ABSTRACT
Through a reading of her last novel Daniel Deronda, this chapter traces Eliot’s increasingly explicit transition late in her career from an ethics based on the presumption of a fundamental human communion to an ethics based on the recognition and respect of differences and of difference as such. It follows this development specifically through the protagonist Daniel’s shift over the course of the plot from an unrestricted, impartial cosmopolitan ethics to a more restricted, partial cosmopolitanism. Eliot exposes a self-referential egoism in Daniel’s earlier impartiality. And she conversely reveals an awareness of and respect for differences in his later partiality, specifically in his insistence on his own separateness as a Jew from the novel’s many gentile characters. Eliot uses Daniel’s Jewishness as a means to highlight the ethical value of separateness as such. And she posits the acknowledgment of this separateness as the necessary foundation for any genuine ethical relationship and friendship between oneself and another, as here between Daniel and his co-protagonist Gwendolen Grandcourt.
