tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4972764383963459152.post5225558576177204821..comments2023-05-30T07:00:13.707-04:00Comments on Bookphilia.com: The light abandonment of ties, whether inherited or voluntaryBookphiliahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05155882653615842141noreply@blogger.comBlogger7125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4972764383963459152.post-23315990532216088372010-02-27T15:30:50.275-05:002010-02-27T15:30:50.275-05:00Rohan: Aha! That makes brilliant sense to me. Than...Rohan: Aha! That makes brilliant sense to me. Thank you for taking the time with these comments! I am reminded that it's better for me to be outside the academy - I'm not half bad at observing but not great at going the whole interpretive way with what I see.<br /><br />Cheers,<br />ColleenBookphiliahttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05155882653615842141noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4972764383963459152.post-60535564585084670442010-02-27T14:42:23.710-05:002010-02-27T14:42:23.710-05:00(Part II)
I think that the drifting away, which ...(Part II)<br /><br /><br />I think that the drifting away, which is so clearly a rewriting of the drifting away scenes with Stephen and Maggie in <i>Mill</i>, is a literalizing of that desire that you could stop making decisions about your life and thus somehow exempt yourself from morality, which turns, in her novels, so much on that labour of choice. It's exhausting, to be always deciding what to do; it's exhausting especially if (as you so nicely say) you have a fierce moral intelligence that won't let you ignore alternative points of view. It's exhausting, too, to ignore your own selfish desires, including for some rest, and justice, and love, and a better husband who isn't a conniving adulterous political animal. Whew: who wouldn't want to lie down in a boat and just float away? It's an unexpectedly nihilistic moment--but again, I have the feeling it is directed at us and our wish-fulilment desires as readers. Romola has to go back because that's reality.<br /><br />Some critics have seen the very last bit as Romola now taking control of the narrative and using it to shape a new generation of men who will help create new contexts, ones in which perhaps women like her will have better options. Others (me included, basically, in the chapter on <i>Romola</i> in my book) have been unable to let go of its conservatism: here she is again, in her (heavily gendered) "place." Where's the authorial lightning that strikes at the end of <i>Mill</i> to leave us furious and dissatisfied at the intractability of reality, the lack of a future for Maggie? Where, even, is the poignancy of the Finale to <i>Middlemarch</i> that, again, leaves you wondering (with Dorothea's friends) why she couldn't do something else with her life? Maybe the ultimate dissatisfaction of <i>Romola</i> is that, unlike these other novels, it seems to idealize the limitations that keep its heroine in her place. It's a consolatory fiction--but so too is the fiction of the Madonna that Romola temporarily embodies. Never mind having a life for yourself: you can be an icon!Rohan Maitzenhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/12111722115617352412noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4972764383963459152.post-36304161515825146572010-02-27T14:42:08.517-05:002010-02-27T14:42:08.517-05:00I think these are really insightful comments about...I think these are really insightful comments about this strange ending. Don't you think that one effect of it is, precisely, to drive us towards interpretation, particularly at a metafictional level? After all the complex historicism of the rest of the novel, in this final part Romola herself may drift, but we are unexpectedly propelled, out of history into myth or allegory. There's just no justifying the whole 'floating away in a boat to find a vocation in a plague-stricken village while all the really important action happens back on Florence without me' section without admitting that what's at stake has nothing to do with realism--or, to put it another way, it is realism itself that seems to be at stake. The parallels to Maggie's attempts to run off and make a new life for herself in <i>Mill on the Floss</i> are very strong, but <i>Mill</i> is largely governed by constraints on what is possible for someone like Maggie in Maggie's position--so her drifting away leads her to catastrophe, because there is (literally and generically) nowhere else for her to go. Romola, on the other hand, is turned back once, to "her place" but then granted a second chance, a kind of reprieve, if you like, from all the things that hold her (and most of GE's female protagonists) back from realizing whatever it is that they really want. To accomplish this for Romola, though, GE seems to be saying, is to enter the realm of fantasy, or, again, of myth.<br /><br />But...the myth I think we want for Romola is that of the fulfilled woman accomplishing something for herself, the kind of thing Romola imagined when she ran away the first time to become a scholar like Cassandre Fedele. GE has placed her so carefully in a time and place where this is not a fantasy but an exceptional but plausible option. So, why is her second escape to something so different and, we might think, really just a further idealized version of her domestic "place"?<br /><br />I think the answer lies somewhere in the moral code you invoke in your title for this post. You can't found a heroic myth on selfish gratification. If you do, you are (close to) Savonarola--brilliant, inspiring, and dangerous, even potentially tyrannical, because you will end up unable to mark where your heroic pursuit of the good ends and your selfish pursuit of power begins. The only sure thing in life is "ties, whether inherited or voluntary": the obligations you accrue because of your relationships with other people and the expectations they have of you as a result. Those are the grounds on which Romola eventually challenges Savonarola, with what I think is a kind of thrilling declaration that if the kingdom of God is as he believes, she will "stand outside it with the people [she] love[s]".<br /><br />When she arrives at the village, what she finds is not something far different from what she knew before but a kind of microcosm of the moral world she already inhabited, then: people whose need for her help creates ties, and whose love and gratitude in turn becomes a foundation for moral life. Why does she have to leave? Because (maybe?) this episode is an excursion, a thought experiment, that actually takes her out of the novel for a while (I know, it doesn't, but it feels like it does, I think). Maybe it's a lesson for us, about thinking you can just drift away and find something else in your life--maybe even a chastening commentary on our own wish that she had become the next Cassandre Fedele and let the plague-stricken people of Florence die in the streets while she parsed Latin hexameters (or whatever). She has to go back. You don't get to opt out of life, or out of morality.<br /><br />(continued)Rohan Maitzenhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/12111722115617352412noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4972764383963459152.post-12411701230065224272010-02-25T05:58:42.686-05:002010-02-25T05:58:42.686-05:00I read 'Romola' a long time ago now, so I ...I read 'Romola' a long time ago now, so I can't remember the exact details (I'll take your word(s) for it). I found Romola herself a bit bland at times though.<br /><br />Now Tito though: if ever a man deserved to almost get away with it and end up strangled it was him...Anonymoushttps://www.blogger.com/profile/07546287562521628467noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4972764383963459152.post-74367571844179218372010-02-24T23:40:52.532-05:002010-02-24T23:40:52.532-05:00Well, I have to say, I was expecting her to kill h...Well, I have to say, I was expecting her to kill herself. So that concluded surprisingly well, considering!Heidenkindhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09494625457587427781noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4972764383963459152.post-80256780011743724282010-02-24T16:31:21.643-05:002010-02-24T16:31:21.643-05:00You're sweet, Mr. K.
All I do, these days, is...You're sweet, Mr. K.<br /><br />All I do, these days, is write page numbers on the back of my bookmark. I go back later and reread the pages that caught my eye to see what was striking me. Often, some kind of pattern emerges that I wasn't at all or entirely aware of while I was reading. That is all.Bookphiliahttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05155882653615842141noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4972764383963459152.post-33373537712689689962010-02-24T12:28:04.696-05:002010-02-24T12:28:04.696-05:00dear C, do you take extensive notes when you read?...dear C, do you take extensive notes when you read? underline? highlight? scribble marginalia as you go? i envy your abilty to summarize and analyze material with the appearance of great ease. he who is jealous, KAnonymoushttp://jkneilson.wordpress.comnoreply@blogger.com