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I wish to thank Carl Rotenberg for his thoughtful response to my essay on the relationship between Gwendolen Harleth and Daniel Deronda. I am afraid that we shall never agree on whether that relationship is therapeutic in nature, but I am indebted to Dr. Rotenberg for his brilliant account of the effect of Deronda's breaking “off peremptorily the intense transference relationship to Gwendolen,” and I intend to make use of it in the book I am writing on George Eliot. I shall comment on some of the issues Dr. Rotenberg has raised.
Dr. Rotenberg correctly observes that during a period of 35 years the self of the reader would have undergone extensive development and that I do not give much information about the transformations that occurred in me between my interpretation of George Eliot in Experiments in Life and my current responses. He looks forward to my expanding on this topic in another context. I have done so in “Middlemarch Revisited” (1999), and I deal with the topic at length in No Longer the Same Interpreter: Rereading George Eliot the book I am currently writing.
Dr. Rotenberg and I agree that Daniel Deronda is both a very great and a very flawed novel; but whereas he feels that my criticisms “go to the heart of Eliot's authorial integrity and competence,” I find her failings to be those which characterize almost all major realistic novelists. I do not believe that “if Eliot's rhetoric and her text [by which he means, I suppose, what I call ‘mimesis’] are at odds with one another, then the characters are wooden, and they may not carry any lasting influence.” Indeed, I believe the opposite, as I have expounded at length in Imagined Human Beings. Perhaps my favorite passage of literary criticism