The Role of Setting in Romola

 

I read Romola recently in an edition that had turned up in the local Salvation Army: volume V of the Harper & Brothers set of the Novels of George Eliot (1899) which includes the illustrations after designs by Frederic Leighton, so formal and statuesque, that had accompanied the novel’s serial publication in Harper’s Magazine.  Leighton made chalk drawings which he then recast on woodblocks before turning them over to the engravers, Joseph Swain and W. J. Linton.  Leighton’s home, now a museum, offers visitors to London today a fascinating display of Orientalist and aestheticist décor.

 

                                                   Frederic Leighton

      Romola has excited extreme critical reactions.  For the author herself as well as for some readers, it represents her best work, while for others it is an almost unreadable failure.  A contradiction was apparent even to the novel’s first reviewers.  While the critics at both the Westminster Review and the Spectator thought Romola Eliot’s “greatest” work, the first found a contradiction between its achievement and its cool reception while the other gently suggested that, despite its excellence,  it could never be her “most popular” work. [1]  A few decades after Eliot’s death Leslie Stephen found the book “provoking,” noting “I am alternately seduced into admiration and repelled by what seems to me a most lamentable misapplication of first-rate powers.” [2]  A peculiar qualification persists even among Romola’s admirers.  Henry James praised the book as “decidedly the most important” of her works, yet hedged by saying that it excelled “less as a work of art than as a work of morals.” [3]

    The most apparent way in which Romola stands apart from Eliot’s other novels is the historical setting.  Whereas in earlier Gothic novels, Italy had been a largely fantastic locale populated by malicious aristocrats and corrupt Roman Catholics, the country had acquired a slightly more accurate and considerably more positive reputation by Eliot’s time as more and more middle-class Britons, including Eliot and her illustrator Frederic Leighton, visited there. [4] 

     Some critics have thought she used the foreign setting as a discreet way of addressing her own age.  Encouraged perhaps by the statement in the “Proem” noting that “we are impressed with the broad sameness of the human lot, which never alters,” they have cited parallels such as the nineteenth century crisis of faith, though the followers of Savonarola have little in common with the Oxford Movement.  Likewise the struggles over the Reform Bills in Eliot’s time seem to have little to do with the jockeying for power in Renaissance Florence among followers of the Dominican friar, the Mediceans, and other aristocrats.

     The general interest in the period in the latter half of the nineteenth century had more to do with contrast than similarity.  With the publication of Burckhardt’s The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy Renaissance Italy gained a particular charm for the Victorians, inspiring many writers and artists  including Augustus Pugin’s enthusiasm for a Gothic revival (Contrasts, 1836), Ruskin’s The Stones of Venice (1853), Browning’s The Ring and the Book (1869), Pater’s The Renaissance (1873), as well as the  pre-Raphaelite movement.  Reacting against the ugliness of nineteenth century industrialism, many found in fifteenth century Italy a model of taste and aesthetic achievement worthy of emulation, at once sublime and sensual. 

     There can be no doubt that Eliot did considerable research to include historically accurate period detail: mentioning not only political events and articles of clothing and even using a few Italian expressions.  The death of Lorenzo de Medici and the following political strife sets the era at the story’s outset.  Savonarola plays a considerable part in the plot, and Machiavelli appears repeatedly, while lesser figures such as Poliziano wander through its scenes like movie extras.  The author took great care over her story’s authenticity, noting in her journal that she had been “detained from writing by the necessity of gathering particulars.” [5]  For some readers, her careful study may have been obtrusive.  To Stephen Romola “suggests the professor’s chair,” while to Henry James it “smells of the lamp.” [6]

     For many the densely specified background of the book slows the action.  Romola includes the same willingness to adopt such conventions as unlikely coincidence and retributive justice that characterize her other novels, but the action in Romola does seem bogged down by the historical setting.  Lengthy intervals separate the passages that advance the plot. 

