Dear Serial Readers,
Like Julia, I too am re-reading Romola, although it might as well be a new reading since so much is surprising me in the language and echoes to other plot lines. Last week there was an op-ed in the newspaper on the pleasures and value of re-reading. When I first read this novel, I was a tourist in Florence and assiduously retraced the steps of characters in pages of chapters, such as Tito's in this installment.
This time, I do not have Florence at my disposal, but I am noticing how this novel--one that seems to take prophetic vision as a subject for thinking about narrative--does anticipate other fictions. In this segment, Tito's moral dilemma about his obligation to rescue his father and his rationalizing not doing so seems a draft for Bulstrode in Middlemarch. What obligations are binding from the past and which can we slough off out of self-interest or indifference or failure of memory? Eliot unwraps the anatomy of guilt: "Under every guilty secret there is hidden a brood of guilty wishes, whose unwholesome infecting life is cherished by the darkness."
The other echo I found here is very surprising--Tessa reminds me of Hardy's Tess! There are many parallels between Tessa and Tess, Tito and Alec. But then, this story of chance seduction of an innocent beauty likely has many many versions and sources.
This echoing for me is set in play by Eliot's attention to the then/now, past/present ties that punctuate the story so far. Next time, I'll take a look at what else was appearing in the pages of The Cornhill alongside the chapters from the novel--next week, chapters 11-14.
And what about all the erudite allusions? Eliot is distinguishing this novel from "Silly Novels by Lady Novelists" (her 1856 essay title). The thickness of scholastic showcasing reminds me too of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh (1856), surely a text Eliot had in mind while writing this novel.
Looking forward to your comments--what echoes do you hear?
Signing off,
Serial Susan
4 comments:
To follow up on Susan's post, I saw one very strong echo of a later work by Eliot. In Chapter X, when the narrator asks: "Was it that Tito's face attracted or repelled according to the mental attitude of the observer? Was it a cipher with more than one key?" (p. 98), I couldn't help thinking of the opening of Daniel Deronda and the question of whether Gwendolen is beautiful or not beautiful!
More generally, I've been interested in the way that Eliot is investigating appearance as a way to understand character. Tessa seems to be just what she looks like--an innocent kitten. Tito and Romola, in contrast, seem to have large gaps between their appearances and inner lives. The ending of last week's installment highlighted this: "Romola...was standing by him at her full height, in quiet majestic self-possession, when the visitors entered; and the most penetrating observer would hardly have divined that this proud pale face, at the slightest touch on the fibres of affection or pity, could become passionate with tenderness, or that this women who imposed a certain awe on those who approached her, was in a state of girlish simplicity and ignorance concerning the world outside her father's books" (p. 56). This week's installment reinforced this attention to the divide between outer appearance and inner life through Tito's moral dilemma, something that seems not to register in his looks (at least not beyond a fleeting expression).
Finally, I did notice the strategic use of suspense in this episode, with the enigmatic Fra Luca. This mysterious character felt like a breath of fresh air in this heavily researched historical novel.
It took me a while to finish the Proem, and then to get past Chapter 5, but then I could keep reading more steadily. The second paragraph of the Proem, "Even if, instead of following the dim daybreak, our imagination pauses on a certain historical spot and awaits the fuller morning . . . " reminds me strongly of the opening of Rushdie's recent novel, The Enchantress of Florence. There, the mysterious traveler arrives in Fatepur Sikkri at nightfall, seeing the famous historical (but now virtually abandoned) city from a distance, as if the city and the traveler were spirits. I wonder if Rushdie read Romola in his research for that novel, set in between the two times of Romola!
Like Julia, I keep noticing that Tito is expected to be good because he's beautiful, and I wonder also if it's because he seems to set his guilt aside fairly easily in the way he avoids all painful things.
I find it hard to see this as Eliot's best, since what I most like about her is the complexity of character, but now at the end of chapter 10, with Romola (all too minor so far for my taste!) and other characters emerging more, it gets more and more entertaining. I'm not very interested in Bardi's analysis of scholarship, though I did find Scala's poetic letters and followers who delight in mediocrity somewhat amusing.
And a by the way: I like the new Tuscan backdrop color of the blog!
I thought there was a vague Shakespearean atmosphere the first week, but with chapter 6 I found a clear connection to the Tempest, with Romola and Bardo as Miranda and Prospero, and young Tito as Ferdinand. “Romola’s astonishment could hardly have been greater if the stranger had worn a panther-skin and carried a thyrsus …. [A]mong her father’s scholarly visitors, she had hardly ever seen any but middle-aged or grey-headed men.” “What a brave new world that has such creatures in it!” Instead of scholars, Miranda knew only Caliban. And here is Tito, shipwrecked with his father (or so we think at this point) presumed dead in a shipwreck. “Those were pearls that were his eyes.”
I loved the working scholar’s lament: “I myself, for having shown error in a single preposition, had an invective written against me wherein I was taxed with treachery, fraud, indecency, and even hideous crimes. Such … are the flowers with which the glorious path of scholarship is strewed!”
To Kari’s comment that this is not Eliot’s best novel— I think that is undeniable. The problem is her attempts at historicity. In this section, I found both chapter 7 (a learned squabble) and most of the description of the festival dull. And yet the historical atmosphere is wonderful, even if the reports of past events are tedious.
Now that the true Tito has been unveiled, however, the story has become more intriguing. When Tito met Piero di Cosimo and the latter thought Tito would make a fit model for “Sinon deceiving old Priam,” I suspected we were getting a hint of later treacheries. And in that scene, the difference between inner and outer realities was discussed by the barber’s customers. “What trick wilt thou play with the fine visage of this young scholar to make it suit thy traitor?” When chapter 9 began with a description of Tito as a person “to whom concealment is easy” I thought we were getting another hint—how gratifying to get the whole story instead!
I wonder how bad Tito will turn out to be. Because I read a lot about such people in my work, I felt at the beginning of chapter 10 like I was reading a description of a classic psychopath (think Ted Bundy). Tito has neither a “brand of duplicity” nor a “stamp of candour” on his brow. “The strong unmistakable expression in his whole air and person was a negative one, and it was perfectly veracious; it declared the absence of any uneasy claim, any restless vanity.” Tito has charm, deep falseness, and (possibly) no conscience. His only defense so far is that he struggled a little tiny bit over the fate of his benefactor.
I also wonder if Tito’s future will be complicated not only by the inevitable return of his foster father, but also the appearance of one or more actual parents. Victorian melodrama or Shakespearean farce?
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