TOWARDS MODERNISM: A STUDY OF PAINTERLY TECHNIQUES IN GEORGE

ELIOT’S DANIEL DERONDA

by

ANNA BIGHTA

(Under the Direction of Simon Gatrell)

ABSTRACT

In Daniel Deronda (1876), George Eliot’s use of painting is a push towards a modern

(meaning psychological) realism than what she has accomplished in her previous novels. In

Daniel Deronda, Eliot seems to want the Victorian reader to become conscious that her peculiar

painting techniques both intensify and destabilize his or her imaginative vision of Eliot’s

fictional reality, thence, consequently, the reader may realize that human perception works

similarly in fragments, glimpses, hyper-clarities, and obscurities.

INDEX WORDS: Daniel Deronda, George Eliot, painting, realism, modernism, ekphrasis,

word-painting

TOWARDS MODERNISM: A STUDY OF PAINTERLY TECHNIQUES IN GEORGE

ELIOT’S DANIEL DERONDA

by

ANNA BIGHTA

B.A., Emory University, 2002

A Thesis Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of The University of Georgia in Partial Fulfillment

of the Requirements for the Degree

MASTER OF ARTS

ATHENS, GEORGIA

2005

© 2005

Anna Bighta

All Rights Reserved

TOWARDS MODERNISM: A STUDY OF PAINTERLY TECHNIQUES IN GEORGE

ELIOT’S DANIEL DERONDA

by

ANNA BIGHTA

Major Professor: Simon Gatrell

Committee: Richard Menke Douglas Anderson

Electronic Version Approved: Maureen Grasso Dean of the Graduate School The University of Georgia August 2005

iv

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I thank Christopher Lane for giving me my first “A” on an undergraduate English

term paper. I also thank Simon Gatrell for his infinite patience and support. Anne-Christine Hoff

provided much needed academic and emotional support, as did David Lee, who, in addition,

provided technical support.

v

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS........................................................................................................... iv

TOWARDS MODERNISM ..........................................................................................1

WORKS CITED ..........................................................................................................28

TOWARDS MODERNISM: A STUDY OF PAINTERLY TECHNIQUES IN GEORGE

ELIOT’S DANIEL DERONDA

In her novel Daniel Deronda (1876), George Eliot prompts the Victorian reader to

develop a new consciousness of visuality through manipulating the reader’s sense of ekphrastic

hope and fear. Ekphrasis is defined in this paper as an attempt at bringing the meaning of an

artistic image onto the page. According to W.J.T. Mitchell in Picture Theory (1994), ekphrastic

hope is a state of understanding while ekphrastic fear is a state of disconcertment, and each

offers its particular uncanny effect. The post-modern reader experiences these effects as well

although more exposed to the technique than the Victorian. Eliot most often uses painting in the

form of image doubling, a technique used to emphasize an object of representation as both a

painting and a literal image, thus evoking an ultra-clear, hyper-real effect. However, image

overload can happen here, triggering the reader’s doubt. Secondly, Eliot generalizes certain

paintings to emphasize the increasing banality of visual realism. Rather than letting all the visual

evidence deliver a message, she focuses selectively within certain paintings, which then

demonstrates realism’s subjectivity and psychological nature. Eliot also alters space. By

removing literary and painterly boundaries dividing each other she creates a surreal merging of

the real and the painted. Furthermore, Eliot alters time, such that she slows down the novel to the

pace of a painting – one instant of simultaneous motion – and speeds up the painting to the pace

of the novel, creating an interval of linear motion. Painterly images intermingling with textual

images can be thought of as Eliot’s metaphor for the non-linearity of narrative and human

perception, or, at least, a considerably fragmented narrative and human perception. Victorians

2

can recognize realism and reality as signs. Hence, traces of symbolism and expressionism

emerge within the text of Daniel Deronda.

The uncanny experience, Freud hypothesizes, is the anxiety or wonder caused by re-

exposure to something familiar which, prior to the recurrence, had been alienated or repressed.

Realism works as a method of evoking the uncanny in the sense that to see an object in its

“entirety,” situated in a medium that sets itself apart from what Walter Ong would call the

physical “lifeworld,” reintroduces the “lifeworld” to the observer. The object’s reappearance in

his or her conscious imagination surprises the person who normally takes aspects of his or her

environment for granted; the object is at once immediate, ready for close examination, and yet

distanced as an imagined representation. It is ironic that the object must be reconceived in the

mind, away from the physical world, in order to understand its rela tionships to the physical

world. Creative Victorians sought to define reality by simulating it through secondary media

such as the canvas or the page. In particular, to capture a glimpse of visual “reality,” for

example, in genre painting or the contemporary novel, was to gain access to more abstract social,

political, psychological, and spiritual patterns occurring in the “real” world. As Georg Lukacs

once said in realism’s defense: “great realism… does not portray an immediately obvious aspect

of reality but one which is permanent and objectively more significant, namely man in the whole

range of his relations to the real world, above all those which outlast mere fashion” (“Realism in

the Balance” 48). Victorians could generalize more confidently when they saw evidence

redisplayed before them, or, such was the hope.

Two aesthetic problems with realism approached the surface of intellectual consciousness

by the second half of the nineteenth century. First, the methodology which helped signify

“realism” as a literary or artistic style grew banal to artists and their Victorian audience. The

3

world being more than what one sees, visual accuracy failed to satisfy expectations of existential

clarity about human behavior and the human condition. Second, realism in both art and literature

bifurcated to a less manageable degree as artists and writers contested the definition of “truth.” In

Realizations: Narrative, Pictorial, and Theatrical Arts in Nineteenth-Century England (1983),

Martin Meisel explains the artist’s aesthetic and moral dilemmas.

