***

Published serially in 1862–63, Romola was George Eliot's first attempt to set a novel somewhere other than the English Midlands of her youth, and the toll that the research and composition of this mid-career novel took on her is well known. With the assistance of George Henry Lewes, Eliot researched the period for more than a year before she wrote a word of the novel, including intense study of English, Italian, Latin, French, and German sources. Serious doubts about the worth of the endeavor plagued her throughout its composition, and George Eliot would famously report much later to her second husband that “I began it a young woman, – I finished it an old woman” (qtd. in Harris 340). Just as famously, however, Eliot wrote to her publisher John Blackwood that “there is no book of mine about which I more thoroughly feel that I could swear by every sentence as having been written with my best blood, such as it is” (Letters 6: 335–36).

Still, readers then and now have deemed Eliot's venture into historical fiction largely a failure. Initial judgments (such as John Morley's in an unsigned 1863 review) that the book too often lapsed into an “instructive antiquarianism” (qtd. in Carroll 208), or (from an anonymous reviewer in the same year) that the “accumulation of details. . . affects us like a medieval painted window, in which the action has to be disentangled from the blaze of colour and overwhelming accessories” (qtd. in Carroll 215–16), are to be found throughout a near century-and-a-half of critical commentary.Footnote ² And, perhaps it is because so many critics have believed neither Eliot nor her readers to have had a handle on the period that they have been so ready to squeeze this novel into their own favored paradigms. Three in particular have proven useful to modern critics.

The first paradigm is the humanist one, exemplified most of all by those critics who read “Romola as Positivist Allegory” (as J. B. Bullen titled a 1975 article). While, as Bullen contended in 1994, the term “Renaissance” was still a highly ambiguous one in English writing in the 1860s, Eliot's philosophical commitment to the positivism of Auguste Comte was certain (209). Alluding to Romola's shift in allegiance from her father Bardo de’ Bardi (the classical scholar) to Savonarola (the Dominican friar) to her own domestic humanism, T. R. Wright argued similarly in 1986 that in Romola “the heroine passes through all three of Comte's stages” – the classical, the theological, and the positivist – “thereby tracing in her own life the history of Humanity” (189–90). From this perspective, the novel's setting in fifteenth-century Florence is irrelevant; her positivist “religion of humanity,” Andrew Sanders wrote in 1979, “entails planting a nineteenth-century seed in a fifteenth-century soul” (176–77). So, if critics more recently have backed away from reading the novel strictly as a Comtist parable, Romola's restricted significance as a nineteenth-century humanist parable is well-established.Footnote ³

Sharing this indifference to the novel's historical setting, the culturist paradigm could be considered merely a variation of the humanist, except that this second paradigm is more concerned with society than belief. According to the culturalist paradigm, Romola does not so much trace a progression from classicalism through spiritualism to humanism as show the social tensions between classicalism and spiritualism and their final reconciliation in “Culture.” The most influential proponent of this paradigm has been David DeLaura whose seminal Hebrew and Hellene in Victorian England: Newman, Arnold, and Pater (1969) examined “the process by which the substance of dogmatic Christianity was transformed, within one or two generations, into the fabric of aestheticism” (xi): in other words, how Hebrew and Hellene are synthesized in the late Victorian era through a “progressive religionizing of the idea of culture” (xi–xii). In a short 1966 article that anticipated his major argument, DeLaura contended that Walter Pater (one of the major agents of this synthesis) drew his aesthetic philosophy largely from Savonarola as portrayed in Eliot's Romola. In both Romola and Pater's The Renaissance (1873), DeLaura explained, Savonarola represents “an indispensable element in the complex dialectic of Christian and pagan motifs” (230). “Perhaps it is the unexpected sympathy which Pater extends to the ascetic Savonarola [in The Renaissance] which most marks the influence of Romola in The Renaissance” (229), he wrote, specifically tracing the “complex dialectic of Christian and pagan motifs in the high Renaissance” in Pater's book to Eliot's novel (230). As in the first paradigm, Romola's specific historical setting is assumed to be mostly an exotic stage for a very Victorian drama. As DeLaura put it, Eliot and Pater were drawn to the period because it seemed loosely to parallel their own: “the opposition between the Renaissance humanists and the religious reformers,” he wrote, “was not dissimilar to that between Mill and Huxley and the varying kinds of Victorian religious revivalists” (230), a conclusion reached by several other important modern critics of the novel.Footnote ⁴

