Troubling Classifications: Reading Genealogies and the Composite Human in Daniel Deronda

Despite insisting that "human beings" crowd around gambling tables in the opening of Daniel Deronda, this classification becomes unstable once the narrator systematically replaces human features with animal ones: the "bony, yellow, crab-like hand…easy to sort with the square gaunt face…seemed a slight metamorphosis of the vulture." Alongside animal imagery, terms like "sort" signal Eliot's investment in a pillar of evolutionary theory—classification. This essay first explores how classification provides a reading of Deronda within George Henry Lewes's theories of mental inheritance to evaluate the path by which he comes to discover his Judaism, then moves to examine how classification complicates the novel's representation of "human beings" while providing insight into the relationship between Gwendolen and the novel's chief predator. Reading the compositeness of the novel's characters alongside Eliot's own philosophy of individual composition integrates the novel's "two halves" and exposes the compositeness of the individual.