Her eyes and her wit are both dazzling; her nose and her morals are alike free from any tendency to irregularity; she has a superb contralto and a superb intellect; she is perfectly well-dressed and perfectly religious; she dances like a sylph, and reads the Bible in the original tongues. -443-
By the time she comes to write her own last novel,
or it may be that the heroine is not an heiress-that rank and wealth are the only things in which she is deficient; but she infallibly gets into high society, she has the triumph of refusing many matches and securing the best, and she wears some family jewels or other as a sort of crown of righteousness at the end.
Gwendolen certainly gets into 'high society.' The 'family jewels' that Gwendolen puts on become a sign of enslavement and a lurid crown of infamy, indicating to her own scorched sensibility her betrayal of Mrs. Glasher, Grandcourt's cast-off partner and the mother of his children, who should be wearing them as his wife.
In recent years the life transformations as well as the written achievements of Mary Ann Evans, Marian Evans, Marian Lewes, George Eliot-and her familiar names of Pollyann, Mutti, Madonna, too-have become a focus of critical attention. That a single writer preoccupied with organic communities should have so many named identities, that a woman intellectual should choose a male pseudonym, that a rebellious atheist should so often imagine the religious life, and that a woman who set herself outside society by living with a married man for many years should yet have resisted publicly identifying herself with feminist causes: all these seeming contradictions have been felt to be in need of explanation.
Feminist criticism of George Eliot's work and recent critiques of her life have produced much innovative thinking about her that has moved away from the assumption that hers are 'classic realist' texts, content to mirror a society and instruct the reader how to interpret that society. Instead, the emphasis has been upon what her friend Edith Simcox called the 'irreconcileable tendencies' of her work or what Nancy Miller in Subject to Change describes as her insistence on 'the difficulty of curing plot of life, and life of certain plots,' the dilemma of her heroines being, even when technically free, 'bound… to another script.'
In such discussions Romola emerges as a pivotal text. George Eliot's earlier novels were all set in the English countryside. The particularity -444- of her descriptions of country customs, manners, work, houses, flora and fauna, and regional speech, had been (and remain) a major part of these novels' pleasurability.
Romola is usually taken to be George Eliot's least successful work of fiction, a novel massively imperfect, encumbered by its own learning and by the desire to communicate to the reader all the circumstances of Renaissance Florence. Yet it is also among her most innovative fictions. The temporal distance of the historical novel made it possible for her to engage more directly than she had previously dared with the hypocrisies of her own society. Here, for the first time, she engaged with the dissimulations and self-unknowings of married life and political or public life at once. For example, Tito's decision to sell the library entrusted to him by Romola's dead scholar father is strictly legal. Tito tells Romola: 'The event is irrevocable, the library is sold, and you are my wife.' As in Victorian England, so in Renaissance Florence, a married woman's property passes to her husband. George Eliot's friend Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon organized resistance to this law, and George Eliot-a rare act for her- publicly signed and distributed sheets for the petition. Suzanne Graver quotes from John S. Wharton's Laws Relating to the Women of England (1853), which makes it clear that, as the law still went in mid-nineteenth-century England, more was assumed than the woman's loss of financial control at marriage: not only the property but the person of the wife was absorbed into the identity of the husband. Marriage was 'coverture,' meaning 'that the husband and wife are treated at Common Law as one person indivisible, the personal and separate existence of the wife being legally considered as absorbed and consolidated in that of her husband.' In Romola Eliot shows, in contrast, the agonized and adamant resistance of Romola to any identification with her husband once she recognizes the selfishness of his aims.
Romola shows a capitalist society in crisis, urged to transform itself by a recoil of religious idealism realized in Savanorola. The problem of aesthetic values caught into those of the market is embodied in Tito's beauty and his possession of jewels, which gives him access to power within such a culture. Both Savanorola and Tito come to grief; Romola finds salvation. In this novel George Eliot uses distance to explore dilemmas fundamental to her own society, but she does not indicate possible communal transformations. Instead a solution of a kind is reached by means of transfiguration: Romola rescues a child and his village and becomes a kind of madonna, freed from the exigencies of mar-445- riage and the dominance of men: father, confessor, brother, and husband all die.