The nineteenth-century artist, especially the Victorian artist,

working for a comprehensive audience, had a double injunction

laid upon him. He found himself between an appetite for reality

and a requirement for signification. Specification, individuation,

autonomy of detail, and the look and feel of the thing itself pulled

one way; while placement in a larger meaningful pattern, appealing

to the moral sense and the understanding, pulled another. A story

rightly told satisfied both requirements. (12)

One could have camped with either ideal realism, infused with moral purpose, or with vulgar

realism like naturalism, which gave more room for chaos and the unexplainable, or one could try

to balance the polemics of the two.

Eliot offers her initial separate-but-equal manifesto on painterly and novelistic realism in

Adam Bede (1859). She claims that, aesthetically and morally, reality is a “mixed and entangled

affair” (177). However, Eliot still uses the divisions of good and evil, and ugliness and beauty, to

organize reality. Dutch paintings seem to demonstrate a “truthfulness” to which Eliot aspires,

images of neutral, unassuming beauty; the paintings involve themes like an old woman eating in

the kitchen or a village wedding comprised of people with irregular faces (179). Eliot proclaims,

“all honour and reverence to the divine beauty of form! Let us cultivate it to the utmost in men,

women, and children – in our gardens and in our houses” (180). At this moment in Eliot’s mind,

4

an ideal, universal beauty exists, and alongside it, a mundane beauty that comes with pity and

sympathy.

Let us love that other beauty too, which lies in no secret

of proportion, but in the secret of deep human sympathy.

… It is so needful we should remember their existence,

else we may happen to leave them quite out of our

religion and philosophy, and frame lofty theories which

only fit a world of extremes. Therefore let Art always

remind us of them. (180)

The reality of sociopolitical egalitarianism caused by respecting and representing all beauty

seems like a viable hypothesis to Eliot so long as she and her readers keep in mind the

separateness between the two beauties.

Ideal and vulgar realisms begin collapsing when Victorians start doubting their capability

to represent totality and unity. In The Industrial Reformation of English Fiction (1985),

Catherine Gallagher detects this alteration in Victorian thinking through political arguments and

an aesthetic style shift emerging in the novels of the 1860s. She claims that “the introduction of

the [Arnoldian] politics of culture into the novel created just such a programmatic separation of

the novel itself from the object of its representation” (266). Authors realized that egalitarian

representation, whether represented with good intention in the novel or vouched for in

Parliament, would hardly create a harmonious Britain. Most of the population was not educated,

hence, would not know how to best rule themselves. Thus, selectivity and exceptionalism were

inevitabilities.

George Eliot’s body of work exemplifies the Victorian conflict between facts and values.

Gallagher illuminates in Felix Holt, the Radical (1866) Eliot’s realization of realism as an

5

arbitrary system of representation and her novelistic push for a political system more conscious

of its own inevitable artifice. Eliot’s pre-1860s idea of realism paralleled Utilitarian theory in

that “both assume that the accumulation of facts automatically produce value, and each asserts

that the value of a representation is directly proportional to the amount of detail it includes about

observable social reality” (Gallagher 222). However, during the writing of Felix Holt, Eliot

seems to discover, as do other English writers of the time, that “the object of representation could

be deprived of value in the very process of representing it and that the value thus subtracted from

the thing depicted could be appropriated by the representation” (226). To summarize, Eliot

slathers detail on the object of representation with the goal of extracting value out of the object,

but realizes increasingly in her later writing that she is actually pumping value into her

representation of the object while the object, in itself, retains no value at all.

J. Hillis Miller also observes the collapse of Eliot’s earlier realism in her subsequent

novel, Middlemarch (1871). Miller examines what he calls Eliot’s earlier “totalization

enterprise” in “Optic and Semiotic in Middlemarch” (125). Eliot presupposes, according to

Miller, that two metaphor systems, such as light and woven material, might completely depict

the universal laws of human behavior. But, despite the narrator’s declaration, for example, that

humans must think of their own subjectivity because, like a network of threads, each person

somehow connects to everyone else, the narrator retains the position of objective generalizer.

Metaphors that demonstrate such a paradox, Miller asserts, sabotage the novel’s attempt at

perfect realism.

Daniel Deronda (1876) is George Eliot’s final replay of the collapse of her early realism.

The realism in this work does not function rigorously as the visual clarifier that perpetually

refines toward some pure objective truth. Rather, the realism is increasingly used as a subjective

6

perspective and, therefore, is toyed with. Modernity emerges in Daniel Deronda. In Techniques

of the Observer (1990), Jonathan Crary summarizes Walter Benjamin’s thoughts on perception

in saying that “there is never a pure access to a single object; vision is always multiple, adjacent

to and overlapping with other objects, desires, vectors. Even the congealed space of the museum

cannot transcend a world where everything is in circulation” (20). In the case of Daniel Deronda,

what is true for the macrocosm is true of the microcosm. Painting is one in a plethora of other

constituents forming perception. And when focusing on painting, George Eliot treats various

painterly themes in various ways. Eliot’s last epic wields visual art, music, drama, sculpture, and

architecture. I want to examine Eliot’s use of painting in particular and how bringing painting

into Daniel Deronda expands the reader’s perception of reality. The narrator and characters

allude to contemporary and older paintings; they also discuss paintings existing only in the

novel’s imaginary world. The narrator also refers to the characters’ thought acts by metaphors of

painting and sketching. Eliot describes and analyzes characters and scenes through what Rhoda

Flaxman would call “word-painting.”

[Word-painting] refers to extended passages

of visually oriented descriptions whose techniques

emulate pictorial methods. Word-painters

typically employ framing devices, recurrent

iconographic motifs, careful compositional

structures, and pay close attention to contrasts

of light and dark, of color, volume, and mass.

(Victorian Word-Painting and Narrative 9)

The prominence of Eliot’s painting analogy in all its permutations gives evidence that she

actively contends with consciousness of representation as signs defined in terms of other signs

7

and makes tenuous her continued pursuit of objective realism. By adding painterly realism to the

novel, Eliot hopes to restore the uncanny experience to literary realism but, in the process, she

introduces the Victorian reader to a further element of psychological realism.

