Italian Mythmaking in Romola

Abstract

In 1863 Robert Browning called Romola ‘the noblest and most heroic prose-poem’.¹ It is indeed a novel with epic pretensions which tries to unite the particular historic moment with myth in ‘an attempt to explore the present in the context of the past, and to probe, at the same time, the external human condition’.² Felicia Bonaparte argues cogently that Eliot’s novel deals with nothing less than the development and future of the whole of western civilization.³ George Eliot herself defined her novel of Romola as a ‘historical romance’ and in the work she unites the two great shaping traditions in European literature, of realism and romance, in a wider examination of history in an ‘orphaned’ age, to determine whether the past could provide a creed for the present. History, no longer merely the context of the novel, becomes its subject. Eliot here speaks through mythology, particularly the myths of the Graeco-Roman and Christian worlds, to create her own mythopoesis in the service of her overall vision. The great quest myths of Homer and Virgil were for Eliot a symbolic expression of the collective human consciousness, and the concrete facts of history were, she believed, the continuing embodiment of the great universal myths.