From Home to Homeland: The Bohemian in Daniel Deronda (1998)

Humiliated at the gambling tables of the continent, Gwendolyn Harleth returns to her English homeland and to Offendene. Just large enough to be called a mansion, Offendene difficult to rent because it has no landed property attached to it and so rather too anxiously ornamented with stone, an adverbial mismodifier that inscribes English architecture with the signs that all not well in the state of England. Gentility, however, still self-evident: But inside and outside it was what no beholder could suppose to be inhabited by retired tradespeople: a which was worth many conveniences to tenants who not only had the taste that shrinks from new finery, but also were in the of rank where annexation a burning topic. (1:28) Socio-economic anxiety, the possibility of falling into a lower class, assuaged here by the certainty of having taste. But the sentence nevertheless culminates in a striking metonymic figure: the English upper classes are depicted as a border-territory vulnerable to annexation. Despite the of taste, the Englishmen of the passage face a double-edged threat in an annexation of which they may be either objects or agents. Collapsing anxiety and ambition in this way hypothetical annexation presumes a plot of social positioning perfectly in keeping with the conventions of the Continental drawing-room comedy of manners. What interesting here, however, that the domestic discourse of the manor house taken over by territorial tropes. Interrupting the description of the Offendene home, a new catechrestic figure emerges: the geopolitical rhetoric that seizes on a border-territory's vulnerability to annexation in order to represent socioeconomic uncertainty presumes that it possible to match the idea of a home to the idea of a national territory. In this sense the domestic figure that dominates Gwendolyn's homecoming not only conveys a sense of nationalistic anxiety, but locates that anxiety in a particular social class. As Bourdieu has maintained, this class not defined, as Marx would have it, by its economic relationship to the means of production, but by a complicated notion of prestige--a prestige whose reactionary anti-materialist modesty relies nevertheless on a tacit elitism. So it that the shabby somber furniture and faded upholstery (1:28) of Offendene, Gwendolyn's subjunctive home, morally preferable to the wealthy and onomastically tainted Diplow and Ryelands. Removed both from secure land and from capitalist enterprise, the that functions as Gwendolyn's adopted home tells the story of the way in which class identity can be somehow implicated in an unsettled sense of national consciousness. The passage thus indicates that the English novel of 1876 no longer about class, but about nation. Given these variables, it no wonder that the domestic lines of development of Daniel Deronda will ultimately turn away from the home and towards a more abstracted community: the homeland. Although the domestic community of a household can be abstracted, in theory, in the minds of those who have left it, it can also be experienced first hand. The domestic community of a nation, however, can only be imagined. As Benedict Anderson has argued, the nation is imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion.(2) Abstracted, imagined, the community of the nation poses a set of new difficulties for the narrating of late-nineteenth-century domesticity. Offendene Gwendolyn's subjunctive home in the sense that Eliot uses this house that not home as an occasion for ruminating on the origins of that wider life--that broader vision whose conspicuous absence of such pressing concern to the narrator: Pity that Offendene was not the home of Miss Harleth's childhood, or endeared to her by family memories! …