The uncanny, revelatory part of the realism happens when the object takes on vividness

not just as a reality but also as artifice representing reality. We marvel at the quality of the object

yet also the accuracy of the manner in which the object is represented. Elaine Scarry offers some

theories about imaginative vision in Dreaming by the Book (1999). She claims that “only by

decoupling ‘vividness’ from ‘the imaginary’ (where we unreflectingly and inaccurately place it

in many everyday conversations about aesthetics) and attaching it to its proper moorings in

perception, can we then even recognize, first, that the imagined object is not ordinarily vivid, and

second, that its not being vivid is tautologically bound up with its being imaginary” (4). What is

seen is more imaginatively intense than what is simply imagined. Scarry also says that “our

freely practiced imaginative acts bear less resemblance to our freely practiced perceptual acts

than do our constrained imaginative acts occurring under authorial direction” (31). An object

appears more vivid when its existence is guided through by the author’s hand. Furthermore, she

says that “a painting approximates or exceeds the vivacity of the visible world, since it is itself a

piece of the visible world” (4). The painting crosses over from the real world to the imagined

because it is a physical visual representation. Daniel Deronda’s dependence on the painting

analogy suggests that George Eliot, during the novel’s formation, had been considering the

bridging quality of painting. Scarry’s theories help the post-modern reader see that painting is

Eliot’s tool with which she increases literary vividness and yet also destabilizes Victorian

dependence upon objective visual realism.

8

In Picture Theory (1994), W.J.T. Mitchell defines ekphrasis as a verbal representation of

a visual representation (151). Ekphrastic hope, then, he defines as when

the impossibility of ekphrasis is overcome in

imagination or metaphor, when we discover a

‘sense’ in which language can do what so many

writers have wanted it to do: ‘to make us see.’

…

[Ekphrastic hope] is also the point in the rhetorical

and poetic theory when the doctrines of ut pictura

poesis and the Sister Arts are mobilized to put

language at the service of vision. (152-3)

Ekphrastic hope is the state of mind in which the possibility exists that two representations, one

visual, one verbal, share one meaning. Eliot depends on the Sister Arts tradition, the tradition of

ut pictura poesis, to add and subtract different sets of values from the images she invokes. The

reader’s ekphrastic hope helps realize Eliot’s intended image. Observe, for example, how Eliot

describes Grandcourt after his marriage to Gwendolen Harleth.

Grandcourt, who drank little wine, had left

the table and was lounging, while he smoked, in an

easy-chair near the hearth, where a fire of oak boughs

was gaping to its glowing depths, and edging them

with a delicate tint of ashes delightful to behold. The

chair of red-brown velvet brocade was a becoming

background for his pale -tinted well-cut features and

exquisite long hands: omitting the cigar, you might

have imagined him a portrait by Moroni, who would

have rendered wonderfully the impenetrable gaze and

9

air of distinction; and a portrait by that great master

would have been quite as lively a companion as

Grandcourt was disposed to be. (DD 317)

In George Eliot and the Visual Arts (1979), Hugh Witemeyer says, “Grandcourt has not only the

inexpressiveness of a Moroni portrait but also the inhuman stasis of any portrait” (66).

Witemeyer also reasons that because Grandcourt lacks morals, he also “lacks animation, a visual

effect of death- in life” (66). Grandcourt has “exquisite long hands,” in the Italian Mannerist style

of exaggerated human features (DD 317). The rich, dark-colored and textured background

contrasting with Grandcourt’s pale skin suggests Giovanni Moroni’s portraiture style. When

rendering the “impenetrable gaze and air of distinction,” the Moroni- like portrait appears human

(317). When the painting becomes a comparable companion, Grandcourt loses organicness and

dimension; he becomes the painting. Eliot evokes ekphrastic hope to drain Grandcourt of human

passion.

Another example of ekphrastic hope is when Gwendolen demonstrates a moment of

beautiful boredom at the Archery Ball. The narrator remarks that “Sir Joshua [Reynolds] would

have been glad to take her portrait; and he would have had an easier task than the historian at

least in this, that he would not have had to represent the truth of change – only to give stability to

the beautiful moment” (117). Two conflicting interpretations emerge. As a novelist and a

recorder of history, Eliot admits the challenge of establishing an aesthetically stimulating vision.

But also she undercuts Sir Joshua’s portraiture as only required to hold a moment while writing

carries the double duty of that and depicting the “truth of change.” As the narrator contemplates

the Royal Academy president taking Gwendolen’s portrait the reader is made to contemplate her

as both real and an ideal, beautiful, painted woman in his or her imagination. The narrator’s

10

remark allows Reynolds’s hypothetical portrait to exist in time with her “moment,” while the

allusion to Reynolds contributes to isolating Gwendolen’s “moment” in time.

Word-painting relies on ekphrastic hope to realize itself, to vivify the visual effect by

implying it has artistic value. When the descriptive landscape includes a painting, an

architectural structure, or a tableau, the distinction between word-painting and ekphrasis blurs.

