ABSTRACT
"Just think of having lovely little fays bathing in the veins," ponders a sister in the New Life in 1881. Daniel Deronda, the title character of Eliot's final novel, makes some similar observations. Daniel Deronda serves as a prime example of how mysticism may reshape the concept of personal identity—a trope that occurs very frequently within Victorian fiction. Gwendolen Harleth is presented in the first book of Daniel Deronda as a spoiled child. Early in the novel, Gwendolen is told by the artist Klesmer that she is unsuited to the stage—lacking the talent of a true artist. Rex immediately presumes that the influence and possessions of the dead Grandcourt will transfer to his widow—which in effect is exactly what Gwendolen had hoped to have from the marriage from the start. Possessed individualism is a way of describing the changing consciousness of the individual. The individual can no longer be imagined or hypothesized to exist exclusively as a single, autonomous entity.