The third paradigm, the communitarian, requires reading Eliot's entire oeuvre as challenged not so much by the death of God, or the dialectic between Christian and classical cultures, but by the modern loss of community. Many of these critics have found a more theorized version of this thesis in Ferdinand Tönnies's Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft, or Community and Society (1887), in which local, organic agricultural communities based upon the family and tradition are pitted against an urban heterogeneous industrial society that is shaped by the rational pursuit of self-interest in a capitalistic and secular environment. Tracing this tension between community and society back to Scott's historical novels (38–39), for example, Avrom Fleishman in the The English Historical Novel (1971) contended that Romola (along with Pater's Marius the Epicurean (1885) and the historian Burckhardt's The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy [1860]) is “elegiac” in heralding the death of Gemeinschaft (152). Suzanne Graver developed the correlation with Tönnies more completely in her George Eliot and Community (1984), where she argued that Eliot in nearly all her novels engaged in describing this fundamental modern transition from community to society (14–15). The historian Bernard Semmel reiterated this reading in 1994, portraying Eliot as ostensibly dedicated to liberalism but in fact bemoaning the loss of “family affection and social cohesion” (5–6). For all of these critics, too, the specific historical period of Romola is a matter of indifference, as Eliot only intended it as a gesture to an “inherited tradition of piety and asceticism” (Fleishman 155), a pre-politicized urban mass (Graver 13–14), or a national community of the past (Semmel 11–13).

Needless to say, all three of these paradigms have their uses in situating Eliot's oeuvre as a whole as well as Romola particularly within the greater contexts of Victorian culture and society. Indeed, together, these paradigms account for much of the work of modern Victorian studies. However, none of these paradigms is able to – or seems even to want to – make sense of Eliot's specific choice of fifteenth-century Florence. As I have already suggested, it may be the persistent assumption that the novel is a failure as a historical romance that has made critics relatively complacent with analyses that operate at such a level of historical generality: a progressive tale moving through the three stages of humanity, a dialectical tale resolving Hebrew and Hellene in culture, or a regressive tale siding with Gemeinschaft over Geschellschaft. But, as most of these same critics have also conceded (and bemoaned), the novel itself clearly operates at a level of great historical specificity, which suggests that the real if difficult question to start with when interpreting Romola is, why exactly did Eliot choose late fifteenth-century Florence as the setting?

One way to begin to answer that question is to review what we now know about the period, particularly in relation to the history of liberal theory. The two major contemporary historians of “the republican tradition,” J. G. A. Pocock and Quentin Skinner, both have emphasized this period's significance as (in Pocock's phrase) the seminal “Machiavellian moment,” when political theorists first grappled with the paradox of modern political existence. “The formal dilemma of the humanist republic,” Pocock explained in The Machiavellian Moment (1975), was “that it was an attempt to realize a universality of values within a particular, and therefore finite and modal, political structure,” or more specifically “the problem of reconciling the Hellenic view that man was formed to live in a city with the Christian view that man was formed to live in communion with God” (84). For later theorists, Pocock argued, the great interest of this period – from the fall of the Medici in 1494 through their reestablishment in 1537 – was that, for the first time, political thinkers “work[ed] out the implications and contradictions inherent in civic humanism” (86). Savonarola represented one major approach, contending (again in Pocock's words) that the contradictions between universal moral values and particular political structures “could be finally overcome only if the final phase of a republic's existence could be made to coincide with the millennium, end of time, or eschaton” (84). In other words, these values could be achieved if the political structure of the humanist republic could be remade as the City of God. In Savonarola's thinking, this task required equating the practice of civic virtue with the achievement of spiritual rebirth, which, as Quentin Skinner has pointed out, was one of the two dominant qualities of Savonarola's thought (The Foundations 145). The other dominant quality of Savonarola's thought was his rejection of the “ideal of the vir who devotes his virtus to seeking the attainment of honor, glory, and fame” (The Foundations 146), the keynote of Machiavelli's rival and much more worldly approach to the problem of realizing universal values with the merely political structures at hand. Writing after Savonarola's martyrdom and the return of the Medici, Machiavelli essentially gave up the godly city as utopian and instead defended virtù as the most powerful tool for securing provisional stability, one of the few values that humans could enjoy in a cosmos governed by fortuna. Machiavelli was particularly convinced of the importance of citizen militias in this regard.

