Dear Serial Readers,
What's up now with Romola doing an about-face, and heading back home, like the ever dutiful daughter she is, after Fra Girolamo (aka Savonarola) reprimands her about fleeing Florence and her marital pledge? In the previous installment, Romola's determination to leave Tito and her home, her preference for freedom alone over a marriage with a deceitful (if she only knew!) husband, came across as bold and forthright. But Eliot seems to show that ironically it's Romola's strong will that also makes her so pliable, first by her father, then her husband, and now this religious father. Before I throw the book across the room in exasperation over all the Fra's lecturing Romola for shirking her duties to her husband and to her city, his bullying her into a submissive child (why can't she resist??), I want to pause to consider Eliot's liberal distribution of flawed characters, especially these mighty men and their abuses of power. Also, I suppose Romola's retreat underlines how difficult it is to defy social conventions, in this case, sticking to those wedding vows.
I also see the bigamy motif in a symbolic way here--Romola (like Maggie Tulliver before her, and Dorothea and Gwendolen later) seems wedded to two conflicting principles or impulses, both fierce and both compelling: self-assertation and self-renunciation, or, egoism and selflessness. The problem for me is that this binary falls especially hard on women in Eliot's novels, which may be what she's angling for her readers to notice. Certainly Bardo, Sav, and Baldassarre might be considered to be self-serving in their individual passions. But Romola is chastened and returns like a bad child to her home in the Via de' Bardi--"Instead of taking a long exciting journey, she was to sit down in her usual place." Eliot often shows this circular itinerary, where her female characters in particular (think of Maggie here) attempt to strike out on their own, only to be forced back.
Rather than an adventure narrative for Romola of the usual kind men seem to enjoy (Tito's mobility in contrast to Romola's lack of mobility), perhaps Eliot will unfold a different kind of realist narrative, perhaps one of creatively making do? What does it mean that the tabernacle is now empty, the crucifix outside rather than inside? Layers of insides and outsides, as readers have pointed out! The lure of spiritual passion, even with the troubling element of ascetism, is a favorite Eliot theme--something both Maggie and Dorothea wrestle with. Romola's interactions with this crucifix (a symbolic image of "Supreme Offering," Sav tells R) will be interesting to track, no doubt--first locked up with suspicion, then used as a prop in a disguise, now visibly placed in her home.
Meanwhile, Tito seems like a Teflon pan--no charge against him (Baldassaree, Romola) seems to stick. Again, the contrast with Romola here might speak to gender privilege--what this superficially suave, appealing young man can accomplish, lies and treachery and all, in contrast to what his virtuous, passionate, determined wife (not to mention his father and his other wife) cannot do. Baldassaree's attempt to expose Tito comes across as naive, and it's not surprising he, rather than the object of his revenge, ends up in prison. I did find noteworthy that Baldassarre's transformation (short and ineffectual as it is) seems inspired by the printed word, once those "black marks become magical." He is resusciated by the power of these visible Greek letters on a page which then rekindle "that sense of mental empire which belongs to us all in moments of exceptional clearness." The value and power of words, once again, whether printed or the "arresting voice" of spoken language.
I know that there are serial readers out there who are indeed reading Romola now, but are hesitant to blog along here. Please please join the conversation--a quick one or two sentences is fine, even a question or an observation--whatever you can manage! I promise to scan more of Leighton's illustrations next time--one titled "The Visible Madonna" (the title of one of the chapters).
Next installment: chapters 42-46 for March 1863. Only five more installments after that!
Serially submitted,
Susan
2 comments:
oh, yes, frustrating section! I was struck by how Tito is such a giant deceiver, and yet he is informed, helpfully, at the Rucellai gardens dinner that "effective dissimulation is never immoderate." indeed?
I wondered why the shifts in time-perhaps merely so that there is enough of a gap between when Romola leaves and she decides to go back. This section starts the day before she leaves, and then moves even further back in time to Baldassare's moments of clarity. After two chapters that occur before the narrative of the previous section, the novel returns to Romola being convinced to return by Sav, as Susan calls him. (I appreciate the overly familiar nickname.)
I still think the novel presents Sav. as partly working for good, but perhaps that is only because I expected him to be portrayed as entirely awful. I was struck here, though, but the familiar-to-a-medievalist comparison between Jesus's suffering and what Romola has endured--Jesus's is always worse! And he died *for us*! But this time I thought, how does Savanarola know that Romola's pain is less than that of being nailed to a cross? I really hope to see him proved wrong, but I suspect Romola will become a ministering angel and be even more beautiful than she was when she was timidly trying to get Tito to love her as before. Sigh.
This installment had me thinking about the serial form, as Romola completes what Susan aptly called a "circular journey" back to Florence. Her brief adventure and return had an episodic flavor that reminded me of earlier serial fiction like Dickens's Pickwick Papers! I admit that I, too, was very disappointed to see Romola's forward journey away from a terrible marriage frustrated by the enigmatically charismatic Sav.
I'm curious, what did you think of the political dialogue in "A Supper in the Rucellai Gardens"? This section reminded me of Eliot's political debates in other novels (the "Hand and Banner" chapter in Daniel Deronda, for instance), and I really want to connect to such moments in the novel, but I have a hard time. Do you think these were designed for a particular kind of reader? I wonder if this is a place that Victorian readers might have seen the past and present collapsing?
I was very interested in the way Eliot extended her description of Savanorola and his power over Romola at the end of this section. One of the most fascinating parts this novel for me is the description of attraction, compulsion, and repulsion among characters. Like Tito, Sav has a difficult-to-define quality that makes him irresistible (Romola seems again to involuntarily kneel in his presence). The written word (and mastery of language and knowledge) is certainly a source of power in the novel, but so is the intangible, I think. It's amazing that Eliot attempts to use the written word to explore "something unspeakably great" and the area where "feeling would no longer pass through the channel of speech" (p. 345), and that she does this so effectively. I'm eager to see whether Eliot can sustain a powerful representation of intangible emotions through the remainder of the novel!
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