Victorian Fiction and the ''What If?'' Theory: Heritage and Inheritance ...

Victorian Fiction and the ''What If?'' Theory: Heritage and Inheritance 

in Daniel Deronda 

Marion Helfer Wajngot 

Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas, Volume 

10, Number 1, January 2012, pp. 29-47 (Article) 

Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press 

DOI: 10.1353/pan.2012.0009 

For additional information about this article 

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/pan/summary/v010/10.1.wajngot.html 

Access Provided by Healey Library, UMass Boston at 10/22/12 2:25PM GMT

Victorian Fiction and the “What If?” Theory: Heritage and Inheritance 

in Daniel Deronda 

Marion Helfer Wajngot 

Stockholm University 

Partial answers 10/1: 29–47 © 2012 The Johns Hopkins University Press 

I 

In the past decades, critics from Ian Watt to Kieran Dolin have explored 

the way fiction emulates the processes of legal procedures such as those 

of a court trial, and examined the dialectic relations between literature 

and law. 1 While both the laws and the literature of a society express and 

influence the attitudes and norms of its members, the law seems to have a 

more conservative function, whereas literature can work to question and 

undermine prevalent attitudes, and thereby contribute to change. While 

acknowledging relations of causality in the effect of literature on the development 

of the legal system, this essay explores the opposite effect: 

laws giving rise to fiction — like kernels out of which an infinite number 

of narratives may stem. Legal discourse has an inherent narrative potential 

2 in that each possible individual application of a law can give rise to 

a fictional story. George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda (1876) is one of many 

nineteenth-century novels that seem to be engendered out of the laws 

of inheritance — or rather out of the legal practice of inheritance and 

wills that stemmed from the Common Law’s endorsement of the primogeniture 

principle which had initially evolved out of the feudal system 

brought to England with the Norman Conquest. 

In Daniel Deronda, as in numerous other novels, this narrative potential 

is realized in more than one layer of the plot. The multiple stories 

that the novel comprises are built around one or two central issues 

that become a commentary on the law through presenting a spectrum of 

1 See Dolin’s survey in his introductory chapter (1–10), including an obvious reference to 

Bakhtin (1981, 124), who, like Watt (31), discusses the imitation in fiction of the revelatory 

and testimonial procedures of the law court. 

2 Meir Sternberg (2007) has presented a similar idea, but with a focus on the narrativity 

of the law-code itself, particularly in Biblical law.

30 Marion Helfer wajngot 

situations to which it applies. It is as if Eliot’s novel, like many others, 

constructs its plots on the basis of the question, “But what if…?” Each 

of these “what ifs?” pertains to a particular potential case that is latent 

in the law or legal practice. Novelists thus create fictional case studies 

which explore specific potential consequences and social as well as moral 

implications of prevalent interpretations and applications of the law. 

The two major strands of Eliot’s double plot, with Gwendolen Harleth 

and Daniel Deronda as the protagonists, share a preoccupation with an 

inheritance issue that is based on privileging the male heir. In both plots, 

this theme serves as the trigger for action. From these two interrelated 

narratives, numerous minor ones branch off, each with a plot that is thematically 

related to them. The subplots or sub-narratives of the lives and 

problems of a series of minor characters embody various aspects of one 

or several of four areas of thematic concern: gambling, which is part of 

the action and also becomes a strong metaphor; the duty or vocation that 

to the mind of several of the characters comes with inheritance; the problematics 

of illegitimacy; and the conditions of women as associated with 

the prevalent system of inheritance. 

These issues are the common ground between Daniel Deronda and 

numerous other nineteenth-century works. In Victorian Conventions, 

John Reed names more than forty novels of this kind. We only need to 

consider the part played by inheritance in such well-known works as 

Wuthering Heights, Vanity Fair, David Copperfield, Bleak House, Our 

Mutual Friend, The Woman in White, The Moonstone, Felix Holt, or 

Henry Esmond in order to realize the proliferation of inheritance plots in 

Victorian fictional structures. While the preoccupation of literature with 

the transmission of material goods and spiritual knowledge between generations 

can be traced as far back as the Bible, it seems to be particularly 

prominent in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Reed discusses 

the inheritance motif in nineteenth-century fiction mainly in terms of a 

plot convenience, and as a way of either educating a lost heir to become 

more deserving or of pointing to more lasting rewards in a world to come 

(143–45). Yet the more serious novels on his list (especially those written 

in the second half of the century), go far beyond the functional use of this 

“tired convention” (Reed 283): the topos of inheritance signals cultural 

patterns that the artistic community found gravely disturbing. 

A strand of criticism accompanies the representation of inheritance in 

Victorian novels. While plots are elegantly constructed around the topoi 

of birthright, entail, and usurpation, their ethical concerns are often opposed 

to the system. Daniel Deronda is one of many nineteenth-century

Heritage and inHeritance in Daniel DeronDa 

novels characterized by an ethical engagement with traditional wrongs 

through strategies that evoke the empathy of the reader, creating an emotional 

background for a rational reconsideration of social judgments and 

legal practices. 