     Apart from that, the thematic emphasis on Romola’s concept of wifely duty and of Christian (or simply moral) self-sacrifice are unlikely to appear as attractive to moderns as to the book’s original audience.  Even after she loses her faith in Savonarola, Romola seems motivated by God’s words to Eve “thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee.”  Once she realizes that Savonarola’s decisions arise, as others’ do, in part out of a desire for power, such acts as his refusal to move against Bernardo di Nero’s execution seem more pragmatic than principled.  Yet, as James had noted, morality is foregrounded in Romola’s story, and the heroine herself is clearly meant to be exemplary, a kind of saint though in the end her virtue is semi-secular.

     Not only does Romola lose her own evangelical fervor, she comes to think that Savonarola himself acts as much from egotism as from piety.  She seeks then to retain the ideal of philanthropic service endorsed by Christianity while shedding its supernatural justification.  The author’s own ambivalence toward religion had long been evident.  Though an atheist, her lover George Henry Lewes called her Madonna.  Yet she is enough of a public critic of organized Christianity to call the popular cleric John Cumming deceitful and unscrupulous, lacking any “genuine charity,” most false when he sets himself up to interpret prophecy as Savonarola did.  She discloses her fundamental distaste for faith by a declaration that , “so long as a belief in propositions is regarded as indispensable to salvation, the pursuit of truth as such is not possible.” [7]

     In spite of her dim view if such popular preachers of her own day, her devotion to morality was as strong as any believer’s, and, though she did not devote herself to charitable works as Romola did, the fictional character reflected the views of her creator.  A sympathetic friend recalled Eliot’s statement of agnostic principles. 

 

I remember how, at Cambridge, I walked with her once in the Fellows’ Garden of Trinity, on an evening of rainy May; and she, stirred somewhat beyond her wont, and taking as her text the three words which have been used so often as the inspiring trumpet-calls of men—the words God, Immortality, Duty—pronounced, with terrible earnestness, how inconceivable was the first, how unbelievable the second, and yet how peremptory and absolute the third. [8]

     The self-sacrificing moral fervor that governs Romola’s life is confused both by an intensity unsympathetic to most readers and by the lack of a suitable exemplar or teaching once Christianity is disregarded.

     Many readers have felt they were treading water in a high tide of historical circumstance, while others have been repelled by a theme built around such an exceedingly severe concept of virtue, unpalatable to many (and, indeed, considering her personal life, to the author as well).  [9]  For at least one twenty-first century reader, these issues amplify each other, as the heroine is found to be incongruous with her “delicately described historical environment.” [9]  Yet the fact is that each of these two elements – the imagined Italian city and the female exemplar of noble submission rivaling Griselda’s – need not represent anything factual about authentic about history or prescriptive about morality.  It is sufficient that, however ill they may seem to mix, they form significant parts of the artist’s worldview, and both setting and protagonist contribute to characterize her vision.  The reader who appreciates Romola will relish both, though for others this book will remain a “failure" or simply “most obscure.” [10]

     Romola’s virtues may lie neither in the grand morality its author envisioned nor in any specific light that Renaissance Florence may shed on nineteenth century London.  One who appreciates George Eliot’s sensibility will make the most of the period detail, as though browsing an account of local antiquities by an overeducated and underemployed curate.  Such a reader will savor the pathos of the learned and principled Bardo de' Bardi and, later Baldassarre Calvo and the creepy charm of Tito Melema, as talented if less violent than Miss Highsmith’s Mr. Ripley.  The swelling political and religious passions generate an air of unceasing drama behind the main players, a tide of self-interest and self-deception that regularly accompanies “who loses and who wins, who's in, who's out.”  As long as that apocalyptic holy man, the Pope Angelico, has not yet arrived, people will toss and turn and flail in the effort to remain afloat, and the likeliest redemptive sign, alight like a nimbus, will remain the qualities of compassion that illuminate the heroine through turmoil and doubt, preserving her and making of her a beacon that shines as clearly as anything may in this fallen world.

