In George Eliot'sDaniel Deronda, animal vitality figures prominently in shaping the human shell, to use an opening animal metaphor. Approaching the significance of the animal leads to a reading of Gwendolen Grandcourt's character as a responsible creature. Gwendolen is Eliot's heroine, one half of the pair of protagonists around whom the novel revolves. Eliot's fantastic character takes shape in three movements, each punctuated by its own animal metaphor: Gwendolen morphs from Lamia to mastered-animal to white doe. Animal imagery appears at the edge of the human, the point at which humanity gains and loses subjectivity, and Gwendolen's novel is fundamentally one of finding her place in the world, her singularity, her responsibility. Images of animals stand in the linguistic gaps – in the places words fail – to figure the subject.Footnote ¹ Animals appear at the end of the ability of language to mean. Nevertheless, this analysis is not intended to encompass the complex range of animal representations in George's Eliot's oeuvre, or even to catalog every example in Daniel Deronda. Instead, it suggests the possibility of using animal metaphor as a map for reading a Victorian heroine.

Animal metaphor, the linguistic comparison of a human character to an animal (here encompassing the possibility of metonymic representation, that is, the substitution of a uniquely associated animal for the human character), births into language a new relationship, a new life.Footnote ² Akira Lippit identifies the life born:

Animetaphor is the word made flesh bonding two entities, losing its place as metaphor as it constitutes a new creature that is neither referent but the vital offspring of both. The comparison of fundamentally different entities (whether emphasizing difference in the case of metaphor or metonymic similarity) makes possible a new creature while simultaneously calling attention to the fact that the relationship is born through “mere words” and thus never approaching the real.

Discussions of relationships between humans and animals must always return to words: haunting words that remind one of human speech, animal silence, and spotlight the possibility of the subject speaking. Animetaphor unites humanity and animality into a sort of monstrosity, an advent of the impossible in language,Footnote ³ despite the relatively permeable boundary between human and animal that, since Darwin's On the Origin of Species (1859), admits kinship between the “higher” and “lower” taxonomic orders.Footnote ⁴ This unity is monstrous for its excess. Denise Gigante defines monstrosity in Romantic terms as, “too much life,” and the monster as, “one whose life force is too big for the matter containing it” (434). As humanity strives with animality to find the locus of the human (as a distinct subjectivity) outside of the monstrous, the representational value of narrative and language is destabilized.Footnote ⁵ Eliot employs the symbol of the animal to represent this linguistic struggle through frequent and sustained use of animetaphor, specifically in relation to Gwendolen's monstrosity; Gwendolen is “extraordinary.”Footnote ⁶

Louise Penner traces the critical history of the “gendered plots” that structure the novel: those of Gwendolen and Daniel Deronda, the titular hero, from the perspective of parallel wounding (88).Footnote ⁷ Indeed, both plots reimagine and disrupt normative social order: Gwendolen's invests a feminine heroine with the power to break the filial order (by allowing her husband to die!) and Deronda's upends nationalism.Footnote ⁸ Animal metaphors appear throughout the text, with more than half referring to Gwendolen while only five refer to Deronda; as Gwendolen loses subjectivity, animality figures her decline, while Deronda's converse position negates his demand for animal imagery. Within the kaleidoscopic movement of the text, Gwendolen's world gradually enlarges and she shrinks in relation to it. Eliot presents a monstrous heroine shrunken in the world of her own novel.

Gwendolen begins her story with monstrous subjectivity. Barbara Hardy argues that the animal metaphors in Daniel Deronda and Middlemarch have a dehumanizing effect. Grandcourt, Daniel Deronda's villain and Gwendolen's husband, is a lizard, an alligator (in the mind of his lackey, Lush), a boa, and finally a “dangerous serpent ornamentally coiled in [Gwendolen's] cabin” (12). Gwendolen is likewise compared to both a horse and its master (13). Hardy's point is one of animal mastery: “Gwendolen's image of mastering horses turns into Grandcourt's vision of her as a mastered horse” (13). Hardy, however, sees a decline in metaphor after the marriage. When Grandcourt holds his wife by the “bit and bridle,” and Gwendolen acknowledges her solitude and need for dependence, the need for metaphor disappears: her dehumanization is complete. Hardy has discovered the scent of the animetaphor in monstrosity, but her reading requires another look in light of recent work in animal studies.

