". . . ignorance gives one a large range of probabilities." George Elliot (Daniel Deronda)
Last night I was finally able to watch Daniel Deronda, another one of those novels I have placed on my list for when I someday get to teach a class on novels in the Victorian Age (if ever). What is so clearly illustrated in the movie is how tragic it is that we go through life misinformed and misinforming. When we do not know ourselves, we pretend to be something ... we fill in the gaps of our knowledge of ourselves with unsubstanciated default assertions that are rarely true in the end. We do the same with others. where there are gaps in our understanding of others, we tend to fill in the gaps with fictions and so much of our relational lives are lived as fictional characters meeting fictional characters. "How can we meet face to face till we have faces?" C.S. Lewis once asked and it is a question that we should be asking ourselves over and over. "I wish you could know everything about my life without my telling you" Gwendolyn says at one point in time in the movie. I suppose that is something we ALL wish of some of our relationships in life. Maybe that's why I keep a blog?
I suppose the essential difference between Daniel Deronda and Gwendolyn Harleth is in how they react to what they do not know. He has gaps in his understanding of himself but none that he has chosen and when he gets a chance to replace ignorance born of assumptions, he does. Gwendolyn on the other hand seems to be willing to pretend that she can be other than what she is. Or maybe simply to pretend that she can be a part of who she is and not have the other part mind. In the face of Hendleigh Grandcourt's manipulations, she looses herself. She looses her fierce desire for independence and autonomy and trades it all in for a financial security that she thinks is of more value to her.
I suppose the sad thing about this period, particularly for women, is that the choice to be independent was so difficult to achieve ... and indeed, men of this era had made it so. One might regard Daniel Deronda as "the better person" but ... one should not forget that he was a man and a man of inherited means at that. In short, he could afford to be a better person than Gwendolyn because he HAD a benefactor that did not demand his soul in exchange for his support. What, I wonder, would Gwendolyn and Daniel have turned out to be if their curcumstances in that regard had been reversed? If Gwendolyn had had a "Sir Hugo" to provide for her future, I don't think she would have compromised in her marital decisions at all.
The fact is that life does force us to compromise between important values sometimes. Gwendolyn happened to believe in the Victorian assumption that a woman's role in life was to sacrifice for men and for family and, to her own sorrow, she does so in whom she decides to marry. Daniel doesn't but ... he is not put in a position where he looses his source of income for marrying someone other than who Sir Hugo approves.
But I wonder. My original point simply was that wherever we are ignorant about ourselves or the people we relate to, we tend to fill the ignorant spaces up with conjectures that are, I suspect, almost always wrong. And as long as we continue to do this, we will be inevitably making poor relational decisions because those decisions will not be based on the TRUTH of who we are and who they are. I tend to think this is why we can find ourselves confused in our new relationships as we experience, over the course of time, old relationships foundering on the rocks of experiencial knowledge. "The moment of finding a fellow-creature is often as full of mingled doubt and exultation," George Elliot (Mariann Evans) writes in Daniel Deronda "as the moment of finding an idea." After you have been fooled, either by others or yourself, enough times, you doubt whether your first impressions of anyone can be true. "There is a great deal of unmapped country within us" she continues, "which would have to be taken into account in an explanation of our gusts and storms."
Question for Comment: What sort of experiences have helped you to get to know yourself better? What sort of curcumstances have allowed you to get to know others better most efficiently?
I think I myself enjoy talking but sometimes I wonder if I require more now ... after have been talked out over a number of cliffs in my life. "Speech is but broken light upon the depth of the unspoken" Elliot wrote in her book, The Spanish Gypsy. Maybe it is important for me to get to know people by means of more than just writing? Maybe I am not as bad at judging who they are as I think I am. I just fail to make use of more than speech.
I suppose the essential difference between Daniel Deronda and Gwendolyn Harleth is in how they react to what they do not know. He has gaps in his understanding of himself but none that he has chosen and when he gets a chance to replace ignorance born of assumptions, he does. Gwendolyn on the other hand seems to be willing to pretend that she can be other than what she is. Or maybe simply to pretend that she can be a part of who she is and not have the other part mind. In the face of Hendleigh Grandcourt's manipulations, she looses herself. She looses her fierce desire for independence and autonomy and trades it all in for a financial security that she thinks is of more value to her.
I suppose the sad thing about this period, particularly for women, is that the choice to be independent was so difficult to achieve ... and indeed, men of this era had made it so. One might regard Daniel Deronda as "the better person" but ... one should not forget that he was a man and a man of inherited means at that. In short, he could afford to be a better person than Gwendolyn because he HAD a benefactor that did not demand his soul in exchange for his support. What, I wonder, would Gwendolyn and Daniel have turned out to be if their curcumstances in that regard had been reversed? If Gwendolyn had had a "Sir Hugo" to provide for her future, I don't think she would have compromised in her marital decisions at all.
The fact is that life does force us to compromise between important values sometimes. Gwendolyn happened to believe in the Victorian assumption that a woman's role in life was to sacrifice for men and for family and, to her own sorrow, she does so in whom she decides to marry. Daniel doesn't but ... he is not put in a position where he looses his source of income for marrying someone other than who Sir Hugo approves.
But I wonder. My original point simply was that wherever we are ignorant about ourselves or the people we relate to, we tend to fill the ignorant spaces up with conjectures that are, I suspect, almost always wrong. And as long as we continue to do this, we will be inevitably making poor relational decisions because those decisions will not be based on the TRUTH of who we are and who they are. I tend to think this is why we can find ourselves confused in our new relationships as we experience, over the course of time, old relationships foundering on the rocks of experiencial knowledge. "The moment of finding a fellow-creature is often as full of mingled doubt and exultation," George Elliot (Mariann Evans) writes in Daniel Deronda "as the moment of finding an idea." After you have been fooled, either by others or yourself, enough times, you doubt whether your first impressions of anyone can be true. "There is a great deal of unmapped country within us" she continues, "which would have to be taken into account in an explanation of our gusts and storms."
Question for Comment: What sort of experiences have helped you to get to know yourself better? What sort of curcumstances have allowed you to get to know others better most efficiently?
I think I myself enjoy talking but sometimes I wonder if I require more now ... after have been talked out over a number of cliffs in my life. "Speech is but broken light upon the depth of the unspoken" Elliot wrote in her book, The Spanish Gypsy. Maybe it is important for me to get to know people by means of more than just writing? Maybe I am not as bad at judging who they are as I think I am. I just fail to make use of more than speech.
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