Gypsies and the British imagination, 1807

THE STORIES, novels, and poems of George Eliot are peppered with references to Gypsies, from Mr. Dempster’s pet name for his “dark-eyed wife” in “Janet’s Repentance” (1857) to Maggie Tulliver’s escape to the Gypsy camp in The Mill on the Floss and, finally, to the principal subject of her book-length poem, The Spanish Gypsy.¹ Like Walter Scott and George Borrow, she was drawn to the fantasy of family romance and the theme of disinheritance. Like Borrow and, to some extent, Matthew Arnold, she saw the Gypsy as a figure who could signify gender heterodoxy—feminized masculinity and, for Eliot, unconventional femininity. In a general sense, she used the Gypsy as a way to mark the kind of individual to whom she returned again and again in her fiction: the alien or inexplicably aberrant member of a community that is otherwise homogeneous, organic, and traditional. Eliot’s powerful interest in what Raymond Williams calls “knowable communities” is matched by and inseparable from her engagement with the individual who does not quite fit in and who struggles with the desire for both acceptance and escape.² Often, although not always, Eliot imagines this individual as a being marked by physical difference—an un-English swarthiness, foreignness that expresses itself in a bodily way, lameness, or deformity. The Gypsy, set apart by appearance and, ostensibly, by what the Victorians understood as race, suited Eliot well in her desire to represent difference and unassimilability.

Two movements are evident in Eliot’s reliance on the Gypsy to indicate temperamental and physical difference in her characters. The first involves her initial use of “gypsiness” and foreignness generally as metaphors for other kinds of unconventionality and her ultimate turn to the actual alien as a character in exile. This first movement, or transition, might be described as a shift from the fantasy of family romance to the actualization of family romance and, beyond that, to the romance of nation. Although Maggie Tulliver harbors the suspicion that she was born to Gypsies and not to the Dodsons and Tullivers, Eliot emphasizes the ultimately delusional nature of her fantasy. In Eliot’s book-length narrative poem, The Spanish Gypsy, however, the heroine, Fedalma, discovers that she was in fact born into a Gypsy tribe and is not a Spanish princess of uncertain birth, just as, in Daniel Deronda, Daniel learns that he is a Jew and not the illegitimate son of an English aristocrat. In both stories, then, the odd child turns out to be biologically other, and this “racial” difference leads naturally to the project of nationalism—a homeland for the Gypsies and for the Jews. The question of origin, with which the literary representation of Gypsies is almost always associated, is transferred from family to nation, from the identity of an individual to that of a people. Origin turns out to be not simply genetic but also geographic, however elusive and hypothetical that geography might be.

The second shift takes place within the transition from The Spanish Gypsy to Daniel Deronda. In both works, the protagonist discovers the secret of her or his birth and ends by leaving a country of exile for a country of origin. By the end of The Spanish Gypsy, Fedalma has inherited from her father, a Gypsy chieftain, the mission of leading her people to a homeland in Africa. Similarly, Deronda sets sail for the Levant, not, like Fedalma, with boatloads of his brethren but with his Jewish wife, Mirah. In this, her final novel, Eliot rewrote the story of a Gypsy woman in fifteenth-century Spain as the story of a Jewish man in late-nineteenth-century England. It is noteworthy that she repeated this plot so faithfully, the poem being in some respects a rehearsal for the novel, and that she chose to change the sex and “race” of her central character, as well as the time and place of her story of exile, in these particular ways. The success of Daniel Deronda’s narrative sheds light on the failures of Fedalma’s. Eliot’s need to repeat Fedalma’s plot so exactly—and yet with crucial differences of time, place, and protagonist—underscores the unresolved and highly problematic nature of the Spanish Gypsy’s story.

I want to look at the changes that Eliot made in recasting her narrative of national identity in light of The Spanish Gypsy’s problematic conclusion, a vexed ending that hauntingly separates Fedalma from the traditional womanly fate of marriage, and in terms of the kind of nationalist vision that Eliot wished to represent. Why and how do a man and a Jew enable her to tell her story differently? And what does this successful revision say about Eliot’s unresolved conflicts about femininity and the status of the Gypsy as a candidate for nationalism? Why did she turn from Gypsy to Jew in order to imagine a triumphant and, to her mind, fully modern resolution to the problem of the alien? Like many others in the nineteenth century, Eliot paired these two “others within,” Gypsy and Jew, in her thinking about seemingly cohesive but stateless nations. In spite of Eliot’s apprehension of the resemblance between the two groups, she ultimately saw the Jews as a people tied fortuitously to history and text and, therefore, as worthy creators of a modern state, while she regarded the Gypsies as tragically cut off from their past and tradition and thus unable to forge a salutary future. The Gypsy heroine Fedalma and the Jewish hero Deronda—the two end points, if you will, of Eliot’s long meditation on the outsider—meet with very different personal and political fates. Fedalma’s fate, as I have suggested by the title of this chapter, is an impossible one.

In trying to delineate George Eliot’s passionate and long-standing commitment to representing the provincial communities of England’s recent past, Raymond Williams uses the phrase “knowable communities.”³ The St. Oggs of The Mill on the Floss, Middlemarch, the Raveloe of Silas Marner, the Hayslope of Adam Bede (1859)—these are the fictional communities that drew Eliot’s novelistic interest and constitute the great achievements of her sociological imagination. Each can be fully known because, in Steven Marcus’s words, “the world [they] represent has already been defined and in some sense closed off; things in it … have already happened.”⁴ But these places are knowable as well because of the homogeneity, despite class differences, of the social experiences of their inhabitants and the presumed familiarity—the knowability—of each inhabitant to his or her neighbors. Williams locates the dramatic tension of Eliot’s novels in the conflict between the knowable community and the “separated individual”: “It is part of a crucial history in the development of the novel in which the knowable community … comes to be known primarily as a problem of ambivalent relationship: of how the separated individual, with a divided consciousness of belonging and not belonging, makes his own moral history.”⁵ Eliot’s divided individual, who struggles against traditional ways of being and yearns for a modernity that frees individual desire, is often, but not always, a woman and often at risk of going beyond separateness to the condition of being a pariah. Williams argues that Eliot finds it nearly impossible to imagine or to represent a satisfying resolution to the conflict between traditional community and individual aspiration, and her heroines in particular, as Gillian Beer has noted, tend to suffer a kind of imprisonment or stagnation in their own ultimate typicality.⁶

In Eliot’s fiction, the separated individual is often figured as disinherited, either literally or metaphorically: Will Ladislaw, object of a double disinheritance; Silas Marner, robbed of both love and wealth; Daniel Deronda, denied his Jewish inheritance; Dorothea Brooke, in danger of being written out of her husband’s will; Tom and Maggie Tulliver, ejected from childhood happiness and economic stability, like Adam and Eve from Eden. Indeed, the theme of disinheritance informs a good deal of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century fiction, beginning but certainly not ending with Tom Jones (1749), Jane Eyre, and David Copperfield (1849–1850). The plight of the orphan, unanswered questions of origin, and the fantasy of noble or at least salutary birth—the family romance—are central to the development of the novel. But for Eliot, the phenomenon of disinheritance is always linked not only to relations between child and parents and to fortune or property, but also—and more important—to the individual’s vexed relation to community and often to race or nation.

