Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 September 2004
TWO CARNIVALESQUE EVENTS are referred to in George Eliot's Daniel Deronda. One is used as an example in a discussion of political expediency: the Archbishop of Naples is said to have sanctioned, in what would now be called a populist gesture, the St. Januarius procession against the plague (1993, 384; bk. 4, ch. 33). The other is embedded in a simile: the attitude of the British mainstream society to Jews is compared with the attitude of the matrons of Delphi to the tired Maenads who had wandered into their city: the matrons “tenderly” minister to the Bacchae and take them “safely to their own borders” (195; bk. 2, ch. 17).