George Eliot's Italian Roads: Mobility,Temporality and the Crises of Realism in Romola and Middlemarch

In Romola (1862–3) and Middlemarch (1871–2), Eliot takes the reader on the road – both literally and metaphorically, in an abstract and specific sense – as the two novels (re)present journeys in time and in space. At the most elementary level of genre, they are historical novels: the one about Girolamo Savonarola's fifteenth-century Florence and the other about England and Italy at the time of the 1832 Reform Act. Both follow a Bildungsroman logic as the respective heroines’ paths – as individuals, citizens and national subjects in the wider worlds of Florence, Middlemarch and Rome – are traced from immaturity, via education and growth, to maturity and, arguably, perfection.

Eliot conducted intense research into the two novels’ temporal and geographical settings, and the emotional and physical labour Romola in particular cost her, when she decided to break with the pastoral world of her fiction up to and including The Mill on the Floss, is well known. The author went on the road herself twice, journeying to her Italian sites to research and experience the reality, materiality and history of the places she would describe in her novels. Her goal was that verisimilitude which Lukács would later define as the central attribute of this particular genre and which Moretti also sees both as a precondition and technique in the convincing portrayal of a character's becoming amidst modern philosophical, cultural and political discourses. ¹ These novels were thus also Eliot's journeys into and experiments with realism.

There are, of course, momentous ‘on the road’ scenes in the novels themselves: notably, Romola's two flights from Florence and Dorothea's honeymoon in Rome. In the wake of the recent ‘mobilities turn’, roads and journeys have sparked growing interest among scholars of the Victorian novel, as in the work of Charlotte Mathieson and Ruth Livesey. ² Journeys in space, Mathieson writes, are a ‘vital and active presence in the structure of the Victorian novel’ and often signify a ‘key moment in the plot's development’ or ‘key moments of [the protagonist's] development’. ³ This is undoubtedly true, and Mathieson's elaborations of how the Victorian novel creates the national and global space through which gendered, dispossessed, English, Empire-serving, colonised bodies move is illuminating. Equally persuasive is Livesey's analysis of the stage coach journey motif in which she links together novelists’ exploration of the Victorians’ affective bonds to localities first and then the nation by invoking the period ‘“just” past’ which had shaped a sense of communal belonging and history that now anchored and enabled the present route towards a national future. ⁴

My own interest in the Italian roads of Romola and Middlemarch does not extend to issues of national spaces or histories or, indeed, to European or global ones. I am interested in the road as a structuring device which, as it works across time and space, shapes events and characters, not only as backdrop but as an agent of narrative and emotional change, and which also operates to structure the generic and affective registers in which a specific novel is written. The earliest reviewers hinted at the interconnectedness of character, setting and narrative modality in Romola and Middlemarch as they discussed the heroine's fit into her temporal and geographical surroundings. Romola was, famously, seen as a failure, allegedly jarring with the novel's realistically drawn historical background. R. H. Hutton and the Westminster Review reviewer deemed her ‘not natural’, stylised, and ‘a modern Englishwoman’ in a novel about ‘an Italian lady of four centuries [ago]’. ⁵ In contrast, Dorothea was seen as a ‘profoundly imaginative psychological study’ in front of a ‘background of perfect realistic truth’: in Middlemarch, argued Edith Simcox, characters and actions emerged inescapably and organically from the material circumstances of the 1830s world. None of the reviewers, however, quite explained how or where the meaning-making, or jarring, structures occurred. ⁶

At this point, we must turn to Bakhtin who wrote eloquently about the history of the novel, its discourses and genres and its formal building blocks: especially chronotopes (time-spaces). In a discussion about Goethe's Wilhelm Meister and Italian Journey – two texts Eliot knew well ⁷ – Bakhtin elaborates how the narrative chronotope makes visible the inseparability and interconnectedness of time and space on a synchronic as well as a diachronic level. Moretti's casual paraphrase in Atlas of the European Novel – ‘[w]hat happens depends on where it happens’ – should not distract from the fact that the chronotopes are, as Bakhtin stresses, ‘where the knots of narrative are tied and untied’ and where meaning-making occurs. ⁸ The road is, according to Bakhtin, the most important chronotope in the history of the novel. ⁹ It is here that ‘meetings’, ‘encounters’, ‘collisions’ and ‘escapes’ happen: the road chronotope enables the representation of such events. ¹⁰ The ‘encounter’ is therefore a structure associated with the road chronotope or even, as Bakhtin says at other moments, a separate chronotope in itself. ¹¹ As he elaborates, in the modern novel, the time-spaces form a ‘crucial relationship with the hero and his fate’, and the hero(ine)'s becoming is ‘inseparably linked to historical emergence’. ¹² In short, the chronotopes are the meaning-making structures that most affect form: they are crucial to plotting and character development but also to genre and narrative modality.

The title of Bakhtin's latter essay, ‘The Bildungsroman and Its Significance in the History of Realism’, provides the final guiding paradigm in my analysis: realism. I understand poetic discourse, including the theory of the novel and of realism, as a central cultural force and actuality in the Victorian era, which connected with other intellectual discourses, be these Bildung, history, gender, psychology, evolution, history, imperialism, capitalism or democracy. The aim of this essay is thus to analyse in detail how exactly time and space operate in Eliot's novel, which I do by way of the road/ encounter chronotope, and how they connect with discourses of history, Bildung and realism. Compared with earlier criticism which discussed Romola and Middlemarch as either historical novels, or novels of education or realist texts. ¹³ I believe that these debates are most fruitful when combined, and that formalist analysis reveals the interdependence of discourses and techniques, as well as the contingent nature of their realisation in Eliot's work and that of other Victorian writers. At its most abstract level, my essay partakes in that line of neoformalist scholarship of the nineteenth-century novel – including recent studies by Isobel Armstrong, Ian Duncan, Lauren Goodlad, Fredric Jameson, Anna Kornbluh, Caroline Levine, Clare Pettitt and Jessica Valdez – which analyses aesthetic form as entwined with social, political, philosophical and cultural content, dynamics, realities and potentialities. ¹⁴