Adjust that Christian “universality of values” to mean universal individual liberty and one begins to understand the deep significance of these Renaissance Florentine articulations of the “humanist republic” to modern liberals, from the seventeenth century forward. What I am calling the liberty problem is the problem, for liberals, of how to realize universally this primary value, individual liberty, within a particular political structure, democracy. To put the problem in more familiar Victorian terms, given the inevitability of democracy, how exactly will all citizens enjoy liberty without plunging the state (the then, and still, favored political structure) into anarchy? There are several representative mid-century formulations of the liberty problem that one could turn to at this point, including any of the well-known hyperbolic passages about “doing as one likes” (51) as Matthew Arnold notoriously slighted liberty in defense of stability in Culture and Anarchy (1869). However, the first chapter of John Stuart Mill's On Liberty (1859) is more instructive, for it reveals that the liberty problem – that is, how to achieve and maintain stability in a polity committed to individual freedom – deeply preoccupied the era's “libertarian” as much as its “authoritarian” liberals. As important as the famous paragraph in that first chapter of On Liberty is, which announces “the object of this Essay is to assert. . . that the sole end for which mankind are warranted, individually or collectively, in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number, is self-protection” (80), it is the paragraphs following that actually teach us more about how Victorian liberals – from Arnold to Mill – understood the liberty problem, which was very closely related to the way Florentine republicans did. In the course of describing those “warranted” interferences with individual liberty, Mill reiterates many of the same policies one finds in Savonarola and Machiavelli. Consider just these two sentences:

Here, one witnesses Mill, like so many liberals since, drifting between solutions that promise only civic stability (jury duty, military duty, etc.) to ambitions more moral – more Savonarolan – in scope (the performance of “certain acts of individual beneficence,” “any other joint work necessary to the interest of. . . society,” the implicit elimination of “evil”). In short, like the Florentine republican, the Victorian liberal approached the liberty problem with virtue uppermost in mind, but an understanding of virtue so elastic as to make routine (even within the same sentence) dramatic leaps around that spectrum of virtue policies long ago defined by the theories of Machiavellia and Savonarola.Footnote ⁵

***

Eliot was typical of Victorian liberals in approaching the liberty problem with this same elastic understanding of virtue, which is why, I think, it has been difficult for modern commentators to see the consistency of her concerns. To best appreciate Eliot's thinking about virtue in relation to the liberty problem in Romola specifically, there are two nineteenth-century contexts, both notably overlooked in the modern commentary on the novel, that deserve special attention: Risorgimento and republican womanhood theory.

The relationship between virtue and liberty is a richly developed one in other nineteenth-century contexts, and one additional context is particularly helpful in introducing the two that will be my focus in this section of the essay. That context was the contemporary French experience, which provided liberals across the Channel with a pungent example of what happens to modern states when they seek to become more egalitarian in their promotion of liberty. In 1848, George Eliot showed herself, quite clearly, to be inspired by the pursuit of liberty, and, more obscurely, to be troubled by its associated problem, the dangerous fragility of political structures when faced with the universal realization of liberty. This is from a letter to a friend that year:

In elaborating, Eliot shows her heart to be in the right place, as far as her dedication to the value of individual liberty, but, like so many other Victorian liberals, to be exceedingly unsure of the means to achieving a truly liberal polity. On the one hand, Eliot admires the Christian virtues of the French workers and writes also that “our decayed monarchs should be pensioned off” (1: 254); but on the other hand, she admits to being very concerned that anarchy would result if newly liberated citizens were not virtuous. She admits here, for example, that she has “no hope of good from any imitative movement at home,” for, while “[i]n France the mind of the people is highly electrified – they are full of ideas on social subjects,” “[h]ere [there is only] selfish radicalism and unsatisfied brute sensuality” (1: 254), a theme elaborated upon in the “Address to Working Men” from Felix Holt (1866).