One could argue they reinforce each other in creating the effective vision. An example of Eliot

integrating word-painting with ekphrasis happens when Deronda leads visitors through the

Abbey, Sir Hugo’s estate and Daniel’s childhood home. The narrator studies the grounds of the

converted chapel:

They walked on the gravel across a green court,

where the snow still lay in islets on the grass, and in masses

on the boughs of the great cedar and the crenellated coping

of the stone walls, and then into a larger court where there

was another cedar, to find the beautiful choir long ago turned

into stables, in the first instance after an impromptu fashion

by troopers, who had a pious satisfaction in insulting the

priests of Baal and the images of Ashtoreth, the queen of

heaven. The exterior – its west end, save for the stable door,

walled in with brick and covered in ivy – was much defaced,

maimed of finial and gargoyle, the friable limestone broken

and fretted, and lending its soft grey to a powdery dark lichen;

the long windows, too, were filled in with brick as far as the

springing of the arches, the broad clerestory windows with

wire or ventilating blinds. With the low wintry afternoon sun

upon it, sending shadows from the cedar boughs, and lighting

up the touches of snow remaining on every ledge, it had still a

scarcely disturbed aspect of antique solemnity, which gave the

scene in the interior rather a startling effect; though, ecclesiastical

11

and reverential indignation apart, the eyes could hardly help

dwelling with pleasure on its piquant picturesqueness. Each

finely-arched chapel was turned into a stall, where in the dusty

glazing of the windows there still gleamed patches of

crimson, orange, blue, and palest violet, for the rest,

the choir had been gutted, the floor leveled, paved, and

drained according to the most approved fashion, and a

line of loose-boxes erected in the middle: a soft light

fell from the upper windows on sleek brown or grey

flanks and haunches; on mild equine faces looking out

with active nostrils over the varnished brown boarding;

on the hay hanging from racks where the saints once

looked down from the altar pieces, and on the pale

golden straw scattered or in heaps; on a little white-and-

liver-coloured spaniel making his bed on the back of an

elderly hackney, and on four ancient angels, still showing

signs of devotion like mutilated martyrs – while overall,

the grand painted roof, untouched by reforming wash,

showed its lines and colours mysteriously through the

veiling shadow and cobweb, and a hoof now and then

striking against the boards seemed to fill the vault with

thunder, while outside there was the answering bay of

the bloodhounds. (DD 419-20)

The passage demonstrates Flaxman’s definition of word-painting. Eliot includes color such as

gleaming “patches of crimson, orange, blue, and palest violet,” light such as the “soft light”

which “fell from the upper windows on sleek brown or grey flanks and haunches,” line such as

the “line of loose-boxes erected in the middle,” and also iconography, the dog motif

(symbolizing devotion), represented here by the spaniel curling up on the hackney (419). Present

also in the passage is Flaxman’s cinematic panning as Eliot traces the trail from the outside

ground, to the stable door, the church’s external wall details, the interior stalls, floor, horses, and

12

spaniel, upper statues, and finally the cavernous roof. Eliot faithfully records the “piquant

picturesqueness” of the Romantically charged structure (419). The horse’s echoing stamp while

we observe the dark mysterious roof preserves the hushed solemnity surrounding an art

collection displayed in a museum. But also by introducing a new sense, the stamp returns the

reader to the literary three-dimensionality of standing in Sir Hugo’s stable. Thus, not only does

Eliot execute word-painting, she turns the scene into an ekphrastic object which she analyzes.

Gwendolen Harleth considers herself a work of art and insists that her audience treat and

discuss her as an aesthetic object. She perpetually poses and gestures, trying to insert herself into

imaginary or existing art. Hence, Eliot obliges the reader to have ekphrastic hope in Gwendolen;

we must try to see Gwendolen as both (preferably simultaneously) a literary character and a

visual object. As Gwendolen imagines herself in a portrait of Saint Cecilia, we, as well as her

immediate audience, are sucked into picturing her.

‘Mamma, mamma, pray come here!’ said

Gwendolen, Mrs Davilow having followed slowly

in talk with the housekeeper. ‘Here is an organ. I

will be Saint Cecilia: some one shall paint me as

Saint Cecilia. Jocosa (that was her name for Miss

Merry), let down my hair. See, mamma!’

She had thrown off her hat and gloves, and

seated herself before the organ in an admirable pose,

looking upward; while the submissive and sad Jocosa

took out the one comb which fastened the coil of

hair, and then shook out the mass till it fell in a

smooth light-brown stream far below the owner’s

slim waist.

Mrs Davilow smiled and said, ‘A charming

picture, my Dear!’ not indifferent to the display of

13

her pet, even in the presence of a housekeeper.

Gwendolen rose and laughed with delight. All this

seemed to the purpose on entering a new house

which was so excellent a background. (DD 26-7)

Gwendolen’s “stream” of hair introduces subtle dynamism into the scene. The narrator affirms,

implying some admiration, that Offendene appears to have no other practical function than to

offset Gwendolen in her painting fantasy. Nevertheless, because of this we don the painter’s role

and habitually envision her making any scene a living painting. If the reader contemplates the

possibility of one signified shared between a word and an image, he or she eventually progresses

into territory of doubt. The reader experiences “ekphrastic fear,” which Mitchell defines as “the

moment of resistance or counterdesire that occurs when we sense that the difference between the

verbal and visual representation might collapse and the figurative, imaginary desire of ekphrasis

might be realized literally and actually” (Picture Theory 154). Ekphrastic fear questions the

adequacy of representability. Mrs. Davilow takes a moment to disrupt the reader’s ekphrastic

hope in Gwendolen.

[Gwendolen’s] first movement was to go to the tall

mirror between the windows, which reflected herself

and the room completely, while her mamma sat down

and also looked at the reflection.

‘That is a becoming glass, Gwendolen; or is it

the black and gold colour that sets you off?’ said Mrs

Davilow, as Gwendolen stood obliquely with her three-

quarter face turned towards the mirror, and her left hand

brushing back the stream of hair.

‘I should make a tolerable Saint Cecilia with

some white roses on my head,’ said Gwendolen, - ‘only,

14

how about my nose, mamma? I think saints’ noses never

in the least turn up. I wish you had given me your perfectly

straight nose; it would have done for any sort of character –

a nose of all work. Mine is only a happy nose; it would

not do so well for tragedy.’

‘Oh, my dear, any nose will do to be miserable

with in this world,’ said Mrs Davilow, with a deep, weary

sigh, throwing her black bonnet on the table, and resting

her elbow near it. (DD 28)

By converting generic artistic tragedy into situational tragedy, Mrs Davilow unwittingly

reminds the reader of the superficiality of living only to be painted. She also illuminates the

naïveté of the early Victorian realist idea that one set of visua l cues refers to one set of emotions,

a tactic frequently adopted in contemporary dramatic and artistic posturing. Also, in the irony of

Mrs Davilow’s reply, the reader regains ekphrastic fear that Gwendolen is more wholly human

as a literary representation than as a painting.