This article begins with an analysis of the two road episodes when Romola leaves her native Florence: first to encounter Savonarola and be told to return to her husband and hometown and second when she ‘drifts away’ in a boat towards the plague village. This is followed by a discussion of the Rome honeymoon in Middlemarch – featuring museum, studio and home visits – in which Dorothea understands the true nature of her marriage with Casaubon and re-encounters Ladislaw. I preface each section with notes related to Eliot's own travels to Italy in 1860 and account thereof, both to contextualise and draw out Eliot's sophisticated understanding of a particular place in time but to also develop further critical parameters. These are Eliot's historical self-awareness and her realisation that the encounter with an ‘other’ space can be transformative for the individual: in a positive scenario, it causes wonder and helps the subject grow; in a negative encounter, it can unsettle, even shatter, the individual's sense of self. These realisations, already evident in Eliot's travelogue, guide my later analysis of the two novels as I further elaborate on Eliot's participation in contemporary discourses of history, Bildung and, more generally, flights into the unknown – be these journeys related to the modern age, an individual or the project of art.

Romola

Romola's depiction of Renaissance Florence is, unquestionably, the result of Eliot's extensive historical and geographical scholarship – of which the Romola notebook and Eliot's extensive reading bear evidence ¹⁵ – but also of her own travels to and experience of Italy. As Margaret Harris and Judith Johnston argue in their introductory remarks to Eliot's 1860 travelogue, ‘Recollections of Italy 1860’, the Italy trip marked the beginning of a new ‘process of making new meanings’. From this point on, the critics argue, Eliot's fiction ‘was to be explicitly concerned with the presence of the past in the present, with the resonance of Savonarola's Florence in nineteenth-century England, or the interaction in Middlemarch of the 1830s and 1870s’. ¹⁶ Livesey's recent monograph confirms this view, as she elaborates on the Victorians’ evocation of the ‘just past’ in their novels. ¹⁷ James Chandler takes the Victorians’ interest in history further and suggests that the nineteenth century was, in fact, ‘the first epoch conscious of itself as such’. ¹⁸ Eliot's and her contemporaries’ fascination with their own historicity, research into and approaches to other periods, becomes especially evident in their contact with Italy's visible architectural history. Eliot's travel recollections largely consist of an enumeration of places and artefacts seen. And yet her accounts of seeing the tombs of Michael Angelo, Dante and Machiavelli in Santa Croce (JGE 356), finding in the Uffizi Galleries ‘the cabinet of gems, quite alone in its fantastic, elaborate minuteness of workmanship in rarest materials’ (JGE 357) and likening Michelangelo's Laurentian library in San Lorenzo to ‘a chapel with open pews of dark wood’ (JGE 355) find echoes in Romola's settings (Bardo's library), plot devices (Tito's precious stones) and personnel (Machiavelli is a political-philosophical commentator in the novel). ¹⁹

As Caroline Levine has argued, Romola is a study in both history and in realism, though Levine, like critics before her, also sees the novel ‘brimming [….] with symbolic images and prophetic voices’. ²⁰ This conflict in modality and also genre is important for my analysis of the road chronotope. Empiricism and (self-)knowledge are key elements not only of realism but also of the Bildungsroman, and the novel charts Romola's journey from paganism via Christianity to humanism. The heroine's first flight from Florence, after Tito has sold her father's library for political and personal gain and despite his earlier promises, represents an important moment of personal crisis. After an initial attraction, Romola and Tito's marriage collapses: his ruthless ambitions, political cunning (on which the ‘real’ Machiavelli comments from the side lines) and exploitation of Romola's respected and insider status in Florence conflict with her detachment from the powerful in society as she places morality, truth and the greater good above status and success. She flees. As Bakhtin argues, escapes are commonly represented in the road chronotope, and scenes of crisis are, in the modern novel, an important architectonic element vis-à-vis a protagonist's growth and change. ²¹ It is exactly these scenes of crisis – often by way of, or resulting from, significant (road) encounters – which bear chronotopic weight, with consequences for plot and character but also, I will suggest, narrative and generic register. Furthermore, Romola's flight is emblematic for an analysis of historicity, as the following analysis will show.

After Tito's betrayal, Romola takes the occasion of his departure to Rome on diplomatic business to leave her father's house in the Via de’ Bardo in Oltrarno in the early hours of Christmas Eve 1494. She vows never to return and even to settle for a life of potential poverty and hardship, if it is away from her husband's deceit and authority. ²² Romola's journey can be mapped, as Eliot, consistent with her realist agenda and historicist project, provides detailed and precise temporal and geographical parameters. Time here is ‘everyday time’, which Bakhtin sees as characteristic of the modern novel. ²³ Space possesses depth and thus accurately reflects, as Robert Tally emphasizes, that ‘the world was revised through geometric three-dimensionality’ in the Renaissance. ²⁴ Romola's journey takes her onto the road, across the Ponte Rubaconte, past the Piazza di Santa Croce and its church, where Tito and Romola were married, towards the Porta San Gallo and from there on the north-bound throughfare towards Bologna, where she plans to part from her servant Maso.

