T. Calandra Pedrotti, ‘Introduzione'. in G.Eliot. Silas Marner. II Tessitore di Raveloe. Ed. T. Calandra Pedrotti.Torino: Utet, 1939, p.7
Victorian age, but he does not explain what he means with this statement. The quick mention o f the fact that George Eliot described ordinary events could be an explanation. The critic possibly means that like Dickens and Trollope, George Eliot was not interested in heroes and extraordinary events. If this is the case, Calandra Pedrotti makes an interesting observation which was better expressed some years later by Mario Praz, who talks o f the Eclipse o f the hero in the Victorian novels. However, Calandra Pedrotti also writes that novels like Adam Bede and The Mill on the Floss are typical examples of Victorian novels because they represent tragic events. This could mean that what made George Eliot a typical Victorian novelist was the sensational, pathetic elements present in her novels, as it was in Dickens’ works, for example. Also De Logu in his study emphasises the presence o f sensational and melodramatic elements in George Eliot’s novels.
Another aspect o f George Eliot’s works which Calandra Pedrotti focuses his attention on, is the peculiar mixture o f Realism and moralism in his novels . The presence o f moralism in George Eliot’s novels has been noted by many critics. It is seen as the negative feature o f the novels o f the second period, as mentioned above. Calandra Pedrotti finds this moralistic attitude also in the other novels. She writes that ‘...this realistic writer is actually a moralist, and her characters always reflect her serene and careful meditation’.
This mixture o f Realism and moralism is what Calandra Pedrotti notices about Silas Marner. On the one hand, he suggests that the novel’s characters are true because the reader can recognise in them his own good and bad passions. On the other hand, he points out that George Eliot gives an ethical teaching to her readers, emphasising that Silas Marner gains redemption after having experienced pains and sorrows. Mario Praz too, as we will see below, talks o f ethical teaching implicitly or explicitly present in the English novelist’s works. Though briefly, Calandra Pedrotti in this essay gives some interesting suggestions, which, as we have noticed, we will find in other essays.
Vittorio Radicati also considers George Eliot a realistic writer and writes that her works represent a peculiar aspect o f Realism. He notes a link not only between Italian
Veristi and French naturalistic writers, but also between the Italians and George Eliot, i
whose novels were full o f ‘...that sincere, affectionate, spontaneous participation in the life i
o f ordinary, humble, poor people’. R a d i c a t i , like Calandra Pedrotti, also focuses his | i attention on the fact that George Eliot preferred to represent ordinary people and events } rather than extraordinary ones. Radicati further suggests that in this regard George Eliot’s Î novels are similar to the works o f Italian Veristi. He seems to affirm that there was a link J between that peculiar branch o f Realism that is English Realism and Italian Verisnw. As I |
Î
will show in the next chapter, there are similarities between George Eliot and i
!
contemporary Italian novelists as far as content is concerned, whereas from a stylistic j point o f view Italian novelists aimed at objectivity in a way that is different from George 1
Eliot’s use o f narrative conventions. Radicati was certainly aware o f this. He points out that the English novelist was true in her representation o f life (and explains this attitude by linking it with the positivistic education she had received). He quotes a passage from chapter XVII o f Adam Bede where Eliot declares her intention to describe events as precisely as she can, as when a witness reports the facts in a law court. He explains that the facts George Eliot was interested in were domestic events, common to the majority of human beings, and he notes that she sympathised with her humble characters. The sympathy she felt for them led to a precise description o f their inner feelings and also of the sensations she felt as a narrator.
Having noted this characteristic o f George Eliot’s novels, Radicati suggests that the main and most important feature o f her novels is not the realistic attitude but the psychological analysis, the power o f representing the inner life o f characters. This made George Eliot’s novels modern, and similar, in a way, to Russian novels. Radicati sees a web-like stmcture in George Eliot’s novels. He points out that actions and events concerning different characters are strictly interwoven; that in George Eliot’s narrative world individuals can fulfil their own aspirations only at the disadvantage o f others . In this regard, he compares Mr Tulliver with ‘Ntoni, a character from one o f Verga’s novels. Radicati is the only critic who has explicitly drawn a comparison between George Eliot and Verga. He emphasises how basic the meditation on the moral side o f situations is in George Eliot’s novels, how important the principle o f duty is. This moralistic element is common to all George Eliot's novels but it is explicitly emphasised in the novels belonging
to the second period. Radicati considers this a negative feature o f the late novels, as did other Italian critics. As far as Romola is concerned, Radicati underlines how much the author had studied in order to represent precisely and faithfully life in Florence in 15"’ century. He believes that George Eliot had sacrificed the imaginative and artistic power to erudition and meditation, but he justifies this choice. He writes that George Eliot's aim was to write an historical novel; that she wanted to give a historically exact and detailed picture; and that she succeeded in doing this. It is natural that in a historical novel ‘...meditation is an obstacle to imagination, that emdition restricts poetry’,"® When summarising the novel’s plot, Radicati focuses his attention on Tito Melema, on his personality and on his experience. He is ‘the true protagonist o f the novel’. B e s i d e him there are Romola and her father, some real-life artists and politicians, and finally Girolamo Savonarola, who as ‘an inflexible judge’'’" dominates everybody.