 

 

 

 

1.  Westminster Review, October 1, 1863 and R. H. Hutton in the Spectator July 18, 1863.

2.  Leslie Stephen, George Eliot (1902), 126.  Sir Leslie Stephen had married Thackeray’s daughter and was the father of Virginia Woolf by his second wife.

3.  Henry James, Views and Review by Henry James, intro. LeRoy Phillips (1908).

4.  Eliot herself had visited Italy four times during the 1860s and her illustrator Frederic Leighton had studied at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Florence and frequently visited the city in later years.

5.  The Journals of George Eliot, ed. by Margaret Harris and ‎Judith Johnston, 108. 

6.  Leslie Stephen, George Eliot (1902), 126 and Henry James, review of George Eliot’s Life as Related in her Journals and Letters ed. John Cross (1885), Atlantic Monthly, May 1885, pp. 668 ff.

7.  "Evangelical Teaching: Dr. Cumming." Westminster Review, vol. LXIV, October 1855.

8.  F. H. W. Myers, “George Eliot,” The Century Magazine (November, 1881).  Myers himself had abandoned Christianity and founded the Society for Psychical Research in part to pursue unorthodox proofs for the soul’s immortality. 

9.  Julia Straub, “George Eliot’s Romola and Its Shattered Ideals,” Nineteenth Century Gender Studies 4.1 (Spring 2008).

10.  “Failure” is from George Knoepflmacher, Eliot's early novels; the limits of realism; “most obscure” from Jaqueline Bohn Donada, “George Eliot's Brazilian Brazilian Critical Fortune and the Case of Romola,” The George Eliot Review 2013.  

The Oscillation of Meaning in Volpone

 

                                   illustration by Aubrey Beardsley

 

     The aesthetic text has a capacity to represent contradictions and ambiguities with great economy, often using figures of speech.  Through devices such as oxymora and  irony, authors may suggest a proposition and its opposite as well, allowing thereby the delineation of logically incongruous complex experience.  This characteristic may appear even in highly conventionalized aesthetic texts.  Though the psychological types of the “comedy of humours” and the social conventions on which the satire of “city comedy” realism rely on values shared by author and audience with the plays reinforcing the expectations of the culture as a whole, this general alignment by no means forecloses the use of equivocal images. 

     Virtually all the pillars of bourgeois society are questioned and ridiculed In Ben Jonson’s most frequently performed play Volpone: lawyers and courts, merchants, and doctors.  Each is presented as driven solely by cupidity.  That unifying theme not only characterizes most of the characters; it seems very nearly their only trait.  Every act in  the drama arises out of self-interest, even (for Corbaccio) to providing euthanasia for a testator who inconveniently continues to live. (III, ix)  This simple, unvarying motivation is consistent with Jonson’s definition of a “humour.” [1]

 

Some one peculiar quality

Doth so possess a man, that it doth draw

All his affects, his spirits, and his powers,

In their confluctions, all to run one way.

 

Marrie ile tell thee what it is (as tis

generally received in these daies) it is a

monster bred in a man by self loue, and „

affectation, and fed by folly.

 (III, i, 156-I58  Every Man in his Humour)

 

 

     The audience knows very little of any of the main male characters beyond their avarice.  The only exceptions are the hermaphrodite, eunuch, and dwarf who are fundamentally ornaments of Volpone’s establishment included only to indicate his affluence and peculiar taste, and the honorable Bonario and Celia to provide contrast and conflict as they are, so far as the reader may judge, perfect in every way.

     Jonson was careful to distinguish such deep-seated over-riding “humours” that dominate an individual’s actions from mere vogues to which any weak-minded person might be susceptible and which may vary over time.

 

 

As when some one peculiar quality

Doth so possesse a man, that it doth draw

All his affects, his spirits, and his powers,

In their confluctions, all to runne one way,

This may be truly said to be a Humour.

