Abstract
George Eliot’s historical novel Romola reflects in a particularly obvious way her use of fiction as a means to test the powers and possibilities of various forms of humanism. Set in fifteenth-century Florence, this ‘experiment’ poses in dramatic form many of the issues that have dominated ethics since the Greeks. However, as always, it was George Eliot’s intention that the novel’s depiction of ethical situations be more than merely diagrammatic. As she explained in a famous letter, she sought to present a ‘picture’, not a ‘diagram’.1 The ‘aesthetic’ teacher aspired to what she considered the highest office of art: the arousing and guidance of sympathy. Thus ‘the most effective writer is not he who announces a particular discovery, who convinces men of a particular conclusion, who demonstrates that this measure is right and that measure wrong; but he who rouses in others the activity that must issue in discovery’.2 Strictly didactic writing could not, she believed, move the reader to intelligent reflection: ‘Art is art, and tells its own story.’3
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Notes
Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince, tr. George Bull (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1961) p. 97.
For a discussion of the Comtean background and other aspects of the novel see Avrom Fleishman, The English Historical Novel: Walter Scott to Virginia Woolf (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1971) ch. 6.
A more favourable view is given in Andrew Sanders, The Victorian Historical Novel: 1840–1880 (London: Macmillan, 1978) ch. 8.
Baruch Hochman, The Test of Character: From the Victorian Novel to the Modern (Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1983).
Many accounts of the novel centre on Romola rather than Tito. For instance, Carole Robinson in ‘Romola: A Reading of the Novel’, Victorian Studies, VI (Sep 1962), argues that ‘the true conflicts of Romola occur within the heroine’ (p. 30).
See John Goode’s discussion of money and related matters in the novel: ‘The Persuasive Mystery of Style: The Wings of the Dove’, in John Goode (ed.), The Air of Reality: New Essays on Henry James (London: Methuen, 1972).
The novel has aroused widespread critical disagreement. See, for example, Sallie Sears, The Negative Imagination: Form and Perspective in the Novels of Henry James (New York: Cornell University Press, 1968), where she argues that ‘It is possible … to go through the novel and show the principal agents are not responsible for what happens; it is also possible to show that they are’ (p. 85); and
Quentin Anderson, The American Henry James (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1957), which contends that in the novel ‘the complexity lies simply in the notation of the shifting relations between things which are as definable as musical notes’ (p. 244).
For one reading see George Sebouhian, ‘The Transcendental Imagination of Merton Densher’, Modern Language Studies, V (1975) p. 33–45.
Again, there is disagreement here. Jean Kimball, ‘The Abyss and The Wings of the Dove’, Nineteenth-Century Fiction, X (Mar 1956), believes that ‘The real drama in The Wings of the Dove is the subjective drama, the entirely inward struggle for her own salvation which occupies Milly Theale during her time in London and Venice’ (p. 296).
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© 1986 Richard Freadman
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Freadman, R. (1986). Morality: Romola and The Wings of the Dove. In: Eliot, James and the Fictional Self. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-18444-6_6
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