Practiced by Jews, so that evidence of circumcision amounted to evidence of Jewish origin. The period in which Deronda's story takes place, male babies were not routinely circumcized. The referent – to la chose, in fact: the 115hero's phallus, which must have been circumcized, given what we are told of his history. The text's insistent reference leads relentlessly to The authority of the discourse but effectively disrupts its coherence. Insistence on the hero's specifically Jewish identity not only puts in question But Daniel Deronda employs a discourse that cannot accommodate such Up the spiritual and cultural tradition of Judaism’, since the narrator, she claims, makes it clear that to be a Jew Of Deronda but also a physical transformation of the type found in fairy tales. This ‘detail’ became the central element in a deconstructive readingĬhase argues that the novel demands not only a spiritual conversion on the part Must be invisible, or non-existent – which is one more demonstration in detail of why the plot does not in fact work. In order for the plot of Daniel Deronda to work, Deronda's circumcised penis What this has to mean – given the conventions of medical practice at the time – is that he never It is only when he is a grown man, having been to Eton and Cambridge, that he discovers that Mr Davis has discovered a detail – or a missing detail – in Daniel Deronda that throws the whole central plot of the novel out of kilter.

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