While this chronotope abides by the principles of the modern realist novel, alternative, conflicting elements also surface: passing Pietra and having almost reached the city limits, Romola, who wears the disguise of a holy Sister, briefly lifts her hood at the exact moment her path crosses that of two monks whose approach she had not noticed with her cowl lowered. One of the monks happens to be Savonarola, who emerged briefly before at Dino's death bed, and who recognizes Romola and tells her firmly that he has ‘a command from God to stop [her]’: ‘You are not permitted to flee.’ (R 338) This chance encounter is remarkable – in a realist scenario, improbable – as it is reminiscent of the older Romance genre. As Bakhtin would say, the ‘suddenly’ and ‘at just that moment’ logic of the Romance has a particular bearing on how time in the detailed medieval timescape of Eliot's novel ‘does not add up’ from a modern point of view because of its random contingencies, simultaneities and ruptures. ²⁵

This chance encounter also illustrates Savonarola's character, described as the ‘gem’ of the novel by an unnamed reviewer in the Athenaeum, ²⁶ and his charisma, religious-political zeal and authority. The woman's resultant ‘irritation’, ‘stron[g] rebellion’, ‘anger’ and ‘defiant words’ – ‘I will not return. I acknowledge no right of priests and monks to interfere with my actions. You have no power over me.’ (R 338) – are forcefully countered by Savonarola's words and actions. He arranges Romola's servant's return to Florence while chastising Romola for a flight he calls proud and selfish. What follows is a clash between characters and their gendered and religious-ideological world views, ²⁷ but also between historical epochs. Savonarola's chauvinism, masculine and religious power meet Romola's proto-feminist righteousness and desire for individual freedom and self-determination. Despite his celebrated complexity – the novel will later expose the self-interest in Savonarola's ideology which, ultimately leads to Romola's rejection of both the man and Christianity – Savonarola appears to be a character type without much historical embedding rather than a man of flesh and blood inhabiting a realistically depicted, temporally and geographically contextualised world. On the other hand, Romola seems to exist between two historical periods. At moments, she speaks and acts like a Victorian woman trapped in a failed marriage with a despotic, unfaithful husband, and standing up for proto-feminist self-determination and justice. At other times, she is the duty-bound Italian Renaissance wife who stoically acquiesces to social, cultural and religious authority. As reviewer R. H. Hutton realized, Romola is cut from a different cloth than the other characters in the novel, having been given contemporary features by Eliot, to the point where he ‘wish[ed] that Romola had been [entirely made] a modern Englishwoman’. ²⁸

The road chronotope thus reveals temporal as well as cultural fissures which are evident from the Proem onwards, as Kelly Battles has suggested: ²⁹ in the Proem, the nineteenth-century English narrator imagines the spirit of a Florentine citizen, who died during Lorenzo di Medici's political and cultural heyday but then returned to his hometown after the death of the ruler. Now, everything has changed in Florence, as France has invaded Tuscany because of the political and moral weaknesses of the new ruler, Piero di Medici, and Savonarola has risen to power in the new, allegedly ‘popular’, Republic. For all Eliot's ambition to portray Renaissance Florence with fidelity, the characters Savonarola and Romola do not at all times seem to inhabit the same period, act in front of the same socio-cultural backdrop or follow the same realist modality. The road scene reveals what Nicola Trott has called the overall ‘difficulty of Italy’ in this novel, in which different temporalities and ‘levels of cultural life’ are perpetually transmitted, translated, crossed and even hybridized. ³⁰ In my argument, the anachronism in the road chronotope has structural significance as it shapes not only Romola's character and Bildung but also the symbolic, affective, generic and even cultural registers in which the novel is written.

Savonarola convinces Romola that she has broken the marriage vow she willingly entered, despite her brother Dino's warnings and in front of her fellow Florentine citizens. Hence her flight is wrong for religious, communal and personal reasons. Using gendered language about a woman's and wife's selflessness and duty and invoking her conscience and ties to her birthplace, the friar now enlists Romola for his project to make Florence a second Jerusalem. He asks her to forsake her privileged detachment and instead ‘live for Florence’ and its citizens by way of charity and work (R 341). When Romola, whose (Victorian) mind is ‘still torn by conflict’ and ‘instinctive(ly) shrinking from a return to her husband’, expresses her feelings – ‘My husband…. he is not… my love is gone!’ (R 344) – Savonarola dismisses her interjection and plight. Romola's specific psychology and motivations, which are crucial in the realist novel's process of Bildung, are dismissed in Savonarola's generic and ahistorical appeal to her alleged religious purpose. Once more, his character (like his cause) signifies type and abstraction – something Bakhtin sees characteristic of older novelistic forms – rather than individuality, as he hovers between being a character and being an idea of a man. Savonarola may be individualised, but he only speaks a public discourse of religious duty and purpose and is entirely devoid of interiority or a private, secret life. ³¹

As the novel reveals contradictions across temporal, cultural and genre modalities, Avrom Fleishman sees a related narrative issue in Romola, namely the absence of ‘needful relations’ between characters, on the one hand, and characters and the novel's setting, on the other. ³² While there are meaningful relations between characters – in the way that Savonarola is significant here for Romola's educational process as he shifts her from what he considers her pagan selfishness and self-absorption to an other-directed charity which he motivates through his Christian faith and mission – Fleishman suggests that ‘there is nothing in the main movement of the plot […] that could not be situated in another time and place’. ³³ Ann Ronald hints at the same issue when she diagnoses a certain lifelessness in the novel, despite Eliot's geographically and historically ‘accurate’ depictions of Renaissance Florence: scenes ‘never come alive, they freeze’, as characters also ‘never act [but] pose’. ³⁴ The locale in Romola is detailed and specific but, according to Bakhtin, it is only in the modern novel that a ‘direct proportionality’ between spatial and temporal quantities and qualities, that is, their value, is achieved. ³⁵ In other words, in the adventure novel of everyday life, the chivalric romance and the pre-modern (auto)biographical genres, which Bakhtin lists as older novelistic types, the world remains a static and fixed setting with which the protagonist does not interact in a meaningful, life-changing way. Fleishman and Ronald echo Hutton's aesthetic judgment about Romola's ‘failure’ to transport its readers, despite Eliot's apparent gift ‘for revivifying the past’. ³⁶ David Kurnick speaks of the novel's oscillation between a ‘radical individuality and radical generality’. ³⁷ Characters – especially Savonarola but also Romola – do not emerge organically from the background and Romola's proto-feminist, Victorian individualism and psychology jar with Savonarola's a-historical, ideational character despite his fundamental importance for her Bildung.