This introduction also gives some useful information about the reception of George Eliot’s novels in Italy. Radicati notes that up to his times George Eliot’s most popular novels in Italy were Silas Marner. The Mill on the Floss and, to a minor extent, Adam Bede. He complains that outside England even the most careful critics were not interested in George Eliot. The bibliography Radicati added to his introduction mentions a couple o f English critical studies about George Eliot and the book by Negri. Radicati did not make a list o f Italian translations o f George Eliot’s novels.
ibid.,p. 14 ibid.,p.l6
Debenedetti’s essay is interesting because it does not analyse George Eliot’s works by focusing on the realistic aspect, as we would have expected from a critic who has dealt with Naturalism and with Verga. Debenedetti emphasises the importance of autobiography in the first period novels, which he defines as rural novels because they are concerned with villages and small towns. According to Debenedetti, these novels can be considered the first examples o f the domestic novel form (whose origins can be found in Dickens' and Thackeray’s attention to childhood) because they are concerned with the family and not with a single individual. Their main feature is their autobiographical character. They describe emotions, images, scenes really experienced by the author. This led Debenedetti to accept the common critical attitude which considers the characters of George Eliot’s early novels truer than the characters o f the late novels. According to him this is due to the fact that the artist’s inspiration when writing the late novels was no longer lively, that ‘...she was not provided spontaneously with narrative material, but she had to search for it’.’^ The Mill on the Floss is the masterpiece among the mral novels, and shares their basic characteristics. It is a domestic novel and it is autobiographical. However, Debenedetti points out the fact that this autobiography is not narrated either by Maggie or by Mary Ann Evans, but by George Eliot. Debenedetti admits the identification between Maggie and Mary Ann Evans, but notes also the fact that the reader knows M aggie’s story through the testimony o f an observer, the narrator, who does not interfere
In this study I will refer to the 1957 edition of Debenedetti’s translation.
G. Debenedetti, ‘Introduzione’ in G.Eliot, 11 Mulino sulla Floss, Ed. G.Debenedetti, Milano: Arnoldo Mondadori, 1957,p. 9
with the character's tragic destiny. In this way the English novelist created a stoiy whose tragic end could not be avoided, because the narrator had to report it, and, at the same time, a story rich in pity and sympathy because it was an autobiographical story. To use Debenedetti’s own words. The Mill on the Floss is characterised by a ‘distance and at the same time an identity between George Eliot and Marian-Maggie’."'"’ George Eliot knew that Maggie had to die because she was not able to be happy (and Debenedetti knows that ‘to find happiness is a duty’'”' for George Eliot), however, she could not but sympathise with a character whose situation she felt so close to hers. The novel is rich in pity and this pity becomes tenderness when George Eliot narrates how much Maggie has been loved, and becomes respect for the feelings of others when George Eliot reports the tragedy of childhood, which is never understood by adults.
In drawing the reader’s attention to George Eliot as a narrator who is distant both from Mary Ann and Maggie and at the same time is in sympathy with them, Debenedetti deals with the pseudonym question. He links Mary Ann Evans’ decision to write under a pseudonym with the Victorian context, characterised by a ‘strict and hypocritical P u r i t a n i s m I n this social and cultural context her novels would have been rejected by the readers and censored if they had been written under the name o f Maiy Ann Evans, the name o f a woman who lived with a married man. Debenedetti’s interpretation o f the Victorian social and cultural context is typical o f Italian criticism. For example, Mario
ibid.,p.l5 ibid.,p. 14 ibid.,p. 12
Praz defines the Victorian age as the ‘age o f compromise’; Anna Luisa Zazo also seems to accept this interpretation, Zazo, in her introduction to The Mill on the Floss. underlined the hypocrisy characterising Victorian society. Zazo too wanted to understand why Mary Ann Evans decided to use a pseudonym. Her conclusion is different from Debenedetti’s. She did not think that by using the pen-name Mary Ann Evans wanted to conceal her real name, which was reason for scandal in that social context. Rather she believed that by using a male pseudonym Mary Ann Evans merely decided to follow a common fashion (the critic mentions the Brontes as examples). This interpretation is not so naive as it may seem, neither is it so different from Debenedetti’s. In fact, Zazo too links the choice o f the pseudonym with the necessity to create a distance between the woman and the novelist. Thanks to the employment o f a male pseudonym, the novelist could interrupt the natural flow o f events in the novel by means o f narratorial comments, and these would not have been considered as Mary Ann Evan’s own opinion’s. Furthermore, the women she portrayed would not have been connected with Maiy Ann Evans’ life and personality. Nevertheless, the critic notes that Maggie is actually the personification o f Mary Ann; Zazo points out that Maggie dies because she is not able to find happiness throughout her life, which was the basic duty o f a human being, according to Mary Ann Evans. This interpretation is identical to Debenedetti’s .
As he wrote in his Storia della Letteratura Inglese Firenze : Sansoni,1989,p.488 In this stuc
Debenedetti’s final opinion about The Mill on the Floss is absolutely positive. It is not a moralistic novel; it is not one o f the novels where the moral part is dominant and makes the whole narration pedantic. Flowever, the whole stoiy brings with it an important message. It underlines the eternal meaning and importance o f good feelings. It is a novel belonging to that age and to that literary genre characterised by the fact that ‘psychology had not scattered, disjoined the soul’."’® Debenedetti appreciates the novel because it is a domestic novel. It described a family’s experience, it emphasised the relationships among its members, and dealt with good feelings. What emerges from the novel in the end is respect for feelings. Debenedetti mentions the fact that Maggie dies held by her brother. This final scene is mentioned also by Anna Luisa Zazo, though in a different way, as we will see in the analysis o f her introduction to the novel.
Before analysing Zazo’s introduction to The Mill on the Floss, it is worth noting that this time the critic is a woman, and that, as we will see, her interpretation o f the novel can be considered feminist. It is, then, appropriate to give a brief account o f the history of Italian Feminism.