Pharmakos, Pharmakeus, and George Eliot's Narrative Rhetoric

This essay uses the concepts of the pharmakos and the pharmakeus from Derrida's “Plato's Pharmacy” to describe the relationship between George Eliot's scapegoated characters and the narrators that structure her novels' systems of value. Focusing in particular on Hans Meyrick of Daniel Deronda and Theophrastus of Impressions of Theophrastus Such, this essay argues that Eliot's apparent scapegoats are not designed to affirm the moral vision of Eliot's narrators through negative exemplarity: rather, pharmakos and pharmakeus together generate a complex narrative rhetoric that cannot be reduced to an affirmation of either side's values or authority.