In the text's first movement, Gwendolen begins as a Lamia and metaphors of monstrous power mark her early adulthood. In the Leubronn scene, the reader overhears three men describing Gwendolen:

The Lamia, a monstrous, magical creature, neither snake nor woman, materializes in the discourse to characterize Gwendolen's snake-like charm. Her beauty is striking, extraordinary. It is the excess of life that points inevitably for her watchers toward death: the sort of beauty “a man might risk hanging for.” In his poem, “Lamia” (1819), Keats animetaphorically addresses the destabilizing fears that humanity and monstrosity are indistinguishable, and that magical power extends beyond the human shell that Lamia inhabits. While in human form, Lamia convinces the scholar, Lycius, that she is no less human that any other:

Lamia speaks herself human here. Nevertheless, in deceiving Lycius, she retains her magical extension of influence beyond her physical body, particularly over human perception:

Lamia makes the long distance seem short and blinds Lycius to her divinity; she is powerful, a figure exceeding, blurring the boundaries of humanity. This blurred boundary of life extending beyond life characterizes the Lamia animetaphor in Daniel Deronda as well. Gwendolen is a Lamia, a figure for extravagant excess, a figure of beauty (perhaps) but beauty unbounded. Keats's “Lamia” begins as a mystical beauty dressed in gemstones and “sprinkled with stars,” and transforms to “a full-born beauty new and exquisite.” Monstrosity, figured with animality, approaches the boundary of life itself, questioning what is human and how humans relate. The snake-like Lamia is somehow abundantly beautiful yet inhuman: “She is certainly very graceful. But she wants a tinge of colour in her cheeks: it is a sort of Lamia beauty she has.” This comment is never attributed to a particular character, yet it is in quotes, following a string of sentences also unattributed and in quotes. The effect of this din of voices discussing the possibility of beauty is to draw the reader into the conversation. Eliot forces an aesthetic speculation and imagines the reader's participation gazing at the boundary at which Gwendolen resides: beautiful or not? Magical-snake-woman or full-born beauty? This boundary, between the human and the inhuman, plots the imaginary center of this investigation. The specular relationship between the reader and the characters in the text (particularly Gwendolen, as the subjective object of the gaze) demands a consideration of what it means to be a subject, to be a vital other. Can this Lamia animal be a subject? Can any animal?

Eliot labors over the boundary of subjectivity. Gwendolen's sphere of influence already extends beyond her body, infecting those around her. Concluding the novel's first paragraph, Eliot asks: “Why was the wish to look again felt as coercion and not as a longing in which the whole being consents?” (3). Gwendolen coerces with Lamia-power, and the Lamia metaphor heightens with a returning emphasis on the gaze – as serpentine lidless eyes seem to endlessly stare: “[Deronda's] attention was arrested by a young lady.” Eliot continues: “Many were watching her,” and, “Gwendolen was much observed.” Deronda, in a twist, initially arrests her gaze, as well: “But in the course of that survey, her eyes met Deronda's, and instead of averting them as she would have desired to do, she was unpleasantly conscious that they were arrested” (6; bk. 1, ch. 1). With a perceived evil-eye, Deronda devastates her streak of luck at the tables. Nevertheless, Gwendolen soon regains her superhuman powers and begins to organize the world once again around herself:

Gwendolen is in control; she controls the perception of those around her with Lamia-like beauty and influence: she masquerades as a powerful subject.