The cause of Italian unification intrigued Victorian liberals for similar reasons, as it involved not only the moral clarity of the Italian peoples’ struggles for liberty against various great European powers but also that more complex question of “the mind of the people.” In terms of the latter, whatever the specific failings of character among contemporary Italians (as so often noted by British and American liberals visiting the major cities), the robust mythology of Risorgimento had a way of dissipating that particular concern, so that there was no shortage of English writers ready to champion the cause. Meaning literally “the resurgence,” Risorgimento was indeed a complete mythology, developed by Italian patriots since the Congress of Vienna in 1815, and including major episodes and figures from Italy's past, all telling the same story. Central to that story was Savonarola, whose republic stood in the mythology for the last moment of Italian independence before their enslavement by foreign oppressors (Thompson 70). In fact, the six years of Florentine history (1492–98) that Eliot chose to fictionalize in her novel were perhaps the six most important years in the Risorgimento mythology (Thompson 69).Footnote ⁶

Eliot's own version of the mythology seems to have been significantly shaped by three sources in particular, sources that also reinforced one another in terms of their approach to the liberty problem. One source that is recognized as influencing Eliot's thinking is the two-volume La Storia di Girolamo Savonarola (Firenza 1859–61) by perhaps the most influential Risorgimento historian, Pasquale Villari. In Villari's telling, Savonarola emerges as a hero of Italian freedom and a passionate advocate of republican government (Santangelo 119–21), and a rebel against Church as much as against political despotism (Thompson 71). George Henry Lewes began reading Villari's history during his and Eliot's first visit to Florence in 1861, and he immediately pressed Eliot to read it as well. In it, Savonarola attempted “to establish freedom through the reformation of private virtue so that civic virtue would evolve naturally through private sanctity” (Santangelo 119–20). Savonarola's fanaticism, on the other hand, is significantly downplayed by Villari (Santangelo 120, Thompson 72). (This is a fact that is perhaps more remarkable to modern than Victorian readers, overly influenced as we are by Jakob Burckhardt's contemporaneous portrait of the friar as a Gemeinschaft medievalist [Weinstein 5–6].) In short, Savonarola, in Villari's telling, offers a fairly compelling solution to the liberty problem, contending that liberty is best ensured through the (moderately) religious cultivation of moral virtues.Footnote ⁷

A second source would be Lewes himself, particularly when one remembers he was Eliot's primary sounding-board during her conceptualization of Romola. Lewes's political vision was, like Eliot's, fundamentally liberal, as is clear from his own response to the events of 1848. His interest in Risorgimento, for one, can be traced to that year, when he began a radical paper, the Leader, which for a decade espoused, among other liberal economic and social causes, “international republicanism, with Mazzini at its head” (Ashton 86). Yet another product of Lewes's 1848 enthusiasm was his Life of Maximilien Robespierre (1849), an examination of another failed republic of virtue. Here, Lewes dwelt on the positive influence of Rousseau on Robespierre but ultimately condemned him as a fanatic, for his “intense dogmatism coupled with a want of human sympathy” (327). One can hypothesize that, in contrast to Robespierre, the less fanatical Savonarola (in Villari's telling at least) must have been extremely appealing to Lewes. In any case, that Lewes was excited by Villari's portrait of Savonarola is clear from the famous journal entry alluded to above.Footnote ⁸