Critics like Michael Ragussis and Bernard Semmel have emphasized Eliot’s extensive debt to Walter Scott, in whose works the theme of disinheritance is ubiquitous. Ragussis’s focus on the question of Jews and conversion in English culture makes Daniel Deronda an obvious point of interest for him, but he also devotes attention to The Spanish Gypsy, which he discusses in relation to Ivanhoe. Semmel concentrates on both texts and identifies The Spanish Gypsy as an inversion of the kidnapping plot of Guy Mannering.⁷ The debt to Scott is particularly instructive in trying to establish the contours of Eliot’s interest in Gypsies and Jews—the disinherited ones—and use of these groups in her earlier work to evoke various kinds of marginality. If we look, for example, at Ivanhoe, we see that Scott has given the “Disinherited Knight,” the novel’s hero, a counterpart in the Jews, whom Isaac of York describes to his daughter, Rebecca, as “disinherited and wandering.”⁸ Scott had used this kind of analogous relation as well in Guy Mannering, in which, as we have seen, a disinherited Scottish laird is implicitly compared with a tribe of Gypsies banished from their home on the laird’s property. Eliot takes up Scott’s fascination with dispossessed groups, deepening the connection between estranged individual and disinherited nation, evoking characters metaphorically as marked by race, or, later in her career, giving them distinct but hidden racial identities.

Silas Marner (1861), a novel in which no racial or national group appears or is overtly mentioned, nonetheless offers an example of Eliot’s metaphorical deployment of the alien to figure the outsider, the separated individual, or the pariah. The novel opens with a meditation on the displaced linen weavers, “emigrants from the town into the country,” who make their way among the “brawny country-folk” looking like “the remnants of a disinherited race.”⁹ The author here sets the stage for the questions to be addressed by the novel as a whole: How will these peripheral, peripatetic men manage to attach themselves to a settled community, and will they ever reconcile their marginality with the demands and ethos of such a community? Moving from wanderer and stranger to settler, will these men become integrated or remain alien, unassimilable, “contract[ing] the eccentric habits which belong to a state of loneliness” (SM 6)? These weavers, of whom Silas Marner will emerge as one, are marked as a separate race, distinguished by a particular physicality—“pallid undersized men,” “alien-looking”—and they exist in a “state of wandering.”

The narrator uses the precise words—“disinherited” and “wandering”—to identify the likes of Silas that Scott’s Isaac uses to describe the Jews in Ivanhoe, but Gypsies also come to mind. Both groups are peripatetic: they wander the globe in exile but live, always within view of settled community, as what Jonathan Boyarin calls “the other within.”¹⁰ But whereas the Jew usually is associated with urban plots and contexts in nineteenth-century literature, the Gypsy most often appears as an itinerant in the English countryside, a pastoral figure who wanders the roads or camps on the edge of town. Eliot underscores Silas’s unstated connection to the Gypsies later in the novel when the community of Raveloe suspects that a swarthy peddler—with curly black hair, “a foreign complexion,” and earrings—has stolen the miser’s gold (SM 61–62, 75). Just as the superstitious inhabitants of Raveloe initially had suspected and shunned Silas, they now invent out of whole cloth another outsider, a peripatetic of a different sort and an ironic double for Silas, to blame for this crime. In the opening paragraph of the novel, the narrator also establishes one of the signal features of knowable community by stating that no one knew “where wandering men had their homes or their origin” or could account for such people, “unless you at least knew somebody who knew his father and mother” (SM 5). Eliot will return repeatedly to the trope of unknown origin and to the anxieties it creates both for the closed community and for the individual who feels out of place therein. In the world of Raveloe, the status of stranger might be tantamount to some form of tainted birth, blemished by miscegenation or illegitimacy.

Imagined as the remnant of a “disinherited race,” a wanderer whose origin, home, and parentage are unknown to those among whom he comes to dwell, Silas himself is evoked only obliquely as an alien. Maggie Tulliver, however, is an outsider in the very community into which she was born, and she is evoked by the narrator, her family, and herself through persistent association with a racially distinct group. With The Mill on the Floss (1860), Eliot begins to deploy the myth of family romance—the possibility, although not the reality, of mysterious origin, kidnapping, and babies switched at birth. Maggie’s parents lament her anomalous femininity—her dark complexion and straight, unruly hair, her tomboy ways and lack of decorousness—as a sign of insanity, genetic mutation, or racial otherness. In chapter 2 of The Mill on the Floss, Mrs. Tulliver frets about Maggie’s resemblance to “a Bedlam creatur” and the “brown skin as makes her look like a mulatter,” while Mr. Tulliver explains that his daughter’s inheritance of his, rather than her mother’s, mental and physical characteristics makes her a casualty of “the crossing o’ breeds,” a freak of nature like a “long-tailed sheep.”¹¹ Her idiosyncrasies of appearance and temperament separate her not only from her family—and especially from the phalanx of Dodson women she fails to resemble—but also from the community of St. Oggs itself, the knowable community that insists on conformity to gender norms as well as to other forms of unexceptionable behavior.

Eliot marks Maggie’s difference through metaphor as well as through a sense that she is physically, even genetically, eccentric. Even after she undergoes a metamorphosis from wild child to liquid-eyed, brown-cheeked, red-lipped beauty, she still draws the opprobrium of those Eliot refers to as the “world’s wife,” who see her “very physique … to be prophetic of harm” (MF 619, 621). This bodily difference, associated with her dark skin and hair, accounts both for Maggie’s seductive powers as a young woman and for her ultimate romantic failures. Like the dark-haired heroines of Scott’s fiction and the eponymous heroine of Madame de Stäel’s Corinne, or Italy (1807), with whom she feels a deep if frustrating affinity, Maggie is destined for unhappiness. Flinging de Stäel’s novel back at its owner, Philip Wakem, Maggie declares, “I’m determined to read no more books where the blond haired women carry away all the happiness. I should begin to have a prejudice against them—If you would give me some story, now, where the dark woman triumphs, it would restore the balance—I want to avenge Rebecca and Flora Mac-Ivor, and Minna and all the rest of the dark unhappy ones” (MF 433). Eliot places Maggie Tulliver within this literary tradition of paired heroines—one light, one dark—and, like Scott, overlays the pairing, at its most fundamental a contrast of good and evil or chaste and impure, with racial difference. Although Philip predicts that Maggie might avenge all the miserable dark women and steal the love from her cousin Lucy Deane, Maggie’s own blond-haired nemesis, The Mill on the Floss does not substantially controvert de Stäel’s model of blond victory and brunette loss.

In childhood, Maggie and Lucy (named for Corinne’s rival, Lucille) compete for the attention not of a lover but of Maggie’s brother Tom. In a comic episode that nonetheless underscores the moral and racial drama of dark and light femininity, Maggie disgraces herself by pushing “poor little pink-and-white Lucy into the cow-trodden mud” with “a fierce thrust of her small brown arm” (MF 164). Wanting to punish Lucy for her much praised decorousness and for the charm that attracts Tom to her, Maggie tries to make her pastel-colored cousin as brown as she is by coating her with mud and dung. Disgraced and facing certain punishment, Maggie decides to run off to join the brown-skinned Gypsies, having been told so often that she is like a Gypsy and “half wild.” Impulsively in search of her “unknown kindred,” imagining herself a changeling, and fueled by motives of revenge, Maggie seeks her true parentage and people. The narrative of Maggie’s brief escape to Dunlow Common, where she believes the Gypsies are camped, combines the poignant evocation of her discovery of another family—in particular, another mother—with gentle mockery of her arrogance and naïveté. Maggie’s misguided expectations and selfish desires are exposed throughout the scene, beginning with her disappointment that the Gypsies have camped in a lane rather than on a common and continuing with her belief that this experience will be like a fairy tale, “just like a story.”