Of more interest for plot construction than the actual right of the firstborn 

son to inherit the landed property and title of his father is often the 

possibility — according to the 1540 Statute of Wills — to disinherit such 

a son. However, the principle of primogeniture did not only remain the 

Common Law default rule in cases of intestacy but kept its place in common 

practice and attitudes, and in the construction of entails. The legal 

practice, originally part of the social power structure, was both a sign of 

and a reason for attitudes and thought patterns that became ingrained in 

society; in fiction, it served to shape the way plot constructions based 

on inheritance functioned in relation to ethical inquiry. The self-evident 

place that the idea of a “rightful” or “natural” heir held in the contemporary 

thought structure, and the assumptions about the connection between 

property, inheritance, and social stability, remained firm through 

the mid-eighteen hundreds, but in the second half of the century novels 

saw intensifying ethical objections to the prevalent system (Dolin 20 and 

passim). 

The plots of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847) and William 

Makepeace Thackeray’s Vanity Fair (1848), to take two of the bestknown 

mid-century novels, hinge on inheritance and show primogeniture 

to be firmly established as a naturalized or “internalized” way of viewing 

the passage of material wealth and class identity from one generation 

to another. Nelly Dean’s analeptic narrative is framed by Lockwood’s 

noticing, on his first visit to Wuthering Heights, the name “Hareton 

Earnshaw” and the year “1500” inscribed above the main entrance, and, 

towards the end of the novel, by his account of the young Hareton Earnshaw 

in 1803 being taught to read and enabled to decipher the script over 

the door that will tell him of his inherited right to the property. The final 

view of the three gravestones, with its emphasis on peacefulness, further 

accentuates the return of a seemingly necessary equilibrium. 3 

John Sutherland has suggested that the reason Catherine’s ghost 

haunts Heathcliff is that she wishes to stop him from writing his will 

and disinheriting the children of those who have injured him. “In the 

last analysis,” Sutherland writes, Catherine “reverts to type: she is the 

3 See Sanger for a discussion of the symmetrical genealogical patterns of Wuthering 

Heights. 

31


mistress, he the outsider at Wuthering Heights. He may have a share 

of her grave, but not the Earnshaw’s family house” (67). Here — as in 

all tales that involve a usurper — place, position, and possession can 

only be usurped if the notion of rightful possession or heritage is firmly 

established. The idea of an accepted order of succession permeates the 

novel and the world it embodies, and comes to the fore when the lawyer 

speaks to Nelly of “the natural heir,” that is, Hareton Earnshaw (Brontë 

143). The “natural heir” echoes the nomenclature of the law, which often 

speaks of heirs of the “body” (Macpherson 6, 23n). Thus the reader is 

made to feel that Heathcliff’s intrusion is unnatural, and that Hareton’s 

condition when he is bereft of his heritage, including his status in the 

neighborhood, is not only unjust but against nature. 

The death of Daniel Deronda’s Henleigh Grandcourt, who is at least 

as evil in his way as Heathcliff, 4 similarly appeals to the reader’s sense of 

justice, but while Heathcliff’s demise re-establishes the traditional system, 

the death of Grandcourt eliminates the male heir selected by the testator 

in conformity with primogeniture, in favor of Sir Hugo’s daughters. 

The double inheritance plot in Vanity Fair, with the many characters 

that contend for the fortune of Miss Crawley, and the double-edged cutting 

off of George Osborne from his father’s will, is part of the novel’s 

general exposure of the vanity of human wishes and actions. Although 

in the end Pitt Crawley inherits both his father’s title and estate and his 

aunt’s fortune in what appears to be a satirical fulfillment of the principle 

that leaves everything to the oldest brother, Vanity Fair does not seem 

to attack the inheritance system per se. In later novels, however, we can 

sense Thackeray’s increasing dissatisfaction with conventions of wealth 

and inheritance, and, in particular, with the established rule of primogeniture, 

which he associates with current political debates regarding aristocracy 

and meritocracy. This is most evident in Henry Esmond (1852), 

and perhaps even more so in its sequel, The Virginians (1859). In the latter 

novel, the absurdities of the system are pointedly treated through the 

twins George and Harry Warrington, born within an hour of each other. 

Through their mother’s snobbish sense of rank and precedence, which 

makes her insist that the younger brother give the older one all the deference 

due to a firstborn son, the novel highlights the system’s privileging 

of the older brother as a serious impediment to brotherly love. “What if,” 

this novel seems to ask, what if there were a case of two brothers almost 

4 Lance St John Butler, for instance, reads Grandcourt as an incarnation of the devil and 

Deronda himself as a Christ figure (137–42).


exactly of the same age — and we have a law that makes brothers envious 

and suspicious of each other to the extent that a younger son can be 

expected to rejoice in the death of his older brother, and an older brother 

to be unable to trust the good will of his junior? 

