"The painted record" in George Eliot's historical novel Romola
pp. 101-118
in: Käte Mitchell, Nicola Parsons (eds), Reading historical fiction, Berlin, Springer, 2013Abstract
In George Eliot's mid-Victorian historical novel Romola (1862-3), vision merges with history and memory as a means by which characters gauge their relationships both to each other and to time — to the past, present, and future. Romola is a novel about re-membering the past, about putting various "pasts' together into an historical narrative designed to have meaning not only for the characters within the text but also for its readers. The novel disturbs traditional stories of the past in its exploration of sight and visual culture in order to reveal to readers a new way of seeing what the past may come to mean for audiences in the present. In 1846, George Eliot wrote that "in the obscurity which criticism has produced, by the extinction of all lights hitherto held historical, the eye must accustom itself by degrees to discriminate objects with precision' (2000a, 10). In Romola, the commentator-turned-novelist shows particular concern with expressing a type of historical acclimation to her subject that relies upon contemporary discourses of Victorian visuality and their influence on how nineteenth-century British readers came to understand their position in relation to events separated by geographical and temporal distance. She suggests that the historical novelist can