Although she will discover that her fantasy of Gypsy life bears no resemblance to the reality she discovers in this Gypsy camp on the edge of St. Oggs, she does glimpse the face of a “gypsy-mother” who resembles her: “Maggie looked up in the new face rather tremblingly as it approached, and was reassured by the thought that … the rest were right when they called her a gypsy, for this face with the bright dark eyes and the long hair was really something like what she used to see in the glass before she cut her hair off” (MF 171–72). Maggie imagines—and sees—a new mother who, like a looking glass, reflects and thereby affirms what her own mother rejects. Something in Maggie remains unaccounted for and unabsorbed by her life in her own tribe, and something in her is reflected in the Gypsy woman’s mien. This moment of recognition is eclipsed by Maggie’s ultimate fear of the Gypsies and her desire to return home, the chastened child who has foolishly run away. But in the course of The Mill on the Floss, Maggie never does discover her true kin, either by childish escape or, more conventionally, by marriage. Although her waifishness turns into a dark and voluptuous beauty as she grows older, her racially marked body changing from freakish to exotic, Maggie’s ability to attract the love of men fails utterly to ensure her happiness or even her survival. As she had run off, with unhappy results, to the Gypsies, she later disappears, with even more disastrous consequences, in the company of her cousin’s fiancé, a man she can never marry. Her routes of escape are fully blocked; she resumes the status of pariah, this time irrevocably; and she is “rescued” from a life of isolation, disgrace, and celibacy by regression and death. The fantasy of family romance dictates that the dream of alternative parentage be just that—an illusion—and Maggie’s imagined tie to the alien Gypsies provides her with neither family nor home. Hers is an exile with no possibility of repatriation.

Although published after The Spanish Gypsy, Eliot’s novel Middlemarch (1871–1872) includes a figure whose foreignness, or foreign ancestry, serves as a transition from the largely figurative strangeness of Maggie Tulliver—and Silas Marner before her—to the actual, although hidden, foreign origins of both Fedalma and Daniel Deronda.¹² The identity of Will Ladislaw, Dorothea Brooke’s lover and second husband, is never separable from the foreignness of his ancestry, his surname, and his appearance. Neither are his foreign ancestry and name separable from his bohemianism, his artistic interests, his reformist politics, and his heterodox masculinity. The nephew of Dorothea’s punitive and dry-as-dust first husband, Casaubon, Will is descended from a Polish grandfather—a patriot and musician—on one side and a pawnbroker and his high-spirited actress daughter on the other: “You see,” he tells Dorothea, “I come of rebellious blood on both sides.”¹³ On both sides, as I have indicated, he has been disinherited: his paternal grandmother had been disowned after running off with the Pole, Ladislaw, and his mother ostensibly had forfeited the inheritance from her father after going on the stage.

Although Will’s Polish ancestry remains his only real claim to foreignness, numerous characters in the novel allude to him as an alien of various sorts. His peripatetic ways, uninhibited manner, and social promiscuity inspire Lydgate, an outsider of a different kind, to refer to Ladislaw as “a sort of gypsy” (M 436).¹⁴ The narrator repeats Lydgate’s comment a number of pages later and corroborates that Will “rather enjoy[s] the sense of belonging to no class” and has a “feeling of romance in his position, and a pleasant consciousness of creating a little surprise wherever he went” (M 461–62). The narrator, continuing to emphasize the benign aspects of Will’s unconventional behavior, remarks on his delight in taking the town’s children “on a gypsy excursion to Halsell Wood at nutting time” and on his habit of stretching out full length on the floor of the homes of those he visits. But the narrator sounds a more ominous note by referring to the way in which this recumbent posture confirms for other visitors “the notions of his dangerously mixed blood” (M 463). When rumors begin to circulate in Middlemarch about the possibility of a love match between Dorothea and her late husband’s nephew, the epithets directed at Will begin to accrue and intensify in their distastefulness. No longer just a Pole or a Gypsy, he becomes, in the words of his detractors, an “Italian with white mice,” then the possessor of “any cursed alien blood, Jew, Corsican, or Gypsy,” and, finally, when news of his maternal grandfather’s occupation becomes a matter of common knowledge, “the grandson of a thieving Jew pawnbroker” (M 490, 719, 772).

Although critics have disagreed about whether Eliot intended to suggest that Will’s grandfather was, indeed, a Jew and whether Will is, therefore, an early version of Daniel Deronda, the novelist’s point seems to be that Will’s status as an outsider is both salutary and an incitement to the bigotry of those around him in the knowable community to which he has attached himself.¹⁵ He is an ideal husband for Dorothea, the novel suggests, because of his foreignness, which is inseparable from his artistic spirit, political liberalism, and lack of social snobbery. But his identity is also a flashpoint for the insularity and narrow-mindedness of Middlemarchers, a way of exposing the liabilities of existence in a community that insists on homogeneity, or at least on its appearance. Dorothea’s friends and relations imagine Ladislaw’s “bad origin”—as Sir James Chettam, Dorothea’s brother-in-law, refers to his birth—to be inextricably connected to the lack of principle and “light character” they attribute to him (M 816). But the resolution of Dorothea and Will’s story suggests that this persistent prejudice is only a minor impediment to happiness and success. Will, we learn, “became an ardent public man, working well in those times when reforms were begun with a young hopefulness,” and his marriage to Dorothea is loving and reproductive. Dorothea may be prevented from becoming a new Saint Theresa or an Antigone because of the “imperfect social state” into which she was born, but her happiness is not marred by the convictions of others that her marriage is a mistake (M 836, 838). The doubly disinherited outsider, Will Ladislaw, prospers and finds his place in a changing England.

With Fedalma and Daniel Deronda, Eliot’s “separated individual” moves from pariah to exile. No mere metaphoric aliens or foreigners capable of a satisfactory, if resigned, integration into English society, these characters are members of disinherited and displaced nations and implicit exiles from homes or places of origin to which they will ultimately try to return. Although it would be a mistake to attribute an absolute teleology in Eliot’s fiction from disinherited individual to disinherited nation, it seems that, by the latter part of her career, she was attracted to the idea of permanent separateness—or separation—as a solution to the problem of the outcast. The mechanism for this imagined solution is “racial” difference, not as a metaphor for temperamental difference or tenuous social position, but as a total and irreducible identity. Racial or national identity is offered as the reason, perhaps the occasion, for severing ties to a seemingly temporary home, a natal country that becomes a diaspora. Furthermore, identity in both The Spanish Gypsy and Daniel Deronda is a hidden reality, a secret fact of birth to be discovered by the protagonist. Maggie Tulliver may imagine that she is a foundling, but, with Fedalma and Daniel Deronda, this daydream—or nightmare—comes true. The Freudian fantasy of family romance becomes the plot of family romance, and the discovery of true parentage brings with it the confirmation and reification of difference. The trauma of disinheritance and ostracism is ostensibly to be overcome by inheriting an unknown lineage and a distant land. The disaffected child is a changeling after all.