Gwendolen’s deconstruction as a literary character as well as a painted character happens

as the reader feels the overload from being conscious of the catalogue of paintings surrounding

the Saint Cecilia scene.

Gwendolen… was not prepared to have their arrival

treated with indifference; and after tripping a little way

up the matted stone staircase to take a survey there, she

tripped down again, and followed by all the girls looked

into each of the rooms opening from the ha ll – the dining-

room all dark oak and worn red satin damask, with a

copy of snarling, worrying dogs from Snyders over the

sideboard, and a Christ breaking bread over the mantelpiece;

the library with a general aspect and smell of old brown

15

leather; and lastly, the drawing-room, which was entered

through a small antechamber crowded with venerable

knick-knacks.

[Gwendolen poses as Saint Cecilia.]

‘What a queer, quaint, picturesque room!’ she

went on, looking about her. ‘I like these old embroidered

chairs, and the garland on the wainscot, and the pictures

that may be anything. That one with the ribs – nothing

but ribs and darkness – I should think that is Spanish,

mamma.’

‘Oh Gwendolen!’ said the small Isabel, in a tone

of astonishment, while she held open a hinged panel of the

wainscot at the other end of the room.

Every one, Gwendolen first, went to look. The open

panel had disclosed the picture of an upturned dead face, from

which an obscure figure seemed to be fleeing with outstretched

arms. ‘How horrible!’ said Mrs Davilow, with a look of mere

disgust; but Gwendolen shuddered silently, and Isabel, a plain

and altogether inconvenient child with an alarming memory,

said –

‘You will never stay in this room by yourself,

Gwendolen.’

‘How dare you open things which were meant to be

shut up you perverse little creature?’ said Gwendolen, in her

angriest tone. Then snatching the panel out of the hand of

the culprit, she closed it hastily. (DD 26-7)

The juxtaposition of the snarling dogs and Christ breaking bread creates moral contrast.

Furthermore, with those images, and the gothic picturesqueness of dark rooms, the amorphous

portrait of “ribs and darkness,” and the melodramatically portentous dead-face painting, Eliot

manages to place the reader in a surreal environment where painted and real vision blend, but she

quickly overloads the reader in making him or her aware of these visual stimuli. Traditional

16

literary realism fails because ekphrastic hope barely keeps the reader’s fantasy together, and lets

the artifice of representation seep into the reader’s mind. The scene grows expressionistic when

the reader becomes hyper-conscious of the clutter of painted items and potentially painted

compositions, yet can only focus on the details that Eliot makes noticeable. In turn, the reader

realizes that painting and writing are extremely subjective.

Eliot reveals the stress which comes from aligning the socially ideal and the socially

real in her portrayal of Daniel Deronda. She acknowledges her own subjectivity when she says,

“often the grand meanings of faces as well as of written words may lie chiefly in the impressions

of those who look on them” (DD 186). Eliot might add pictures to the statement as well. Yet she

also adheres to the possibility of objective portrayal producing sympathy. Eliot describes

Deronda thus:

Look at his hands: they are not small and dimpled with

tapering fingers that seem to have only a deprecating

touch: they are long, flexible firmly-grasping hands, such

as Titian has painted in a picture where he wanted to

show the combination of refinement with force. And

there is something of a likeness, too, between the faces

belonging to the hands – in both the uniform pale-brown

skin, the perpendicular brow, the calmly penetrating eyes.

Not seraphic any longer: thoroughly terrestrial and manly;

but still of a kind to raise belief in a human dignity which

can afford to acknowledge poor relations.

Such types meet us here and there among average

conditions; in a workman, for example, whistling over a

bit of measurement and lifting his eyes to answer our

question about the road. (186)

17

Eliot tries to complicate the still pervading idea that wealth is directly proportional to spiritual

elevation while sustaining physiognomic generalizations, which she considers more universal

and democratic. By likening Deronda to what Hugh Witemeyer conjectures to be Titian’s Young

Man with a Glove, Eliot encourages the reader to characterize Deronda with imaginative sobriety

(George Eliot 101). As the novel proceeds, for Eliot as well as Witemeyer, Deronda grows so

Christ- like in action that his appearance resembles Jesus Christ’s in Titian’s The Tribute Money

(101-2). It becomes increasingly difficult to believe Deronda is “thoroughly terrestrial and

manly” (DD 186). As the novel continues, he grows less “real” as a source for an idealized

human portrait, and more “ideal” as a humanized portrait of the ideal. Witemeyer summarizes

that Eliot uses portraiture as both a beginning from which to discern the particular nature of a

human and later as an ideal state of being to which a human aspires. Thus, Eliot courts ruining

her literary illusion; the reader becomes aware of the literary character as a painted object.

Word-painting offers the reader a clear view of Jewish culture by specifically evoking

sympathy for the Cohens.

[Deronda] was surprised at the prettiness of the scene.