Rather than seeing the road chronotope and Romola as failures, I want to argue that Eliot, at least in parts, intended these clashes between periods, genres and relations between characters and settings, and that she was experimenting with realism. Aware that her fourth novel was different from her previous ones, she wrote to Sara Hennell that it was consciously planned to be a departure both in its historical-cultural setting and in terms of genre. She responded to the argument that Romola was ‘pure idealism’ thus:

You are right…. The various strands of thought I had to work out forced me into a more ideal treatment of Romola than I had foreseen at the outset – though the ‘Drifting Away’ and the village with the plague belonged to my earliest vision of the story and were by deliberate forecast adopted as romantic and symbolic elements […]. ³⁸

The exceptionalism of Romola may then be that it is realism, romance, Bildungsroman and historical novel all at once, and a novel that partakes simultaneously in two periods and two cultural geographies. This results in a particular, and at points discomforting, reading experience; the road chronotope, with Romola and Savonarola's collision as a significant narrative knot, can help analyse these varied registers.

Romola's second flight from Florence, after her godfather's execution, takes her onto the road once more. Another moment of crisis arises two years after Savonarola convinced her to stay in Florence and to enter ‘into communion with the Church’ to fulfil her own ‘moral needs’ (R 367). Romola pronounces her newfound vocation to be in ‘works of womanly sympathy’ and the ‘daily helpful contact with the less fortunate of her fellow-citizens’, to whom she gives food, money and spiritual comfort (R 367). ³⁹ Sympathy is, of course, a central concept in Eliot's work and Eliot scholarship. ⁴⁰ Her realist poetic, as critics have suggested, revolves around the dual concepts of ‘sympathy’ and ‘knowledge’. From her 1856 reviews of Ruskin's Modern Painters and Riehl's historical study of the German people to ‘The Sad Fortunes of the Reverend Amos Barton’ (1857) and Adam Bede (1859), Eliot would develop a theory about the form of fiction and of realism, which she would then perform in her novels: her aim was to expand art's social vista towards concrete representations of hitherto unrepresented real people in real circumstances, which would elicit the reader's sympathetic responsiveness toward seeing a larger ‘truth’ about human nature and behaviour beyond the particular case. ⁴¹ As I suggest here and elaborate further in the context of Middlemarch below, an analysis of road scenes not only contributes to scholarly debates about Eliot's sympathy, but the road chronotope also has structural implications for what is a major concern in Eliot's works.

This chapter of Romola's local charitable work changes when Bernardo del Nero and four other Mediceans fall victim to political change and intrigue and are sentenced to death for alleged conspiracy. Neither Tito nor Savonarola help them, despite their power and knowledge of Bernardo's innocence: the one because he selfishly protects his self-interest and position; the other because he believes that ‘minor respects’ must often be sacrificed for the sake of the larger national-religious project (R 464). Pressed by Romola, Savonarola admits a desire for power and an interest only in things and people that ‘strengthen [his] own party’ (R 464), at which point the woman realizes that Savonarola's Christianity is a tool for political and personal power and not the ‘something wider’ which she had been made to believe (R 464). She departs from Florence again, and Chapter 61 finds her standing on the brink of the Mediterranean, preparing to ‘drift away’ from life by sailing a small boat into the sea and death.

It is noteworthy that this manifestation of the road chronotope is altogether unspecific and impersonal, despite it being another crisis and growth moment for Romola's Bildung which sees her turning from Christianity to a purer humanism which she calls a ‘fellow-feeling for the nearest’ (R 472). There are no temporal specificities beyond the mention that Bernardo's execution occurred eight days earlier; in fact, the relevant chapters almost seem to exist outside of time. Romola's location is also unmappable because unspecified, like her path to the coast. There are no details and no identifying spatial or geographical markers.

Compared to the previous road scene's encounter and dialogue which explored Romola's rebellious motivation and conflicting allegiances, this chapter also lacks psychological complexities. There is no analysis of Romola's death wish through the loss of specific people or the occurrence of particular incidents, like her godfather's death or her knowledge of Tito's second family and betrayals. The chapter merely motions to the woman's rebellion against a concept – the Christian sense of duty and authority – and in an abstract way alludes to Romola's desire to be released from ‘the burthen of choice when all motive was bruised’ (R 474). As Romola sets sail, lies down and looks at the undefined and symbolic ‘wide spaces of sea and sky’ (R 475), she feels finally freed from all claims men or Florence might have on her. As she contemplates human sympathy and looks for a message of love in ‘that far-off symbolic writing of the heavens’ (R 475) – a message which does not appear – she falls asleep. In this vague and abstract time-space, Romola's thus far individual and psychologically motivated character changes too: alone and without social, geographical or historical surroundings her character moves ever closer to abstraction, symbol and idea.

