Daniel Deronda (is boring but I love him anyway)

Ok, so my first post will be dedicated to George Eliot's Daniel Deronda, a book I finished last week (or the week before? Days are blurring together...). First, let me say that I am a devoted Eliot fan: if I could steal a brain and take it on as my own, hers would be high up on the list (along with Virginia Woolf). I love her ability to depict humanity in all its glory and dirt--particularly with characters like Gwendolyn in Deronda. My friend Tony says Gwendolyn is his favorite character in all of literature, and while I've never really thought about who my favorite character across the board is, I do love Gwendolyn with a special love. Gwendolyn knows who she is: she knows that she is selfish, small, petty, and ignorant, and she does not apologize for it. She is initially fatigued by these unfortunate facts (but with the fatigue of a bored princess), but through her interactions with Daniel Deronda, she becomes bent on rehabilitating her shallow soul. Her turn toward perfection is a little too much for me, but I do love her messiness. It gives me hope for my own messy soul.

Deronda himself is too perfect to be true (so is Mirah, his love). He's righteous, intelligent, devoted, selfless, reflective, and any other good adjective you can think of--and that's it. Thus the title of my post. His boringness didn't really occur to me until I finished the book though; while I was reading it I was loving him and wanting to be more like him, just as Gwendolyn was. But at the end, I thought, "Humph. So that's all there was to him? Just one dimension of perfection." Which is what we always say we want in a man (by we I mean women who love romance, like myself), but in the end, it's kind of boring. It's almost like Eliot wrote Deronda to be a philosophy or a worldview, more than a character. That is, he's not really human in the way Gwendolyn is...he's not messy enough. His primary purpose seems to be more to establish what humans "should" be/do/want/think in the book. In the end, he's sort of like a cardboard cutout of The Man of My Dreams. Looks great, but there's nothing behind the shiny outside. Here's to messy humanity!