Summary
English novelist whose last novel Daniel Deronda (1876) Said reads in Chapter Two as an assenting Gentile response to Zionism, legitimating it from within high liberal-capitalist culture while taking no account of Palestine’s actual inhabitants. The novel is fiction; events and speeches inside it are the novel’s, not facts.
Details
- In Said’s reading, the novel alternates a comedy of manners among a rootless British upper bourgeoisie with Daniel Deronda’s discovery of his Jewish identity and discipleship under Mordecai Ezra Cohen; it ends with Daniel and Mirah marrying and travelling to Palestine (in the novel) (The Question of Palestine, PDF p.81-82 / printed p.60-61).
- Said argues Eliot can sustain her admiration of Zionism only by seeing it as transforming the East into the West, and expresses complete indifference, by absolute silence, to the peoples of the East as people with wishes and aspirations; she is placed beside John Stuart Mill and Karl Marx as thinkers who held European liberties inapplicable in the Orient (The Question of Palestine, PDF p.84-87 / printed p.63-66).