Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-8ctnn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-28T02:12:21.430Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

THE RELIC AND THE RUIN: EQUIVOCAL OBJECTS AND THE PRESENCE OF THE PAST IN DANIEL DERONDA

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 November 2016

Priyanka Anne Jacob
Priyanka Anne Jacob*
Affiliation:
The College of Wooster
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Early in George Eliot's Daniel Deronda, Daniel's life is set on a decisive new path by his fleeting attraction to an object in a shop window. He is turning into a side street off Holburn Road when:

his attention was caught by some fine old clasps in chased silver displayed in the window at his right hand. His first thought was that [his aunt] Lady Mallinger, who had a strictly Protestant taste for such Catholic spoils, might like to have these missal-clasps turned into a bracelet; then his eyes travelled over the other contents of the window, and he saw that the shop was that kind of pawnbroker's where the lead is given to jewellery, lace, and all equivocal objects introduced as bric-a-brac. A placard in one corner announced – Watches and Jewellery exchanged and repaired. (344; bk. 4, ch. 6)

Daniel then moves across the street to avoid the shopkeeper, and it is only from this new vantage point that he notices the name “Ezra Cohen” above the window – the name he's been seeking while wandering Jewish neighborhoods in London in the hopes of reuniting his protégée Mirah with her family. He will return to the pawnshop later and become acquainted with the Cohens, eventually finding through them his mentor and Mirah's actual brother, Mordecai. Although some discussion of the silver clasps ensues, they are neither purchased nor used in the space of the novel. Still, this seemingly inconsequential trinket proves to have a long history, one that raises questions about the lingering remains of the past, the equivocality of the object, and the dispossessions that haunt Daniel Deronda.

Type
Research Article
Information
Victorian Literature and Culture , Volume 44 , Issue 4 , December 2016 , pp. 855 - 874
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2016 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