Romola does not sail into death but towards a plague-ridden village which brings her to ‘a new life’ (R 519) as she finds there a purpose and outlet for her ‘fellow-feeling’ by caring for the sick. As Romola arrives in her religious attire, with her ‘golden hair’ forming a halo around her ‘fair face’ (R 526), carrying a small boy and offering her assistance, the villagers identify her as ‘the Holy Mother, come to take care of the people’ (R 522). Here, in this (almost) ‘idyllic’ time-space where life realities are ‘sublimated’, as Bakhtin would say, Romola gets to work. ⁴² Released from the burden of choice and the desire to die she overcomes religious divisions between Christians and Jews (who brought the plague) in a new humanism and practice of sympathy. While the villagers soon establish that Romola is no supernatural figure, they continue to call her ‘the blessed Lady’ whose ‘beautiful loving deeds’ will, later in socio-cultural, rather than religious, lore, become material for ‘[m]any legends’ (R 527). ⁴³ As her work is near completion, Romola takes a final step in her process of Bildung: analysing her willingness to help strangers but not attend to the ‘needs of the nearest’ (R 528), she decides to return to Florence. She briefly refers to Tito – to whose needs she feels she remains bound, despite his betrayal – but her deeper commitment is to the place Florence and its citizens where Savonarola's reign might ‘bring calamities’ (R 529). At this point, her character either shifts from a realist character to one in a fable (the genre George Levine attaches to the novel) or, more visibly than ever before, finds an existence between two generic modes. She will return to Florence, learn of Tito's death and find a quiet fulfilment in caring for Tito's other wife Tessa and their children.

In Levine's view, Romola's Bildung is not a moral one because she possesses, from the outset, ‘a highly complex moral sensibility’ which does not change as the novel progresses. Rather, he suggests that her Bildung relates to a knowledge ‘which makes the sensibility richer, a working out of that sensibility's implications and possibilities’. ⁴⁴ And this growth, he argues, cannot be contained by the methods of realism. Levine sees the absence in Romola of what Barbara Hardy has called ‘free scenes’ – that is, scenes which are not essential to the plot but exist primarily to elaborate on character – and the dominance of scenes of crisis as further evidence of the novel's non-realism and the author's ‘genuinely experimental work’. ⁴⁵ Jacob Jewusiak transposes Romola's conflict between realism and symbolism, or fable, onto the readers when he writes that the reading effect is therefore also one of limited sympathy because of a certain historical as well as narratological detachment. ⁴⁶ I have sought to explain this readerly discomfort, which should not be equated with the novel's aesthetic failure, by way of the novel's manifestations of the road chronotope to explore what is a simultaneously modern, realist, symbolic and historical Bildungsroman. The second part of this essay analyses how the road chronotope of Dorothea's Roman honeymoon journey intersects and shapes events in Middlemarch, also as more than a backdrop, namely an agent of narrative and emotional change.

Middlemarch

Eliot's 1860 Italy journey has been framed as the writer's own Grand Tour: replete with ‘studiousness’ and featuring a ‘steady curriculum’ directed at ‘the pleasure of improvement’, her well-crafted ‘Recollections of Italy 1860’ can be read as a moment and record of Bildung. ⁴⁷ Henry James complained that the travelogue, on the whole, lacked Eliot's spiritual-emotional responses to the places she saw: while it revealed some ‘tempered enjoyment of foreign sights, which was as near as [Eliot] ever came to rapture‘, it was ‘rarely apparent that [Rome's life and works of art] said much to her, or that what they have said is one of their deeper secrets’. ⁴⁸ This assessment is of a generalizing nature, though not entirely inaccurate given that the travelogue consists largely of a listing of sights seen. There are moments in the travelogue which show Eliot's cognitive-affective wonder, and which I read as nuclei for the later account of Dorothea's fuller, more explicit, paradigm-shifting transformation. ⁴⁹ Eliot's description of her own journey to Rome is, as I will suggest, truly chronotopic – what happens depends on where it happens, as Moretti paraphrased Bakhtin – as she contemplates the city's time-spaces and her own becoming. At the same time, her visit to the Vatican Museum in 1860 also calls to mind critical parameters – notably the presence of a disorienting, fragmenting sublimity – and focal points that will guide my analysis of Middlemarch.

After an initially disappointing start in Rome – not least due to not finding suitable accommodation after a crowded omnibus ride into the city – Eliot's perception changes after her and Lewes's first trip to the Coliseum, the Forum and the Capitol. When she finds herself face-to-face with, and dwarfed by, two colossi at the steps of the Capitoline Hill, she invokes the ‘men of old’ who witnessed and partook in humanity's victories over diverse threats and dangers (JGE 342). ⁵⁰ She understands Rome's grand history through the ruins of its past and herself, in a further display of historical consciousness (vide Chandler), as part of a historical development. Summer Star calls this the ‘becoming aware of oneself as a given being, in a given world, that is greater than one's individual conception’. ⁵¹ This produces ‘a thrill of awe’ in Eliot (JGE 342). ⁵²

The same reaction – awe – reappears in Eliot's account of her first visit to the Vatican Museum:

Perhaps the greatest treat we had at the Vatican was the sight of a few statues, including the Apollo, by torchlight […]. Even the mere hurrying along the vast halls with the fitful torchlight falling on the innumerable statues and busts and bas-reliefs and sarcophagi, would have left a sense of awe at these crowded silent forms which have the solemnity of suddenly arrested life. (JGE 344)

The word ‘awe’ takes us into the mechanisms of the sublime and its cognitive-affective processes of fragmentation and reassembly. ⁵³ The method of deconstructing boundaries (light-darkness) in the torch-lit museum is also discernible in the description of the sculptures, where it makes a larger statement about representation: the sculptures express ‘arrested life’ in marble as they are abstractions, ideas and representations of something real, and physical objects at the same time. Boundaries between life and art, idea and reality, lifelessness and animation are encountered and negotiated in the Vatican episode of Eliot's travelogue, creating a similarly immersive, sublime reaction as the individual's understanding of her existence in time and space. These two scenes exemplify what Goethe had considered the goal of his own Italian Journey, namely, ‘to discover myself in the objects I see’. ⁵⁴ Rome is thus more than background for Eliot in these descriptions: it causes a personal epiphany that touches upon conceptions or understandings of time, life and art. Unable to explore this moment of Bildung further in her travelogue – ‘How much more I have to write about Rome!’ (JGE 349) – Eliot would instead create a delayed expansion of this experience in her account of Dorothea Casaubon's honeymoon.

