Daniel Deronda, George Eliot [portable ebook reader .TXT] 📗

are a young copy of him in your face. He never comprehended me, or if he did, he only thought of fettering me into obedience. I was to be what he called ‘the Jewish woman’ under pain of his curse. I was to feel everything I did not feel, and believe everything I did not believe. I was to feel awe for the bit of parchment in the mezuza over the door; to dread lest a bit of butter should touch a bit of meat; to think it beautiful that men should bind the tephillin on them, and women not⁠—to adore the wisdom of such laws, however silly they might seem to me. I was to love the long prayers in the ugly synagogue, and the howling, and the gabbling, and the dreadful fasts, and the tiresome feasts, and my father’s endless discoursing about our people, which was a thunder without meaning in my ears. I was to care forever about what Israel had been; and I did not care at all. I cared for the wide world, and all that I could represent in it. I hated living under the shadow of my father’s strictness. Teaching, teaching for everlasting⁠—‘this you must be,’ ‘that you must not be’⁠—pressed on me like a frame that got tighter and tighter as I grew. I wanted to live a large life, with freedom to do what everyone else did, and be carried along in a great current, not obliged to care. Ah!”⁠—here her tone changed to one of a more bitter incisiveness⁠—“you are glad to have been born a Jew. You say so. That is because you have not been brought up as a Jew. That separateness seems sweet to you because I saved you from it.”

“When you resolved on that, you meant that I should never know my origin?” said Deronda, impulsively. “You have at least changed in your feeling on that point.”

“Yes, that was what I meant. That is what I persevered in. And it is not true to say that I have changed. Things have changed in spite of me. I am still the same Leonora”⁠—she pointed with her forefinger to her breast⁠—“here within me is the same desire, the same will, the same choice, but”⁠—she spread out her hands, palm upward, on each side of her, as she paused with a bitter compression of her lip, then let her voice fall into muffled, rapid utterance⁠—“events come upon us like evil enchantments: and thoughts, feelings, apparitions in the darkness are events⁠—are they not? I don’t consent. We only consent to what we love. I obey something tyrannic”⁠—she spread out her hands again⁠—“I am forced to be withered, to feel pain, to be dying slowly. Do I love that? Well, I have been forced to obey my dead father. I have been forced to tell you that you are a Jew, and deliver to you what he commanded me to deliver.”

“I beseech you to tell me what moved you⁠—when you were young, I mean⁠—to take the course you did,” said Deronda, trying by this reference to the past to escape from what to him was the heartrending piteousness of this mingled suffering and defiance. “I gather that my grandfather opposed your bent to be an artist. Though my own experience has been quite different, I enter into the painfulness of your struggle. I can imagine the hardship of an enforced renunciation.”

“No,” said the Princess, shaking her head and folding her arms with an air of decision. “You are not a woman. You may try⁠—but you can never imagine what it is to have a man’s force of genius in you, and yet to suffer the slavery of being a girl. To have a pattern cut out⁠—‘this is the Jewish woman; this is what you must be; this is what you are wanted for; a woman’s heart must be of such a size and no larger, else it must be pressed small, like Chinese feet; her happiness is to be made as cakes are, by a fixed receipt.’ That was what my father wanted. He wished I had been a son; he cared for me as a makeshift link. His heart was set on his Judaism. He hated that Jewish women should be thought of by the Christian world as a sort of ware to make public singers and actresses of. As if we were not the more enviable for that! That is a chance of escaping from bondage.”

“Was my grandfather a learned man?” said Deronda, eager to know particulars that he feared his mother might not think of.

She answered impatiently, putting up her hand, “Oh, yes⁠—and a clever physician⁠—and good: I don’t deny that he was good. A man to be admired in a play⁠—grand, with an iron will. Like the old Foscari before he pardons. But such men turn their wives and daughters into slaves. They would rule the world if they could; but not ruling the world, they throw all the weight of their will on the necks and souls of women. But nature sometimes thwarts them. My father had no other child than his daughter, and she was like himself.”

She had folded her arms again, and looked as if she were ready to face some impending attempt at mastery.

“Your father was different. Unlike me⁠—all lovingness and affection. I knew I could rule him; and I made him secretly promise me, before I married him, that he would put no hindrance in the way of my being an artist. My father was on his deathbed when we were married: from the first he had fixed his mind on my marrying my cousin Ephraim. And when a woman’s will is as strong as the man’s who wants to govern her, half her strength must be concealment. I meant to have my will in the end, but I could only have it by seeming to obey. I had an awe of my father⁠—always I had had an