From Author to Text

Re-reading George Eliot's Romola

Caroline Levine, Mark W Turner

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781138385764
• eBook ISBN: 9780429762703
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

First published in 1998, this volume proposes to shift the critical emphasis from a canonical author to her uncanonical text – from George Eliot to her novel Romola – and contends that this choice both broadens the range of interpretive possibilities and brings them into sharper focus.

The editors invited a variety of critics to put their different critical models to work on Romola and the results are fertile and suggestive: among the issues explored here are the domestic politics of marriage, the relationship between narrative and epistemology, the materiality of the text, the novel's relation to nineteenth-century narratives of martyrdom, and the gendering of space. Such theoretical eclecticism, when focused on a common reference point, necessarily opens out into a dialogue among critical and interpretive models. Theory throws light onto Romola, just as Romola throws light onto theory.

PART THREE
Rethinking Authority

CHAPTER SIX
George Eliot Martyrologist: The Case of Savonarola

DAVID CARROLL

I

George Eliot frequently expressed a fear, at times amounting to horror, that the living spirit of historical development would become entrapped, permanently confined in the prison of past forms, institutions and conventions. True progress was a life or death struggle:

Our civilization, and, yet more, our religion, are an anomalous blending of lifeless barbarisms, which have descended to us like so many petrifactions from distant ages, with living ideas, the offspring of a true process of development. We are in bondage to terms and conceptions which, having had their root in conditions of thought no longer existing, have ceased to possess any vitality, and are for us as spells which have lost their virtue.¹

This is the reason why terms and conceptions upon which we still rely have to be continually redefined to embody the living ideas by which we live. In no area was this task more pressing than in that of religious belief, and one way of reading George Eliot's oeuvre is to see it as a sustained attempt to recast the lexicon of Christianity in terms applicable to an age about to embrace the religion of humanity. This redefinition, begun in Scenes of Clerical Life with terms such as faith, incarnation, redemption, providence, life after death, judgement and justification, is continued throughout her career.

Romola is George Eliot's radical attempt to redefine for her Victorian readers the idea of martyrdom, through the life and death of Savonarola. This was to prove difficult terrain for the novelist as she explored the complex and contradictory motives of the Dominican priest expressed in the contemporaneous records and their multiple interpretations. It is a difficulty re-created in the novel as Romola agonizes over Savonarola's confessions and retractions. One might add that even an official martyr's freely chosen death provides a 'witness' which is not without its ambiguities and uncertainties. As the Catholic theologian, Karl Rahner, explains:

For it might be asked whether the death of a martyr is in fact exempt from the general law that every moral decision remains ultimately enigmatic, for oneself and certainly for others? [...] Even in the case of a martyr's death, does not the radical problem still remain unanswered whether an act which is good in itself is necessarily good in execution, and whether anything that we see happening will remain valid when it is weighed upon God's scale.²

The orthodox answer he provides to these questions is that the Church bestows the divine validation: 'Church and martyrdom bear witness to one another'.³ But what if, as with Savonarola, the so-called martyr is the Church's victim? What validation is available to the heretic and schismatic? This is the challenge George Eliot faces in Romola as she continues her programme of the humanistic redefinition of Christian concepts and ideas in a fictional world emptied of divine sanction.

There were also more specific reasons why her interest focused on this enigmatic historical figure. The most immediate was that the Florence of 1860, in which George Henry Lewes suggested to the novelist that the Dominican priest might be a good subject for a novel, was a hotbed of speculation over the significance of his life. Could his ideas about the reformation of Florence and Italy provide inspiration and guidance to the rising excitement of the Risorgimento? For the New Piagnoni historians, named after Savonarola's original followers, they certainly could, and the Convent of San Marco became the meeting-place where they began to collect and edit his sermons, letters and treatises. The reconstruction of his life at which they aimed was accomplished by the Neapolitan professor, Pasquale Villari, who had fled to Florence from Bourbon persecution in 1848. His fine biography, La storia di Girolamo Savonarola e de' suoi tempi, appeared in two volumes, in 1859 and 1861, and it may well have been the first volume of this work that Lewes was reading when he suggested to the novelist that Savonarola's 'life and times [would] afford fine material for an historical romance' (Letters, III, 295).

