Large-Scale Sympathy and Simultaneity in George Eliot’s Romola

Abstract

This article argues that George Eliot’s Romola theorizes large-scale sympathy as a way of ethically engaging large groups of individuals outside one’s immediate social ambit. Yet the failed attempts of characters like Savonarola and Tito to imagine the experiences of unknown others suggests that large-scale sympathy estranges the sympathizing subject from the specificity of individual experience. This leads us to see a fault line at the heart of George Eliot’s work, whereby the necessity of imagining the simultaneous experience of others is continually brought into conflict with the impossibility—and the danger—of doing so.

Religion Counts: Faithful Realism and Historical Representation in George Eliot’s Romola

“…Despite the ubiquity of religion in her novels, much literary criticism still freely chooses to ignore religious contexts and characters in her works (Knight 2019, pp. 16-21), opting instead to focus on secular humanist concepts like "sympathy" (Albrecht 2022;Ermarth 1985;Jewusiak 2014;Reilly 2013;Tegan 2013). This occlusion has a lot to do with the secular focus of the humanities today but can also be located in elements of Eliot's biography.…”

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

“…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.…”