A third, and also overlooked, source of Eliot's interest in the Risorgimento generally and the late fifteenth century specifically would be Thomas Anthony Trollope, the younger brother of the famous novelist and an expatriate living in Florence. When Trollope hosted Eliot and Lewes at his home there (they slept comfortably in the cow house), he was himself writing a four-volume history of Florence – one, like Villari's, inspired by the Risorgimento mythos. (Trollope would proudly recollect in his memoir, What I Remember, that Villari wrote to tell him “my history of Florence to be in his opinion the best work in the subject extant” [417–18].) That history was published in 1865 as History of the Commonwealth of Florence from the Earliest Independence of the Commune to the Fall of the Republic in 1531. In his memoir, Trollope recalled that he “had much talk with George Eliot during this time – very short at Florence – when she was maturing her Italian novel, ‘Romola’” (462), and it is notable that this political historian, for one, appreciated the result.Footnote ⁹ We can only speculate about the nature of their talk, of course, but what is clear is that Trollope himself – like Villari and Lewes – viewed the period very much through the lens of the liberty problem. Committed like other Victorian liberals – from Mill to Arnold – to the Athenian polis, or “municipalism,” as the essence of political life, Trollope contended in his History “that the municipal system, as it was developed in Italy, possesses capabilities of carrying social life to a larger and higher degree of civilization” (Trollope History 1: 2). At the same time, like Machiavelli as well as Mill, Trollope was highly aware of the particular nature of political structures (to recall Pocock's language), especially the (in Trollope's words) “predisposing tendency to decay and dissolution in the constitution of the municipal form of social organization” (History 1: 4). More, Trollope was highly suspicious of Machiavelli's emphasis upon militias as a means of checking that predisposing tendency to decay, recognizing in such martial solutions a tendency to repress the specific value of overwhelming importance to liberals, individual liberty (History 4: 100–01). At the same time, Trollope's portrait of Savonarola's greater ambitions is also more ambiguous than Villari's, emphasizing not only Savonarola's patriotism but his fanaticism too (1865 4: 23–24, 61–62, 107, 130).

Like Villari, Lewes, and Trollope, Eliot in Romola clearly viewed her period through a version of the Risorgimento mythology distinctly inflected by the liberty problem. The “Proem” to the novel makes it clear that Eliot understands late fifteenth-century Florence as a period of contemporary interest because it dramatizes the challenge of self-rule. The city, we are told, stands “as an almost unviolated symbol, amidst the flux of human things,. . . that we still resemble the men of the past more than we differ from them,” specifically in their political preoccupations:

As the plot progresses, one sees particularly the influence of Eliot's three sources in her depiction of the theories of both Machiavelli and Savonarola. In her three sources, Machiavelli's republican theory appears as an intriguing but ultimately dangerous and ineffectual solution to the liberty problem. Romola comes to a similar conclusion. Relatively early in the novel, Machiavelli, represented as a thoughtful intellectual with a keen interest in rival republican strategists, is one of the “men of ideas” Eliot carefully places in the crowd listening to Savonarola's patriotic calls for republican independence (299; ch. 25). This characterization is muddied, however, by the narrator having earlier hinted that Machiavelli's curiosity was more a function of youth than temperament, and that he would indeed eventually become the infamous champion of realpolitik (221; ch. 16). And it is that emergence of the “real” Machiavelli that is most significantly emphasized in the course of novel's few scenes involving him. While early in the novel Machiavelli admires Savonarola's power as an orator (224; ch. 16), later we learn that this admiration is not for Savonarola's spiritual profundity but for his having “got the ear of the people. . . because he gives them threats and promises, which they believe come straight from God, not only about hell, purgatory, and paradise, but about Pisa and our Great Council” (471; ch. 45). As the real Machiavelli would set forth so memorably in The Prince, virtù is no moral quality but the mere mastery of fortuna, like the channeling of a raging river for a season or two (Machiavelli 82). Eliot's Machiavelli contends similarly that “the cause of [Savonarola's] power will be the cause of his fall” (472). By its very nature, fortuna always overwhelms even the most “virtuous” leader, particularly if that leader has silly qualms about using all that fortuna bestows upon him. As the character Machiavelli explains in one critique of Savonarola, “[i]f a prophet is to keep his power, he must be a prophet like Mahomet, with an army at his back, that when the people's faith is fainting it may be frightened into life again” (472; ch. 45), a critique that Eliot has Machiavelli develop at some length in the chapter “The Scaffold” while awaiting with the rest of the crowd the renewed republic's zealous execution of enemies – a policy Machiavelli strongly favors (581–82; ch. 60). When Eliot characterizes Machiavelli's interpretation of Savonarola's motives as one “that presupposed no loftiness” (522; ch. 52), she clearly intends to situate Machiavelli (as most Victorian liberals did) at the far end of the spectrum of approaches to the liberty problem, where civic virtue is a mere instrument of state rather than a path to moral perfection. Like her sources, then, Romola is notably willing to consider the merits of virtù as a means to stabilizing republics, but ultimately deems the approach not only cruel but ineffective at stemming corruption, decline, and fall.Footnote ¹⁰