In the novel's first paragraphs, by pressing the end of humanity, Eliot begins to explore naked animality, flirting with the other through the gaze. Jacques Derrida, in The Animal That Therefore I Am, calls attention to the animality of the gaze, and the inherent subjectivity of the self, in a scene with his cat. Derrida finds the other in his cat's eyes:

Chronologically in the text – at the roulette wheel – and figuratively, Gwendolen is seen before she sees, presented involuntarily, naked. She is seen and sees, uncertainly. Gwendolen is exhibited as other, a naked animal, before Deronda and before the reader. Her sight – both as insight and in the context of “seeing-as,” becomes increasingly important as the text progresses. Gwendolen initially sees the world as existing for her, she has “the implicit impression which had accompanied her from childhood, that whatever surrounded her was somehow specially for her” (Eliot 705; bk. 8, ch. 69). Eliot has begun to destabilize this vision through the gaze: Gwendolen sees herself seen naked under Deronda's gaze, an animal that in its very otherness nears the loss of its subjectivity.

Nevertheless, until her marriage, Gwendolen reigns in her “domestic empire” (Eliot 34) over her family and social institutions alike. After the narrator explains that Gwendolen strangled her sister's canary because its song interfered with her own, the reader sees that Gwendolen has calculated how to rule: “There was more show of fire and will in her than ever, but there was more calculation underneath it” (Eliot 19; bk. 1, ch. 3). As her domestic empire extends to include suitors, they similarly receive her wrath. During Rex's proposal, she curls up “like a sea anemone” at his touch before her final scathing abuse: “Pray don't make love to me! I hate it” (Eliot 71; bk. 1, ch. 7). It seems that even the narrator's account of her power falls victim to it in the interpretive light used to describe her influence: “Social institutions generally, were all objectionable to her” (Eliot 70; bk. 1, ch. 7), and “Everybody of course was concerned to satisfy this wish of Gwendolen's” (Eliot 50; bk. 1, ch. 6). Her belief in her own power begins absolute and remains in force throughout the early pages of the novel: “How could she believe in sorrow? If it attacked her, she felt the force to crush it, to defy it, or run away from it, as she had done already” (Eliot 13; bk. 1, ch. 2).

Even into her early courtship, Gwendolen relishes her monstrous (Lamia-like) power and uses it to arrange control of her world in spectacular fashion:

Grandcourt recognizes her power over him, too. After her initial failure to accept his advances, the narrator offers a look into his reflection:

Bearing in mind her earlier rejection of Rex, the reader understands Grandcourt's concern with this powerful, blind worm. Eliot's metaphor, however, has already begun to drift toward ambiguity: it is no longer clear whether or not the animal threatens real violence. Gwendolen's soaring, serpentine power has devolved into that of the blind-worm; she can still bite, but not mortally. Paradoxically, Eliot reminds the reader of the safe violence threatened by the word, and the reader catches a hint of the coming bite, the mortal bite of Gwendolen's desire for Grandcourt's death and its embodiment in the moment of inaction when she declines to throw the rope. Words bite consciousness – and the biting worm is the vivid figure of coming violence.Footnote ¹⁰ Animetaphor calls attention to the paradox of safe violence, of powerful inaction: of the blind biting worm.

Gwendolen's interaction with Grandcourt has begun to weaken her supposed subjectivity, to shrink her, and the animal metaphors reify the image for the reader. Eliot marks the end of a woman's Lamia-power (and subjectivity) upon marriage: “To be very much sued and hopelessly sighed for as a bride was indeed an indispensible and agreeable guarantee of womanly power” (32; bk. 1, ch. 4). This is precisely what Gwendolen loses when she consents to be caught. Eliot recalls this loss with a catching metaphor: “A fish honestly invited to come and be eaten has a clear course in declining, but how if it finds itself swimming against a net?” (264; bk. 3, ch. 27). Gwendolen has no power to arrest Grandcourt's wooing. She is a fish in a net, not the master of a subjective gaze.Footnote ¹¹

Gwendolen is lost in a complex struggle for power and perhaps for her very humanity that punctuates her incarceration, beginning with Grandcourt's courtship and extending through her marriage. She struggles, but succumbs to his desire for mastery, in the process succumbing to animality and relinquishing her subjectivity. In this movement, Eliot compares Gwendolen to a lap-dog, inferior and mastered, if still somewhat deluded by misimagination. She is forced into her subservient position, incapable of experiencing the full breadth of the human experience (here called “dog-hood”). She is made inferior, animal, ascribed with a sickened imagination – limited from the possibility of humanity. Eliot writes:

