Eliot, George.  Romola.  Oxford:  London, 1949.

Romola as historical novel
Jason Carr
April 2, 1993

"There is a great deal of unmapped country within us which would
have to be taken into account in an explanation of our gusts and
storms."  Daniel Deronda.          


      In broadest terms, a historical novel must involve have
some interaction with historic events or personalities.<1> 
George Eliot wrote Romola after researching the Early Florentine
Renaissance so extensively that it broke her health.  Eliot is
reported to have said "I began it as a young woman, -- I finished
it as a young woman."<2>  This extreme devotion to research made
for a novel filled with detail, tedious or amusing, depending on
the point of view and familiarity with the cityscape of
quattrocento Florence.  
     There is then an obvious historical setting in physical
space.  Action takes place in the minor loggias, the piazzas, and
at the spiritual center of Florence, the duomo:  Santa Maria del
Fiore.  The scenes of the novel are fairly interesting, but seem
much more so when one is familiar with the structures and gardens
Eliot compulsively namedrops.  On a single page Eliot slips in
the following allusions:  "And the well-known bell-towers --
Giotto's, with its distant hint of rich color;" "And here, on the
right, stands the long dark mass of Santa Croce;" "Filippo
Brunelleschi or Michelozzo would have devised something of
another fashion than that;" "Why have five out of the eleven
convenient gates been closed."<3>  This is a mental game for
anyone who has memorized the town on the Arno, but may be
tiresome for others.  At least Eliot does not provide the reader
with a vague or unreal backdrop for her readers.  
     These Florentine spaces are not uninhabited by recognizable
historical persons.  During the course of the novel Romola (or
her retrograde husband Tito) talk freely with or about the
Medicis (including the recently departed Lorenzo) and the Sforzas
of Milan.  One scene has Tito politically scheming:
     " . . . leaning against the door was a close-shaven,
     keen-eyed personage, named Niccolo Machiavelli, who,
     young as he was, had penetrated all the small secrets
     of egoism."<4>

Girolamo Savonarola looms in the last half of the book, as Romola
formulates her own ethical system.
     It is this search for moral truth that seems to be the
driving point of the novel.  The educated but naive Romola falls
for the beautiful, self-interested Tito.  Tito's egoism is not
intentionally cruel but seems to be a creeping self-involvement
that begets cruelty when left unchecked.  After Tito's amorality
is revealed (chiefly in the secret selling of Romola's father's
library) Romola emotionally separates herself from her husband
and flees Florence (the World?)  She is temporarily outside
society, "without a law."<5>  Romola is physically intercepted
by Savonarola, who tells her to return to her holy duty to her
admittedly corrupt husband.  Curiously, she elected to escape in
the disguise of a nun.  "You have put on a religious garb, and
you have no religious purpose."<6>  Here we have the
foreshadowing of Romola's "conversion."  She has religious
purpose, but it is unrelated to God.  She is supposed to serve
mankind, to assist humanity in whatever form she can.  This
attitude has led some to say that Romola takes a Positivist
stance.<7>  
     Comtean empathy is greatly increased in Eliot: her
characters sometimes lose themselves in sympathetic imagination. 
     " When she heard Savonarola invoke martyrdom, she
     sobbed with the rest. . . she felt herself penetrated
     with a new sensation  . . . the resemblance was that
     between the memory of music, and the sense of being
     possessed by actual vibrating harmonies."<8>
And again:
     ". . . she only saw what [Savonarola at his execution]
     was seeing -- torches waving to kindle the fuel beneath
     his dead body . . . she only heard what he was
     hearing -- gross jests, taunts and curses."<9>
Viola Meynell states that Romola is " in fact a great manifesto
against mysticism."<10>  If this is so then the heroine's 
compassionate sensitivities seem to be the proxy for banished
mysticism;  the female persona is sublimated here into a secular
ecstasy.  In this light, Romola becomes not a "novel portraying
moral deterioration in 16th century Florence" but a historical
novel that uses a convenient timeframe (Machiavelli and
Savonarola were contemporary) to provide contrast to the inner
life of the heroine.<11>  Instead of writing in a Machiavellian
character, Eliot employs the man himself.  
     Even though these famous men come into play they are not the
carriers of the story.  Unlike the Byronic hero, always in focus,
always tragic and beautiful, Romola sits on the sideline.  The
men will come and go, murder and bribe while Romola endures as
nurturer.  She abandons this role during her flight from
Florence, but returns to her nature wholeheartedly by the last
chapter.  Her introspection and compassion are so low-key that
they seem to not be the focal point of the novel -- Tito's
carryings-on are much more glamorous.  At the end however, Tito's
fate can be briefly stated:  " . . . calamity overtook
him."<12>  Eliot uses Tito to show her society the dangers of
self-involvement and disinterestedness in the common good.  More
than just a novel for entertainment or distraction Romola is an
indictment of the mores of her social apathy of Eliot's time.    
                             NOTES



<1>Avrom Fleishman, The English Historical Novel:  Walter Scott
to Virginia Woolf.  (Baltimore:  Johns Hopkins, 1971), 1-3.


<2>Viola Meynell, introduction to Romola, by George Eliot
(London: Oxford University, 1949), xi.

<3>George Eliot, Romola, (London:  Oxford University, 1949), 3.

<4>Ibid., 406.

<5>Ibid., 373.

<6>Ibid., 369.

<7>Fleishman, 158.

<8>Ibid., 256.

<9>Eliot, 595.

<10>Meynell, xi.

<11>J. Sherwood Weber, ed., Good Reading, (New York:  New
American Library, 1964), 75.

<12>Eliot, 599.
http://www.mousetrap.net/~mouse/uta/