POOR MISS FINCH by Wilkie Collins

POOR MISS FINCH by Wilkie Collins

26 May 2009

Hello, Romola--chaps 1-5 (July 1862)

Dear Serial Readers,


Welcome to a collaborative reading of George Eliot's Romola. Here is the plan: each week I'll post a short entry on the installment of the novel. At the end of this post you can click "comment" (there will be a number, showing how many have left comments); you'll see a box where you can respond in any way you like to this segment. If you are purchasing or borrowing a copy, I recommend the Oxford edition because it includes the monthly divisions in which the novel was originally published in The Cornhill Magazine. But I'll also indicate weekly which chapters to read for the next installment, so any edition of the novel works (even the online version mentioned in the sidebar). Next week: chapters 6-10.


A bit of background first: George Smith, publisher of the magazine, secured the rights to publish Romola in The Cornhill only three weeks after Eliot began writing the novel. He paid her ten thousand pounds, an unprecedented sum, far more than any author had received at the time. Although originally Eliot agreed to write the novel in 12 parts of 32 pages each, in the end she wrote 14 installments. Because of the enormous amount of meticulous research Eliot folded into this historical novel, it was never received as "popular," but many critics considered it her "greatest." Henry James called Romola "the most important of George Eliot's works...the one in which the largest things are attempted and grasped."


As I began reading the novel, I marveled at how Eliot's narrator becomes a virtual tour guide conducting readers back in time to early modern Florence. The "Proem" (a word that almost suggests a hybrid genre--part prose, part poem--that suits the hybrid time of then/now) establishes how "we" might view a culture "three centuries and a half ago" (five centuries for us) from the present vantage point of "now" (a word that comes up often). This shuttling back and forth between "then" and "now" mediates the brief tour of the major sites of Florence including Brunelleschi's Duomo, the Pitti Palace, the Ponte Vecchio. If you are lucky enough to read this novel while touring Florence, you'll discover how the narrative provides an itinerary through the city, even calling attention to changes between "then" of 1492 and "now" of 1862. But if you're not able to make it to Florence, this novel is packed with historical and visual details, much like a thorough guidebook. The story only unfolds between the lines of this virtual tour, so I can imagine if early readers were eager for story over exposition, they might've felt impatient at first.


The first chapter uses Tito, a "stranger," as a stand-in for the reader as foreigner in Florence in 1492. Like any tourist, Tito is first eager to find food, lodging, and some money (and a pretty girl to seduce perhaps), as he orients himself in this city. Nello the barber is quite the networker--his clientele brings him lots of information through conversation, sort of the hub or pulse of the gossip and news of the city.

Given all the scholarly knowledge of Renaissance Florence that Eliot pours into this opening, the final chapter of the installment about "the blind scholar and his daughter" seems almost ironic. Bardo is dependent on Romola in order to pursue his scholarship (much like Dorothea and Casaubon a decade later in Middlemarch), and yet he complains about "the wandering, vagrant propensity of the feminine mind" and regrets his son's absence. Bardo does concede that Romola has "a wide-glancing intelligence" and a "man's nobility of soul," and Romola mentions Cassandra Fedele, a Venetian woman scholar, as her role model.

Two more quick observations before signing off. First, I was intrigued by the references to the new print technology of the era--the printing press--and Bardo's resistance to "these mechanical printers who threaten to make learning a base and vulgar thing." Shades of today and the digital divide, the anxiety of the Kindle, perhaps? Second, as close readers of Eliot know, webs and rivers are favorite extended metaphors, and both crop up in the early pages of this novel. The Proem describes fifteenth-century Florentine culture as "a strange web of belief and unbelief," also echoing the 1860s in the wake of Darwin's Origin of Species, an era of increasing agnosticism and atheism.

Please feel free to add brief comments--I promise briefer ones too, and I'll also include some of Frederic Leighton's wonderful illustrations that accompanied the Cornhill installments.

Starting serially,
Susan

2 comments:

Maura said...

I have four comments on the first section.
First, I find the very non-English non-Victorian setting enough to make this feel like something other than a Victorian novel, so I feel a little disoriented. But in a good way.
Second, I found the first chapter to be reminiscent of Shakespeare. This stranger comes to town mysteriously and meets a "low" character, who can then nicely introduce us and the stranger to the city. Bratti (and some others) peel off witty aphorisms reminiscent of such characters in Shk. Early modern humor, I suppose. The announced death of Lorenzo and the reaction of the crowd also fits in with this Shk'n feel.
Third, I note that GE is much better presenting history in the voice of the novelist rather than the voice of the historian. How effortlessly and effectively she conveys the death of Lorenzo and the character sketch of Piero di Cosimo. In contrast, the history of the Bardo family (beginning of Chapter 5) is presented like the most tedious of history texts.
Fourth, Romola and Bardo are like a rough draft of Dorothea and Casaubon! It's really rather remarkable. It will be interesting to see the different way the story resolves (given the obviously different relationship), and GE's treatment of it here can inform our understanding of D & C and vice versa. I wonder if she felt dissatisfied with the resolution of their story, which is why she had to rework it ten years later. I can't remember if GE creates an analogous relationship in any of her other books. Does she detest the ancients? or only those who are obsessed with them and see value in nothing else?

Julia said...

I'll admit at the beginning of this serial reading experience that I've read Romola before, and so the anticipation of what will happen to the characters is no longer a driving force for me! The good thing about this is that it shifts the focus to how Eliot is presenting her "historical" story. I found the proem so compelling--the way that Eliot emphasizes the "sameness of the human lot" (p. 3) despite the extreme specificity of the novel's setting effectively justifies a project that seems so distant from other Victorian novels (as Maura points out). I wonder whether Victorian readers needed to be coaxed into reading this kind of novel (as opposed to something with a more contemporary setting). Might we read the proem as a kind of argument for the value of the novel itself?

On a related note, I'm wondering how the novel's tendency toward hybridity (so many Italian words, Latin phrases, etc.) might have been received by contemporary readers. Eliot clearly goes to the trouble of defining some words (ex: "The Spirit is clothed in his habit as he lived: the folds of his well-lined black silk garment or lucco hang in grave unbroken lines..." p. 4), suggesting that they were not known to readers. As Susan pointed out, when combined with the detailed tour of Florence, this does feel like a kind of cultural immersion.

Finally, I too noticed the similarities between Bardi and Causabon. My initial inclination is to read this as a warning against putting the search for knowledge ahead of human relationships. I was particularly struck by the kinds of antiquities in Bardi's room: "a beautiful feminine torso; a headless statute, with an uplifted muscular arm wielding a bladeless sword; rounded, dimpled, infantine limbs severed from the trunk..." (p. 45). This seemed a troubling decor to me!