Raising such questions, the novel compels its reader to consider the 

effects of laws whose validity is taken for granted. As Bernard Harrison 

suggests, “the peculiar value of literature in a culture such as ours, 

the thing which really does make it essential to a civilized society, is its 

power to act as a standing rebuke and irritant to the dominant paradigm 

of knowledge” (4). The test cases that imply such criticism do their work 

as particular instances of potential effects of the law, demonstrated in the 

individuality of fictional lives, in contrast to the general and generallyaccepted 

legal rulings. 5 The “what if?” cases provide concrete features 

that may be new to the reader and that demand both emotional and rational 

responsiveness. A novel that is carefully structured around mutually 

illuminating cases, all of them being developments of a particular law or 

legal practice, allows an alert reader the intellectual pleasure of registering 

and integrating such correspondences. Yet another kind of pleasure 

arises from the reader’s emotional involvement with the characters and 

their fate. This combination of intellectual and emotional pleasure motivates 

an ethical response. 

Harrison emphasizes the quality of fiction that brings the reader into 

close proximity with the mind and emotions of another. These particularities 

may be said to provide the answers to the “what if?” questions. They 

bring the reader close to an otherwise inaccessible experience (Carroll 

361–62). It is through the close experience of the details of the moral and 

emotional lives of literary characters that readers may enter the phase 

that Harrison calls “dangerous,” one that entails a change in the reader’s 

habitual thoughts (3–4). Literature can do this “by setting our familiar 

words sedulously against one another in unheard-of contexts,” creating 

“alternative possibilities of construal” (Harrison 16), eliciting and reshaping 

our emotions, and affecting our reason (see also Nussbaum 38). 

Marie-Laure Ryan suggests something similar in her comparison of 

the experience of virtual reality to that of reading. Both, she claims, can 

5 The need for the particularity of fictional cases to open new perspectives of cognition to 

the attentive reader has been discussed by Martha Nussbaum: “one point of the emphasis on 

perception is to show the ethical crudeness of moralities based exclusively on general rules, 

and to demand for ethics a much finer responsiveness to the concrete – including features 

that have not been seen before and could not therefore have been housed in any antecedently 

built system of rules” (37). 

33


lead to “immersion”: “readers are caught up in a story” and when they 

“experience emotions for the characters, they do not relate to these characters 

as literary creations nor as ‘semiotic constructs,’ but as possible 

human beings” (117). The verisimilitude of the unfamiliar combined 

with the destabilization of habitual patterns of thought are central features 

of the “what if” mode in fiction. In Daniel Deronda, as in much 

nineteenth-century fiction, there is a pattern of particular cases that form 

such “dangerous” prompting towards new ways of thought, specifically 

on the issue of inheritance. 

II 

Since its publication in 1876, Daniel Deronda has been read as two stories 

in one book. As late as 1998 Lisabeth During called it an “internally split 

novel” (68). However, in reference to a similar statement in a contemporary 

review, George Eliot herself wrote to a friend: “I meant everything 

in the book to be related to everything else there” (1955: 290). While it 

is true that Gwendolen Harleth has next to no contact with Deronda’s 

Jewish world, the novel achieves a certain unity through its concern with 

heritage in both parts of its plot, and through the related concern with the 

position of women in a social and legal system governed by the principle 

of primogeniture. 

Harold Fisch discusses the relation between the Gwendolen Harleth 

and Daniel Deronda parts of the novel in terms of irony. Gwendolen’s 

little life, private, personal, and domestic, is ironically set against the 

events of the larger world of politics, countries, and peoples in which 

Daniel plans to find his place (349), and a contrast is established between 

property, central to the English part of the plot, and spiritual heritage, 

central to the Jewish part. In terms of the inheritance motif, this distinction 

concerns family land and wealth as opposed to the collective 

heritage of the individual as part of a people or a nation. However, the 

split between the private and the public does not follow the English/ 

Jewish axis. Whenever the notions of duty and vocation (see, among 

others, Toker 116-30) go beyond the concerns of domestic life, they are 

organized on the basis of gender. They are reserved for men and related 

to heritage in both the English and the Jewish plotlines. 

In his centenary essay on Daniel Deronda, H. M Daleski discusses 

the novel’s “imaginative unity of conception” in terms of “analogous 

situations”: the opening chapter begins a series of occurrences of the motif 

of “the forsaken child” and the motif of “pawning and redeeming” that


will run through the novel as a whole (68–69). In his analysis Daleski 

links these motifs to the theme of “loss of inheritance” (75) — the “owning 

and disowning” of his title. But George Eliot, like other authors of 

her time, employed the theme to raise specific questions concerning the 

effects of contemporary inheritance practices: in Daniel Deronda these 

include the public duties that accompany the inheritance of landed property, 

the social exclusion and suffering of an illegitimate child, the political 

significance of the problems of a rich heiress, acceptance of spiritual 

leadership as a heritage, as well as the ethical implications of the gambling 

motif — all of which she associated with an outdated system of 

inheritance that excluded and marginalized both men and women. 

In Daniel Deronda, the specific outcome of the prevalent legal customs 

reflected in the “ill-advised will” of the father of Deronda’s guardian, 

Sir Hugo Mallinger, is that Sir Hugo only has a life interest in his 

property: in the absence of a male heir, at his death everything will go 

to his nephew, Henleigh Grandcourt. The second inheritance plot, which 

concerns the heritage of Daniel Deronda (who grows up believing that he 

is Sir Hugo’s nephew, and later that he is his illegitimate son), also hinges 

on the privileged position of the male heir. When Deronda is finally revealed 

to be the son of a Jewish opera singer, the spiritual heritage of his 

maternal grandfather, which his mother has kept from him, seems to be 

antithetical to the material inheritance central to the “Mallinger plot.” 

