Dear Serial Readers,
We've reached the final installment! I'm eager to hear your thoughts about the ending of this novel. The Epilogue follows a fairly conventional pattern of Victorian fiction by fast-forwarding eleven years from Savonarola's execution to May 1509, but then we see a domestic scene rather uncommon to conclusions of Victorian narratives--not the pared-down nuclear family of mother, father, child as in the closure of Jane Eyre, but instead three adult women and two children! I suppose one could argue that Romola, who finally is able to assert herself, if only provisionally, as scholar where she is Lillo's teacher and evident head of this household, inhabits a typically masculine position. Yet Lillo calls her "Mamma Romola." Tessa is curiously silent in this closing vision which finds her rounder and plumper and "astonished...at the wisdom of her children." Even so, I'm intrigued by this family without men. Two immediate precursors come to mind: Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh (also set in Italy--perhaps such alternative arrangements only imaginable out of Britain) and Christina Rossetti's fairytale narrative poem, "Goblin Market" where the last stanza imagines a family circle of two women and children, but no mention of men as part of this community. With R's household shrine, Savonarola does hold a place in Romola's moral universe--not as the great prophetic religious leader, but as a human-sized man who had once rescued her in need.
I had wanted to upload one of Leighton's final illustrations for this serial, but I'll describe it instead. There's a very striking image of Romola "Drifting Away." But the only "drifting" I can find in this image is the word in the caption. Her arms are muscular, and she has a firm grasp of the sail rope, and her glance outward looks determined, even stern, and even somewhat like portraits of Savonarola! This visual portrayal seems a bit at odds with Eliot's words, and also looks nothing like her other heroines (Maggie Tulliver and Mirah and Gwendolen H. G.) who appear in boating scenes. Leighton's image (but for the costume and the mountains in the distance) might suit Dickens's Lizzie Hexam, the female waterman of Our Mutual Friend. Despite this seeming disparity, Romola does exert much strength and direction once she wakes up from this drifting away and returns to the land, and this unwavering action continues through the epilogue.
What about Romola's entering (wandering) into that scene of the plague, with the wandering Jews viewed by the ignorant villagers as the source of this pestilence? Eliot next wrote "The Spanish Gypsy," a dramatic poem also inspired by her travels in Italy, and in Spain, in which she contemplates the meanings of racial identity. In this novel, Romola is recalled to life and from the water by the crying "Hebrew" child Benedetto who is eventually converted, while Romola herself is transformed by the villagers into the legendary blessed lady who came over the sea to rescue them. This mode of turning to others, helping others in need, seems the one act of redemption Eliot affirms. Given the novel's skepticism about religious belief and superstition, where does the novel end up on the religion question here? What kind of Christian is Romola, with her household shrine for Savonarola?
Like Kari and Julia, I did find the attention to Savonarola's struggle with ambition and belief fascinating, especially given my temptation to identify Eliot (in her work as novelist) with this character! She was at a pivotal point in her own career, as a widely respected great author (although castigated for her personal relationship with a married man). At the same time, Eliot's own conflicts with conventional religious practice and belief and with public fame are well documented through her letters and journals.
At the same time, I continued to see links between Romola and Sav. In the full spectrum of this historical novel, Romola serves as an important witness of Savonarola's rise and fall. Yet at the moment when Savonarola is led before the crowd to be degraded and executed, the narrator merges the consciousnesses of these two grand characters where Romola sees and hears the crowd just as Savonarola does. Is Romola at the end more a modified, better, version of Savonarola than she is of Bardo, or is she a mixture of both, are both the male models inspiring this very large (tall!) female character?
I was surprised that the Epilogue did not rejoin the work of the Proem, and foreground the reader's passage from 1509 back to the present tense. Instead of the sweep of a historical epic, the narrative ends in this small-scale, domestic realm of Renaissance Florence, perhaps striking for the contrast to the grander strokes of the Proem.
