TALK: The Danger of Art in George Eliot's Daniel Deronda
Rachel Mann (IHC Senior Fellow)
Wednesday, November 4 / 12:00 PM
McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB
In Daniel Deronda, Eliot frequently incorporates visual art into her heroine Gwendolen Harleth's moments of physical stillness:the author's temporary prohibitions of movement reveal her character's interior feelings and show the moral consequences of focusing on exterior beauty. Gwendolen continually voices her desire to look like different kinds of art objects: in her moments of stillness, she fantasizes about using her beauty to escape to a higher status through appearing like a piece of visual art. Yet Gwendolen suffers because of this desire; her aspiration to become an immobile art object turns out to be potentially fatal--and threatens to stifle her selfhood and her inner feeling--when she marries the wrong man.
Sponsored by the IHC’s Senior Fellow program.