Helena Michie suggests that the geographical ‘away’ on Victorian honeymoons coincides, traditionally, with a gendered, psychological and sexual reorientation: the virginal young woman becomes a wife. ⁵⁵ However, ‘reorientation’ might be too gentle a term for Dorothea's experience in this Italian road chronotope, as various critics have suggested in their discussions of what the narrator calls Dorothea's ‘fragmentariness’, caused by an overload of the senses in combination with cognitive realisations that shatter her preconceptions. ⁵⁶ I want to invoke Foucault's concept of a ‘heterotopia’ for Dorothea's violent experience of Rome. Within the road chronotope – which is again associated with meetings and (cognitive) collisions – the heterotopias may be understood as specific, facilitating formations and mechanisms.

Heterotopias, or, ‘different spaces’ (espaces autres), are ‘places that are outside all places, although they are actually localizable’. ⁵⁷ Because of their unsettling relationship with the space (real and imagined) that surrounds them, and because they contain several emplacements incompatible with one another in a single place, they contest the actual space we live in. ⁵⁸ They often contain a temporal dimension, both literally and in terms of a person's processes of development: for instance, the honeymoon trip (voyage des noces), with its destination ‘elsewhere’ or ‘anywhere’, involves the girl's deflowering as part of a voyage, passage and transition. As a defining moment both physically and mentally, Foucault calls the honeymoon trip a ‘crisis heterotopia’. ⁵⁹ In comparison, the museum heterotopia disorients the reader through its even more pronounced heterochronia; potentially also to the point of cognitive fragmentation. As Foucault writes, its temporal discontinuities (découpages du temps) result from ‘the desire to contain all times, all ages, all forms, all tastes in one place’ that is ‘itself outside time and protected from its erosion’. ⁶⁰ This ‘perpetual and indefinite accumulation of time in a place that will not move’ is visible in Rome, the Eternal City, as a whole and in the Vatican Museum specifically. ⁶¹ In the Rome chapters’ exploration of Dorothea's thoughts and feelings, space and time intersect in complex chronotopic ways, shaping not only subsequent novelistic events but also the woman's education.

The museum scene is noteworthy for several reasons, both narrative and discursive. It reintroduces Will, who will from this point become Dorothea's most important interlocutor and Casaubon's rival, and it begins, in the interchange with Naumann, the novel's discourse about aesthetics. Kathleen McCormack convincingly charts the explicit and implicit associations of Casaubon with moribundity in Rome (his entombment in the Vatican library), his asexuality and lack of passion yet censorship of his wife's education and enjoyment (his omitting to show the Villa Farnesina frescoes to his bride) and his directionless, labyrinthine and ‘closeted’ mind which enmires him in the futile, unfinished Key to all Mythologies. ⁶² In contrast, the Vatican scene associates Will with animals (dog, boar, stag), vitality (walking along a path) and nature (he is looking out of the window when Naumann finds him). ⁶³ The figurative key to the men's contrasts lies in the chapter's centrepiece, the Reclining Ariadne statue: Dorothea, deep in thought, ignores the sculpture as she leans on a pedestal close by, her eyes fixed on a streak of light projected onto the floor. ⁶⁴ The sculpture invokes the narrative development of an (erotic) relationship triangle, in which the sleeping Ariadne is abandoned by Theseus on Naxos, after she has helped him overcome the minotaur and escape the labyrinth, to then be reawakened by the arrival of Dionysus who claims and marries her. Abigail Rischin suggests that the statue symbolises Dorothea's ‘transitional moment’ and path between two men. ⁶⁵ This is certainly true: here is a symbol of a honeymoon gone wrong and an allegorical representation of Dorothea's sexual awakening. ⁶⁶ And yet there is more to the statue: it captures the motionlessness of sleep – the ‘temporal arrest’ Eliot mentions in her travelogue – but the unmoving statue also invokes the sense of a moving history, as the two colossi did for Eliot at the Capitoline Hill. It motions to a past which has created this piece of art, a myth that has been communicated over millennia and that now affects and changes the viewer in the present and into the future. The museum and its artifacts thus dislocate time, as Foucault suggested, but they also upset the viewer's notions of space: the statue is at once located in Rome but also outside this real space through its anchoring in ancient Greece and the world of myth. With its complex heterotopic structure and temporospatial relations to the world and time outside of it, the museum space, with the Ariane statue, is an agent of change for both the plot and Dorothea's path.

The final focus in this scene, beyond the structural role of time-spaces present, is artistic representation, its different media and the dichotomy between the ideal and the real. Naumann's Nazarene conception consists of idealizing and spiritualising Dorothea's figure in a painting to show ‘sensuous force controlled by spiritual passion’. ⁶⁷ Ladislaw objects, saying that only language can adequately represent the real, breathing woman in ‘movement and tone’, as well as her ‘divine’ voice (M 179). ⁶⁸ In contrast, painting would flatten all these characteristics. To Ladislaw, Dorothea is, and must be, a real woman – which prompts Nauman to suggest Will's sexual interest in his second cousin's wife – but the narrator also confirms that Dorothea's ‘tragedy’ is not that of the Virgin Mary, Ariadne or Antigone but of ‘ordinary human life’ (M 182). ⁶⁹

Dorothea is neither myth nor ideal but ‘real’; that is, a realist representation of humanity. Hence the analysis of her epiphany (or crisis) caused by and in Rome's roads and museums is elaborated in full psychological detail in subsequent chapters. In the same way that Eliot had insights in Italy that went beyond sightseeing, and further developing her Romola experiment, Dorothea's Rome does more than just form ‘a background for the brilliant picnic of Anglo-foreign society’ (M 181) as the protagonist's mental and emotional education develops organically out of and with the Eternal City's complex time-spaces.