A lap-dog cannot have the ideas necessary to retain subjectivity in Eliot's novel. To this end, Agamben identifies the slave as a figure of the animal in human form (37). Because there is an anthropology at work defining the human by opposition, that which is not a member of the presupposed class of man becomes the excluded – the animal within the human body itself (Agamben 37). The slave, as inhuman, becomes the figure for the animal. Following Heidegger, Agamben argues that the animal behaves reacting to a set of circumstances – it is “taken [captive] by” whatever disinhibits it, driven by “instinctual captivation” (54–55). This is the circumstance that underlies Gwendolen's final non-act. She sits tight, animal-like, captivated by dread. The human and the animal, animetaphorically incarcerated together, are unable to respond, caught in the dearth of subjectivity. Gwendolen is keenly aware of both her anger and her imprisonment; she dreads both life and death:

Despite her overwhelming emotion, the only action she can execute in Grandcourt's final scene (to which we will return shortly) is to hold her hand. She cannot respond, or can only respond with a non-response.

Alice Kuzniar emphasizes the relationship between censorship and silence: “The animal's mute, helpless response to physical deprivation and senseless cruelty illustrate its master's forced, censored silence” (48). This perhaps begins to expose Gwendolen's forced censorship, the willful silencing of the other as animal, as subjugated wife. Gwendolen was forced to submit: “She had been brought to accept him in spite of everything – brought to kneel down like a horse under training for the arena, though she might have an objection to it all the while” (Eliot 279; bk. 4, ch. 28). In this complicated metaphor, Gwendolen is both the mark of pride and the “dehumanized” victim of Grandcourt's megalomaniacal power.Footnote ¹² It is this subjection that provides Grandcourt with the pleasure that he takes from the marriage: “On the whole, Grandcourt got more pleasure out of this notion than he could have done out of winning a girl of whom he was sure that she had a strong inclination for him personally. And yet this pleasure in mastering reluctance flourished” (Eliot 279; bk. 4, ch. 28). Gwendolen's inability to speak is connected with the inability to act, to answer, to respond. Her whole body is mute. Reflecting on the physical connection between silence and melancholia in Tibor Dery's Niki, Kuzniar writes, “human incarceration appears all the more unbearable insofar as Dery points out that all living creatures naturally long for health and liberty. . . . Depressed resignation [to incarceration] expresses itself most saliently in her silence. . . ‘the muteness of her whole body’” (52). Gwendolen's humanity is at stake in her incarceration and she falls silent before her master, a symptom of her melancholic animality.

Both Daniel Deronda and Grandcourt expose Gwendolen as a naked animal, gazing at herself, destabilizing her innocence and forcing upon her the shame of self knowledge. Early in the text Gwendolen decides to pawn her necklace to recoup some of her gambling losses and is so satisfied with the decision that she can kiss her mirrored visage just before heading to the pawnbroker. She faces herself with no “self-discontent.” Deronda's clandestine redemption of the necklace, however, prompts her to reflect: “He 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. Gwendolen felt the bitter tears of mortification rising and rolling down her cheeks” (Eliot 14; bk. 1, ch. 2). Though the narrator describes her “resemblance to the serpent” when she takes the necklace to the shop to raise money, Gwendolen fails to find the action mortifying until Deronda redeems the necklace (Eliot 14; bk. 1, ch. 2). Briefly, her “naïve delight in her fortunate self” is shaken (Eliot 13; bk. 1, ch. 2).

