed only between early modernity and the modern. Thus, Deronda – the man of culture – is the latest standard-bearer of virtue under what is nonetheless an older ethics of desire. Deronda, cannot be joined to the egoistic Gwendolen, who presages modern desire built on gender opposition and epistemological inquiry (not on visible signs of virtue). While femininity in Eliot's novel seems defined by the shift from old-fashioned sentimentality to modern sexuality, masculinity in this novel appears one step behind. Such unrationalized coexistence accounts for a novel which critics have seen as beset by “generic conflicts” and where the “hoped for union or marriage [between Deronda and Gwendolen] will instead diverge into two very different conclusions” (Gates 702). Both the inability of Gwendolen's proto-heterosexuality to perform coherently and the novel's difficulty in providing full and unifying resolution for its various plots reflect a dialectical process of change.

Mordecai's final words to Deronda, spoken on the older man's death bed, are tinged with a deep eroticism: “Death is coming to me as the divine kiss which is both parting and reunion – which takes me from your bodily eyes and gives me full presence in your soul” (882; ch. 70). The phrase “bodily eyes” seems to suggest some other (spiritual?) eyes through which Mordecai will remain present. Deronda similarly articulates this doctrine of the absent presence to Gwendolen, saying “Now we can perhaps never see each other again. But our minds may get nearer” (878; ch. 69). For Deronda, Mordecai will exist outside of visibility but somehow present nonetheless; for Gwendolen, Deronda has a similar role. The lost, yet internally present or visible, object creates in both Daniel and Gwendolen “a complex self-division” that enables them to “struggle against egoism” and therefore to control desire (Chase 173). This formulation invokes sentimentality in its emphasis on the visible but also hints at what lies beyond, since the object that might be “seen” is not really there. Eliot elaborates on Deronda's practice of the self in an attempt to finesse the various archaic and emergent ideas about gender and sexuality with which she is dealing; judging by the number of readers who found it unsatisfying in her own moment as now indicates both the diversity of identities that fail to cohere or get quickly incorporated into some other model.Footnote ⁶

Forty years later, another text emerges that bears some striking connections to Eliot's last novel: each is concerned with a man devoted, on the one hand, to his nation and to humanity in general and inexorably drawn, on the other hand, to a narcissistic diva. In 1914, Freud published his essay “On Narcissism,” and, like Eliot, Freud presents us with a male subject who has impulses to preserve and transmit his culture. The psychoanalyst describes the narcissistic male child whose subjectivity is transformed by his extreme anxiety about castration, an anxiety that forces him to give up his early narcissism and create instead an “ego ideal” – an internalized model of the perfect man who receives the love and adoration the formerly narcissistic child had reserved only for himself. Significantly, the ego ideal is made up of “the common ideal of a family, class or a nation” (“Narcissism” 101); in a related piece Freud tells us that the relationship to the ego ideal adds “an erotic factor to” not only to the “esprit de corps” that would attach him to nation and class but also “to the love of mankind in general” (“Paranoia” 61). Freud's generic female subject does not experience castration anxiety in the extreme way that the boy does and, thus, like Eliot's self-involved Gwendolen Harleth in Daniel Deronda, does not fully give up her early narcissism: women “especially if they grow up with good looks, develop a certain self-contentment” (“Narcissism” 88). Therefore, women hold “a great attraction for those [men] who have renounced part of their own [narcissism] and are in search of object-love” (89): men are attracted to narcissistic divas. For men, castration anxiety crushes infantile narcissism and leads to the emergence of the ego ideal that connects men to country and humanity at large; unable to take themselves as the objects of their own narcissism, they seek out narcissistic women, objects that make men feel whole again. Thus, male participation in the homoerotics of culture and heterosexual desire for women will now have the same origins or cause: castration anxiety. And now that masculine desire is the result of the repressed experience of castration anxiety, it has a meaning located beyond the visible. Like female sexuality, which can never be spoken if women are to maintain their permanent status in the Freudian schema as objects of desire, male sexuality has a meaning beyond the visible and demands constant and unending surveillance. Freud places both men and women in the same discourse of sexuality, where the subject's hidden relation to desire fully defines his or her gender identity, accomplishing neatly in forty pages what Eliot could not, or perhaps chose not, to do in nine hundred. Thus, Freud ushers in modernity's model of sexuality, linking gender and sexuality into two fully complementary discourses. The unraveling of this identity, and its contradictions, continues to occupy us today.

The gradual breakdown of knowledge into distinct fields – the separating out of ethics, economics, private life, etc. – has come to be taken as a move which epitomizes the onset of modernity.Footnote ⁷ For example, Adam Smith's formulation of the “invisible hand” that guided general patterns of labor and consumption suggested that economic behavior is, and should be, the result of individual choice, the ethical effects of which only an economist or expert would be able to judge in retrospect (1: 477). Such a move effectively positions economics and ethics as related though distinct discourses, discourses which in classical and medieval culture had been seen as fused and inseparable. This process of disaggregation, say, of economics and ethics has been seen as modernity itself, an historical period which is defined by separates spheres (economics/ethics, public/private, etc). However, an inverse process by which formerly related discourses become fused has received much less attention. It is this inverse move that defines Freud's accomplishment and that, ultimately, alters the terrain, allowing for the heretofore uncertain “solidification of modern sexuality” to happen: by bringing men and women into the same discourse of desire, by clearing up the asymmetries with which Eliot struggled, two discourses – desire and gender – which used to be simply related to each other became, in Freud's theories, so fused as to be inseparable. Yet, Eliot's novel suggests all the difficulties such a fusion encountered and asks us to question its inevitability, what might have existed prior to such fusions, and the very tentativeness and perhaps limited moment of modernity's triumph.