While some very insightful criticism has recognized the importance of acting, especially for women, throughout George Eliot's Daniel Deronda, this dramatic thread has yet to be analyzed to its fullest potential. The theatre is often marked as a unique site which enables a permeability of the boundaries between imagination and reality. I investigate how Eliot exploits this theatrical blurring of boundaries in Daniel Deronda, carrying this transgression to a new level altogether. In her novel, a character's thoughts are subsequently transferred into and enacted in reality. In other words, a character's thoughts become "performative". My project will first demonstrate how this phenomenon more generally works for the character of Mordecai, whom Eliot uses to "set the stage" and prepare the reader for the subsequently more powerful thinking capabilities of Gwendolen, the central subject of my discussion because of the relationship between her gender and her unique inner capacities. As the most dramatic character but also as a Victorian woman, Gwendolen's thinking then becomes particularly performativeÌÄå¢Ì¢åâåÂÌ¢åÛå her concentration of mental energy, built up under the strain of her marriage, releases into the physical world to murder her husband. My project offers critical payoff in elucidating the interplay between performativity and gender, which gets at that mystical quality of the performative itself. Additionally, my thesis adds to that usual critical discourse on Eliot and detachment, including the relationship between sympathy, possession, and models of reading. Evidence for my analysis is drawn from close readings of the text, as well as Victorian theatre theory, Eliot's other fiction, and concurrent work by Eliot's partner G.H. Lewes. Daniel Deronda, as a development away from Eliot's high realist fiction, offers a powerful model of the capacity and worth of female thought for consumption by a Victorian female readership.