The traffic in men: female kinship in three novels by George Eliot

Style, Spring, 1998 by Patricia Vigderman

Grandcourt's cruelty might have had less effect had Gwendolen actually been as entirely unscrupulous as the men she seemed to resemble before her marriage. Yet, in addition to her complexities of gender, Gwendolen has also a moral complexity. As a child, though excusing herself for the irritable strangling of her sister's canary bird, "the thought of that infelonious murder always made her wince." Unlike the thicker-souled Hetty, her openness to the "murderous thought" leaves her vulnerable to "the sharp backward stroke of repentance" (33). Where Hetty's murder of her child puts her into a sort of fugue state, in which she cannot even remember that there was a child, Gwendolen's allowing Grandcourt to drown in a boating accident at Genoa makes her sharply aware of how strongly she had wished for his death. The kinship with Lydia that trafficking in Grandcourt has brought her is the kinship of sexual opportunism, the underside of female life, and she is horrified to find herself part of that system.

In some sense, the keenness of moral suffering in this beautiful "bad" woman obviates the need for a Dorothea or a Dinah to "save" her. Her good-woman counterpart, Mirah Cohen, has her own little struggles, but essentially her place in the narrative is as an exchange object in a conventional traffic in women. She is the symbol of Daniel's Jewish inheritance, of the - in Sedgwick's terms - intensely homosocial kinship between her brother Mordecai and Daniel. Her goodness cloys because it is utterly virginal. It is part of her exchange value, not the achievement of an independent moral life. If Mirah weren't Jewish, her hand and wrist would probably put painters in mind of the Blessed Virgin too; unbaptized as she is, she is given the innocence of a child in limbo.(5) So pure is she that she is not even aware of the moments of exchange when Daniel goes back and forth between her and Gwendolen. Gwendolen's friendship with Daniel has intensified as her marriage becomes more and more intolerable. Taunted by her husband with gossip about Deronda's relationship to "the little Jewess," Gwendolen goes to visit Mirah, who revives her faith in Daniel's goodness. Although these few moments are quite intense for Gwendolen, Mirah doesn't quite get what is going on. She is, of course, also unaware of the final scene between Daniel and Gwendolen, in which the good man Mirah unknowingly gave Gwendolen in their one interview is returned to her. Therefore, this traffic does not really connect Gwendolen and Mirah because Mirah is not the woman who is analogous to Dorothea for Rosamond or Dinah for Hetty.

In this novel the character in that feminine position is Daniel himself.(6) A man with as complicated a class and gender story as Gwendolen's, he is brought up in ignorance of who his mother is, as the "nephew" of an English baronet. He becomes involved with a Jewish community as part of his search for Mirah's family after he saves her from drowning. Mirah and her brother Mordecai gradually draw him toward his destiny. The revelation late in the novel that he is himself Jewish confirms that destiny, and, having been until then unable to choose a path in life, he sees that his road lies in the East, in the great project to create a land for his people in Palestine.(7)