Influenced by mid-nineteenth-century discussions of nationalism and inspired by the unification of Italy, Eliot valued the persistence and cultivation of national identities.¹⁶ In her essay “The Modern Hep! Hep! Hep!” published as part of Impressions of Theophrastus Such, Eliot, through her alter-ego narrator Such, laments a current tendency toward the “fusion of races” and counsels “moderation” in the “effacement of those national traditions and customs which are the language of the national genius”:

Nationalism is valued not only because Such/Eliot wishes to safeguard cultural traditions but also because national, religious, or (as we would say) ethnic groups suffer oppression, or “subjection,” in societies like Britain. Using biological metaphors, Such ruminates about the “national life” that dwells “in our veins” and about the powerful role played by memory in establishing group identity. But he seems to suggest as well that certain groups have stronger “spirit[s] of separateness” than others and singles out the Jews, an “expatriated, denationalised race,” as one such people (“MH” 348, 338). It is not simply, then, that he prizes the Jews’ survival as a distinct group with a set of traditions, rituals, and cultural characteristics but that he regards the Jews as exiles awaiting return to “a native country, the birthplace of common memories and habits of mind, existing like a parental hearth quitted but loved” (“MH” 338 [emphasis added]).¹⁸ Like the Italians, the Jews merit a state of their own, and the state is imagined as the wellspring, the “parent,” of group identity. In Daniel Deronda, the visionary Mordecai, who acts as Daniel’s spiritual and political guide, speaks of reviving the Jews’ “organic centre,” a community that will, like Italy, be a “republic” and the realization of a people’s connection to its ancient land.¹⁹ Using the metaphor of the parental hearth in “The Modern Hep! Hep! Hep!” Eliot brings into relief what her fictions imply: that individual inheritance and identity find their analogue, perhaps their extension, in the contours and vicissitudes of national identity, that the familial home and the national home are images of each other.

The knowable communities that form the heart of Eliot’s fiction constrain and yet hold most of the individuals—separated, marginal, outcast—who find themselves in a struggle with convention and tradition. Fedalma and Daniel Deronda, however, outsiders who discover that their separateness derives from a biological tie to an alien group, leave their countries of exile—Spain and England, respectively—to seek a homeland. Both outcasts begin not in knowable communities, but in a hostile, incommodious land in one case and in a modern England where community is at best elusive in the other. Both places offer little in the way of redemptive social or national life, making urgent the need for a radical resolution to the protagonist’s marginality. Nationalism provides an answer to the separated individual’s conflict with a radically inhospitable and not merely knowable community. Difference that is both temperamental and racial can be transcended through the creation of a community of fellow outsiders, in which difference itself constitutes the basis for citizenship. Eliot’s sympathy with subject groups and her desire to invent at least a novelistic solution to their oppression coalesce, one imagines, with her own fantasy of an alternative community that is both knowable and hospitable to the alien and the outcast.²⁰

The partly idealized and partly oppressive knowable community, then, gives way to what Benedict Anderson calls the “imagined community.” For Anderson, nationalist passion is fueled by the longing for a hypothetical homeland and the desire to live with strangers as fellow citizens. It is based on a fantasy of nation and an “image of communion.”²¹ As Mordecai declares, “Community was felt before it was called good,” even before it was imagined in the form of nation (DD 594). Anderson also emphasizes the way the state, in a nationalist imagination, “loom[s] out of an immemorial past, … and glide[s] into a limitless future.”²² He sounds a note very similar to Eliot’s account of the role of memory in “The Modern Hep! Hep! Hep!” In both Eliot and Anderson, the individual’s memory ties him to something that he cannot himself remember but locates in a very distant, primordial past and takes as the basis of identity, as well as fate. “It is the magic of nationalism to turn chance [the chance of birth] into destiny,” writes Anderson, crafting a line that could stand as the synopsis of both The Spanish Gypsy and Daniel Deronda.²³ These works add another meaning to “imagined community” by refusing to represent—how could they?—the homelands toward which they merely gesture at narrative’s end. The reader, as Irene Tucker has suggested, is left to do the imagining.²⁴

As I have suggested in my brief discussions of Silas Marner, The Mill on the Floss, and Middlemarch, Eliot’s pariah-heroes fare better than her pariah-heroines. Some twenty-five years ago, in the heyday of feminist literary criticism, Gillian Beer offered an observation about Eliot’s heroines whose accuracy and poignancy have, to my mind, not been surpassed. “Eliot chose always,” she wrote, “to imprison her most favored women. … She does not allow them to share her own extraordinary flight from St. Oggs and from Middlemarch. She needs them to endure their own typicality.”²⁵ Those female characters associated with foreignness and racial difference, Maggie Tulliver and Fedalma, the heroine of The Spanish Gypsy, are no exceptions to this rule, and yet they suffer radically different sorts of imprisonment. Maggie, as Beer remarks, can never escape St. Oggs. Fedalma, though, rises above typicality and becomes the leader of her people—a Moses destined to deliver them from bondage into freedom in a new land. But both women, as we shall see, are denied the recompense of love. Eliot’s deep ambivalence about the freedom of women and the need to weigh it against the demands of community and the kind of national identity that she endorses in “The Modern Hep! Hep! Hep!” make her finally unable to reconcile female heroism and romantic love.

The male characters tainted by foreignness in Eliot’s novels not only achieve a kind of social integration and acceptance but, perhaps more significant, secure for themselves—or are blessed with—procreative futures. Will Ladislaw, although still suspect in the eyes of some hidebound Middlemarchers, realizes his political ambitions as an English reformer and produces a family with Dorothea Brooke. Even Silas Marner becomes a father, not through marriage and biological paternity but through the fortuitous adoption of Eppie.²⁶ His fatherhood helps not only to redeem him as a moral being but also to bind him to his community. Maggie Tulliver—mulatto, Bedlamite, Gypsy—perishes, barred from marriage because of her romantic failures and destined for a premature death as an estranged member of her community. Her male counterpart in the novel, Philip Wakem—who, as a hunchback, is bodily although not racially marked—survives but remains celibate. Maggie’s victory, if she can be said to have one, is in the grave, where both her lovers in life come to visit and mourn her and where she is permanently reunited with her brother, Tom. Nonetheless, her sex, which makes her vulnerable to public disgrace, precludes both procreativity and survival.

What, then, of Fedalma, the Spanish Gypsy? Eliot’s long dramatic poem, set in Spain during the time of the Inquisition, has attracted attention of late from critics interested in issues of race, conversion, and nationalism in Eliot’s fiction. The most cogent way of identifying the philosophical debate in the poem would employ the terms that Bernard Semmel uses to analyze much of Eliot’s work. Eliot struggles between two powerful and competing beliefs: on the one hand, the Comtean imperative that the individual sacrifice his will to the “general good” and, on the other, the liberal individualist critique of Comte, best represented by John Stuart Mill—and, not incidentally, by George Henry Lewes, Eliot’s mate—that emphasizes the paramount importance of individual liberty.²⁷ In The Spanish Gypsy (1868), Eliot dramatizes this struggle in the heroine, Fedalma, raised as a Spanish princess and torn between her love for the Castilian knight Duke Silva, to whom she is betrothed, and her duty to the people, the Gypsies or Zincali, she discovers to be her own. Her father, Zarca, leader of a tribe of Zincali who have been brutally captured by the Spanish and are destined for annihilation by Silva’s uncle, the vicious Prior, demands of Fedalma that she become his second-in-command, “the angel of a homeless tribe”:

Duke Silva, Fedalma’s lover and, by association, the inevitable enemy of her people, argues for the Millite position: the primitive tie of blood and the call of birth must not be given primacy. “Love comes to cancel all ancestral hate,” Silva proclaims, “[s]ubdues all heritage, proves that in mankind / Union is deeper than division” (SG 288). The freedom to choose one’s destiny is crucial to Silva, and so he decides to join the Zincali, to become a Gypsy, so he can marry Fedalma and support her people’s just cause. Eliot stages what amounts to a refutation of Silva’s belief in individual liberty, however, when the Zincali hang his uncle, the Prior, and Silva, feeling betrayed and enraged by the people with whom he has chosen to ally himself, murders Zarca, the father of his beloved Fedalma. This act establishes a permanent enmity between the lovers, demonstrates the impossibility of choosing identity and ignoring birth, and bestows the leadership of Fedalma’s people wholly on her. Obliged to take her father’s place, she haltingly but dutifully proceeds to set sail with her people for an unknown homeland in Africa. Not dead like Maggie Tulliver, her sacrifice is only partial: she will keep faith with her father’s dream and “plant / His sacred hope within the sanctuary,” but will die a “priestess,” a “hoary [white-haired] woman on the altar-step” who has become the “funeral urn,” the “temple” of her father’s remains (SG 370). Heroic but celibate, she will not achieve the synthesis of personal happiness and vocational success that Will Ladislaw enjoys or even the surrogate parenthood and communal integration of Silas Marner.

