(Said, ‘Zionism’ 127) Said’s monolithic vision of the novel’s participation in a morally condemnable imperialism distorts our understanding of what Nancy Henry calls the ‘text’s mimetic and moral subtleties’ (Henry 113). 2 Said reduces Daniel Deronda to an illustration of Eliot’s alleged imperialist mind frame, which understands Zionism (‘a Jewish movement for colonial settlement in the Orient’) as a project that is ‘epistemologically, hence historically and politically’ akin to British colonialism as it relegates the colonized other to silence, and renders them dispensable (Said, ‘Zionism’ 127 and 140): 3 ‘here is an unmistakable coincidence between the experiences of Arab Palestinians at the hands of Zionism and the experiences of those black, yellow, and brown people who were described as inferior and subhuman by nineteenth-century imperialists’. 1 Said’s analysis of George Eliot’s final novel is open to criticism in many ways, due to its one-sided condemnation of Eliot as another nineteenth-century representative of the ‘club of empire’, which includes, according to Said, the likes of J. S. Mill, Arnold, Carlyle, Newman, Macaulay, Ruskin, Disraeli, Dickens, Kipling, Conrad, Haggard, and Stevenson. 5 For essays that rather unquestioningly repeat Said's argument see particularly those by Robbins and (.)ġ Edward Said, in his essay ‘Zionism from the Standpoint of Its Victims’, called Daniel Deronda ‘an exotic young man’ (Said, ‘Zionism’ 120).4 Hardy establishes Deronda as ‘fairly complex in psychological presentation' he is complicated, mov (.).3 See also Said, Culture and Imperialism 63: ‘For Disraeli's Tancred and Eliot's Daniel Deronda, the (.).2 Said, ‘Zionism’ 123: ‘Eliot cannot sustain her admiration of Zionism except by seeing it as a metho (.).1 The other most obvious male exotic character in George Eliot's work is, of course, Will Ladislaw in (.).

Daniel deronda cliff notes