Abstract
Eliot’s next novel, Romola, represents a radical departure from Silas Marner, in terms both of setting and of plot: here Eliot moves the action of her narrative to fifteenth-century Italy, and it closes with a description of what appears to be the first matriarchal family in Eliot’s fiction. From the beginning, Romola has been the subject of hostile criticism directed at both its preponderance of historical detail and its failure to focus exclusively on Savonarola, its historical hero. In recent years, however, some critics have responded to such objections by equating Romola Bardi’s experience with ‘man’s moral history’ and tracing in the novel’s plot the narrative patterns of the epic, the morality play, the allegory, the fable, the Bildungsroman, and, most recently, the ‘“continuous historical” apocalypse’.1 Most of these readings concentrate on the stages of Romola’s personal development: from her early attachment to a pagan father, through her phase of commitment to Savonarola’s Christianity, and finally to her independent assumption of a new sympathetic morality — viewed by many as analogous to Comte’s Religion of Humanity. Such a teleological reading is complicated, however, not only by its unquestioning assumption of a myth of historical progression, but also by the fact that Eliot has chosen as her emblematic human figure a female character whose place in her historical setting is overdetermined by her gender.
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Notes
The allusion to ‘man’s moral history’ is taken from Felicia Bonaparte, The Triptych and the Cross: The Central Myths of George Eliot’s Imagination (New York, New York University Press, 1979) p. 72.
Wilson Carpenter, George Eliot and the Landscape of Time: Narrative Form and Protestant Apocalyptic History (Chapel Hill, NC, University of North Carolina Press, 1986) p. 61.
F.R. Leavis, The Great Tradition: George Eliot, Henry James, Joseph Conrad (New York: New York University Press, 1963) p. 49.
Margaret Homans, Bearing the Word: Language and Female Experience in Nineteenth-Century Women’s Writing (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1986) pp. 206–7.
George Eliot, ‘Margaret Fuller and Mary Wollstonecraft’, Leader 6 (13 Oct. 1855): 988–9
George Eliot, A Writer’s Notebook 1854–1879 and Uncollected Writings, ed. Joseph Wiesenfarth (Charlottesville, Va, University Press of Virginia, 1981) p. 56.
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© 1992 Kristin Brady
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Brady, K. (1992). Romola to The Spanish Gypsy: Fictions of Gender and History. In: George Eliot. Women Writers. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-21899-8_5
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