Fedalma is linked to the other “imprisoned” heroines of Eliot’s works not because of her typicality or her ties to a knowable community, but because she is denied individual liberty and the fulfillment of personal desire, as a result of her dedication to the imagined community of nation. Gender, then, complicates the philosophical debate that informs The Spanish Gypsy. For women, the two poles of individual liberty and devotion to the general good seem farther apart than they ever do for men in Eliot’s fiction; indeed, for the likes of Maggie, Dorothea, and Fedalma, they seem always to be at odds. What has confounded readers and critics of The Spanish Gypsy, however, is that the general good and allegiance to community for the heroine are aligned with a heroic, public, and distinctly political role rather than with fealty to the customs of St. Oggs and the imperative to marry and procreate.

When Eliot was planning her narrative poem The Spanish Gypsy, she noted the image that had inspired its plot and helped explain her thinking about the relationship between tragedy and the origin of individual destiny. In Venice, viewing a painting of the Annunciation attributed to Titian, she thought of the Virgin as a figure of tragedy, as a woman precluded from sharing in “the ordinary lot of womanhood” because it is “suddenly announced to her that she is chosen to fulfill a great destiny.”²⁹ Mary, like Fedalma, cannot choose her own fate but is herself a chosen one, “not by any momentary arbitrariness, but as a result of foregoing hereditary conditions.” In order to tell a tale about the power of biological inheritance to overcome individual will, Eliot writes that she “required the opposition of race.” And at this point, she imagines the stigmas of heredity as inextricably linked to femininity: “Now, what is the fact about our individual lots? A woman, say, finds herself on earth with an inherited organisation [Eliot appears to mean a physiological “organisation”]: she may be lame, she may inherit a disease, or what is tantamount to a disease: she may be a negress, or have other marks of race repulsive to the community where she is born, etc, etc.”³⁰ While we inevitably stumble over Eliot’s equation of disease with the fact of being a “negress,” the degree to which she likens unconventional—indeed, heroic—femininity to physical deformity and racial otherness is also worth noting. The woman who is different, chosen, destined for a fate beyond “the ordinary lot of womanhood,” inherits this destiny as she would a bodily stigma. As a result, she resigns herself to what Eliot calls the “general” and the “inevitable,” which in regard to woman amounts, paradoxically, to a physical fact—whether pregnancy, lameness, or race.³¹ Eliot settles on race—or what she calls a “hereditary condition”—to pry her heroine loose from love, marriage, and desire. That she means the circumstances of female heroism and celibacy to inspire ambivalence is clear: “It is the individual with whom we sympathise,” she continues in the journal, “and the general of which we recognize the irresistible power.”³² It is this ambivalence that current readers of the poem find difficult to grasp.

Michael Ragussis places Fedalma, along with the daughter heroines of Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s Leila, or, The Siege of Granada (1838) and Grace Aguilar’s The Vale of Cedars; or the Martyr (1850), in the literary tradition of Walter Scott’s Rebecca.³³ These heroines of what Ragussis calls “racial plots” (as opposed to marriage plots) are paired with apparently widowed fathers who try to prohibit their marriages to górgios or Gentiles. Fedalma, Ragussis writes, faces “an exile based in the sacrifice of the erotic,” and her body “becomes no more than a kind of grave for the memorialization of the dead father.”³⁴ Although Ragussis concedes that Fedalma’s dismal fate does not override what he calls “the central ideology of the text,” the poem’s rejection of assimilation or “conversion,” he emphasizes the cruelty of the daughter’s sacrifice to the father’s will. If Ragussis stresses the denial of individual desire—or liberty—in his reading of the poem, Alicia Carroll finds in Fedalma’s acquiescence to the needs of the “general” a decidedly sanguine meaning. Far from seeing Fedalma as sacrificial or the conclusion of the poem as funereal, she argues that Fedalma represents “a technically chaste maternal subjectivity that nonetheless resonates with erotic meaning.”³⁵ Carroll finds in Fedalma a type of queenly presence that, combined with her elevated role as mother to her people, makes her a triumphant and resplendent figure.

It may be difficult to reconcile these two views: a young woman denied an erotic and procreative future, on the one hand, and a leader of her people whose symbolic motherhood has an erotic tinge, on the other. But it is not, I think, difficult to see that these contradictory readings are the result of the mixed signals that Eliot leaves at the poem’s end. Although the association that Eliot herself makes between the Virgin Mary and Fedalma might tend to support Carroll’s interpretation, it also seems clear from the poem’s imagery—“I am but the funeral urn that bears the ashes of a leader,” “A hoary woman on the altar-step”—that Fedalma faces celibacy and sterility and has been masculinized at her father’s bidding. Before Zarca dies, he refers to his daughter—now wearing a turban and Moorish dress, and bearing a dagger—as “my younger self” (SG 272). Earlier, Zarca had dared Fedalma to deny her Gypsy inheritance by using language that conflates an exaggerated femininity with “passing” as a Spanish Christian:

Without the “invisible passion” of Zarca, the “great force” who held the Zincali together, the voyage from Spain takes on a melancholy, enervated air. And Fedalma is just as “resigned” to her fate as the celibate leader of her people as other of Eliot’s heroines are to their lives of typicality and conventional domesticity. As Ragussis implies, the grimness of the poem’s conclusion makes it difficult for the reader to muster enthusiasm for what ought to be Fedalma’s heroic mission, and yet this mission is endorsed by the poem as the means of the Gypsies’ survival and as Fedalma’s incontrovertible destiny.

There is a moment much earlier in the poem that dramatically prefigures Fedalma’s role as leader of her people and expresses her genuine yearning for community and the experience of collective identity. Before she learns the secret of her birth, she ventures into the Plaça Santiago and is swept up in the joy of the crowd. She dances before the common people in the square, tambourine in hand. But this is not simply a frivolous moment of pleasure. Fedalma, as Eliot describes her,

The poem evokes Fedalma as a type of Miriam, the sister of Moses, who helped lead the Israelites out of exile in Egypt to journey to the Promised Land. Later, Fedalma will lead the Zincali in just this way, although by then she will combine the role of Miriam with that of Aaron, the brother of Moses, who brought the people into Canaan after their great leader’s death.³⁶ At this point, the poem celebrates, through prefiguration and biblical allusion, the full and transcendent meaning of Fedalma’s role in the Zincali’s exodus. When Duke Silva admonishes her, shocked that she would display herself by dancing in a public square, Fedalma argues that the dance, far from separating her from the crowd as a spectacle to be gawked at, brought her into communion with the people:

Merging with the general will and with communal purpose takes on a joyous and spiritually uplifting cast. That this feeling should almost wholly evaporate by the end of the poem, replacing joy with sacrifice and devotion to community with the apparent suppression of individual desire, perplexes the reader and confounds easy interpretation. What does seem clear, however, is that this poem, like Eliot’s novels, cannot find a way to reconcile public heroism with an acceptable feminine destiny, the leadership of community with domesticity and “a woman’s lot.” When Eliot tries a second time to write the story of hidden parentage, alien identity, and nationalist idealism, she makes her protagonist a man.