Later in the text, realizing a much deeper shame, Gwendolen comes to understand that she has traded her innocence for station. She is finally, under the gaze of her husband, naked and conscious. She is no longer naked of knowledge. “Grandcourt had been rather ecstatically quiescent, while she turned his gentle seizure of her hand into a grasp of his hand by both hers, with an increased vivacity as of a kitten that will not sit quiet to be petted” (Eliot 312; bk. 4, ch. 31). Gwendolen is portrayed as a hysterical kitten. Just after her marriage, she has the ability to act, to resist, though she has no real power to speak out. A few lines later, her heart begins to palpitate as she meditates on the fulfillment of her dreams “of being ‘somebody’ – walking through her own [world]” (Eliot 312; bk. 4, ch. 31). Yet, always, “Hers was one of the natures in which exultation inevitably carries an infusion of dread ready to curdle and declare itself” (313; bk. 4, ch. 31). Lurking beneath the surface of joy at the satisfaction of her dreams lies the subconscious dread of ruin – the dawn of knowledge, inexpressible except through animetaphor. It is this scene that leads to the trauma of her wedding night. Grandcourt enters her room to find her hysterical again: “The sight of him brought a new nervous shock, and Gwendolen screamed again and again with hysterical violence” (Eliot 315; bk. 4, ch. 31). She responds with inarticulate sounds, animal voice, having already lost the power of speech. The kitten will not stand his touch but cannot say so. Martin Danahay explores the disjunction that a violent kitten would create in the Victorian domestic sphere: domestic animals (cats) were not supposed to bear the possibility of violence. This kitten terrorist exponentially increases the threat against the Victorian home since it fails to appreciate its domestic role as the upholder of normative expectation and subjective peace.Footnote ¹³ The radical instability of animetaphor draws attention to a fold in the text, to a fold in the very fabric of language itself: the inexpressible subject, the surprising out of place manifestation of a violent kitten. Yet even as the image destabilizes, the animal's subjectivity is threatened with powerlessness.

Gwendolen began as a creature – a Lamia – without knowing it, naked without knowledge, without consciousness of good and evil, yet with some subjectivity. As a kitten, she comes to know shame and dread – primarily at the hands of the electric eel, Grandcourt.Footnote ¹⁴ She is thrust into the knowledge of the absolute other and thereby knowledge of herself. Animal metaphor recreates her into language as creature, dumb and helpless, without the ability to respond:

Only a few weeks into her marriage, Eliot has begun to diminish Gwendolen's “small” sway; Gwendolen has come to see herself as a creature crushed – dumb and helpless – subjectless except for the mindless threat of violence.

It is no accident that shortly after her revelation as kitten, Gwendolen faces a moment of intense fragmentation. “Gwendolen, yielding up her hat and mantle, threw herself into a chair by the glowing hearth, and saw herself repeated in the glass panels with all her faint-green satin surroundings” (313; bk. 4, ch. 31). The repetition of Lamia colors creates a visual echo in the text, a sort of uncanny déjà-vu thoroughly destabilizing sight. The contrast is striking: the once powerful Lamia commanding the gaze of the gambling onlookers has become much more human in its knowledge of nakedness, and it repeats itself in the mirror. The reference to the human act of clothing oneself, and to the removal of her hat and mantle, upholsters another layer into the text. Gwendolen clothes herself with the garments of self-reflection as she could not in the Lamia scene. Her self-reflection, however, reveals only powerlessness. This also marks a passage of something that was initially attributed to her into her surroundings. She is no longer clothed as a silver-green snake; her walls now bear the marks of her animality. She has begun to sink into a speck in the larger world that, with her help, has donned her dress. She has become a portrait on her own wall, framed by the mirror and the green tint of the room. She is conscious that she no longer inhabits the place of the Lamia. She is naked in the text even though, in safely Victorian fashion, she remains properly clothed. Eliot's narrator paints Gwendolen as an animal yet paradoxically foreshadows the coming of her humanity through her coming complete loss of subjectivity. Dumb and helpless, she reflects on her creature-self morphed onto the wall.

