“That Blent Transmission”

Abstract

Abstract Daniel Deronda responds to women’s changing property rights through Gwendolen’s story and also its “Jewish plot” of cultural inheritance. Together, the narratives map contemporary tensions between social and legal definitions of ownership. If, as the chapter suggests, the novel’s so-called “English marriage plot” uses diamond theft to stage the competing economic claims of wives and sons, its “Jewish plot” uses stolen diamonds to resolve this familial conflict by consolidating more fluid kinship ties. This “blent transmission” of spiritual inheritance counters the fraught transfer of Gwendolen’s diamonds through a form of inalienable property that, despite “theft,” adheres to its path of descent. Eliot’s expansive conception of family ties beyond marriage, her understanding of non-monetary property value, and her defense of socially sanctioned transmission over property law also point to the shortcomings of that law and suggest some of the ways in which legal rights and individuals’ priorities attending personal property diverge.