WORKS CITED

Appadurai, Arjun. “Introduction: Commodities and the Politics of Value.” The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective. Ed. Appadurai, Arjun. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1986. 3–63.Google Scholar
Archer, Jayne Elisabeth. “The Philosopher's Stone and the Key to all Mythologies: Mary Anne South, George Eliot and the Object of Knowledge.” Literary Bric-à-Brac and the Victorians. Ed. Shears, Jonathan and Harrison, Jen. Burlington: Ashgate, 2013. 163–78.Google Scholar
Armstrong, Nancy. Victorian Jewelry. New York: Macmillan, 1976.Google Scholar
Aston, Margaret. “English Ruins and English History: The Dissolution and the Sense of the Past.” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 36 (1973): 231–55. Web. 18 April 2010.Google Scholar
Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham: Duke UP, 2010.Google Scholar
Best, Stephen, and Marcus, Sharon. “Surface Reading: An Introduction.” Representations 108.1 (2009): 1–21. Web. 17 April 2014.Google Scholar
Brantlinger, Patrick. Dark Vanishings: Discourse on the Extinction of Primitive Races, 1800–1930. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2003.Google Scholar
“bric-à-brac.” The Concise Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology. Ed. Hoad, T. F.. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1998. Oxford Reference Online. Web. 28 May 2010.Google Scholar
Brown, Bill. A Sense of Things: The Object Matter of American Literature. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2003.Google Scholar
Burgess, Fred W. Silver: Pewter: Sheffield Plate. Home Connoisseur Series. London: George Routledge & Sons, 1921.Google Scholar
Burstein, Miriam Elizabeth. “Protestants against the Jewish and Catholic Family, C. 1829 to C. 1860.” Victorian Literature and Culture 31.1 (2003): 333–57. Web. 18 April 2010.Google Scholar
Catalogue of the Pedestal Fund Art Loan Exhibition at the National Academy of Design. New York: n.p., 1883. Google Book Search. Web. 28 May 2010.Google Scholar
“The Cathedral of Cologne.” Living Age 11.130 (1846): 568–83. Making of America. Cornell University Library. Web. 17 April 2014.Google Scholar
“Clasps, Furniture, and Other Closures.” Hand Bookbindings from Special Collections of Princeton University Library. Princeton University. Sept. 2004. Web. 28 May 2010.Google Scholar
Dahl, Svend, and Katz, William. Dahl's History of the Book. Metuchen: Scarecrow, 1995. 107–24.Google Scholar
Dellheim, Charles. The Face of the Past: The Preservation of the Medieval Inheritance in Victorian England. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1982.Google Scholar
Eliot, George. Daniel Deronda. New York: Modern Library, 2002.Google Scholar
Eliot, George. George Eliot's Daniel Deronda Notebooks. Ed. Irwin, Jane. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996.Google Scholar
Eliot, George. The George Eliot Letters. Ed. Haight, Gordon S.. 9 vols. New Haven: Yale UP, 1954–78. British and Irish Women's Letters and Diaries. Web. 8 Nov. 2013.Google Scholar
Eliot, George. “The Modern Hep! Hep! Hep!” Impressions of Theophrastus Such. Ed. Henry, Nancy. London: William Pickering, 1994. 143–68.Google Scholar
Eliot, George. “Munich to Dresden, 1858.” George Eliot's Life, As Related in Her Letters and Journals. Ed. Cross, J. W.. Vol. 2. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1885. Project Gutenberg. Web. 17 April 2014.Google Scholar
Eliot, George. “Recollections of Berlin.” Harris and Johnston 241–58.Google Scholar
Eliot, George. Romola. Oxford: Oxford World Classics, 1994.Google Scholar
Eliot, George. “Weimar, 20 July – 3 November 1854.” Harris and Johnston 3–29.Google Scholar
“equivocal, adj. and n.” OED Online. Oxford UP, March 2014. Web. 17 April 2014.Google Scholar
“Equivocal Gentlemen.” Irish Penny Journal 1.5 (1840): 36–37. Web. 21 May 2010.Google Scholar
“Fall of the Monasteries.” Dublin University Magazine 70.417 (1867): 309–28. Web. 19 March 2010.Google Scholar
Fisher, Philip. Making Up Society: The Novels of George Eliot. Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 1981.Google Scholar
Flower, Margaret. Victorian Jewellery. London: Cassell, 1967.Google Scholar
Freedgood, Elaine. “Ghostly Reference.” Representations 125.1 (2014): 40–53. Web. 20 Jan. 2015.Google Scholar
Eliot, George. The Ideas in Things: Fugitive Meaning in the Victorian Novel. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2006.Google Scholar
Gates, Sarah. “‘A Difference of Native Language’: Gender, Genre, and Realism in Daniel Deronda .” ELH 68.3 (2001): 699–724. Web. 28 May 2010.Google Scholar