The house was old, and rather extensive at the back:

probably the large room he now entered was gloomy

by daylight, but now it was agreeably lit by a fine old

brass lamp with seven oil-lights hanging above the snow-

white cloth spread on the central table. The ceiling and

walls were smoky, and all the surroundings were dark

enough to throw into relief the human figures, which

had a Venetian glow of coloring. The grandmother was

arrayed in yellowish brown with a large gold chain in

lieu of the necklace, and by this light her yellow face

18

with its darkly-marked eyebrows and framing roll of

grey hair looked as handsome as was necessary for

picturesque effect. Young Mrs Cohen was clad in red

and black, with a string of large artificial pearls wound

round and her neck: the baby lay asleep in the cradle

under a scarlet counterpane; Adelaide Rebekah was in

braided amber; and Jacob Alexander was in black

velveteen and scarlet stockings. As the four pairs of

black eyes all glistened a welcome at Deronda, he was

almost ashamed of the supercilious dislike these happy-

looking creatures had raised in him by daylight… A large

dish of blue-and-yellow ware was set up on the side table,

and flanking it were two old silver vessels; in front of them

a large volume in darkened vellum with a deep-ribbed

back. In the corner at the farther end was an open door

into an inner room, where there was also a light. (DD 394-5)

Eliot introduces the Cohens with particular attention to visual detail as if to insist on this Jewish

family’s worthiness to be represented with care in a medium dominated in England by Western

European Christians. However, Eliot is also conscious that the scene may be almost too clear,

and, like Grandmother Cohen, assembled for “picturesque effect.” As when Grandcourt lounges

in his armchair, the vibrant coloration of the Cohens set off by a rich background suggest the

Venetian school of Renaissance painting, the style of which Eliot seems to be fond in this novel.

The family poses by a still life arrangement of a blue and yellow dish, two silver vessels, and an

old book. Various lighting frames them. The Cohens’ glistening black eyes seem at once moist

and therefore alive, yet in the midst of “pretty” description, glittery and artificial. Daniel’s

observations of the Cohens in “parenthetic glances” also prompt the reader to see in fragments.

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This scene is a moment of both ekphrastic hope and fear. The reader desires the Cohens to be

characters depicted in the manner of realism, but hesitates as the scene’s still- life quality.

By analyzing a scene and its characters as art objects, Eliot parodies the scene’s realism.

The Meyricks are a household of artists, art lovers, and artisans, who sit together, working on

and living in art. As in a Vermeer painting, the “slice of space” exposes the poor but tidy Dutch

family (DD 196). Their “interior was filled with objects always in the same places” as if

suspended from real time (196). The children learned much from artwork - “a world history in

scenes and heads” on their walls (196). The Meyricks lived a “wide-glancing, nicely-select life,

open to the highest things in music, painting, and poetry” (196). They absorb what they sense is

good in aesthetics. However, their naïveté emerges when they “could not believe that the

manners of ladies in the fashionable world were so full of coarse selfishness, petty quarreling,

and slang as they are represented to be in what are called literary photographs” (197). The

Meyricks still idealize the upper classes and cannot visualize someone like Gwendolen

gallivanting about with wealth. They have trouble enduring aristocratic realism. Furthermore,

because the reader does not witness the Meyricks toiling under economic constraints, they

become a parody of blissful common life.

All the girls were at home, and the two rooms were

thrown together to make space for Kate’s drawing, as

well as a great length of embroidery which had taken

the place of the satin cushions – a sort of piece de

resistance in the courses of needlework, taken up by

any clever fingers that happened to be at liberty. It

stretched across the front room picturesquely enough,

Mrs Meyrick bending over it at one corner, Mab in

the middle, and Amy at the other end. Mirah, whose

20

performances in point of sewing were on the make-

shift level of the tailor-bird’s, her education in that

branch having been much neglected, was acting as

reader to the party, seated on a camp-stool; in which

position she also served Kate as model for a title-page

vignette, symbolizing a fair public absorbed in the

successive volumes of the Family Tea-table. She was

giving forth with charming distinctness the delightful

Essay of Elia, ‘The Praise of Chimney Sweeps,’ and

all were smiling over the ‘innocent blacknesses,’ when

the imposing knock and ring called their thoughts to

loftier spheres, and they looked up in wonderment.

(DD 481)

The Meyricks live in a genre scene. They participate joyfully and celebrate the working-class

culture as they read from Charles Lamb’s “Elia” articles. The Meyricks suggest also that Eliot is

mocking her own realist manifesto in Adam Bede (1859) that Dutch seventeenth-century

paintings adequately represent common life.

Eliot uses painterly techniques to pronounce or make too pronounced a scene or

individual. She also uses painting to do the reverse – to generalize characters. In the opening

chapter when the reader hears several casino guests analyze Gwendolen as an aesthetic object,

the reader also learns about one of her traveling companions, Baron Langen.

‘Who are these Langens? Does anybody know

them?’

‘They are quite comme il faut. I have dined with

them several time at the Russie . The baroness is English.

Miss Harleth calls her cousin. The girl herself is thoroughly

21

well-bred, and as clever as possible.’

‘Dear me! And the baron?’

‘A very good furniture picture.’ (DD 13)

The reader, along with the casino members, is supposed to reduce Baron Langen’s moral value

as the narrator reduces Langen’s ekphrastic value to a minimalist description requiring only two

phrases, “Baron Langen,” and “furniture picture.” A “furniture picture,” a nondescript painting

whose contents are only valued in relationship to its surrounding furniture, implies that Baron

Langen’s character is flat, superficial, and his contents only relevant to the clever baroness’s life.

Nevertheless, literary value exists in Baron Langen simply by enhancing the meaning of his

character with the furniture picture metaphor. He is not just human, but a furniture picture too.

Furthermore, the qualified adjective “very good” adds ironic moral importance to his

superficiality. So, the reader’s ekphrastic hope lets Baron Langen and “furniture picture” share

one meaning, and the reader experiences the tension that results when a literary motive and

motive of plot contrast.

The following example of generalization is not so much about ekphrastic fear for the

reader as it is fear that a person resembles a painting. Gwendolen converses with Anna about the

character of Anna’s brother, Rex.

‘I don’t in the least believe in your Rex, Anna,’

said Gwendolen, laughing at her. ‘He will turn out to

be like those wretched blue and yellow water-colours

of his which you hang up in your bedroom and worship.’

(DD 55)

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Gwendolen threateningly predicts that Rex’s character will share the same meaning as his water-

colors, which, to Gwendolen, have a vague, nonspecific value.