It might be said that when George Eliot wrote Daniel Deronda (1874–1876), her last novel, she rewrote the figure of Fedalma by dispersing her qualities among at least three characters, two of whom are women and one of whom is a man. Eliot transforms the Rebecca figure—the beautiful, nubile young woman who at the end of the narrative is unmarried and bereft of the man she has loved—into an Englishwoman, Gwendolen Harleth. As the Jewish Rebecca loses Ivanhoe to the golden-haired Rowena, the golden-haired Gwendolen loses Daniel Deronda to the Jewish, raven-haired Mirah. Gwendolen, then, is the “imprisoned” heroine, although she is imprisoned, like Fedalma, in celibacy rather than, like Dorothea, in domesticity. Eliot restages the conflict that Fedalma faces between faithfulness to her people and personal desire in the history of the Alcharisi, Daniel’s mother, a Jewish woman who gave up her son and hid her identity in order to practice her art and escape the moral strictures and obligations of her religion. Judaism to her is simply “bondage,” obedience to the ideals of Jewish womanhood “slavery” (DD 689, 694). Unlike Fedalma, the Alcharisi chose desire over community, and, through the perspective and grief of her abandoned son, she is vilified. The power that racial inheritance holds for Eliot helps to explain why this woman, who pursued her vocation and her longing for “the wide world” in a manner that strikes the modern reader as understandable and, in some respects, admirable, receives such brutal treatment in the novel.³⁷

Fedalma’s most important double, however, is Deronda himself. Like Fedalma, he discovers the secret of his birth and ends by leaving his erstwhile homeland to explore a national home for his people, to become, avant la lettre, a Zionist. Deronda, however, leaves England in an aura of hopefulness, idealism, and nobility and with a Jewish wife, Mirah. Further, Daniel fulfills the dream of the scholarly and gentle Mordecai, Mirah’s brother, who, more than anyone else, blesses Daniel’s marriage, while Fedalma is tied to the legacy of an exigent father who stands in determined opposition to the person she loves. Put simply, love and mission merge for Deronda, while they split disastrously for Fedalma. The impasse of The Spanish Gypsy—a heroine too bereft and too uncertain to embrace with passion the mission she nonetheless accepts—may have given Eliot the impetus to reimagine her story differently. Crucial to this reimagining are the question of choice and the evolution, rather than the imposition, of identity.

The narrative traces the gradual process by which Deronda becomes a Jew, even before he discovers the religion (or “race”) of his parents, and makes clear that, once he learns the truth of his ancestry, he chooses an identity with the full exercise of his will. Unlike Fedalma—and more like Maggie Tulliver—Deronda feels certain that his birth was an anomalous one, and his psychology, about which Eliot is quite precise, develops from that feeling:

The sense of an entailed disadvantage—the deformed foot doubtfully hidden by the shoe, makes a restlessly active spiritual yeast, and easily turns a self-centered, unloving nature into an Ishmaelite. But in the rarer sort, who presently see their own frustrated claim as one among a myriad, the inexorable sorrow takes the form of fellowship and makes the imagination tender. … [I]t had given a bias to his conscience, a sympathy with certain ills, and a tension of resolve in certain directions. (DD 215)

Although Deronda did not become an Ishmaelite as a result of his childhood anguish and insecurities, he developed sympathy for other “Hagars and … Ishmaels,” for those who, like himself, had been disinherited (DD 489). A descendant not of Abraham’s rejected son but, somewhat paradoxically, of Isaac, the favored one, Deronda will become a Jew and a friend to the outcast—especially to outcast women like Mrs. Glasher and, ultimately, Gwendolen. This instinct of rescue draws him to a Jewish love object, Mirah, who, because Deronda is what we might call an evolving Jew, does not have to share the celibate fate of Scott’s Rebecca.

Refusing the path of a conventional English gentleman, Deronda wanders abroad, not knowing precisely what he is looking for (although he is ostensibly seeking news of Mirah’s lost mother and brother), and enters a synagogue in Frankfurt. There a stranger stops him and asks about his parentage, thereby causing Deronda to form an inchoate and largely unconscious association between his unknown origin and the experience of Jewishness. Looking for Mirah’s brother in the East End of London, he encounters Mordecai, who takes Deronda under his tutelage and decides to regard him as a Jew for his own quixotic reasons. By the time Deronda meets his mother and learns the story of his birth, then, he is primed to be a Jew: a Jewish sensibility, we are to understand, has naturally taken root within him. As if to emphasize that he actively chooses, as well as inherits, Jewishness and does not, like Fedalma, simply regard it as a worthy although inescapable duty, he declares, “I shall call myself a Jew. … But I will not say that I shall profess to believe exactly as my fathers have believed” (DD 792). Unlike Deronda, Fedalma resists the full implications of her Gypsyhood and, most important, is never allowed the luxury of choice: “being of the blood you are—my blood,” Zarca tells her, “you have no right to choose” (SG 155). Instead of chafing at the prospect of his Jewish identity and all its attendant responsibilities, Deronda embraces his Jewishness easily—because he has already become a Jew.³⁸

The identity of difference, of otherness, that Fedalma briefly senses and revels in during her dance in the town square ultimately becomes her burden, her legacy of responsibility. Although the moment in the square suggests the possibility of a Deronda-like evolution of identity, it is not fulfilled, in part because the poem places her national inheritance and her lover irrevocably at odds. So, unlike Deronda, she does not choose her fate or discover a nearly perfect congruence of temperament and revealed identity, nor does she enjoy a perfect synthesis of love and mission, of personal desire and devotion to community. In Daniel Deronda, Eliot is not interested in staging a struggle between the individual will and the “general,” and, for this reason among others, she shifts to a male protagonist who does not face the conflict, habitual to women in Eliot’s fiction and Eliot’s time, between private and public desire. Women’s ability to choose their destinies in Eliot’s works tends to be suppressed: their will remains subject to the demand that they fulfill, first and foremost, a woman’s lot and the will of the community. Fedalma’s obligation to the community dictates that she embrace a life of political heroism and romantic denial. Indeed, she all but ceases to be a woman at the poem’s end, as if to underscore the necessarily masculine nature of a political leader’s public role and its irreconcilability with conventional femininity.

The discussion of The Spanish Gypsy makes clear, I hope, that escape from typicality, from knowable to imagined community, nullifies the heroine’s sexuality and femininity. The strictures of imagined community turn out to be just as confining, in their own way, as the demands of knowable community: each inhibits female choice and exacts a price for woman’s expression of desire. Imagined community offers Daniel Deronda refuge and transcendence, as it might be expected to do for Fedalma, who, as a Gypsy during the period of the Inquisition, would be denied a life of liberty in Spain, or perhaps a life at all. Fedalma’s return from exile turns out, however, to be a highly equivocal fate. The heroine’s difference of race in The Spanish Gypsy acts much as does the sexual transgression attributed to Maggie Tulliver in The Mill on the Floss: as bodily stigma, as a physical marking that short-circuits the resolution of the marriage plot. In her notes on The Spanish Gypsy, Eliot, as we have seen, defines the “inherited organisation” that would necessarily prevent a woman from attaining personal happiness: lameness, disease, or “marks of race.” But, we might ask at this point, does “race” mark the male body, as it does the female? Does anomalous masculinity carry with it a bodily stigma similar to Maggie’s embodied sexual sinfulness and Fedalma’s dark skin? And if favored men, to use Gillian Beer’s language, are also marked, are they also always imprisoned?