But that a rooke, in wearing a pyed feather,

The cable hat-band, or the three-pild ruffe,

A yard of shooetye, or the Switzers knot

On his French garters, should affect a Humour!

0, 'tis more than most ridiculous.

(Every Man out of His Humour, Induction, I05-II4).

 

 

Sir Politic Would-be and his wife are examples of this minor sort of “humour,” a condition which is not deep-seated or permanent but which follows fashion.  Their absurdities (contrasted with Peregrine’s better sense) form a lighter parallel to the primary drama around Volpone’s wealth. They are surely ridiculous, but they are not wicked.

    Greed is associated with black bile and Volpone is clearly consumed with a rapacious selfishness.  This is evident not only in his miserliness, but also in his fondness for spectacle, for pranks that humiliate others while benefiting himself. 

 

 

I glory

More in the cunning purchase of my wealth

Than in the glad possession, since I gain

No common way.

                               (Volpone I,i)

 

 

Later he declares, “I must have my crochets/ And my conundrums!” (V, vii)  His cruel art form consists of arranging for others to make fools of themselves, but he pursues his medium to the point that he is ultimately found out.  Apart from this rather endearing theatricality, though, Volpone is a merciless and unattractive con man.

     This straightforward assignment of values, however, is complicated by ambiguities and contradictions, beginning with the very title.  The central metaphor of the play, of course, is there announced: the foxy man.  Foxes are admired in the folklore of the world, particularly in many trickster stories for their cleverness and sagacity.  During the European Middle Ages stories of Reynard the Fox were circulated throughout Western Europe.  Foxes are, like Odysseus πολύτροπος (“of many turns”), notoriously wily, yet sometimes the tables are turned on them and their adversaries carry the day.  In life the fox is most often seen as a chicken thief hated by farmers.  Oddly, foxes are also traditionally obliged to run for their lives, pursued by great crowds of loud men and dogs.  Volpone may be, as the dramatis personae names him, a “magnifico,” but he is one few would care to emulate not least because his arrogance seems likely to be heading for a fall.

     Any ambiguity about Volpone’s character is instantly evaporated as he worships his money in the opening scene.  He is clearly in the grip of an obsession that has sunk him in vice and sin.  His servant, his “creature” or “parasite” Mosca, “the fly,” encourages his every move and remains entirely at his service until the end.  Mosca devotes considerable enthusiasm to carrying out his master’s deceptions.  Now a fly is an altogether despicable thing in the common view.  Though Beelzebub, the Lord of the Flies, was a deity to the ancient Philistines and Canaanites, he became for Jews and Christian a demon, though in Paradise Lost (II) a significant one, "than whom, Satan except, none higher sat."  Flies accumulate about a corpse almost immediately upon death where, as part of the machinery of dissolution, they are regarded with distaste by the living.  Cooks and tired campers and wide-awake front stoop loungers are mightily annoyed by flies.  Mosca lacks perhaps the grand, almost Byronic, defiance of Volpone’s plotting, but he feels the same relish that his master does in deceit.  Mosca is depicted as utterly obedient until the point when he conceives that he might grab Volpone’s wealth for himself, when he feels suddenly no trace of the loyalty that had seemed so central to him

     The three scavenger birds – crow, raven, and vulture – are equally inauspicious in folklore, though the first two are often considered tricksters, for instance among natives of the American Northwest and Australian Aborigines.  While this mythic role is doubtless facilitated by the impressive cognitive skills of corvids, in Jonson’s play Corvino, Carbaccio, and Voltore are ridiculous dupes, blinded by the golden bequest they expect to receive.  They think they are getting the better of each other, while they are only fooling themselves.  In the same way, Volpone and Mosca themselves turn out to be tricked.  Whereas in simpler and more stylized allegories such as Everyman most characters are stable with unambiguous, in Jonson’s more realistic drama, they have a certain equivocal looseness, cunning, yet careless due to greed.