However, the two plotlines have parallel thematic implications: for both 

Mr. Charisi, Deronda’s grandfather, and Sir Hugo heritage is linked to 

duty, and to the responsibility of transmitting heritage. 

Of these two major test cases, the one concerning the inheritance of 

Sir Hugo Mallinger’s estates can be seen as modeled on the situation of 

the Bennet family in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (1813). In both 

novels the central property is entailed in such a way that at the death of the 

present holder, who has only daughters, the estate will go to the nephew 

or cousin, the next male in line. The “ill-advised” testators in both cases 

(just like the old uncle in Austen’s 1811 Sense and Sensibility) follow 

the principle of primogeniture, as does common law in default of a will. 

Daniel Deronda can thus be read as a psychological and ethical comment 

on legal issues that Pride and Prejudice treats differently. It may also be 

seen as one in a series of narrative comments on legal conditions that germinate 

out of the law itself. Both novels also depict the excited speculation 

that accompanies the arrival of a bachelor of independent means in a 

country neighborhood, evoking the sense of the narrowness of the gentry 

society. The following paragraph from Daniel Deronda, describing the 

35


anticipation of Henleigh Grandcourt’s arrival at Diplow, is reminiscent 

of the well-known opening of Pride and Prejudice: 

Some readers of this history will doubtless regard it as incredible that 

people should construct matrimonial prospects on the mere report that a 

bachelor of good fortune and possibilities was coming within reach, and 

will reject the statement as a mere outflow of gall. . . . [T]he history in its 

present stage concerns only a few people in a corner of Wessex — whose 

reputation, however, was unimpeached, and who, I am in the proud position 

of being able to state, were all on visiting terms with persons of rank. 

(1984: 76 [ch. 9]) 

Not only the content, but also the satirical tone seems to echo the earlier 

novel, with its underlying serious implications about the crucial significance 

of matrimony for women. The need to be on a constant look-out 

for matrimonial prospects is of course the result of the gentry’s dwindling 

resources and of a system of inheritance that effectively excludes 

women. 

However, within the male world of patrilineal inheritance and entailment, 

the novels indicate a strong link between land and social obligations: 

land law, rather than marriage or class, is the ground upon which Austen 

works out the ways in which persons are, and ought to be, connected to 

others. Ultimately entailment is less interesting to her for the way it manages 

material relations than for the way it imagines ethical ones; but the 

link between ethics and the law is not, therefore, merely allegorical. What 

is entailed in Pride and Prejudice is an argument about short- and longterm 

obligations: an argument on behalf of a model of obligation whose 

durability and impersonality, whose extension through time and social 

space, is enabled by the technology — at once conceptual and historical 

— of entailment. (Macpherson 2) 

Like that of Pride and Prejudice, the plot of Daniel Deronda hinges on 

the principle of primogeniture and its mechanics; the notion of obligations 

— closely linked to the concepts of inheritance and landed property 

— underlies the ethical vision of both works. While characters like 

Fitzwilliam Darcy and Sir Hugo Mallinger acknowledge and live according 

to the special responsibility that the ownership of land imposes, the 

detrimental effects of primogeniture apparent in Eliot’s novel spell out 

what is more implicitly felt in Austen’s work. That the obligations of entailment 

are not always met, while other obligations remain unacknowl-


edged, becomes evident in the metonymic chains of narrative in Daniel 

Deronda. 

This central test case, then, involves the application of primogeniture 

to the Mallinger estates through the will of Sir Hugo’s father, involving 

the disinheriting of Sir Hugo’s daughters, the expectations of his nephew 

Henleigh Grandcourt, and the further complications regarding the status 

of Grandcourt’s mistress and illegitimate children. The narrator links Sir 

Hugo’s irritation with his nephew with his concern for his family: 

In no case could Grandcourt have been a nephew after his own heart; but 

as the presumptive heir to the Mallinger estates he was the sign and embodiment 

of a chief grievance in the baronet’s life — the want of a son to 

inherit the lands, in no portion of which had he himself more than a life-interest. 

. . [not even] Diplow, where Sir Hugo had lived and hunted through 

many a season in his younger years, and where his wife and daughters 

ought to have been able to retire after his death. (134 [ch. 15]) 

The “chief grievance in the baronet’s life” is the result of his father’s 

“ill-advised will” in favor of Grandcourt, who comes short not only as a 

person, but more particularly as the heir to great landed estates, with the 

responsibilities that accompany them. This grievance is at the bottom of 

several of the strands of the narrative: Sir Hugo’s efforts to buy Diplow, 

which bring Daniel into contact with Grandcourt and Gwendolen, Lady 

Mallinger’s feelings of inadequacy as a mother of daughters, and Daniel’s 

believing himself to be Sir Hugo’s illegitimate son. 

