Dear Serial Readers,
Only two more short installments of Romola left after this week! With that in mind, I've installed a new feature on this blog--a poll for our next selection! To see this poll, scroll all the way to the BOTTOM of this screen. The choices are different from my earlier proposals. I should mention that I'm also working on a project analyzing Victorian serials through a digital data instrument my colleague Mike Witmore has been developing called Docuscope. You'll see in the top right sidebar I've linked Mike's blog Wine Dark Sea where he elaborates on docuscoping and how he's used it to identify lexical features that distinguish Shakespeare's genres.
My project, at least for now, will compare Dickens and Gaskell, one writer very attuned to the serial form as a novelist-editor-conductor of periodicals in which he ran some of his novels, the other not an editor-conductor, and very ambivalent about the serial form--the spatial constraints, the need for any breaks at all (apparently Gaskell tended to write with little initial attention to chapter divisions). So I'm proposing for next time either a Dickens novel or Gaskell's last novel Wives and Daughters which was also (like Romola) serialized in The Cornhill. And like Dickens's Drood, which we read here last year, Gaskell died just before she was able to complete the final installment! But she was much much closer than Dickens was with Drood! And for a third choice, I suggest Trollope's Orley Farm, one of his stand-alone novels (not part of a series, like Small House), and published in four-chapter (short) segments. So, please enter your vote on this poll--I've allowed an option for more than one choice!
Mike's "Wine Dark Sea" blog reminds me of the end of this installment--Romola's drifting out to sea. Quite a bit of suspense set up here, and I would predict that Eliot intensifies this suspense by withholding Romola from the next and penultimate installment to insure readers return for the last! Romola's moral and spiritual rudderlessness--and all the dreamily drifting and gliding out to sea--reminds me of Maggie Tulliver in The Mill on the Floss who finds herself in a similar position on the Floss, although she is not alone like Romola! But it's interesting how Eliot returns to the moral dilemmas of her heroine in this fashion. I loved the mixed images too here--Romola's physical competence getting the boat into the sea and unfurling the sails (showing that she's the ever-quick study of a student!) and at the same time total suspension about what to do, where to go, now that she has no one at all to follow, neither a husband nor a spiritual father nor a godfather. Interesting that she doesn't return to her original idea (on her first flight disguised as a religious sister) to seek out the celebrated woman scholar Cassandra Fedele in Venice. Earlier I was impressed too by her determination to witness her godfather's execution, although the ultimate moment is eclipsed from her--"then she saw no more"-- by a fainting spell? And with the narration focused through her eyes, we also don't see the final moments of Bernardo's beheading.
As Julia mentioned about the ending of #11, the public and private overlap and converge in interesting ways in this installment too. But these "tangled threads" for Romola also sour her sense of clear fellowship and connection--to any man, at least. I also saw a resemblance between Romola and Sav during the "Pleading" chapter, Romola's interview w/ Sav that Tito has manipulated Romola into seeking. Sav's "never-silent hunger after purity and simplicity" is thwarted by a "tangle of egoistic demands, false ideas, and difficult outward conditions." Even if the demands and conditions differ for Romola, to some extent the contours of her dilemma seem parallel to Savonarola. Eliot modeled Romola after Barbara Leigh Bodichon Smith, who was a woman with a striking presence and lofty ideals and who campaigned through public lectures on behalf of women's rights at this time. I've read of at least one Victorian woman who was motivated to start a woman's "philosophical society" (where people discussed articles or presented their own work) after hearing a speech by Smith.
For next time, #13, chapters 62-67--and then one more installment after that. So I would expect we'll start our next serial the week of Sept. 21st. Don't forget to vote!
Serially at Sea,
Susan
1 comment:
The chapter "Drifting Away" made me think of water as a liminal space in other Victorian texts, too. In particular, it brought to mind Dickens's later use of water in Our Mutual Friend with the "rebirth" of John Harmon after his near drowning in the Thames. In Eliot's scene, part of the sea journey seems to be about Romola abandoning a "name," just as Harmon does (although in Dickens's later novel, Harmon does this quite literally!).
Like Susan, I was also thinking this week about parallels between Romola and other characters. Instead of pairing her with Sav, however, I was thinking about the way that Romola becomes an orphan at the end of the installment ("Romola felt orphaned in those wide spaces of sea and sky," p. 475), just as Tito has claimed to be an orphan since his entry into Florence. The opening chapter of the installment highlights the way that politically-scheming Tito benefits from "the absence of traditional attachments" (p. 445). Romola's situation is of course much different. Nevertheless, it seems at least a possibility that Romola too might benefit in some ways from the extinguishing of family ties following the death of Bernardo del Nero, when "[t]he bonds of all strong affection were snapped" (p. 471). Will we see two paths that the unattached individual might take--one that is destructive (Tito's) and one that is constructive (Romola's)?
The last chapter of the installment ends with an ominous vision of the orphaned Romola "touching the hands of the beloved dead beside her" (p. 475). This doesn't look good! Yet part of me wants to see something positive in the "new rebellion" that the complete severing of family ties creates in her. The ending of this installment definitely leaves the reader in suspense: is this the end of our noble heroine, or the beginning of a new Romola?
Post a Comment