Though frequently pushing characters and events into a painterly world, Eliot does not

neglect to draw the painterly world into the realist novel’s environment. In Daniel Deronda, the

surreal effect that Eliot evokes in the drawing-room gathering scene is peculiar and requires

examination.

The scene was really delightful – enlarged by

full-length portraits with deep backgrounds, inserted

in the cedar paneling – surmounted by a ceiling that

glowed with the rich colors of the coats of arms ranged

between the sockets – illuminated almost as much by

the red fire of oak-boughs as by the pale waxlights –

stilled by the deep-piled carpet and by the high English

breeding that subdues all voices; while the mixture of

ages from the white-haired Lord and Lady Pentreath to

the four-year-old Edgar Raymond, gave a varied charm

to the living groups. Lady Mallinger, with fair matronly

roundness and mildly prominent blue eyes, moved about

in her black velvet, carrying a tiny white dog on her arm

as a sort of finish to her costume; the children were

scattered among the ladies, while most of the gentlemen

were standing rather aloof conversing with that very

moderate vivacity observable during the long minutes

before dinner. Deronda was a little out of the circle in

a dialogue fixed upon him by Mr Vandernoodt, a man

of the best Dutch blood imported at the revolution: for

the rest, one of those commodious persons in society

who are nothing particular themselves, but are

23

understood to be acquainted with the best in every

department; close-clipped, pale-eyed, nonchalant, as

good a foil as could well be found to the intense

colouring and vivid gravity of Deronda. (DD 405-6)

Eliot manipulates space to create the surreal effect in two ways. First, through the content in the

portraits, she creates for the reader a situation of ekphrastic hope which splices the painted world

with the literary world. The “deep backgrounds” in the portraits expand the room, also allowing

the “full- length” people in the portraits to join the crowd who appear still and portrait- like as

well. Here, the reader senses the simultaneous existence of both a party and a genre scene. The

portraits help build the scene’s imaginative vitality, although the people may not seem vital

(including Deronda) in the sense of being fully alive. The second way Eliot solicits the surreal

moment is by establishing the solidity of the walls, a technique that Elaine Scarry forms into an

arguable theory in the twentieth century. Scarry posits that “the passing of a filmy surface over

another (by comparison, dense) surface is not the only way of solidifying walls. But it is a key

way…and it occurs precisely at moments where the newborn fictional worlds are most fragile

and at risk because they are just in the midst of coming into being” (Dreaming 15). If not moving

across one another, Eliot at least juxtaposes two surfaces to create solidity: the two-dimensional

portraits are inserted into the cedar paneling to become part of the wall, paint coats, and then

intermingled layers of light from waxlights or the fireplace play on the ceiling, and the floor

sports “deep-piled” carpeting (DD 405). Furthermore, Scarry claims that “the idea of the solid

wall prevents not our further sinking downward but our further sinking inward. It provides a

vertical floor for all subsequent imaginings that lets us perform the projective act without vertigo

or alarm, and thereby lifts the inhibitions on mental vivacity that ordinarily protect us”

(Dreaming 12). I do not believe that imagination can be simply corralled by the idea of a wall

24

even if suggested by the author partly because, in this scene, Eliot introduces the phenomenon of

the “deep backgrounds” enlarging the room before she asserts the existence of walls, ceiling, and

floor. However, the experience of vertigo or alarm does intensify after Eliot describes the walls,

ceiling, and floor. Therefore, through the combined solicitation of ekphrastic hope and solid

walls, Eliot creates a surreal moment where the real and painted worlds intermingle.

Eliot encourages ekphrastic hope in the charades scene by manipulating time. In this

scene, Gwendolen assumes the central role as the statue Hermione from Shakespeare’s The

Winter’s Tale during a game of charades, a scene in which Eliot consolidates the Sister Arts.

The tableaux of Hermione was doubly striking

from its dissimilarity with what had gone before: it was

answering perfectly; and a murmur of applause had been

gradually suppressed while Leontes gave his permission

that Paulina should exercise her utmost art and make the

statue move.

Hermione, her arm resting on a pillar, was elevated

about six inches, which she counted on as a means of showing

her pretty foot and instep, when at the given signal she should

advance and descend.

…

Herr Klesmer, who had been good-natured enough

to seat himself at the piano, struck a thunderous chord – but

in the same instant, and before Hermione had put forth her

foot, the moveable panel, which was on a line with the piano,

flew open on the right opposite the stage and disclosed the

picture of the dead face and the fleeing figure, brought out

in pale definiteness by the position of the waxlights. Everyone

was startled, but all eyes in the act of turning towards the

25

opened panel were recalled by a piercing cry from Gwendolen,

who stood without change of attitude, but with a change of

expression that was terrifying in its terror. She looked like a

statue into which a soul of Fear had entered: her pallid lips

were parted; her eyes, usually narrowed under their long

lashes, were dilated and fixed… But the touch of her mother’s

arm had the effect of an electric charge; Gwendolen fell on

her knees and put her hands before her face. She was still

trembling, but mute, and it seemed that she had self-

consciousness enough to aim at controlling her signs of

terror, for she presently allowed herself to be raised from

her kneeling posture and led away, while the company were

relieving their minds by explanation.

‘A magnificent bit of plastik that!’ said Klesmer to

Miss Arrowpoint. (DD 60-1)

Gwendolen often presents herself with an element of fantasy. In Paintings from Books

(1985), Richard Altick informs the reader that Gwendolen’s desire to dramatize a statuesque

pose in Greek dress is possibly a desire to imitate the fancy-portrait, Mrs Siddons as Hermione

(326n). Posing as such offers two benefits: first, Gwendolen can imagine herself at an elevated

status, as only the wealthy and fashionable could afford the luxury of having themselves painted

in their preferred literary fantasies; second, through acting as a statue coming to life, she can

pronounce herself art embodied. The reader senses Eliot ridiculing Gwendolen’s desire for

posing in intellectually or dramatically rich scenes simply in order to model in Greek attire and

to display her “pretty foot and instep” (DD 60). Nevertheless, the reader is given more fodder

with which to visualize Gwendolen as a composite of human and painting. The painterly allusion

and the charades game represent a realistic portion of Gwendolen’s psyche at present.