Eliot takes the mastered-animal metaphor to its logical conclusion. “George Eliot does not intend simply to embarrass us with our animal natures: she sees them as both our starting point and our limit” (Mann 203). Gwendolen's animal nature, her very inability to respond, becomes the breath of her response. Derrida questions the established view of the nature of animal response: “[Philosophers] say the same thing: the animal is deprived of language. Or, more precisely, of response, of a response that could be precisely and rigorously distinguished from a reaction; of the right and power to ‘respond’” (32), ultimately pressing the artificiality of the distinction between “the human” and “the animal.” Following Derrida, the reader sees the boundary crumble at its start. Gwendolen is trapped in a paradox of response. She cannot respond to her husband's control over her. She cannot respond to his designation, “animal”:

Domination and torture situate Gwendolen's animality in this, the final passage before the boat is ordered that will take her on a trip with her husband into the Mediterranean, and Grandcourt to his death. This passage also questions the ability to respond, positing a paralysis of response. Paralysis brings Gwendolen's animality to the forefront and finally robs her of her humanity. She whinnies her assent to Grandcourt's will, dominated, held by the bit and bridle. Gwendolen cannot respond in a new way to succor her tormentor. Yet it is her inability to respond outside of a prescribed (always already given) response that ironically frees her from her subjection to subjectivity.

Harriet Ritvo, in her classic article, “Pride and Pedigree,” explored the breeding practices of newly instituted Victorian dog clubs, noticing a critical peculiarity:

Indeed, breeders sought to address the riotous wild animality that threatened dominion. In a sense, this is Eliot's methodology for disruption: Gwendolen's wild animality leads precisely to riotous behavior and muteness, a monstrous excess. There is no question over the pragmatism of eliminating wild animality from the domestic sphere. Muteness, too, threatens: the mute animal, the animal that fails to respond, has ceased to be useful to its owner. The mute unresponsive animal threatens uselessness. Thus the human animal and its responsiveness is a site of vital instability.

Gwendolen fittingly narrates her own failure to respond to Grandcourt's command to respond when he finds himself drowning. Grandcourt is in command until his end; he gives orders to the very last moment of his death and expects Gwendolen's animal obedience, forgetting that animality divorces the subject from response-ability. It is, finally, obedience to animality that she gives. She sits tight, holding her response:

Gwendolen turns her animality into a powerful stance, a stance straddling life and death: “I held my hand.” She never speaks during the scene – her heart alone gives expression; her mouth is silent. The animal in her cannot respond, and yet it manifests itself with a violent outburst. Danahay suggests that violent Victorian animals are representations of figures otherwise impossible to display: “Aggressive animals in Victorian representation can often suggest domestic violence indirectly when it would not be possible to address the topic directly” (98). The image speaks despite its own impossibility. At the very moment in the text when language fails, the animal speaks. Shortly after the drowning, Gwendolen regains her ability to speak, though haltingly, and splutters a fragmentary confession to Deronda:

The creature, the animal human, rears its head in violent non-response. There is in any interaction with wild animality a threat of violence. The threat (“I wanted to kill”) is realized here through non-responsiveness. She holds her hand. Nevertheless, Gwendolen's animality has guaranteed her innocence. She is but a creature, a non-subject, incapable of the saving response that Grandcourt finally demands. Animality suggests a transformational ethics: the animal cannot be guilty since it is denied the possibility of speech and thus the ability to participate in law.Footnote ¹⁵ Lippit writes: “The ethics of murder is made possible by seeing the animal first as nonhuman, then inhuman” (168). Eliot reverses this paradigm by making the killer animal and thus freeing her from responsibility. This is an extreme instance of zoomorphism – the application of animal traits to humans – bordering on metonymy, the standing in of the animal for the human. That the animal stands in for the human here releases Gwendolen from responsibility (and humanity), yet the move is undermined by her subsequent confession. Teresa Mangum's assertion that during the Victorian period, the paradoxical devaluing of animal life paralleled the increasing importance of pets makes sense in this context: animals were valued as owned, as repositories of their owner's subjectivity – not as independent subjects in themselves. Grandcourt attempts to recreate this relationship in his marriage but it comes back to bite him.

