Conflicting Self-Perceptions in George Eliot'S Romola

George Eliot's Romola () takes place in fifteenth-century Florence in the context of the tumultuous events leading up to the execution of Savonarola (), a Roman Catholic friar who had become a charismatic reformer. The title character, Romola, is the devoted daughter of Bardo, a descendant of the once-prominent Bardi family that had been “destroyed by popular rage in the middle of the fourteenth century” (Ch. 5). Bardo is now a “moneyless blind old scholar”’ (Ch. 5), who, with Romola's help, devotes himself to organizing and preserving his library as his legacy for his fellow citizens. Early in the story, Romola marries Tito, a Greek newcomer to Florence who poses as a scholar willing to help her father. In contrast to Romola, Tito has abandoned an aging parent: Before he came to Florence, he had left his stepfather Baldassarre behind following a shipwreck. The abandonment seems particularly outrageous to Baldassarre, who had rescued Tito as a child from an abusive situation and adopted and raised him, only to experience betrayal in return. The contrast between the devoted daughter and the abandoning son is stressed throughout the novel.

In The Transformation of Rage (1994), I emphasized the influence of Eliot's relationship to her mother on the creation of her characters and the shape of her novels. In this essay, I want to show how Eliot's relationship to her father affected her portrayal of the two contrasting father-child relationships in Romola. After examining her characterizations of Tito and Romola and their relationships to their fathers, I shall attempt to show how the circumstances of Eliot's life are reflected in the contrasting portrayals. I shall argue that the split between the two sets of father-child relationships in Romola reflects both the author's conflicting self-perceptions of her relationship to her own father and her failure to complete the process of mourning his death. Bowlby's (1973, 1980) studies of separation and loss, used in conjunction