Sir Hugo’s own attitude to the responsibilities of a landowner is evident 

in his words to Daniel: “I couldn’t have loved you better if you’d 

been my own — only I should have been better pleased with thinking of 

you always as the future master of the Abbey instead of my fine nephew; 

and then you would have seen it necessary for you to take a political 

line” (531 [ch. 50]). This assumption regarding the political obligations 

of the great landowner is at that point less self-evident than it used to be. 

Although not a Tory in his politics, Sir Hugo still embodies the principle 

that made his father formulate his will in such a way as to ensure that 

property, and thereby power, is concentrated in the hands of a few men. 

Sir Hugo’s strong wishes for Deronda to take on political work are ineffective 

exactly because Daniel is not an English landowner, and the duty 

to be involved with ruling the nation does not devolve on him in the same 

way. Sir Hugo is not particularly worried about blood and ancestry (he 

quotes Napoleon: “Je serais un ancêtre” (138 [ch. 15]), but if he had been 

able to make Daniel his heir, it would have been an obvious duty for the 

37


younger man to enter politics and to have been “at [his] elbow and pulling 

with [him]” (149 [ch. 16]). Sir Hugo’s opinion of the importance of 

that kind of involvement is seconded by Mr. Gascoigne, Gwendolen’s 

uncle, while it is carefully made clear that Grandcourt, the heir, is not in 

parliament (470). 

Gwendolen’s marriage to Grandcourt brings her into the plot of the 

Mallinger estates, and it is through her that the ethical aspects of many 

of the other test cases are woven into the narrative. While Gwendolen 

herself, immobilized in her position as Grandcourt’s wife, seems to 

epitomize female suffering and subjugation, various aspects of her situation 

and its relation to legal conditions are reflected in the lives and 

emotions of the other women characters: Lady Mallinger, Lydia Glasher, 

Mirah Lapidoth, Leonora Alcharisi, Mrs. Davilow, and to some extent 

the Arrowpoint women all struggle with their gendered role, rebelling 

or submitting to it in various ways. As a pendant, perhaps, we see Hans 

Meyerick’s mother and sisters, busy, content, and superlatively good. 

Gwendolen’s and Grandcourt’s marriage is shaped by her knowledge 

of the existence of his mistress and four illegitimate children, and by her 

broken promise to Lydia Glasher not to “interfere with [her] wishes” 

(128 [ch. 14]). When the two women meet, in the period of Grandcourt’s 

courtship, Gwendolen is struck by the claims of his illegitimate family 

and by the moral dubiousness of marrying a man with such a history but 

perhaps even more by Lydia’s person and the desperation of her appearance: 

“it was as if some ghastly vision had come to her in a dream and 

said ‘I am a woman’s life’” (128 [ch. 14]). This vision is echoed through 

the novel, as Gwendolen becomes less and less the mistress of her own 

fate. 

This process begins in the opening chapters, when Gwendolen, having 

left England for Leubronn in order to avoid Grandcourt, is confronted 

with the first event in the novel that is connected to inheritance. She finds 

out that her mother has lost the entire fortune inherited from her father 

through a bad investment. While obviously a plot device, Gwendolen’s 

struggle with her family’s unexpected poverty is made to feed into the 

thematic concerns with women’s lives and conditions, first through Mrs. 

Davilow’s complete inability to act for herself and her daughters in order 

to improve their situation. Before she finally accepts Grandcourt, Gwendolen 

looks around desperately for options that may allow her to avoid 

going out as a governess. Her turning to Herr Klesmer, the musician, to 

find out if she could make a career on the stage, becomes the first in a 

series of recurring stories about the singer’s vocation for a woman. The


obstacles to an independent course for women are highlighted through 

these metonymic chains. The cases of Gwendolen, who is not talented 

enough; Mirah, who nearly turns into a prostitute; and the one successful 

woman actress, Leonora Alcharisi, who sacrifices her relationship with 

her son in order to pursue her singing career, show that although music 

is a possible career for some, even for those endowed with the necessary 

talent the price of success is high, and a further case is made concerning 

socially-determined gender limitations. 

Gwendolen’s failure to find a way of providing for herself leads to 

her accepting Grandcourt in spite of what she knows about him. The detailed 

account of her growing remorse and anguish after this decision is 

what brings the reader to feel for the spoiled and self-willed young girl. 

One of George Eliot’s strong points is her ability to muster the reader’s 

sympathy for the less worthy characters and to make it clear that even 

their experience is grounds for a reconsideration of conventional judgments. 

While making it apparent that Gwendolen’s saving grace, her love 

and concern for her mother, is not operating at the moment of her great 

choice, the novel still enlists the reader’s empathy on behalf of this selfishly 

naive character. Gwendolen’s lack of real choice in the episode of 

the marriage proposal is subtly demonstrated by the way she believes 

that she is going to refuse Grandcourt only to find herself accepting him. 

This lack of control echoes her mother’s failure to do anything at all for 

herself and her daughters. The spectral image of Lydia Glasher as “a 

woman’s life” seems to haunt the novel in the shape of women who can 

do very little to direct the course of their own lives. 