The final move in the text, toward white doe, is affected through this bite. Immediately following Gwendolen's confession (at the end of chapter 56), Deronda sees her as a white doe. It is only when she has become fully animal, embracing her animality and abandoning the possibility of response, that Gwendolen can regain her subjectivity. Gwendolen becomes a white doe, described by the narrator through Deronda's eyes:

In a sense, this segment emphasizes the final transformation of point of view, the final and nevertheless incomplete metamorphosis of the human animal. Cynthia Chase highlights the importance of physical transformation through word and gesture in fairy tales as it applies to Mirah and Deronda, but in Gwendolen's fairy tale, another reversal occurs, in which, “a ritual word and gesture” are precisely what is missing from Gwendolen's magical metamorphosis into animetaphor.Footnote ¹⁶ Her silence in the boat contrasts her confession to Deronda; her physical transformation into a white doe comes in language nevertheless echoing fairy tale convention. This is also the last scene in which Eliot refers to Gwendolen with animal metaphor, effectively marking her excision from the text, and, perhaps, the impossibility of personification.

Eliot's image of Gwendolen's metamorphosis into a white doe creates an interesting intersection with the seventeenth-century French fairy tale, “The Hind in the Wood.” In the fairy tale, a beautiful princess around whom a world has literally been created, transforms into a white doe on the eve of her marriage. The princess, Desiree, is cursed at birth by a spiteful fairy (in the form of a lobster) who had not been invited to celebrate the birth. The curse prohibits her from experiencing sunlight until her fifteenth birthday, so her fairy godmothers, excepting of course the lobster, create an underground marble palace for her to inhabit until her coming of age to the real world. Only months before the end of the curse, the princess travels to meet her prince in a carriage closed to the sunlight, only to find it slashed by the mother of a jealous rival:

D'Aulnoy's fairy tale exposes the impossibility of animality. Desiree becomes an animal only to be enabled to reflect on the beautiful – human – form she lost. The fairy tale's reversal creates a human-animal, an apparent impossibility, a reflective animal. Wordsworth's well-known poem, “The White Doe of Rylstone,” employs a similarly reflective white doe which is: “seemingly doomed in its breast to sustain / A softened remembrance of sorrow and pain” (ll. 238–39). Wordsworth's white doe, that is the form of a woman's soul, has become a “lovely chronicler of things/Long past delights and sorrowings” (ll. 1674–75). In the same way as the does of D'Aulnoy and Wordsworth, Gwendolen's reflection (through confession) in her moment of animality has caused her to leave her fairy tale world and enter reality, but a reality inhabited by a human-animal. She reflects on what she lost, on her image of innocent if monstrous beauty, but no less lives as animal. In D'Aulnoy's tale, the reflective contrast is heightened when Desiree is allowed to transverse the boundary between animal and human, living as animal during the day and woman at night. She reflects on the impossibility of her predicament to her maid:

Desiree, like Gwendolen, has been ensnared, enslaved by a malevolent power. Grandcourt captures Gwendolen no less than Desiree's fairy godmother curses her. They are both captured into a state from which they cannot affect escape – trapped as creatures, unable to respond. D'Aulnoy offers a typically fabulous ending when Desiree is freed from her animal form (after being wounded by her prince) and lives as a human – happily ever after. Wordsworth's doe tale ends when his deer is named as a “Daughter of the Eternal Prime” (line 1910). Gwendolen's final redemption through reflection accepts animality, and thereby human agency, and she realizes: “I must be changed” (Eliot 615; bk. 7, ch. 57).

The human body is the site of the irreducible aporia of animality and humanity. Agamben writes:

This is the heart of the question of what it means to be human and of the possibility of transcending animality; in short, it is at the heart of Daniel Deronda. The novel can perhaps be read as Gwendolen's pursuit of self mastery. Each animal metaphor in the text marks the site of a caesura: a breakpoint of creature tension. Human identity lies in the ability to recognize itself. Eliot deconstructs the possibility of identity, as Chase argues in Decomposing Figures, by undermining the causal authority of identity (actions flow from characters’ desires, not because of who the character is; past effects are produced by present causes). Behavior is not causally related to human identity but rather to the lack of identity. The text's rhetorical causality comes from the decomposition of human identity; Gwendolen's animal origin is posited by her silence (and unresponsiveness) when Grandcourt needs a rope. Eliot is questioning the very possibility of being a human subject, let alone purposing significant action.