Glendinning, Miles. The Conservation Movement: A History of Architectural Preservation: Antiquity to Modernity. New York: Routledge, 2013.Google Scholar
Haight, Gordon S. George Eliot: A Biography. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1978.Google Scholar
Harris, Margaret, and Johnston, Judith, eds. The Journals of George Eliot. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998.Google Scholar
Harrison, Constance Cary. Woman's Handiwork in Modern Homes. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1881. Google Book Search. Web. 28 May 2010.Google Scholar
Hertz, Neil. The End of the Line: Essays on Psychoanalysis and the Sublime. New York: Columbia UP, 1985.Google Scholar
Hinks, Peter. Nineteenth Century Jewelry. London: Faber and Faber, 1975.Google Scholar
Jones, Ann Rosalind, and Stallybrass, Peter. Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Memory. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000.Google Scholar
Kinney, Dale. “Rape or Restitution of the Past? Interpreting Spolia .” The Art of Interpreting. Ed. Scott, Susan C.. University Park: Pennsylvania State UP, 1995. 53–67.Google Scholar
Levine, George. “Daniel Deronda: A New Epistemology.” Knowing the Past: Victorian Literature and Culture. Ed. Anger, Suzy. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2001. 52–73.Google Scholar
Logan, Peter Melville. Victorian Fetishism: Intellectuals and Primitives. Albany: SUNY P, 2009.Google Scholar
Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth. Poems and Other Writings. Ed. McClatchy, J. D.. New York: Library of America, 2000.Google Scholar
Markovits, Stefanie. “Form Things: Looking at Genre through Victorian Diamonds.” Victorian Studies 52.4 (2010): 591–619. Web. 26 Feb. 2014.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Moran, Maureen. Catholic Sensationalism and Victorian Literature. Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 2007.Google Scholar
Murphy, Margueritte. “The Ethic of the Gift in George Eliot's Daniel Deronda.” Victorian Literature and Culture 34.1 (2006): 189–207. Web. 11 Nov. 2013.Google Scholar
Newton, K. M. “The Post-Colonial Critique of Eliot: Is Edward Said Right about Daniel Deronda?.” Modernizing George Eliot: The Writer as Artist, Intellectual, Proto-Modernist, Cultural Critic. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2010. 138–48. Bloomsbury Collections. Web. 2 March 2015.Google Scholar
Nixon, Howard, and Foot., Mirjam M The History of Decorated Bookbinding in England. Oxford: Clarendon P, 1992.Google Scholar
Osborne, Katherine Dunagan. “Inherited Emotions: George Eliot and the Politics of Heirlooms.” Nineteenth-Century Literature 64.4 (2010): 465–93. Web. 23 Nov. 2013.Google Scholar
Pietz, William. “The Problem of the Fetish, I.” RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics 9 (1985): 5–17. Web. 1 Dec. 2013.Google Scholar
Pietz, William. “The Problem of the Fetish, II: The Origin of the Fetish.” RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics 13 (1987): 23–45. Web. 1 Dec. 2013.Google Scholar
Poole, Adrian. “‘Hidden Affinities’ in Daniel Deronda .” Essays in Criticism 33.4 (1983): 294–311. Oxford Journals. Web. 9 Sept. 2013.Google Scholar
Robbins, Bruce. “Death and Vocation: Narrativizing Narrative Theory.” PMLA 107.1 (1992): 38–50. Web. 9 Feb. 2015.Google Scholar
Scheinberg, Cynthia. “The Beloved Ideas Made Flesh: Daniel Deronda and Jewish Poetics.” ELH 77.3 (2010): 813–839. Web 16 Feb. 2015.Google Scholar
Shaffer, E. S. “Kubla Khan” and The Fall of Jerusalem: The Mythological School in Biblical Criticism and Secular Literature, 1770–1880. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1980.Google Scholar
Shears, Jonathan, and Harrison, Jen. “Literary Bric-à-Brac: Introducing Things.” Literary Bric-à-Brac and the Victorians. Ed. Shears, Jonathan and Harrison, Jen. Burlington: Ashgate, 2013. 1–16.Google Scholar
Thompson, Andrew. George Eliot and Italy: Literary, Cultural, and Political Influences from Dante to the Risorgimento. New York: St. Martin's, 1998.Google Scholar
Tylor, Edward B. Primitive Culture: Researches into the Development of Mythology, Philosophy, Religion, Language, Art and Custom. 2nd ed. New York: Henry Holt, 1877.Google Scholar
Wolff, Arnold. The Cologne Cathedral. Trans. Margret Maranuk-Rohmeder. Cologne: Verlag Kölner Dom, 1999.Google Scholar
Womack, Elizabeth Coggin. “A Pledge Out of Time: Redemption and the Literary Pawnshop.” Victorian Literature and Culture 40.2 (2012): 451–67.Google Scholar
Wynne, Deborah. “Equivocal Objects: The Problem of Women's Property in Daniel Deronda .” 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century 6 (2008): n.p. Web. 28 May 2010.Google Scholar