26

Aside from fancy-painting, Eliot uses a prophetic painting to reveal both Gwendolen’s

future and innermost fear. The “fleeing figure” symbolizes Gwendolen as she will try for the rest

of her life to escape the image of her husband’s “dead face” and her guilt for desiring to murder

him (60). Prior to this tragedy, the painting reminds Gwendolen of her “spiritual dread” (63). She

fears human and spiritual bereavement. Eliot marks the “dead face” and “fleeing figure” as the

painting’s two focal points, both of which are sketchy typological symbols bearing no visual

resemblance to any character. This prophetic painting can also be considered proto-expressionist,

in the same sense as Edvard Munch’s The Scream (1893); both reflect a subjective emotional

crisis of an individual, to which viewers can collectively relate.

When considering the charades scene in its entirety, the reader witnesses Eliot

manipulating time. He or she attains a simultaneous experience of viewing a static genre

painting, a written story, and a dramatic tableau. Martin Meisel notes that Victorian artists

attempted to deconstruct the chronological differences, as well as the visual differences, that

theorists like Gotthold Ephraim Lessing had illuminated between art mediums (Realizations 18).

Eliot also tries to disable these differences. In Laocoon (1766), Lessing asserts:

If painting, by virtue of its symbols or means of

imitation, which it can combine in space only, must

renounce the element of time entirely, progressive

actions, by the very fact that they are progressive,

cannot be considered to belong among its subjects.

Painting must be content with coexistent actions

or with mere bodies which, by their position,

permit us to conjecture an action. (77)

27

According to Lessing, the painting is physically incapable of representing an action in sequence,

only in simultaneity. Eliot seems to disagree with this philosophy in the charades scene. She

brings time almost to a halt as she details in three mini-moments the near-simultaneous actions

of a larger moment. First, Klesmer strikes the piano and the panel swings open “in the same

instant” (DD 60). Next, “all eyes” in the act of turning “were recalled” by Gwendolen’s scream

(60). Finally, as Mrs. Davilow touches Gwendolen, an electric charge of emotion releases her

rigid body (61). Gwendolen’s statuesque pose and frozen grimace connect the sequence. The

incident happens so quickly in “real time” that the reader, too, can envision the grimace, Klesmer

with his hand on the keys, the open panel, the alarmed audience, in a simultaneous yet also slow

progressing sequence on canvas. Ekphrastic hope, in this case, makes the reader conscious of the

scene as living and as painted. The image allows for both stasis and the cinematic progression of

reading a painting as Eliot delineates the scene’s multiple actions and also unfolds the plot.

With the painterly images and techniques implemented in Daniel Deronda, Eliot alters

novelistic realism into a style conscious of its objective pretensions, yet sustains the sincerity that

goes along with objective visual representation. She brings to the forefront the fact that neither

painting nor writing provides windows to the world, a visual reality that teaches elemental truths.

Also, Eliot introduces the modernist idea that humans experience their existence in fragments,

pieces of media, segments of thought, and semi-focused glimpses, which are continually

arranged, rearranged, and repeated to form a narrative or to discern some generalization which

helps ease the mind through life. Another way of understanding the observational and

imaginative processes that Eliot demonstrates through characters such as Deronda, Gwendolen,

and Mordacai, and implies in Daniel Deronda as a novel is meta-picturing. W.J.T. Mitchell

claims that “metapictures elicit, not just a double vision, but a double voice, and a double

28

relation between language and the visual experience. If every picture only makes sense inside a

discursive frame, an ‘outside’ of descriptive, interpretive language, metapictures call into

question the relation of language to image as an inside-outside structure. They interrogate the

authority of the speaking subject over the seen image” (Picture Theory 68). By including a great

amount of painterly analogy within Daniel Deronda, the text triggers questions in the reader not

only about Eliot’s authority as a writer, but also about the authority of writing and painting to

mean. Ekphrastic hope allows for infinite salvation from meaninglessness. However, ekphrastic

fear is an intervention and offers alteration of meaning. Eliot seems to encourage the reader to

notice and to engage in meta-discourse, something increasingly happening towards the end of the

nineteenth century.

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Works Cited

Altick, Richard. Paintings from Books: Art and Literature in Britain, 1760-1900.

Columbus: Ohio State UP, 1985.

Crary, Jonathan. Techniques of the Observer. Cambridge : MITP, 1990.

Eliot, George. Adam Bede. London: Penguin, 1985.

---. Daniel Deronda. London: Penguin, 1995.

Flaxman, Rhoda. Victorian Word-Painting and Narrative: Toward a Blending of Genres.

Ann Arbor: UMI, 1987.

Freud, Sigmund. “The Uncanny.” Writings on Art and Literature. Ed. Werner Hamacher

and David E. Wellbery. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1997. 193-233.

Gallagher, Catherine. The Industrial Reformation of English Fiction. Chicago: U of

Chicago P, 1985.

Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim. Laocoon. Trans. Edward Allen McCormick. Baltimore:

Johns Hopkins UP, 1984.

Lukacs, Georg. “Realism in the Balance.” Aesthetics and Politics. Ed. and trans. Ronald

Taylor. New York: Verso, 2002.

Meisel, Martin. Realizations: Narrative, Pictorial, and Theatrical Arts in Nineteenth

Century England. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1983.

Miller, J. Hillis. “Optic and Semiotic in Middlemarch.” The Worlds of Victorian Fiction.

Ed. Jerome H. Buckley. Cambridge : Harvard UP, 1975.

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Mitchell, W.J.T. Picture Theory. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1994.

Scarry, Elaine. Dreaming by the Book. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1999.

Witemeyer, Hugh. George Eliot and the Visual Arts. New Haven: Yale UP, 1979.