A ‘stupendous fragmentariness’ befalls Dorothea as she cannot make sense of the ‘contrasts’ and ‘incongruities’ present in an ‘unintelligible Rome’ (M 180- 82). Her alienation is cultural: the ‘broken revelations’ of the Imperial and Papal city are ‘thrust’ upon the notions of a young girl raised in the English and Swiss Puritan traditions (M 181). Her problem is sexual, even without turning to the unresolvable issue of Casaubon's physical and marital adequacies: Kurnick sees Dorothea's erotically saturated coming-to-consciousness as a ‘painful seduction or even a rape’ by a ‘thrusting’ Rome. ⁷⁰ Her ‘confused ideas’, ‘ache’ and ‘electric shock’ (M 181) are the result of a dislocating experience of time which causes a cognitive-affective break: in this ‘city of visible history’ (M 180) with all its monuments and art speaking of the glories and cost of Empire, divinity and human potential and achievement, her Bildung moves her from the ‘past Dorothea’, who had a naïve, ideal vision of herself as helpmate to an idealised researcher-husband, to a ‘present Dorothea’ who sees herself and Casaubon for what they really are, and what others already knew them to be, namely an incompatible pair.

Middlemarch cannot reveal this to Dorothea; only experiences on the Italian road chronotope can. Consequently, when she, prompted by Will, becomes aware of her husband's scholarly lifelessness and failings, her ‘fresh’ and ‘warm’ emotions lead to mental ‘fits of agitation, of struggle, of despondency’ which she can hardly contain in what she knows must become a ‘renunciation’ based on ‘duty’ (M 184, 186). Her previous self-absorption – vide the novel's famous dictum that ‘we are all of us born in moral stupidity, taking the world as an udder to feed our supreme selves’ (M 198) – now gives way to a true understanding, and ultimate acceptance, of Casaubon as an ‘other’ who is who he is and not who she imagined him to be. ⁷¹ Ideals, such as her hopeful vision of Casaubon's mental ‘large vistas and wide fresh air’, give way to realities, namely his mind's ‘anterooms and winding passages which seemed to lead nowhither’ (M 183). The lack of affect towards and, ultimately, interest in art she also perceives in her husband – he knows about and can quote expert opinions and assessments of paintings, such as those concerning Raphael's Cupid and Psyche scenes in the Villa Farnesina, but he does not ‘care’ about them (M 185) – is further evidence of their incompatibility. Dorothea will, in the later conversation with Ladislaw, express her sympathy for people, not for objects or knowledge, and her desire to make the world a better place for those who live in it. The consequence of these reorienting fragmentations is that Dorothea begins to negotiate a ‘future Dorothea’ who will overcome the ‘terror’ of her realization that, through the Rome experience, ‘life made a new problem by new elements’ (M 184). ⁷² When, in fact, Naumann and Ladislaw stumble upon a contemplative Dorothea in the Vatican, she is inwardly ‘seeing the light of years to come’ and a ‘new real future which replaces the imaginary’ (M 190, 182).

Casaubon's reference in this context to the dictum ‘see Rome and die’ is ironic: it shows a feeble attempt at humour and his perhaps questionable scholarship – because Goethe quotes, in Italian Journey, the local saying about Naples ⁷³ – but also his lack of interpretive skills when he, oblivious to his wife's emotional turmoil, suggests that the aphorism be emended to ‘See Rome as a bride, and live thenceforth as a happy wife’ (M 187). He can neither see that the honeymoon ‘road’ does not lead towards the projected destination, nor does he recognise the dislocating effects Rome and the Vatican Museum have had on Dorothea's understanding of herself in personal and historical time and in space. It is poignant that in the Rome chapters, the death of Dorothea's ideals and hopes for her marriage coincides with her (Ariadne's) rebirth through the encounter with Will (Dionysus). As McCormack has shown, the Rome experience will be invoked in almost all of the pair's subsequent interactions, showing that Rome causes not only a forceful fragmentation but is also ‘a cradle of love’. ⁷⁴ Ladislaw can come to Dorothea's rescue because, as R.L.P. Jackson and John Hagan have argued, Rome's temporal and spatial dislocations, paradoxically, stimulate his imagination and ‘ma[ke] him constructive’ (M 199). ⁷⁵ I would add that the same chronotopic, heterotopic structures that reveal Dorothea's mental and emotional crisis and change also affect Will's education and the direction the narrative will take him into.