     The same principle applies to metaphors.  When Mosca lures his master to new crimes by describing Corvin’s wife Celia as  “bright as your gold, and lovely as your gold,” (I,1), the qualities shared by tenor and vehicle (to use I. A. Richards’ terms) include beauty, value, and prestige.  Yet in context the viewer knows that Volpone’s greed for gold has made him a selfish and hateful miser, and his appreciation of female beauty has been corrupted into lechery and sexual coercion.  Both passions can only inspire further duplicity and crime.  The love of both wealth and women, each of which might be a factor in a fulfilling life instead drives him toward both practical and moral ruin.  Each is thus presented as a potential evil as well as a positive good.

     When Celia is horrified at her husband’s suggestion that she join Volpone in bed, her husband calls her a “whore” (II, iii) specifically because she is not.  Thinking she might cost him a fortune, his nasty nature generates weird fantasies of degradation for her – the insulting name is less lurid than his threats to oblige her to walk only backwards, or to dissect her body as an anatomical lesson.  A little anxiety throws Corvino into hysterical misogyny. 

     The lovely and often-reprinted lyric, perhaps Jonson’s most well-known lines “Come, my Celia, let us prove,/ While we can, the sports of love” (II, iii), which out of context seems a sweet lover’s seduction plea much like “To His Coy Mistress,” is, in fact, delivered by a vicious predator to a most unwilling lady whose response is to wish herself dead. 

     While the characterization governed by the theory of “humours” might tend toward the reductive, in Jonson’s hands it is fleshed out by secondary traits, such as the gusto both Volpone and Mosca find in cheating others.  The readers’ partial sympathy is more easily engaged due to the fact that the  vulture, raven, and crow have equally low motives and less élan vital.  The clever fox turns out to be outfoxed, the fly can find  no fat corpse on which to feed, and the scavengers go hungry as well. 

     On the level of individual figures of speech terms like gold and whore have doubled ironic use in the play, indicating for the first both a positive good and a potential pitfall and, for the second, a degradation of woman that in fact indicates the degradation of the man uttering the insult.  Yet in the end retributive justice has restored a balance to society.  The play’s final lines appear to be moralizing.

 

1^st lawyer:                              Now you begin,

When crimes are done, and past, and to be punish'd,

To think what your crimes are: away with them.

Let all that see these vices thus rewarded,

Take heart and love to study 'em! Mischiefs feed

Like beasts, till they be fat, and then they bleed.

 

suggesting that the malefactors on stage might make the viewer reflect on morality, but this impulse is soon overrun by the realization that the play was all in fun, causing no real injury, and the audience's high comedic spirits can be expressed only by resounding applause.

Volpone:: The seasoning of a play, is the applause.

Now, though the Fox be punish'd by the laws,

He yet doth hope, there is no suffering due,

For any fact which he hath done 'gainst you;

If there be, censure him; here he doubtful stands:

If not, fare jovially, and clap your hands.  (V, viii)

 

 

. 

1.  George Chapman, Jonson’s friend and sometime collaborator, had introduced the theory of “humours” slightly before Jonson with his plays The Blind Beggar of Alexandria and An Humourous Day's Mirth. 

The Story of an Ordinary House

 

 

     I have been living in the same place for such a good while that I feel by now I owe the house a few words.  Every building, since it embodies aesthetic judgements, may be read like a work of art, though, if it has been remodeled over the years, it may resemble more the layering of old Troy or a medieval palimpsest than an objet d’art which is fixed after its completion. 

     Patricia and I had always been renters and had moved about in roughly six-year intervals for the first half of our lives – the West Coast, the Mid-West, the East --   before coming to the Hudson Valley, an hour north of New York City.  Due to chance circumstance (a job offer for my wife) we ended up in Goshen, the county seat of Orange County, a place where there are no oranges, though many orchards of apples, and there lingers only a faint reminiscence of a seventeenth century prince named William of Orange, whose name, of course, had itself nothing to do with citrus fruit.