One of the few women in the novel who do have power over their 

own destiny is Catherine Arrowpoint, whose story is an inverted reflection 

of Gwendolen’s. While the penniless Gwendolen is induced to 

accept a husband she does not love, and who is not eligible for her in 

ethical terms, Miss Arrowpoint’s parents want to dictate her choice of a 

husband because she is the heiress to a great fortune. Daleski associates 

her character with the motif of disowned children because her parents 

threaten to disinherit her if she insists on marrying Klesmer (75). Her 

case, however, also belongs to the novel’s exploration of the social consequences 

of inheritance practices: the woman is viewed as a means of 

placing inheritance rather than as an agent in her own right. Her parents’ 

manipulations demonstrate the tendency to work against contemporary 

sociopolitical changes through marriages between the landed gentry and 

members of the trading class. Yet when her father wants to persuade her 

not to marry Klesmer with the suggestion that the wealth she is to inherit 

39


requires her to “think of the nation and the public good” the sharp Miss 

Arrowpoint retorts: 

“Why is it to be expected of an heiress that she should carry the property 

gained in trade into the hands of a certain class? That seems to me a ridiculous 

mish-mash of superannuated customs and false ambition. I should 

call it a public evil. People had better make a new sort of public good by 

changing their ambitions.” (211 [ch. 22]) 

The sympathy for Miss Arrowpoint built up in the preceding chapters 

contributes to a readerly acceptance of the destabilization of an established 

paradigm of which the principle of primogeniture is a part. She is 

ready to sacrifice her birthright for her love rather than be used to boost 

the waning fortunes of a nobleman, but her comment also shows an insightful 

rebellion against principles that have outlived their relevance in 

a society where the relations between money and rank are in a process 

of change. 

Gwendolen believes that her ability to “manage” people will make it 

possible for her to shape her marriage according to her wishes, yet she 

will soon be more like Lydia Glasher than Catherine Arrowpoint —lacking 

control over her life. She becomes more and more preoccupied with 

Lydia and her children. Her story is connected to Daniel’s not only on the 

level of the plot but also thematically, through the concern with the status 

of illegitimate children. The wording of Daniel’s objection to gambling, 

“our gain is another’s loss” (284-85) comes to her mind several times in 

relation to the wrong she perceives herself as having done to Lydia and 

her children: her gain in marrying Grandcourt is their loss (353, 382, 

386). 

Indeed, Lydia Glasher says: “Mr Grandcourt ought to marry me. He 

ought to make that boy his heir” (128). Lydia’s life gamble has been 

founded on Grandcourt’s willingness to marry her, but her stakes have 

been higher than Gwendolen’s, since for her, loss has meant life as a 

“fallen woman” outside normal social intercourse. Lydia’s isolation, jealousy, 

and sense of powerlessness are convincingly depicted in the scene 

where Grandcourt tells her that she must give up his family diamonds 

because he wants to give them to his bride. Her inner rage and the necessity 

to suppress it is yet another expression of the need for women to 

adapt to a situation where men set the rules, including those related to inheritance. 

Lydia’s powerlessness against the cause of her misery, Grandcourt, 

makes her turn against Gwendolen and send her a cruel letter with 

the diamonds, amplifying the young girl’s agony at having profited by 

“another’s loss.”


Gwendolen’s sense of having wronged Lydia blends with her sense 

of the unworthiness of marrying a man who, she knows, has a mistress 

and children. Curiously, she seems to see Grandcourt’s guilt only as it is 

reflected in herself. When she finally finds out that he has known of her 

knowledge all along, this strikes her as a revelation that ought to bring 

shame not on him, but on herself. She seems to have internalized the 

dominant double standard. 

When Gwendolen finds out that Daniel is generally assumed to be Sir 

Hugo’s illegitimate son, she connects him in her mind with Mrs. Glasher 

and her son: “[s]he, whose unquestioning habit it had been to take the 

best that came to her for less than her own claim, had now to see the 

position which tempted her in a new light, as a hard, unfair exclusion of 

others” (283 [ch. 29]). Like the reader, Gwendolen focuses less on the 

principle itself than on a familiar specific case: she associates the wrong 

done to Grandcourt’s illegitimate family, especially little Henleigh, with 

the presumed wrong done to Daniel, whom she believes to be excluded 

from his paternal inheritance: 

with only a little difference in events he might have been as important 

as Grandcourt, nay — her imagination inevitably went in that direction 

— might have held the very estates which Grandcourt was to have. But 

now, Deronda would probably some day see her mistress of the Abbey at 

Topping, see her bearing the title which would have been his own wife’s. 

. . . What she had now heard about Deronda seemed to her imagination 

to throw him into one group with Mrs Glasher and her children. (282–83 

[ch. 29]). 

Gwendolen sees herself as guilty in relation to Deronda, although she 

has no responsibility for what she believes to be his disadvantaged place 

in the chain of inheritance. Daniel himself, when at length he finds out 

about Mrs. Glasher, perceives the analogy with his own situation and 

feels hurt exactly as Gwendolen, with her newborn moral sensibility, has 

imagined: “He thought he saw clearly enough now why Sir Hugo had 

never dropped any hint of this affair to him; and immediately the image 

of this Mrs Glasher became painfully associated with his own hidden 

birth” (372 [ch. 36]). Thus, part of the metonymic linking of the novel’s 

thematic concerns is performed by the characters themselves. 

