DISTANT VIEWS:DANIEL DERONDA, ILLUSTRATED TRAVEL BOOKS, AND THE SPECTRE OF PALESTINE

Abstract

George Eliot'sDaniel Deronda(1876), a novel that spurred Zionism in Palestine, opens with a scene of watching and thus moves from a male gaze on a woman's body to a project of envisioning a new nation in a distant land. The national drama of the novel turns on the ideological meaning of gazing at landscape, as Daniel Deronda replaces one political perspective with another. Indeed, Mordecai's political dream of a Jewish national future involves “Looking towards a land” (454; bk. 6, ch. 42): his nationalist vision transpires as a gaze upon a far-off place. Colonial ambition itself can be understood as an ideological view of landscape as open to possession, a gaze on the territory of others that insists often violently on itself, to the exclusion of other political perspectives. Motivated not by sex but by moral and political domination, this colonial gaze nationalizes viewership, and makes the landscape it imagines real. For Deronda himself, nationality itself is a kind of viewership. He wants to study abroad, because, he says, “I want to be an Englishman, but I want to understand other points of view” (155; bk. 2, ch. 16). Being an Englishman is a “point of view,” a perspective to claim, to the possible exclusion of other nationalized ways of seeing landscapes both domestic and distant.