George Eliot's Italy: ＂Recollections of Italy＂ and Romola

Abstract

Hye-JoonYoonStarting from her very first published fiction, "Mr Gilfil's Love-Story" in Scenes of Clerical Life, George Eliot shows an abiding interest in Italy and Italian characters, which cannot be reduced merely to her reverence for Dante. For one thing, the violent, jealous, and passionate Italian girl Caterina in "Mr Gilfil's Love-Story" follows the well-established tradition of British travel writing on Italy, which severs the numerous merits of the land from its volatile inhabitants. The question Romola raises, then, is whether this most ambitious attempt to write an "Italian novel" without a single English character, and that one set in Renaissance Florence, moves beyond this stock perspective. Her "Recollections of Italy, 1860," which records her first full-scale travels in Italy, when compared with her writings on her German travels, reveals little evidence of a novelist's interest in the living local culture that goes beyond the predictable enthusiasm of a tourist. The objects are seen and later recollected in tranquility without any real touch with the people and their culture. Similarly, despite the heavy philological labor that went into its production, Romola ultimately remains a work that offers an elaborate historical tourism. The sites, objects, places and historical figures are portrayed in isolation from the enduring historical experience both of Italy and the British readers, or those parts of the novel which have universal appeal, such as the challenges put on Romola by her marriage woes, have weak dramatic ties to the historical backdrop. Moreover, a distinctively Victorian anxiety concerning the sensuous visual culture of Renaissance Italy finds a point of cathexis in the rather un-Italian Savonarola. All in all, Romola's engagement with Italy shows how far a work based primarily on the author's literary experience of a foreign culture can go.