Dear Serial Readers: what will we read next? According to the poll I installed at the bottom of this page, there is a marked preference for Gaskell's Wives and Daughters, with Trollope as second, but not a close second. I am eager to choose something that everyone will be able to keep up with on a weekly basis, and more will join the conversation. The poll will remain open for the next week, and then I'll announce the final winner. But Gaskell seems likely. We'll start in October--I'll post the reading plan in a week. In the meantime, please feel free to email me if you'd like to receive emails each time I've posted on the blog (or alternatively, if you'd like me to remove your address from this forwarding list).
Serially sufficed, (for now),
Susan
2 comments:
Susan, I enjoy your summary of the ending of the novel, and of Leighton's image. I mostly was disappointed with the ending, though I'm pleased that Romola has a household life that seems to be rewarding to her. I find it interesting that Romola replaces Tito in this family.
I hadn't thought the Proem should be revisited in the Epilogue--but indeed, that would be great, and I wonder whether to see that as a statement of the importance of the domestic, or as the impossibility of women ending up in the public sphere, except as nurses?
I was quite disappointed that Romola left her little Hebrew boy behind--He apparently belonged to the lower economic status of the peasant village with its weak priest--who does not seem to be presented as either similar to or distinct from Sav.
I'll see whether I can keep up with Wives and Daughters! I'm very behind at work right now!
Before I get to my thoughts about the ending of Romola, I want to share the quote of the day from this morning's NY Times:
"Can you any longer read Henry James or George Eliot? Do you have the patience?"
MARYANNE WOLF, a professor of child development at Tufts University.
This came from an article on the ongoing debate about the fate of books, but I found it particularly
interesting for our purposes because we've done something very different from attempting to read Romola or Middlemarch, or Daniel Deronda at one sitting. Serial publication already addresses the patience problem, I'd say!
Now, for the ending. As I read the last installment, I kept coming back to the issue of making a lasting impact on one's society and making a "name" for oneself. Romola's father hoped to do this with his library--he wanted his name to live on through this collection of scholarship. There's evidence in this last chapter that Romola lives on in a very different way--through the "legends about the blessed Lady who came over the sea...a woman [who] had done beautiful loving deeds...rescuing those who were ready to perish" (p. 527). Although less concrete and more diffuse, in the end Romola is the character (along with Sav) who is able to attain a degree of immortality. We get the idea that Romola's father, Tito, etc. will be largely forgotten.
Another point that jumped out to me was the way that children seem to gravitate to Romola. We had the earlier scene with Lillo lost in the street, and the final installment has a very similar scene with Benedetto. I'm not sure what to make of this--other than the point that children play a special role in "saving" Romola and bringing her back into a "web" of life when she thinks she might be able to turn her back on it (p. 529). As for Tito's children in particular, Eliot writes that Romola "needed something that she was bound specially to care for; she yearned to clasp the children and to make them love her" (532). Perhaps children are the only source of love untainted by the complications of the political world, and thus the only source of the kind of "noble" love that Romola wasn't able to have with Tito (or Sav. for that matter)?
I agree with Susan that there's something special about the female community at the end--this seems a safe place to put emotional energy.
If we want to see Romola and Sav as merging (as the execution scene suggests), Romola is perhaps able to succeed in her endeavors because she can remain in the private, female sphere. Because Sav was placed (and placed himself) in the public sphere, his efforts ultimately failed. Perhaps this is too optimistic a reading on my part, but I do get the sense that the private, domestic sphere is elevated in terms of its significance and potential. And it isn't a quaint kind of power as a Lady Bountiful that Eliot is talking about. This is a place where a woman like Romola can both find self-satisfaction and perform the worthy work of helping others (and as Susan pointed out, even make an impact on issues as important as biggotry and race relations). Of course this scenario might also seem terribly conservative to readers from the 21st century!
I'm looking forward to Wives and Daughters. This is a novel that I've started but never finished!
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