Secondly, there was the appeal for George Eliot of the place and significance of Savonarola in the Positivist pantheon. As J. B. Bullen indicates, 'In Comte's chronology, Savonarola comes at perhaps the most crucial moment in the moral history of the West. He was situated at that point where the final stage of the Theological era—Monotheism—has begun to decay and the revolutionary Metaphysical period has been initiated'.⁴ His pivotal position in several synthetic philosophies and histories of this kind helps to account for the many conflicting interpretations of his life in mid-nineteenth century Europe.⁵ Villari, for example, presents Savonarola as the champion of Florentine liberty against the tyranny of the Medicis. He maintains that the Dominican, combining the best qualities of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, sought, like Columbus, to create new worlds: 'theirs is the prophetic mind, the hero's heart, the martyr's fate'.⁶ Here were values to inspire the Risorgimento. But there were other, more sceptical views. Jacob Burckhardt in The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1860) made a clear and influential demarcation between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, and depicted Savonarola as a monk unable to come to terms with the modern world taking shape around him: 'He was at bottom the most unsuitable man who could be found for such a work [.] He stood in no more relation to mundane affairs and their actual conditions than any other inhabitant of a monastery'.⁷

How does one interpret the evidence of a life lived, as Savonarola's was, at the cusp of European historical change in the fifteenth century and now again in retrospect, in the nineteenth? The closest George Eliot had come to the topic in her previous fiction was in the provincial life and death of the Revd Edgar Tryan, the public reformer of small-town Milby in 'Janet's Repentance'. The Evangelicalism he brought 'was good, though it had that mixture of folly and evil which often makes what is good an offence to feeble and fastidious minds, who want human actions and characters riddled through the sieve of their own ideas, before they can afford their sympathy or admiration'.⁸ Tryan can easily be labelled—'One of the Evangelical clergy, a disciple of Venn'—but this obscures any genuine understanding. In Romola, as in this early fiction, '[T]he mysteries of human character have seldom been presented in a way more fitted to check the judgments of facile knowingness than in Girolamo Savonarola' (238). The 'bird's-eye glance' of the critic or historian with their 'analysis of schools and sects'⁹ must be replaced by the rather different forensic skills of the novelist. A historical romance might provide some answers.

Finally, the life and death of Savonarola provided the novelist with an opportunity to re-examine not simply the conventions of the Victorian historical novel but, more especially, those of its once popular sub-genre: the novel of martyrdom. This had achieved a new level of popularity as a result of the 'No Popery' agitation following the restoration of the Roman Catholic hierarchy in England in 1850.¹⁰ Charles Kingsley's novel of Christian martyrdom, Hypatia: or, New Foes with an Old Face (1853), came out of that agitation. Though set in Alexandria early in the fifth century, its aim was to attack the 'new foes' of Tractarianism and Catholicism through the life and death of the heroine, the beautiful Neoplatonist lecturer in pagan philosophy, murdered by the mob, which included rioting monks, on the high altar as she was about to be converted to Christianity. The response of Cardinal Wiseman, the recently created Archbishop of Westminster, was to initiate 'The Catholic Popular Library' whose aim was to present a true picture of the Church through the ages; its launch provides a fascinating insight into the role of fiction in mid-Victorian England. He himself quickly produced the first novel for the Library, Fabiola: or, The Church of the Catacombs (1854). Again, a haughty Roman heiress, living in Rome during the last of the Imperial persecutions under Diocletian, is gradually converted to Christianity through contact with a series of Christians, several of whom are martyred in very specifically unpleasant ways. Newman was then prevailed upon to complete the twelfth volume in the series, Callista: a Sketch of the Third Century (1856), a novel which carried its pedagogy more lightly than Wiseman's but otherwise followed the same plan: the heroine is a beautiful Greek sculptor living in North Africa who, through contact with Christians at the time of a fresh outburst of persecutions, is slowly and painfully converted to Christianity just before she dies brutally tortured for refusing to sacrifice to the Emperor. On the rack she makes her final witness in language typical of the genre: 'For Thee, my Lord and Love, for Thee! ... Accept me, O my Love, upon this bed of pain! ... And come to me, O my Love, make haste and come!'¹¹

Though written by men, these novels contain features similar to the fictions George Eliot had labelled 'the modern-antique species' in her satirical taxonomy of 'Silly Novels by Lady Novelists' (1856) written at this time. These 'unfold to us the domestic life of Jannes and Jambres, the private love affairs of Sennacherib, or the mental struggles and ultimate conversion of Demetrius the silversmith'. Her critical comments are two-pronged. On the one hand she ridicules these novels which, possessing 'a ponderous, a leaden kind of fatuity, under which we groan', contain characters 'converted to Christianity after the shortest and easiest method approved by the "Society for Promoting the Conversion of the Jews'", and who use such racy, idiomatic phrases as 'the expiring scion of a lofty stem'—'the virtuous partner of his couch'—'ah, by Vestal!'—and 'I tell thee, Roman'. But, on the other hand, she uses the opportunity to define the true nature of the historical imagination. It is a power, she writes, which will always be 'among the very rarest, because it demands as much accurate and minute knowledge as creative vigour', but it 'can sometimes, by the force of its sympathetic divination, restore the missing notes in the "music of humanity", and reconstruct the fragments into a whole which will really bring the remote past nearer to us, and interpret it to our duller apprehension'.¹² Written a few days before she began her first short story, this essay, we now realize, is both a critical and an aesthetic manifesto, similar in many ways to Jane Austen's and Thackeray's early parodies. Just as her ironic comments on 'the white neck-cloth species' of fiction prompted a definition of 'the real drama of Evangelicalism',¹³ which in turn led shortly after to 'Janet's Repentance', so the critique of the 'modern-antique species' prepared the way for Romola.