Anomalous masculinity expressed as foreignness, as with Will Ladislaw, or as actual “racial” difference, as with Daniel Deronda, does not bar Eliot’s heroes from private satisfactions and public efficaciousness. But do such men carry an enduring mark, a physical sign of difference? And, if so, can they compensate for bodily stigma or, perhaps, obscure it in some way that enables them to mask their alien identities? In The Mill on the Floss, Eliot represents Philip Wakem’s difference of temperament and sensibility as a literal physical deformity. She associates his crippled frame with his sensitivity and acute ability to understand the most complicated motives of others. But his marked body is also associated with his femininity. The narrator repeatedly refers to Philip, who blushes more often than any other character in the novel, as being or looking like a girl. This is true not only in his childhood, but in his young adulthood as well. At the very moment that Philip declares his love for Maggie and she hesitantly but hopefully reciprocates, we read: “Maggie smiled … and then stooped her tall head to kiss the low pale face that was full of pleading, timid love—like a woman’s” (MF 438). Even before Maggie runs off with another man and her death precludes the possibility that she and Philip will marry, we know that this union will not happen. In the erotic economy of Victorian romance, Philip’s girlishness and vulnerability make him an object of pity and tenderness but not of heterosexual love. Philip’s curved spine, like the wound of Philoctetes, with whom the text aligns him, makes the young man a pariah.³⁹ The narrator’s last words about Philip describe him as “always solitary,” a being whose “great companionship” after Maggie’s death remains the trees among which they walked. Philip survives while Maggie perishes, but he is destined for celibacy and noble isolation.

Daniel Deronda’s stigma—his wound—is a more complicated and more hidden business. Inevitably, critics have been fascinated by the question of circumcision in a novel about a young Jewish man who cannot tell that he is a Jew. If, in the nineteenth century, all Jewish boys were circumcised and non-Jews were not, then Deronda had only to look at his own body and compare it with those of his fellow students at Eton and Cambridge to know his identity.⁴⁰ It is possible that Deronda’s mother contrived not to have her baby circumcised because she was determined that he not be raised a Jew. Her devout father died before Daniel’s birth, and Daniel’s father was entirely subject to his wife’s will (“he went against his conscience for me,” she says of him), so she may have been able to avoid this most basic of Jewish rituals. I would argue that Eliot leaves this matter obscure out of necessity—in all likelihood, she could not mention circumcision in her text—but refers to it a number of times obliquely in the novel.

I have quoted the passage in which Deronda thinks of the stigma of his “hidden birth” as “the deformed foot doubtfully hidden by the shoe” (DD 215 [emphasis added]). Unlike Philip Wakem’s wound (which is also displaced to the foot in the comparison with Philoctetes), Deronda’s can be covered and temporarily obscured: he can pass as an Englishman, at least up to a point. Toward the end of the novel, the Alcharisi, Daniel’s mother, also equates Jewishness with bodily stigma. “I rid myself of the Jewish tatters and gibberish that make people nudge each other at sight of us,” she tells her son, “as if we were tattooed under our clothes, though our faces are as whole as theirs” (DD 698 [emphasis added]). The tattoo, like the deformed foot and like circumcision, is both a literal and a metaphorical sign of difference. The body is invisibly marked, cut beneath clothing, and yet the mark is somehow visible, a sign of something that appears to be but is not “whole.” Eliot was fascinated by the Jews’ status as both visible and invisible aliens. In her research notes for The Spanish Gypsy, she comments at length on the persecution of the Jews by the Inquisition and the fate of the Nuevos Christianos [sic],” the converts who tried to hide their Jewish identities in order to avoid immolation. She recorded a series of questions that would have been used to detect the secret of a Jew’s true religious faith: “Does he wear clean linen on a Saturday? Does he reject suet and fat? Does he wash his meat & get rid of the blood? Does he observe the Jewish fasts …? … Has he given his children a Hebrew name? … Has he … invited his relatives or friends to supper before a journey?”⁴¹ These practices, many of which involve the Jew’s body and what he ingests, can be hidden: he can be invisible and yet always in danger of exposure under the pressure of discrimination or even persecution. Clearly, as shown by the Alcharisi and Jewish women under the Inquisition in Spain, this phenomenon of unseen but ever-present stigma is not merely a gendered one. But it is difficult not to see the Alcharisi’s mention of the hidden tattoo and Daniel’s consciousness of the “deformed foot” as oblique references to circumcision, the concealed but crucial and ultimately unavoidable indicator of Jewishness that men alone bear. Deronda’s hidden circumcision, like the undergarments or dietary practices of the Spanish conversos, is also a “mark of race.”

For Eliot, then, the body of the alien, anomalous, and, to some degree, feminized male is also marked. And, as with Fedalma, race joins a profound physical difference to an unconventional destiny. Deronda’s body is marked, however, in a way that allows him to marry Mirah or, put slightly differently, that allows him to marry only Mirah. He proves able to survive the physical sign of difference in a way that is unavailable to Eliot’s favored but doomed women. His stigmatized body must be matched with that of a woman of his kind, whereas Philip Wakem’s deformity seems to preclude coupling. Both men prevail, however, by means denied to their female counterparts. The wound to Philip’s masculinity might lead to a solitary life, but the wound to Maggie’s femininity—a bodily difference that is understood as bodily taint—dooms her to an early death. Deronda’s wound, whether actual circumcision or metaphoric marking, exiles him but allows him a bride, whereas Fedalma’s injury—her racial difference—blights her femininity irrevocably. In Eliot’s universe, a wound to masculinity is endurable, while a wound to femininity is not. For the chosen women, to return to the language of Eliot’s notes on The Spanish Gypsy, “foregoing hereditary conditions” cannot be reconciled with a bridegroom (this is Eliot’s point) or even with the attainment of equanimity and satisfactory resignation. The racialized and unsexed woman ceases to be a woman at all, whereas the man whose masculinity is diminished because of race or other (bodily) difference is still a man. Eliot finds in Daniel Deronda—and in his gender—a resolution to the impasses of Fedalma’s grim unsexing and self-sacrifice.

Like Walter Scott, George Eliot was drawn to the figures of Gypsy and Jew by her interest in disinheritance and national difference. These two stateless and wandering peoples, residents but not citizens of many nations, seemed twinned subjects for the novelists’ working out of themes of individual and racial marginality. But for Eliot in The Spanish Gypsy, in part because she was intent on the narrative of nation and return from exile, Gypsies proved inadequate, or at least problematic, for her literary purposes. The subdued, not to say, defeatist, rhetoric of the end of the poem reflects a difference of history as well as a difference of gender. Throughout the work, as we shall see, Eliot touches on the problems inherent in what she imagines to be the Gypsies’ relationship to their own past, and she repeatedly falls back on a mythic or literary tradition as her source for Gypsy history and identity. The very illusion under which Maggie Tulliver mistakenly operates—that her sojourn with the Gypsies on Dunlow Common will be “just like a story”—also hampers Eliot’s ability to represent Gypsies as historical and, ultimately, literary subjects. We can better understand the limitations that Eliot faced in The Spanish Gypsy through a consideration of her rather different engagement with Jews in Daniel Deronda. These limitations were partly the result of Eliot’s conception of Gypsy life and her projection, much like Maggie’s, of her own psychic drama onto the Gypsy heroine, but they also derived from the general cultural habit of what Katie Trumpener calls “the conflation of literary traditions with living people,” of seeing the Gypsy as an intractably ahistorical and symbolic figure.⁴² It is much more problematic, although unavoidable, to conclude as well that this impulse to imagine the Gypsy in a purely literary context was also due to the paucity of historical and textual sources beyond either the fictional or the philological.