Extending this premise, Agamben argues that, “The speaking man places his own muteness outside of himself, as already not yet human” (35). If you subtract language from the human, it ceases to be human. All of this is collected in the question of Gwendolen's status as a creature moving kaleidoscopically through the animetaphors in the novel. She finds her voice, her ability to respond, only in mute non-responsiveness and only after she becomes fully animal. Marc Redfield observes (in discussing the text's insects) that the reductive mutilation of voice is the evidence of a lost subject (166). The ability to use language simultaneously raises and plummets Gwendolen as subject in the text. Ivan Kreilkamp theorizes that the Victorian novelist's self-validating project encapsulates fears about the utter loss of the subject and thereby the possibility of the novel form as the sustained exploration of the subject:

Eliot's Gwendolen faces this effacement as subject and finds herself in danger of this exact form of misremembering. Though Kreilkamp writes of Dickens and Pip, the fear over the loss of subjectivity in the face of the animal is pervasive. Animal subjectivity is incomplete and transient, dependant. Gwendolen's animality exposes these same qualities in her subjectivity.

In Kafka's Josefine, Margot Norris argues that, “The ontology of the beast must be situated not in a form of consciousness but in that border region on the edge of consciousness, where every perception is erased at the moment of its inscription” (367). This raises the question of narration of the animal perception, since in Kafka's text, the narrator is an animal. In Daniel Deronda and “The Hind in the Wood” perception is not erased. Gwendolen and Desiree maintain perception. They serve, in fact, to mark the advent of the respective characters’ perceptions of themselves as residing in the liminal caesurae between animal and human. Animetaphor crosses the gap and allows the narrators (both human) to speak of the animal's consciousness and to remember, like the characters, what it is to be an animal captive in human form – to be free from concealment, naked. When Desiree is transformed into the white doe, her fairy godmother leads her lady in waiting to her in the forest. Upon discovery, the doe throws herself on her maid. Surprised, the maid studies the “almost human” hind closely: “She looked at her attentively, and saw with extreme astonishment tears fall from her eyes; she then felt sure it could be no other than her princess” (D'Aulnoy 337). Why are tears the mark of humanity in the animal (recall Gwendolen's above)? It is precisely because they mark response and reflection, toward openness, toward the unconcealment of the concealed consciousness present in the animal body.

Gwendolen's transformation is finally one of perspective: she awakens to the world at large, opening to reflection in the same way that the white hind in the forest awakens to the world, through their close interaction with the destabilizing animality afforded through fairy tale magic and animetaphor. George Levine succinctly identifies Gwendolen's transformation through a perspectival shift:

Eliot uses animal metaphor to reduce Gwendolen to a speck. She has come into contact with that which is beyond her control, the other embodied by the world. Her crisis has set her remarkably close to animal perspective – she is small. She is dislodged from supremacy in her own world, from dominion, yet nevertheless, operates from a position of animal power through violent non-responsiveness. She tells the story of her own responsibility. Mirroring the plot of the text, animal metaphor forces Gwendolen into the realization that she is not in control of the other characters, but that she is subject and responsible. Though she had been early in the novel a Lamia, capable of mesmerizing the gaze of the onlookers at the casino, of bending it to her will, by the end of the text she is no longer capable. She becomes, finally, a white doe:

Eliot's narrator processes Gwendolen's shock when she learns that Deronda is going to the East to explore the possibility of “restoring a political existence to my people, making them a nation again” (704; bk. 8, ch. 69). Eliot has prepared her reader thoroughly at this point for the final reversal that she enacts in this passage. The human must see the self in the non-human (animal) to become human, to see the self in relation to the world. The animal gives Gwendolen her voice, even in silence, moving her forward in the text to a psychological freedom to represent her own interests and to assume her human role in the world. Animetaphor finally exposes the abyss of Gwendolen's animality, exposing her as creature, in order to release her humanity. Animetaphor becomes the map for reading the Victorian heroine. And it is because of animetaphor that Gwendolen can say to her mother: “don't be afraid. I am going to live” (707; bk. 8, ch. 69); and to write to Deronda: “I have remembered your words – that I may live to be one of the best of women, who make others glad that they were born” (709; bk. 8, ch. 70).