The poignancy of illegitimacy for an individual child is brought to the 

fore through Daniel’s early suspicions of the secret of his own birth. Having 

once formed the suspicion “that he is Sir Hugo’s son, Deronda has to 

live with the idea that he has been dispossessed” (Daleski 77). The case 

of little Henleigh Grandcourt, whom the reader only sees at a distance, 

41


is given emotional and ethical depth through the case of Deronda, who 

has not been wronged, at least not in this way, but whose “own acute experience 

made him alive to the form of injury which might affect the unavowed 

children and their mother” (372 [ch. 36]). His critique of politics 

and concern for individuals is directly dependent on his own supposed 

family position outside the system of inheritance; and his sensitivity to 

the emotions and experiences of others takes the shape of a strong sense 

of responsibility and a readiness to act for others —Hans Meyerick, Mirah, 

Gwendolen. In his relationship with Mordecai sympathy is a catalyst 

of a radical change: “the essentially realist narrative of Daniel Deronda 

is interrupted by Mordecai’s excessive and seemingly irrational demand 

on Daniel. This demand requires a response that is qualitatively distinct 

from Daniel’s sympathetic care for Mirah and Gwendolen, for it entails 

an ethical leap of faith” (Hollander 77). It seems, indeed, as if Daniel’s 

response to Mordecai is in a mysterious way linked to his Jewish heritage, 

which is revealed when his commitment to Mordecai is already 

taking shape. On the other hand, his sense of sympathy and responsibility 

is already there, and the revelation of his heritage may be seen as a channeling 

of these qualities into action in the public sphere. 

Gwendolen’s mother suggests that Daniel’s status as an illegitimate 

son means that “He does not inherit the property, and he is not of any 

consequence in the world” (282 [ch. 29]). Gwendolen thinks that, had 

matters been more just, Daniel “might have been as important as Grandcourt,” 

but the reader does not have to accept this estimate of worth. 

Men “of consequence” can be expected to take actions that will have 

consequences, as do men who are politically involved. Grandcourt does 

not bother about duty or politics, while Daniel, the novel suggests, will 

eventually act in ways that are of consequence for the Jewish people. 

In the meantime, however, the sense of being an outsider has a deterrent 

effect on Daniel’s wishes to extend his sense of responsibility 

beyond the personal: 

Many of us complain that half our birthright is sharp duty: Deronda was 

more inclined to complain that he was robbed of this half; yet he accused 

himself, as he would have accused another, of being weakly self-conscious 

and wanting in resolve. He was the reverse of that type painted for 

us in Faulconbridge and Edmund of Gloster, whose coarse ambition for 

personal success is inflamed by a defiance of accidental disadvantages. 

(402 [ch. 37]) 

The contrast between Deronda and the type of the villainous illegitimate 

son who is motivated by defiant ambition serves to emphasize the inner


clash between a sense of duty and the lack of a specific direction in which 

to channel it. This “wanting in resolve” is a result of Daniel’s sense of 

not belonging. Yet, by the time Grandcourt’s death makes it possible for 

Sir Hugo to manage his estates according to his wishes, Deronda has 

already received his own heritage, and with it an interest in a different set 

of politics and political struggle. Already before his own Jewish identity 

is revealed to him as a form of belonging, Deronda’s relation to Mordecai 

differs from his ethical response to others: “[Mordecai’s] claim, 

indeed, considered in what is called a rational way, might seem justifiably 

dismissed as illusory and even preposterous; but it was precisely 

what turned Mordecai’s hold on him from an appeal to his ready sympathy 

into a clutch on his struggling conscience” (436 [ch. 41]). Hollander 

claims that this relation signifies another kind of response to alterity: 

“Here, the tension between the ethical and the rational is clearly articulated; 

because it is irrational, Mordecai’s appeal can only be adequately 

acknowledged by an ethical response which exceeds mere rationality or 

sympathy” (85). I would suggest that Deronda’s “struggling conscience” 

is also an effect of his exposure to the values of Sir Hugo, who links his 

wish that Deronda “take a political line” with his wish that he could make 

Deronda his heir (531 [ch. 50]). 

As Hollander also suggests, the knowledge about his heritage is what 

Daniel finally needs to be able to channel his empathy and sense of responsibility 

for others into a practical and public activity. It is, Hollander 

claims, his mother’s brief letter that “marks a second important shift in 

the novel, from the tentative exploration of the ethical, to the historical 

and realist questions of origin, inheritance, and resolution” (86). The affirmation 

of Daniel’s Jewish heritage is thus what provides him with the 

kind of focus which makes political action possible. When his identity is 

finally revealed to him, and he is assured that he will be given the chest 

with his grandfather’s papers, his own immediate response is in terms 

of duty, and this, we may presume, is prompted by the influence of Sir 

Hugo, as well as that of Mordecai. When Daniel responds to his mother’s 

narrative, he does so in terms that echo those of Sir Hugo: “And now, you 

have restored me my inheritance — events have brought a fuller restitution 

than you could have made — you have been saved from robbing my 

people of my service and me of my duty” (567 [ch. 53]). Using words 

such as “duty” and “service,” he sets them within a frame of reference 

that allows for a sense of destiny. 