Eliot wrote in her notes on The Spanish Gypsy that when she began to meditate on the theme of a young female prohibited from experiencing “ordinary womanhood” because “chosen to fulfil a great destiny,” her thoughts fixed on the setting of fifteenth-century Spain:

What Eliot had in mind is somewhat unclear, but it is likely that she believed that she could not use other persecuted groups in Spain—Jews or Moors—because their fates were disastrous and she wanted a “working out,” rather than a recapitulation, of catastrophe. This resolution took the form, of course, of exodus from persecution and embarkation on the search for a homeland. Eliot seems to imply that since her audience would know that this outcome was not consistent with the histories of Moors or Jews in this period, she could not employ it in relation to them. If this is indeed her meaning (and it is, admittedly, hard to tell), it is not clear why she reckoned her readers would accept such a fanciful resolution to the suffering of the Zincali, other than that her readers would consider them an essentially fictive people.

The idea of a Gypsy homeland in Africa seems to have been Eliot’s alone, although Bernard Semmel suggests that she may have been influenced by Bulwer-Lytton’s novel Leila, in which a Spanish Jew of the late fifteenth century envisions a return to Palestine as the only redemption for his people.⁴⁴ It seems likely, however, that Eliot felt free to invent this turn of narrative because she was uninhibited by a known historical record. Her readers might simply not know the “facts of [the Gypsies’] history,” and we can wonder how much Eliot knew of it herself.⁴⁵ She apparently relied on George Borrow’s The Zincali, the German philologist August Friedrich Pott’s Die Zigeuner in Europe und Asien (1844–1845), and a variety of literary texts, among them Miguel de Cervantes’s La gitanilla (1613), but her notes are strikingly empty of references to sources or readings on the subject.⁴⁶ In Eliot’s version of the Gypsies’ fate under the Inquisition, the Zincali are treated as slaves and beasts of burden, “fit for the hardest tasks,” although one character remarks that some believe the queen should have exiled the Gypsies with the Jews (SG 47). The argument against banishment of the Gypsies is their pure physical usefulness to the Spaniards. Zarca’s band, allies of the Moors, have been captured so that Duke Silva can employ them as laborers. Zarca himself is known to be a practitioner of “fallacious alchemy” (SG 49). The Gypsy chieftain’s rebelliousness, refusal to do the duke’s bidding, and rage at his daughter’s abduction and his wife’s murder by Spanish Christians make him an enemy and a danger to the court. Eliot fashions a Gypsy leader as proud nationalist and exacting patriarch.

It is, above all, Zarca himself who articulates the difference between his own people and the others—Jews but also Moors—who suffer in Spain, and it is a difference of religion and, more important, of history:

Not the “chosen people,” the Zincali lack a divine protector, a text of laws, and a sense of either past or destiny: “no Whence or Whither.” Their lack of memory robs them of a desire for the “common hearth for piety,” a phrase reminiscent of Eliot’s evocation of a homeland longed for by exiles in “The Modern Hep! Hep! Hep!”: “a native country, the birthplace of common memories and habits of mind, existing like a parental hearth quitted but loved” (“MH” 338). Neither God nor memory primes them for nationalist ambition. The only faith they have derives from their loyalty to one another, and this loyalty is dictated by their “beating hearts” rather than by a priest or a prophet (SG 145). For this reason—and Zarca is quite explicit about this—he must be not just their leader but also their memory and their godhead. He has learned from Jew and Moor “the rich heritage, the milder life, / Of nations fathered by a mighty Past” and concludes that he must provide the bond that makes his people into a nation (SG 143):

The highly equivocal conclusion of The Spanish Gypsy, then, can be traced to problems of history, collective memory, and origin, as well as to those of gender. The contrast between Gypsies and Jews established in the poem by Zarca suggests that Eliot had begun to imagine her way out of the impasse of this first version of the nationalist narrative. Semmel observes that certain strains of thought in the poem indicate that Jews were already on Eliot’s mind, and her notes for the poem, replete with lengthy discussions of conversos, bear this out.⁴⁷ The Jews, she believed, had a clear past and, as a consequence, a clear destiny. They had both an established link to a specific homeland and the beginnings of a modern ideology of return.⁴⁸ Unlike the rootless Gwendolen Harleth, Daniel Deronda inherits a tradition and a hearth.⁴⁹ Possessed of a written record and what Eliot refers to in “The Modern Hep! Hep! Hep!” as “a sense of separateness unique in its intensity,” the Jews enjoyed “an organized memory of a national consciousness” that was inseparable from their religion and its holy texts (“MH” 140, 153). And as Mordecai declares, “the effect of … separateness will not be completed and have its highest transformation unless [the] race takes on again the character of a nationality” (DD 594). Aligned with the new Italy and the “great North American nation,” a Jewish homeland will assume the contours of a modern state with an enlightened political vision (DD 597).

Because Eliot regarded the Gypsies as a people lacking home, tradition, and memory of their past, she could not render them as a people with a future or, to put it differently, with a modern identity. Stuck in representational limbo, a literary or mythic place unconnected to history or geography, the Gypsies remained in some fundamental way primitive or atavistic. Needless to say, Eliot was not alone in this characterization, and yet it is striking to consider her sense of the Jews’ radical difference from the Gypsies, even in the context of her belief in the deep connections between these two peoples. Part of the project of Daniel Deronda is precisely to establish the modernity of the Jews, their candidacy for nationhood, and their fitness to contribute a political vision to the other nations of the world. Mordecai insists that the “history and literature” of his coreligionists are not dead, that they are as alive as those of Greece and Rome, “which have inspired revolutions, enkindled the thought of Europe, and made the unrighteous tremble.” Not only do ancient texts inform the present and animate the future but, in the case of Judaism, the memory of these texts and their meanings have never wholly gone underground. The inheritance of the great civilizations of Greece and Rome was “dug from the tomb,” while the inheritance of the Jews has “never ceased to quiver in millions of human frames” (DD 596).

Daniel Deronda must learn that Jewishness, which he initially assumes to be hopelessly archaic, has a modern incarnation that is vibrant and generative. His original view of Judaism does not differ tremendously from the view of the Gypsies that plagues Eliot’s poem: he regards it as “a sort of eccentric fossilized form,” unworthy of study or contemporary scholarship. It is through his encounters with Mirah that he comes to see Judaism as “still something throbbing in human lives, still making for them the only conceivable vesture of the world” (DD 411). It is important to Eliot’s revision of The Spanish Gypsy that Deronda’s journey of individual identity bring him a revelation of Jewish modernity through empathy for a loved one. The intellectual and the affective are fused in a way that makes his discovery of origin ennobling and redemptive rather than, as with Fedalma, constricting, isolating, and preclusive of love. For the Gypsy woman, heroism comes at the cost of what Eliot calls “the ordinary lot of womanhood,” and gender, as well as archaicism, freeze her in an impossible mythic present linked to neither living history nor future.