Becoming A Cosmopolitan Patriot

Daniel Deronda is the last novel of George Eliot.Compared with her previous works,Daniel Deronda explores a wider range of topics,such as nationalism,Zionism,empire and cosmopolitanism.Since its publication,critics had always been cutting the novel into scraps.However,it violates the author's original intention that the book is an organic whole,and "everything in the book is related to everything else."Reading the novel from the New Criticism approach by analyzing its form and characterizations,early critics reach the conclusion that Daniel Deronda is made up of two tenuously linked parts,the English part and the Jewish part.This interpretation profoundly influenced many later scholars who include either of the two parts in their discussions.The readings from the vantage point of "national identity" or "Jewish identity" only take Deronda and the other Jewish characters into consideration,overlooking Gwendolen;whereas the feminist or post-colonialist approach only focus on the entanglements between Gwendolen and Grandcourt.Nevertheless,neither nationalism nor imperialism is the theme running through the book.This paper then,reading the novel as a whole,tries to figure out the threading theme of the book by borrowing findings and ideas on nations,nationalism and cosmopolitanism from various thinkers.This paper explores the ethical implications of Deronda's decision to be a cosmopolitan patriot with the help of Kwame Anthony Appiah's theories on cosmopolitanism,and then analyzes the ethical and moral values of the Meyricks'unconditional hospitality to the Jewess Mirah,and finally arguing that George Eliot interrogates both local loyalties and universal sympathies in the novel and manages to reconcile the two in a form of partial cosmopolitanism,which demands two kinds of responsibilities from the individuals simultaneously.The paper argues that in the novel,a unified national identity plays an important part in defining and locating the uprooted peoples in diaspora suffering from hybrid identities or no identities at all.However,it does not mean that there is authorial preference of nationalism over cosmopolitanism in the novel.By analyzing Eliot's dramatic characterization of the narcissistic Gwendolen and the hospitable Meyricks who respect racial and religious differences and welcome the absolute Other,the paper further contends that receiving the Other with unconditional hospitality is the way out for the aloof and superior English gentries,and it suggests that Daniel Deronda can be read as a cosmopolitan novel in this sense.But at the same time,universality and impartiality is also critiqued by the novelist when she censures Deronda's multi-faceted sympathies and orientates him towards a cosmopolitan patriot whose paramount sympathies go to his families and kinsmen from the same race,but at the same time remains hospitable to the universal mankind.Therefore,in the novel Eliot reconciles the responsibilities for the nation and also for the strangers of other nations.It demonstrates that choosing to identify with one's nation and compatriots does not necessarily result in ignorance to or hostility to people from other races,and thus transcends the antagonist relationship between nationalism and cosmopolitanism assumed by many critics.