Romola to The Spanish Gypsy: Fictions of Gender and History

Abstract

Eliot’s next novel, Romola, represents a radical departure from Silas Marner, in terms both of setting and of plot: here Eliot moves the action of her narrative to fifteenth-century Italy, and it closes with a description of what appears to be the first matriarchal family in Eliot’s fiction. From the beginning, Romola has been the subject of hostile criticism directed at both its preponderance of historical detail and its failure to focus exclusively on Savonarola, its historical hero. In recent years, however, some critics have responded to such objections by equating Romola Bardi’s experience with ‘man’s moral history’ and tracing in the novel’s plot the narrative patterns of the epic, the morality play, the allegory, the fable, the Bildungsroman, and, most recently, the ‘“continuous historical” apocalypse’.¹ Most of these readings concentrate on the stages of Romola’s personal development: from her early attachment to a pagan father, through her phase of commitment to Savonarola’s Christianity, and finally to her independent assumption of a new sympathetic morality — viewed by many as analogous to Comte’s Religion of Humanity. Such a teleological reading is complicated, however, not only by its unquestioning assumption of a myth of historical progression, but also by the fact that Eliot has chosen as her emblematic human figure a female character whose place in her historical setting is overdetermined by her gender.