     We looked for an old place, eschewing the treeless and sidewalk-less developments where dogs will bark madly from inside their picture windows at the rare passer-by who ventures to stroll in front of their territory.  Such homes are common on the outskirts of Goshen, and are popular with most of the younger set, but in the village’s center one finds the style of an earlier era, or rather of several earlier eras.  The town offices occupy a building a part of which had been the 1773 Farmers’ Hall Academy where Noah Webster briefly taught, the village hall was built in 1816, a track for trotters still functions that had opened in 1838, and the 1841 Greek Revival courthouse is still in use not far from a police station housed in an 1867 former New York and Erie railway station.  In the village a good share of the homes are over a hundred years old, historic by American standards.

     After a year of searching we bought a house built in 1892 in what is called the “folk Victorian” style, lacking the showy towers of Queen Anne and Italianate styles and the mansard roofs of the Second Empire homes, but spacious with four bedrooms, a full basement, and a walk-up attic.  Its very lack of pretension, its ordinariness, marks its value as an index of late nineteenth century small town upstate New York taste.  Once it boasted the era’s usual gingerbread: porch trim and brackets, gable treatments and corbels, but all these ornaments were removed during the 1970s when the house underwent major changes, including acquiring a cover of siding.  In the interior the pocket doors between entrance hall, living room, and parlor were dismantled, and two panes of stained glass removed.

     The loss of decorative elements is not, however, the sole alteration that the modernization a half century ago brought.  What had been a back stairway was removed to make more room for closets in the biggest bedroom and a second  toilet downstairs was added.  While a large porch already wrapped around two sides of the structure, at that time an even bigger back deck was added, signifying the social shift toward privacy and away from the welcoming openness of porches and front stoops.  So the traditional back entry became a pantry and the kitchen gained a new sliding door allowing access to the spacious deck.  A large in-ground swimming pool was added in the back and a fence erected.  The old bluestone sidewalks were replaced first with concrete and later with asphalt, and the hitching post was hauled off, perhaps to be sold then to the builder of a new faux Victorian. 

     The renovators of the seventies seemed to have a decided predilection for the artificial.  Apart from the siding, a fireplace was built in the living room using imitation stones made of plaster which look entirely unconvincing to us but which have inspired visitors to exclaim how grand our “old stone fireplace” looks.  At the same time horrid drop ceilings were put up in parlor, dining room, and kitchen and the very ugliest tone of shag carpeting installed.  The walls of the living room and on the new fireplace chimney upstairs were covered with simulated bricks, quarter-inch slices glued to the wall, though real bricks had been used  only in the foundation of the original structure. 

     So the first residents’ preferences, expected at the time and preferable to some of us even now, for decoration, natural materials, and a welcoming face to the community around all turned in time toward their opposites: plainness, artificiality, and a preference for enjoying one’s leisure in private.  We did ameliorate some of the most egregious results by removing that carpeting and refinishing the hardwood floors throughout the downstairs and in the corridor above, and by painting the dark fake bricks white, leaving us with what Patricia calls “a cross between a Victorian and a Barbie Dream House.”

     We continue to relish the house’s vestiges of original style: an unusual mechanical front doorbell, for instance, and the decorative interior brass doorknobs and keyholes.  The swimming pool is gone, at what was surely a price greater than that of its construction, but we still have a hand pump in the yard, a somewhat puzzling relic since I read that the village’s water system has operated since 1872.  Many of our neighbors have unnecessarily removed trees and shrubs, and we are glad that our own were never cut.  We are grateful that the greenery is still there, producing lawn waste in profusion when we choose to hack back the foliage, and the birds, groundhogs, squirrels, and deer, whose taste does not change as people’s does, are able to continue eating the black walnuts, Concord grapes, and white mulberries that  grow in profusion, just as they did when the house was first built.