At the other end of the spectrum, if Villari, Lewes, and Trollope were also ambivalent about Savonarola's religious solution to the liberty problem, they generally found it of more interest and potential than Machiavelli's. The same is true, again, of Romola. For one, Savonarola, and not Machiavelli, is obviously the republican theorist of fundamental concern in this novel. Not only does Savonarola's rise and fall frame the action of the novel, but the narrator provides ample and often textbook explanations of the republican logic of Savonarola's decisions, even the most minor, along the way. For example, we learn in detail not only Savonarola's reasoning in instituting the Pyramid of the Vanities (498–502; ch. 49) but also his purpose in creating a Great Council as “the only practicable plan for giving an expression to the public will large enough to counteract the vitiating influence of party interests,” etc. (385; ch. 35).

Most importantly, it is Savonarola who explicitly teaches Romola about civic virtue, emphasizing its essence to be (pace Machiavelli) moral rather than political. At the end of Book II, for example, when Romola leaves her husband Tito in disgust, the Frate stops her on the road from Florence. “[Y]ou are flying from your debts,” he argues, “the debt of a Florentine woman; the debt of a wife. You are turning your back on the lot that has been appointed for you” (430; ch. 40). When Romola pleads that she can no longer love her husband, Savonarola argues that her duties as a wife and citizen of Florence remain: “My daughter, you are a child of Florence; fulfill the duties of that great inheritance. Live for Florence – for your own people, whom God is preparing to bless the earth. . . . Come, my daughter, come back to your place!” (436; ch. 40). It is true that Romola in her return to Florence does not exactly validate Savonarola's equation of civic virtue and strict obedience to a patriarchal God. Instead of resuming her civic duties in the domestic sphere as the Frate demands, Romola redefines a republican woman's sphere to encompass public life as well. Book III begins with Romola busy assisting the victims of the struggle against the French. Addressed in a “fraternal way by ordinary citizens” as Madonna Romola, “[t]he idea of home had come to be identified for her less with the house in the Via de Bardi. . . than with the towered circuit of Florence, where there was hardly a turn of the streets at which she was not greeted with looks of appeal or of friendliness” (452; ch. 43). Still, in all of this, Eliot through Romola is nevertheless endorsing Savonarola's moral understanding of civic virtue. This is made especially clear in the pivotal scene where Romola meditates on Savonarola's fall and disgrace. Her soul “cried out for some explanation of his lapses which would make it still possible for her to believe that the main striving of his life had been pure and grand” (663; ch. 71). Reassessing her recent period of disbelief as an overreaction to Savonarola's fall, Romola now finds it “impossible that it had not been a living spirit. . . which had once breathed in the Frate's words, and kindled a new life in her” (663; ch. 71). Yes, Romola continues to muse, “[e]ven in this [forced] confession [to crimes against the republic],. . . Fra Girolamo shone forth as a man who had sought his own glory indeed, but sought it by labouring for the very highest end – the moral welfare of men – not by vague exhortations, but by striving to turn beliefs into energies that would work in all the details of life” (664; ch. 71). In her Romola, in short, Eliot (like her three sources) may eschew the fanatical (and also patriarchal) aspects of Savonarola's theory, but she seems fully to endorse the moral program of civic virtue at the heart of that theory.