The pair's encounter, after they have resolved mutual misconceptions resulting from their first encounter at Lowick, revolves around a conversation about art and life: Dorothea admits to experiencing ‘awe’ when encountering certain pieces of art but being unable to verbalise her experience for lack of the appropriate critical tools, vocabulary or abstract knowledge (M 193). Nor does she think that a ‘studio point of view’, as Ladislaw calls it, is her preferred way of engaging with the world. Dorothea's key term is once again ‘sympathy’ (M 191) – Romola speaks of ‘fellow-feeling’ – and this concept will generate the central intellectual and emotional bond between Dorothea and Will. ‘[I]n Rome it seems as if there were so many things, which are more wanted in the world than pictures’ (M 194), says Dorothea in her first conversation with Will. She confirms this viewpoint in the second exchange with him following the dinner à trois, in which Ladislaw shows himself capable of moving easily between discussions about art, religion and the relationship between the historical Rome and the contemporary, modern one. Ladislaw especially ‘describe[s] touches of incident among the poor people of Rome’ (M 198) which may be the reason why Dorothea, in their private meeting, confides to the man that she:

should like to make life beautiful – I mean everybody's life. And then all this immense expense of art, that seems somehow to lie outside life and make it no better for the world, pains one. It spoils my enjoyment of anything when I am made to think that most people are shut out from it. (M 205)

Sympathy is not cognitive but affective; it is not elitist but ‘common’ and democratic. Sympathy is directed towards people and ethics – as we can see from Dorothea's plans for model cottages on Sir James's estate – so the woman's discomfort with abstractions, aesthetic or otherwise, is understandable. And most importantly, as Rae Greiner has suggested, sympathy produces and structures the novelist's imaginative processes in realist form. ⁷⁶

In Rome, Will realizes that he does not want to be a painter: he wants something ‘real’ and thus unconsciously rejects Naumann's aestheticization of Dorothea. And he acknowledges in a second discussion with Dorothea, after she has asked him about becoming a poet, that poetry only offers brief spells of the experience of ‘knowledge passing instantaneously into feeling’, which he seeks (M 209). Eventually, Ladislaw will find his vocation in journalism and then politics which fulfil both his celebration of language in the search for truth and his desire for action as a result of one's knowledge, feeling and sympathy. He convinces Dorothea that sympathy is directed at life and towards the living: sensing that he is going too far but unable to stop himself, he refers to Lowick as a ‘stone prison’ in which Dorothea, he fears, will be ‘buried alive’ (M 206). However, despite his obvious sexual and intellectual interest in Dorothea, he also knows that her character, which has been revealed to him in Rome and has been shaped in Rome, will lead her to ‘serve’ Casaubon out of a sense of duty even if there is no love (M 208). Still, his hope that she may one day ‘enjoy’ herself because ‘[e]njoyment radiates’ and is, therefore, more effective than trying to ‘take care of all the world; that is being taken care of when you feel delight’ (M 205) possibly finds a small resonance during Dorothea's later reflections on what path she may pursue, and what path with Ladislaw.

Dorothea's words in her final Italian encounter with Will – ‘I am so glad we met in Rome. I wanted to know you.’ (M 208) – reveal how this chronotope, as crisis heterotopia, shapes and advances Dorothea's intellectual and affective growth, but also her understanding of human history and her place within this world, and in relation to others. The road chronotope is not only material but also modern, Bakhtin argues, because ‘[w]hat is at issue [in modern embodiments of the novelistic genre] is that special connection between a [wo]man and all [her] actions, between every event of [her] life and the spatial-temporal world’. ⁷⁷ Characters are ‘real’ and ‘authentic’, and so is their ‘world’, which is more than a setting and, most importantly, there is ‘an internal and authentic necessity’ between a novel's personnel and the time-spaces they inhabit. ⁷⁸ In this regard, Eliot's Italian road chronotope also forms the author's conceptualisation and materialisation of realism: the details of ‘knowing’ a protagonist's unique character and path in the world effects readerly interest, identification and sympathy, as specificities are translated into generalities, ethics and, perhaps, even action.

Conclusion

This essay has focused on the road chronotope in Romola and Middlemarch, as it plays out in the Italian setting of both novels, as a narrative device that has a bearing on plot, character, genre and readerly response alike. The encounters, escapes and collisions that occur on the road produce or untangle, in Bakhtin's argument, the narrative knots of these novels or, indeed, of any novel. And the specific road encounters of the honeymoon and the museum visit, I suggested, show especially well the affective and cognitive intensity that comes with the individual's experience in what Foucault termed a ‘heterotopia’. I have employed the road chronotope as a structuring device not only to read momentous scenes in these two novels – which are crucial in terms of the heroines’ intellectual and affective change as well as plot development – but also to discuss the novels’ generic belonging to, as well as transgression of, the historical novel and Bildungsroman genres. The road chronotope has brought together scholarly foci in Eliot research – Bildung, history, realism – that have often been kept separate. Moreover, my exploration of the road as a ‘meaning-making’ and ‘organizing centre’ in each novel ⁷⁹ has suggested its implications for something that has been long acknowledged as one of the major concerns of Eliot's work: sympathy.

Sympathy is a key term in Eliot's novels – both Romola and Dorothea's paths are guided and even determined by it – but it is also so central to her poetic that one might even want to appropriate the title of Greiner's monograph (which addresses authors from Austen to James) and call Eliot's a Sympathetic Realism. The road chronotope shows Eliot's realism at work: documenting and imagining realities, foregrounding specificities that lead towards abstractions and ideals that affect the readers’ moral outlook, seeing history in an individual's life record and addressing gender and class formations through ‘democratic imaginations’. ⁸⁰ These formations are contingent and creative rather than necessary or normative. As Ian Duncan has suggested in his analysis of the nineteenth-century novel and Human Forms, ‘the perfect form’ may be one that is ‘dynamic and evolving’. ⁸¹ The same holds true for the ways in which Eliot's realism finds expression – or its limits – in Middlemarch and Romola. Realism cannot be seen, as older criticism thought, as an established or fixed theory, or a set of tools or techniques. It is ‘experimental’, Lauren Goodlad, Isobel Armstrong and Duncan have argued. ⁸² It finds life in ‘tension’ and ‘struggle’, as Fredric Jameson has shown. ⁸³ Form and realism only emerge in praxis, and perhaps even in an eternal process Blanchot called désoeuvrement; an undoing that is the very doing that keeps the project alive.