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Adoption in Silas Marner and Daniel Deronda Marianne Novy Adoption as a theme appears significantly again and again in George Eliot's novels . Very often, in the plot of those novels, an adoptee must choose between a biological heritage and an adoptive one. Eppie in Silas Marner and Esther in Felix Holt both, at the crucial moment, choose their adoptive father. However, in two works written near the end ofEliot's career, the pattern seems to be reversed: the adoptee in her poetic drama The Spanish Gypsy chooses her gypsy ancestry, and the adoptee in Daniel Deronda chooses to identify with his hereditary Jewishness . Why was Eliot so interested in adoption? And why is there such a reversal in the choices her adoptees make? Eliot's representations ofadoption and adoptees are plot devices and, as Bernard Semmel points out in George Eliot and the Politics ofNational Inheritance, ways of dealing with the nation's cultural past and recent social change.l But I want to analyze them as well in terms of their specificity precisely as analyses of adoption, as I compare the best known of these four works-Silas Marner and Daniel Deronda. The number of adoptions in Eliot's and other nineteenth-century English novels is particularly striking because the institution was not legally formalized in England at that time. Figures on the frequency of informal adoptions are impossible to obtain (partly because of the difficulty of determining what counts as adoption, ifit is informal), and historians differ significantly in their guesses.2 But George Eliot was not adopted in any of the usual senses. Nor were most of her readers. We are dealing to a large extent with adoption as the precondition for the family romance plot, adoption in its mythic dimension-the fantasy that people develop to deal with uncongenial parents by imagining better parents elsewhere. Indeed, this fantasy-related to Eliot's experience ofalienation in her own family oforigin-enters into her most directly autobiographical novel, The Mill on the Floss, when Maggie imagines the gypsies as her "unknown kindred."3 Nevertheless, the most immediate variety of adoption in George Eliot's horizon was her own relation to G. H. Lewes's sons. In 1859, when she and Lewes made their own mutual commitment that would have been marriage except for the law forbidding Lewes to divorce his unfaithful wife, Lewes's oldest son Charles, then sixteen, wrote her a letter in which he addressed her as "Mother."4 35 36 Imagining Adoption Rosemarie Bodenheimer has traced in detail George Eliot's relation to her three stepsons and has noted, "her focus on children brought up by substitute parents , and her privileging offostering over kinship, was a dominant feature ofher imagination from 1860 to the end of her career; the experience of her stepsons gave her the authority for those imagined lives."5 When Charles began to call her "mother," Eliot was forty, the same age Silas is when little Eppie wanders into his home. When Charles came to live with them, she and Lewes moved to a home in town (although she preferred the country), because Charles needed to live near his work. These biographical details are surely among the reasons why Silas Marncr, as Eliot put it, "thrust itself " on her to interrupt her work on Romola at this time.6 She was thinking about child rearing, in particular about the rearing of a child not born to her. Silas Marner rewrites the plot of many earlier novels and plays in which a character is reunited with biological parents. Godfrey Cass refuses to acknowledge the wife he has secretly married. When she dies, their daughter, Eppie, wanders into the home of the poor, isolated weaver Silas. Silas raises her with much love; she flourishes, and through his concern for Eppie, Silas develops ties with many other people. After manyyears, childless byhis acknowledged wife, Nancy, Godfrey reveals himself to Silas and Eppie as her father and asks her to return to him. He says, "I have a natural claim on her that must stand before every other" (169),7 but she does not agree. In one sense, this conflict is a dramatized custody case. But instead of the legal system, Eppie herself-and the readers-must decide which family she should choose. Nancy's father believes that "breed [is] stronger than pasture" (98),R but Silas Marner challenges this belief-unless breed is redefined. How does Eppie's rejection of heredity in favor of...

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