Romola - Major Themes

Major Themes

Literary scholars have drawn comparisons between the setting of the novel and George Eliot's contemporary Victorian England: "Philosophically confused, morally uncertain, and culturally uprooted, was a prototype of the upheaval of nineteenth-century England". Both Renaissance Florence and Victorian England were times of philosophical, religious and social turbulence. Renaissance Florence was therefore a convenient setting for a historical novel that allowed exotic characters and events to be examined in Victorian fashion.

Romola is the female protagonist through whom the surrounding world is evaluated. Contemporary and modern critics have questioned the likelihood of the level of scholarship attributed to women such as Romola in Renaissance Italy, and have pointed to the possible role of the title character as a Victorian critique of the constrained lot of women in that period, as well as in Eliot's contemporary period. Felicia Bonaparte speculated about the title character as a "thoroughly contemporary figure, the Victorian intellectual struggling to resolve the dilemmas of the modern age". In a similar vein, the story also deals with the dilemma of where the duty of obedience for women ends and the duty of resistance begins.

The psychological and religious introspection seen in Eliot's other novels is also seen in Romola. Richard Hutton, writing in The Spectator, observed that "he greatest artistic purpose of the story is to trace out the conflict between liberal culture and the more passionate form of the Christian faith in that strange era, which has so many points of resemblance with the present"., in The spiritual journey undertaken by the title character in some ways emulates Eliot’s own religious struggle. In Romola, the title character has a non-religious and scholarly, yet insular, upbringing. She is gradually exposed to the wider religious world, which impacts her life at fortuitous moments. Yet continued immersion in religious life highlights its incompatibility with her own virtues, and by the end of the story she has adopted a humanist, empathic middle-ground.