There are, of course, significant differences between the sub-genre described so far and George Eliot's novel. One of the most obvious is that the former fictions are usually located in the early Christian centuries during periods of persecution when pagan and Christian forces were in violent conflict. But it is clearly possible to see George Eliot's Renaissance Florence as a reprise of that conflict. Just as the conversion of the Emperor Constantine in 312 is anticipated as the origin of the universal church in those novels, so the events in Florence in the 1490s are presented as the birth of modern European civilization. A second major difference is that the role of the martyred saint is in Romola shared between the martyred Savonarola and the saintly Romola. As we shall see, the latter's chief task—after playing the part of the Madonna, 'the sweet and sainted Lady' (566), in the plague-stricken village—is to interpret the life and death of the former to the world, having lived through his agonized conflicts in her domestic life.

Despite these differences, it remains striking how many of the elements in Newman's Callista, which is typical of the species, recur, suitably transformed, in Romola. The patrician and high-minded heroine belongs, like Romola, to hagiography rather than to realistic fiction. Callista, too, undergoes a gradual conversion through contact with a series of male protagonists, each of whom represents a strand of belief from pagan or Christian antiquity. Her final spiritual experience is in the form of a dream: 'She slept sound; she dreamed. She thought she was no longer in Africa, but in her own Greece, more sunny and bright than before; but the inhabitants were gone';¹⁴ in this heavenly landscape there appears her Christian slave-girl, who is first transformed into the Madonna, then into the resurrected Christ before a sudden cry alerts her to the reality of her imminent capture and trial. Then, there is the careful recording and cautious assessment of Callista's trial documents which have come down to us, to the second of which, comments the narrator, 'we attach no such special value [...] since it comes to us through heathen notaries, who may not have been accurate reporters'.¹⁵ Finally, there is the worship of the martyr's sacred relics and the subsequent healing miracles which correspond to Savonarola's shrine and his afterlife of sacred memory celebrated on 23 May, the birthday—the dies natalis—of his martyrdom, in the Epilogue to Romola.

Behind such similarities of detail there are the more profound similarities which originate in the traditional patterns of the lives of saints and martyrs. These go back to the Acts of the Martyrs in the first Christian centuries, and are repeated in various forms through the Middle Ages, the Reformation and counter-Reformation, especially the latter as recorded in Foxe's Acts and Monuments.¹⁶ We will look at the type of the female saint's life later when we examine Romola's role in Savonarola's martyrdom, but his life and death follow the pattern established originally by Stephen, the first Christian martyr, in the Acts of the Apostles: his witness, persecution, arrest, trial, condemnation, execution, canonization. All the novelists writing in this sub-genre deploy this dramatic sequence in some form or other. How does George Eliot use it and other features of the genre in the re-creation of Savonarola in her own novel of martyrdom?

II

There are essentially four phases in Savonarola's public career in Romola, extending from the arrival of Charles VIII in Florence in 1494 to the excommunicated priest's trial and death in 1498. It is a clearly defined sequence of increasing complexity and ambiguity as events exert a steady pressure upon his religious beliefs. The first phase of this developing martyrdom is the most orthodox. On 17 November 1494 the French army enters Florence—the day on which Savonarola is preaching his Advent sermon in the Duomo, the climax of his warnings to the city. In the style of a Hebrew prophet he warns the Florentines that the Bible 'showed that when the wickedness of the chosen people, type of the Christian Church, had become crying, the judgments of God had descended on them' (211). His lengthy sermon in chapter 24 is an elaborate typological interpretation of current events: the French army is the 'new deluge which was to purify the earth from iniquity' (213); the French king is the new Cyrus, God's chosen instrument; Italy is the promised land; and Florence its sanctuary.

The sermon begins by exposing the pollution of the city, the sanctuary from which God's presence has departed. Savonarola attacks Florentine corruption with such vehemence because God 'has made his purpose present to my soul in the living word of the Scriptures; and in the deeds of his providence; and by the ministry of angels he has revealed it to me in visions'. This opening condemnation ends with the warning: 'Behold! the ministers of his wrath are upon thee—they are at thy very doors!' (229). Like so many other characters in Romola—like Dino, Tito, Bardo, Baldassarre—he imposes his own vision upon the turbulent city. Look! See! It i...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Editors' Note
• Introduction
• I Rethinking the Text
• II Rethinking the Heroine
• III Rethinking Authority
• Figures
• Notes on Contributors
• Select Bibliography
• Index