Nevertheless, Romola was also the work in which George Eliot moved further into the implications of the demands of relationships: what does a child owe a parent-and is it the less if the relationship is one of fostering, not of blood? or is it more? The problem of the demands that relationships impose is worked at through the relationships of Romola and her brother, each to their father. The brother exactingly elects a religious life that sets him at odds with his father's needs. Romola wearies, but remains. Tito comes from far away and abandons the search for the foster father who had nurtured him and who may now be a slave. In one laconic sentence George Eliot summarizes Tito's inability to respond to such demands: 'He would have been equal to any sacrifice that was not unpleasant.' The mild word «unpleasant» sardonically dramatizes the flaccidness of Tito's moral fiber. He gives himself up to the present, which his beauty and skill makes incandescent for others as well as for himself.
But that emphasis on the present cut free from the drag of the past proves to be a corrupting force. Tito is not obliged thoroughly to understand himself. He can skim and slide from one group to another, from one emotional impulse to the next. He feels no loss in losing the past. In this he is at an extreme distance from his scholar father, Baldassarre, who lives in 'the vague aching of an unremembered past,' his store of knowledge slipped away from him in aphasia and amnesia. As Baldassarre struggles with his turgid memory the question is posed: 'Was it utterly and for ever gone from him, like the waters from an urn lost in the wide ocean? or was it still within him, imprisoned by some obstruction that might one day break asunder?' In the event, Baldassarre's memory returns only in the moment of revenge as he murders Tito, never in benign access to the learned treasures that had earlier stocked his imagination. These different forms of memory loss set Tito and Baldassarre apart, not alongside each other.
Scholarship, hedonism, capital, religious fervor, marriage: all are brought to crisis in this novel, and all are found wanting. George Eliot herself saw Romola as an experiment, a move away from the English countryside that her readers associated her with. In all her books she was writing against pastoralism, against the townsperson's simplification of rural life and the idealization of rustic feelings. She sought to avoid both the epic and the puppet, to set her readers alongside experi-446- ences that they believed themselves apart from. Her insistence is always on the complexity of each person's life, the passionate stamina of being human. But she was not interested solely in individuals. Rather, she brought to the fore the degree to which people know themselves as part of a social group and the degree to which society determines individuality. Perhaps that was one reason she was fascinated by the move from the Midlands to Italy. Yet, as her contemporary critics were not slow to point out, the Renaissance society that she conjured was, in its ethical dilemmas, not unlike mid-nineteenth-centuryBritain-even while the people spoke an awkward scholarly dialect derived from written records. Lewes urged her publisher and friend, Blackwood: 'When you see her, mind your care is to discountenance the idea of a Romance being the product of an Encyclopaedia.' Yet that fascinated immersion in a society she did not know, could not tap into through the long roots of family association, brought quite new areas of her own productivity within George Eliot's reach: 'If one is to have freedom to write out of one's own varying unfolding self, and not to be a machine always grinding out the same material or spinning the same sort of web, one cannot always write for the same public,' she wrote of Romola. The experience of writing Romola liberated the daring to write large-scale and complicated accounts of the social forces at work in a particular place and time (as in Middlemarch), or even across the sweep of Europe and of racial diversity (as in Daniel Deronda).
In her later novels- Felix Holt, Middlemarch, Daniel Deronda-issues of gender and of race are (in differing degrees) knotted together. In recent years critics have been able to demonstrate how far, in general, shared ideologies and assumptions underpin the relationship between fiction and first readers and shape the novel form. Victorian fiction writers were not, for example, always more astute than their fellows in pinpointing the Orientalism and colonialism active (or somnolent) in British society. George Eliot does not often comment directly on such