Before examining the novel's meditations upon the liberty problem within the second context, republican womanhood theory, it is important to see that Eliot was by no means alone in her reevaluation of the role of women in a republic as a means to solving the liberty problem. New approaches to the liberty problem are to be found throughout the late eighteenth century and nineteenth century: considered together, they roughly signify the conclusion of the republican tradition and the emergence of the liberal one. For, in the wake of the American and French revolutions, the expansion and protection of individual liberty specifically – among all the “universality of values” passed on by Renaissance humanists – became more and more important to political thinkers, even as the traditional concern with stabilizing political structures remained. As the old tension between “a universality of values” and stability transformed into this new tension between liberty specifically and stability (i.e., the liberty problem), the ancient virtue solutions revived during that Machiavellian moment of the Renaissance – notably the competing Florentine republics of religious or military virtue – were increasingly viewed with skepticism by moderns, for such solutions emphasized versions of virtue that were actually detrimental to the realization and protection of the value now most deeply held, liberty. A rich variety of alternative approaches – each designed to give greater weight to liberty – were developed instead, from the federalism of James Madison (where liberty would be checked more by law and institutional balances than by civic virtue) to the civil society theory of the Scottish Enlightenment (which emphasized the cultivation of virtue through markets rather than militias or faith). Still other theorists focused on women as an untapped source of civic virtue, and the language Eliot uses to describe Romola's changing role is clearly indebted to this tradition of thought, what intellectual historians now call republican womanhood theory.Footnote ¹¹

Republican womanhood theory contended that women – as the mothers, sisters, and spouses of male citizens – had a special tutorial role in new republics. Some historians, especially literary historians, have mistakenly lumped this theory in with the “separate spheres” ideology that emerges in the early nineteenth century. But there were quite a number of important theorists – including Mary Wollstonecraft and Margaret Fuller (the associated subjects of an important 1855 essay by Eliot) and John Stuart Mill – who were able to imagine women enjoying equal autonomy and yet also fulfilling special roles.Footnote ¹²

Familiar as she was with Wollstonecraft, Fuller, and Mill, probably the most important source for Eliot in this regard was an 1834 book by one of Rousseau's French disciples, Louis Aimé-Martin's De l’éducation des mères de famille, ou la civilization du genre humain par les femmes. This book, which was in the words of historian Jane Rendall “the most dramatic and exaggerated case for ‘maternal education’” as well as “extraordinarily influential throughout Europe and the US” (123–24), deeply impressed Eliot as a young woman.Footnote ¹³ In it, Aimé-Martin argues that a stable republic finally depends upon the responsible exercise of civic liberty, and only mothers can successfully teach sons and husbands this lesson (34–35). Building upon a distinction popularized by the liberal philosopher Benjamin Constant in his 1819 “The Liberty of the Ancients Compared with That of the Moderns,” Aimé-Martin argues that the militias of the ancients no longer teach one proper civic conduct. “With us,” he notes, “life is more intellectual, society more general; education should therefore be more extended” (63). “[N]ew duties have arisen to modify former duties, and from. . . this has originated a more perfect civilization, in which women are called upon to play the part of legislature, by means of the irresistible influence which they exercise over their husband and their children” (64). Yes, “[a]rmies are required to conquer nations,” but “a moral sentiment alone is required to civilize and to save them:” “[h]ere woman's mission reveals itself” (94).

In this light, Eliot's rejection (through Romola) of both the virtù- and God-saturated republics of Machiavelli and Savonarola is typical of the modern movement toward a new moderate civic virtue, as counseled by better-known nineteenth-century liberal theorists like Constant and Aimé-Martin, particularly the latter in associating this new kind of virtue with women. The already described return of Eliot's protagonist to Florence to take on a new role as Madonna Romola seems emblematic of this shift. As the narrator explains, if after this return Romola now “came away. . . from some contact with the disciples of Savonarola amongst whom she worshipped, with a sickening sense that these people were miserably narrow,. . . she found herself recovering a firm footing in her works of womanly sympathy. Whatever else made her doubt,” the narrator adds, “the help she gave to her fellow-citizens made her sure that Fra Girolamo had been right to call her back” (463; ch. 44).