The two major plot lines both reach their climax in Genoa, where 

Grandcourt brings Gwendolen to get her away from Daniel’s company 

43


in London, and where Daniel goes to see his mother for the first time, 

neither of them knowing of the other’s plans. Again, the narrative touches 

on all aspects of the inheritance theme. Although previously Daniel 

did not even know whether his mother was alive, the doubts about his 

heritage have never really concerned its material aspect (he is told by 

Sir Hugo that he has a yearly income of 700 pounds, and it is now understood 

that the capital comes from his father). By allowing Daniel his 

financial inheritance with such facility, Eliot indicates that this is not 

where the problem lies. His mother mentions proudly yet perfunctorily 

that she has given Daniel his father’s fortune and made Sir Hugo the 

trustee. What she does spend time and pain on is her account of her dealings 

with the spiritual heritage devolving from Daniel’s maternal grandfather. 

She honestly tells her son that she asked sir Hugo to take him to 

England and bring him up as an English gentleman, because she wanted 

to pursue her career as a singer and did not want to be encumbered with a 

child; we may take it for granted that she is as honest when she also says 

that she believed it would be to her son’s advantage that she separated 

him from a heritage that for her had meant only subjection and bondage. 

As a woman, she could have no active part in the public aspect of the 

transmission of that heritage, but could only be “a makeshift link” between 

the generations before and after her, through her domestic role as 

daughter and mother (541 [ch. 51]). She tells Daniel that his grandfather 

“never thought of his daughter except as an instrument” (567 [ch. 53]). 

The melodrama of Leonora’s confession to her son makes it less easy for 

the reader to respond to her plight than to the more subdued, but no less 

intense confession of Gwendolen’s suffering to Daniel, as she describes 

her guilt about her husband’s death. 

Yet, there are clear thematic parallels between these two narratives. 

The dispositions of Grandcourt’s will, revealed after the fatal accident 

at Genoa, demonstrate not only that he can humiliate Gwendolen even 

after his death, but also that she is just another of the “makeshift links” 

between one generation of men and the next. In his will, Grandcourt 

settles his estate on his illegitimate son in case his wife bears no son. 

As Grandcourt’s wife, Gwendolen is expected to produce the next heir, 

otherwise she loses the position and money the marriage has brought her. 

The tables are turned, and an obvious parallel is created between Lydia 

Glasher’s earlier situation, banned to Gadsmere, and what Gwendolen 

ends up with in Grandcourt’s will. Gwendolen, it seems, is less upset by 

these dispositions than is Sir Hugo; indeed, she is satisfied that the wrong 

done to her husband’s son is now rectified.


Grandcourt’s premature death — a plot resolution with a particular 

thematic resonance — is first anticipated when Mrs. Arrowpoint, in a 

discussion of Grandcourt as the heir to Sir Hugo’s property, gives voice 

to the dictum “it is ill calculating on successions” (125 [ch. 14]). This 

point is part of the discussion of the vanity of hopes for material heritage; 

Alain Jumeau suggests that Grandcourt’s dispossession of Gwendolen 

opens up a route for her moral regeneration (30). The reader, who has 

watched her prolonged grappling with guilt and relief — both the relief 

of no longer being bound to her husband, and that of no longer depriving 

his illegitimate family of their right — may feel more like Sir Hugo in 

estimating the effects of the will of the dead on the living. However, Eliot 

quickly makes it clear that the passing of any human being has more 

complex effects than relief. Gwendolen, who has wished for her husband’s 

death, is now snared in a new tangle of guilt, stricken by complex 

emotions partly shared with the reader through her confession to Daniel. 

Both when she seems to win and when she finally loses the gamble of 

her life, Gwendolen loses much more than she realized was at stake, but 

perhaps wins in terms of an ethical attitude to others. 

When Gwendolen and Daniel meet for the last time, neither of them 

has anything to do with the succession of the Mallinger estates. Their 

contacts with it have served to develop a moral sensibility in each of 

them. Inheritance, the source of the many thematically linked narratives 

in the novel, has a unifying function in Daniel Deronda, one that makes 

the aesthetic pleasure of reading one with the ethical experience of the 

characters. By pressing the aesthetic effect of thematic recurrence as well 

as an element of readerly unease into the service of the ethical this novel 

makes a powerful statement in the public debate on the subject of inheritance: 

in the longer run, it may have contributed to social change, adding 

to the concerted appeal of narratives engendered by primogeniture and 

challenging the legitimacy of this concept under changing socio-political 

conditions. Daniel Deronda is one of the narratives that have counteracted 

the preserving effect of the law, working towards a change of standards 

and an updated codification of altered norms. 

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Victorian Fiction and the ''What If?'' Theory: Heritage and Inheritance ...

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