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Article: THE OTHER WOMAN IN 'DANIEL DERONDA.'.(George Eliot)
- Article from:
- Studies in the Novel
- Article date:
- December 22, 1998
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1998 University of North Texas. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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Although a number of George Eliot's novels are concerned with national destiny and various types of otherness, Daniel Deronda is Eliot's only novel of contemporary Victorian life and the most critical of the rhetoric of Englishness, the national myth uniting religious and cultural prejudice, law, and class prerogative. The novel's representation of Deronda gradually reveals disguised foreignness and suggests the possibility that neither "leech or lancet" may "furnish us with the precise product": "pure English blood" (p. 581).(1) Deronda is the outsider within, the other shown to be the same/ difference. He resembles Mr. Torrington's unmanageable West Indian "half-breeds" ...