However, the novel does not end here, and the outlandish plot twists that follow her role as Madonna Romola – the second departure from Florence in a failed suicide attempt by open boat, the nursing of the plague victims, and the final return to Florence as a kind of surrogate mother – are the ones that have most troubled the critics reviewed in the first part of this essay. I read these twists quite differently, though, as in fact representing Eliot's serious effort to tease out the cosmopolitan logic of republican and (in its modern form) liberal theory, something from which nationalist theorists, such as Constant or Aimé-Martin, shied away. Later in her life, Eliot would recollect that these scenes in fact “belonged to my earliest vision of the story” (Letters 4: 104), and that original seriousness of purpose combined with the undeniable clumsiness of artistic execution suggest, I think, that these final events served a didactic purpose that Eliot was simply unwilling to give up. For the twists and turns serve to dramatize for the reader Romola's own maturing understanding of how the liberty problem might be solved, an understanding the narrator is at pains to share with the reader in the passage that opens chapter 69, “Homeward.” Here, shortly after completing her work in the village struck by plague but before returning yet again to Florence, Romola reflects upon the recent events:

As described here, there are three, increasingly obscure, steps in Romola's evolving comprehension of political life. Most clear is the first, her renunciation of her original and uncritical civic dutifulness in Florence, on the grounds that such dutifulness may produce stable political structures (the pillars listed here being Church, State, and marriage) but at the cost of what Pocock labels a “universality of values” and Eliot's narrator “the simpler relations of the human-being to his fellow-men.” Second, in a kind of rebirth in the green valley, Romola recovers those simpler relations through an explicitly instinctive service to others, but it seems more important that she – in a third step, at the conclusion of this service – consciously recognizes that sustaining these simpler relations is itself the foundational act, even if political structures are in doubt. “If everything else is doubtful, this suffering that I can help is certain.”

Such gestures as these in Eliot's work, it is true, are often read as evidence of her communitarianism, and the next step Romola takes in the novel would seem to support this reading. Shortly after the passage just cited, in the same chapter, Romola reverts rather suddenly to her old local allegiances: “[h]er work in this green valley was done, and the emotions that were disengaged from the people immediately around her rushed back into the old deep channels of use and affection” (650; ch. 69). However, if it is this communitarian impulse that sends her rushing back once and forever to Florence, Romola's political development does not end here. Rather, we find her, in the Epilogue, tending to a “family” of affection rather than biology. We see her tutoring a young boy, Lillo, as Aimè-Martin prescribed, but tutoring him to be loyal finally not to his family or his city but to humanity: “We can only have the highest happiness, such as goes along with being a great man, by having wide thoughts, and much feeling for the rest of the world as well as ourselves” (674; Epilogue). In short, Romola seems at last to endorse a kind of virtue that does not sustain the old political structures so much as look beyond them, to a world that protects and cultivates individual liberty without recourse to these hoary old tools of state, the bloody militias of Machiavelli or the fanatic churches of Savonarola.

The sheer ambition of Eliot's utopian liberal cosmopolitanism needs emphasis today, particularly as a corrective to the now dominant readings that find in Eliot's oeuvre the communitarian opposite. For the liberal state in Eliot's later work, beginning with Romola, seems itself finally to be little more than a provisional tool, just like those other tools of virtue once proffered by Machiavelli or Savonarola or Wollstonecraft or Mill, for the universal realization of liberty. Eliot's keen sense of the state's only instrumental, as opposed to intrinsic, worth emerges in Daniel Deronda (1876) – in what Patrick Brantlinger has called that novel's “international nationalism” (272) – but perhaps most clearly in later work “The Modern Hep! Hep! Hep!,” the final essay in The Impressions of Theophrastus Such (1879).

Here, in the midst of defending the great nation as the current means to individual greatness, Eliot reveals the very temporariness of the nationalist solution to the liberty problem, a conclusion that Romola reaches finally, as well.Footnote ¹⁴ The time is “not yet come” for cosmopolitanism, or communism, to be highly virtuous, both texts agree, but some day it will.