George Eliot

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The Madonna and The Gypsy

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SOURCE: "The Madonna and The Gypsy," in Studies in the Novel, Vol. 15, No. 1, Spring, 1983, pp. 44-54.

[In the following excerpt, Neufeldt compares The Spanish Gypsy with several of Eliot's novels in order to trace the emotional and spiritual progression of Eliot's heroines.]

It has been suggested that Romola marked a turning point in Eliot's development as a novelist. And indeed, Cross later recalled his wife's telling him that "the writing of Romola ploughed into her more than the writing of any of her other books. She told me she could put her finger on it as marking a well-defined transition in her life. In her own words, 'I began it as a young woman—I finished it an old woman'" [George Eliot's Life as Related in Her Letters and Journals, ed. by J. W. Cross, 1885]. I would argue, however, that in at least one respect her next work, The Spanish Gypsy marked an equally significant turning point for Eliot. Romola ends with the heroine finding fulfillment in the role of a Madonna; Middlemarch ends with a would-be Madonna finding fulfillment as a wife and mother. In between Eliot depicts a heroine, variously denominated as angel, goddess, and priestess, who finds only frustration and futility. The progression denotes Eliot's growing realization that the claims of public duty and responsibility must not be satisfied at the expense of personal fulfillment and happiness….

In The Spanish Gypsy Eliot portrays a heroine who sacrifices the joys of "ordinary womanhood" to dedicate her life to her father's dream of creating a new nation, of instructing and liberating her people, only to announce at the end that the dream she has dedicated herself to at great cost is an illusion.

Eliot began her drama of renunciation in the summer of 1864, and evidence of her difficulty with it began to appear almost immediately: "Horrible scepticism about all things—paralyzing my mind. Shall I ever be good for anything again?—ever do anything again?" [Gordon S. Haight, George Eliot: A Biography, 1968]. By February of 1865, while struggling with the fourth act, Eliot recorded: "George has taken my drama away from me." Her complaints were of headaches, feebleness of mind and body; yet one cannot help wonder (even after acknowledging that she was working with a new form) whether these were not the physical symptoms of much more deep-seated difficulties she was having with her subject matter, for within five weeks she was at work on Felix Holt, having witnessed with much joy the marriage of Charles Lewes and Gertrude Hill in the interval. Only after she had finished Felix Holt, had seen its enthusiastic reception, had nostalgically retraced with Lewes part of the first trip they had made together the descriptions of which are filled with a sense of health, ease, relaxation, and a delight that was "immense—greatly from old recollections," and had seen a steady increase in her fame, her circle of staunch friends, and her social acceptability, could she return to The Spanish Gypsy in March of 1867. Yet she had never lost interest in the unfinished work. In August 1866 (not long after the completion of Felix Holt), she wrote to Frederic Harrison: "Now when I read it again, I find it impossible to abandon it: the conceptions move me deeply, and they have never been wrought out before. There is not a thought or a symbol that I do not long to use: but the whole thing requires recasting, and as I never recast anything before, I think of the issue very doubtfully" (Letters, IV). The recasting she spoke of involved the change from a drama in verse to the form in which we know the poem, but what more, one wonders, did she have to recast? Was the writing of Felix Holt important to the completion of The Spanish Gypsy? I believe it was.

Significantly, there is no suggestion in Felix Holt of Esther Lyon seeking her happiness outside "the ordinary lot of womanhood." The renunciation of marriage is not one of the possibilities offered her. At the end of Chapter 44, the narrator says, "In the ages since Adam's marriage, it has been good for some men to be alone, and for some women also. But Esther was not one of these women; she was intensely of the feminine type, verging neither towards the saint nor the angel. She was 'a fair divided excellence, whose fulness of perfection' must be in marriage." In short she was no Romola, nor, like her Biblical name-sake or Fedalma, could she sacrifice herself for her people. In choosing between Harold and Felix, Esther had to choose between the claims of her hereditary past and the claims of her personal history. She was saved from the tragic consequences of an involvement in the Transome history because she gave precedence to the claims of her personal past, which involved both her duty to her foster father and her emotional ties to Felix. After Esther testified at Felix's trial, the narrator comments: "In this, at least, her woman's lot was perfect: that the man she loved was her hero; that her woman's passion and her reverence for rarest goodness rushed together in an undivided current." It is precisely this fusion of public and private good that enables the narrator to say in the Epilogue that Esther never repented her decision.

The Spanish Gypsy again sets up for the heroine the conflict between hereditary claims and personal history, between duty and personal fulfillment, but for Fedalma there is no happy fusion of publicand private good. At the beginning, love seems to her such an easy bliss, yet one has only to recall the statement in Felix Holt that "it is not true that love makes all things easy; it makes us choose what is difficult" to realize how naive she is. When Zarca places before Fedalma her duty to renounce Silva and take up "the heirship of a gypsy's child"

To be the angel of a homeless tribe;
To help me bless a race taught by no prophet
And make their name, now but a badge of scorn,
A glorious banner floating in their midst.

and to help him found the new gypsy nation, Fedalma sees no reason why she cannot have it both ways; she will marry the Duke, then declare her heritage and enlist the Duke's aid for his new father-in-law. Zarca rejects such a scheme as unheroic—"A woman's dream—who thinks by smiling well / To ripen figs in frost." When Fedalma counters that the love she has pledged "is nature too, / Issuing a fresher law than laws of birth." Zarca replies scathingly:

Round your proud eyes to foolish kitten looks;
Walk mincingly, and smirk, and twitch your robe;
Unmake yourself—doff all the eagle plumes
And be a parrot, chained to a ring that slips
Upon a Spaniard's thumb.

Because Zarca is obsessed with his dream, he sees things in overly simple black and white terms. He can state without a moment's hesitation that Fedalma was born not to the slavery of marriage, but to reign. "You belong," he says, "Not to the petty round of circumstance / That makes a woman's lot, but to your tribe." Later, in Book Three, he tells Silva that Fedalma's destiny is to

… live a goddess, sanctifying oaths,
Enforcing right, and ruling consciences,
By law deep-graven in exalting deeds,
Through the long ages of her people's life.
If she can leave that lot for silken shame,

…..

Then let her go!

When he says to Fedalma in Book One, "Now choose your deed: to save or to destroy." Fedalma and the reader both know that things are not that simple. In fact, such over-simplification with its concomitant lack of awareness of the consequences involved is the fatal weakness of both Zarca and Silva. While Zarca understands well what the consequences of Fedalma's marriage would be for him, he has little understanding of the price she will have to pay to obey him:

And, for your sadness—you are young—the bruise
Will leave no mark.

It is the woman, one should note, who quickly comes to understand the full implications of the choices being offered. When Zarca calls Fedalma to "feed the high tradition of the world." he calls on her to accept the "higher" demands of civilization and society, of the collective will of which the fathers are the guardians, and to renounce the "lower" pleasures of passion, instinct, and sexual desire, of the natural world of regeneration, birth and growth associated with the mother. He calls on her, in other words, to renounce her personal history and her desire for individual love and fulfillment. Fedalma's response is that she has pledged to Silva "A woman's truth," and such a love for another person takes precedence over abstract ideals of duty and honor. Thus she is faced with the choice of betraying her father or the man she loves, and will have to pay a high price whatever choice she makes. She chooses to obey her father, but as she does so, she asks:

O father, will the women of our tribe
Suffer as I do, in the years to come
When you have made them great in Africa?
Redeemed from ignorant ills only to feel
A conscious woe? Then—is it worth the pains?

"I will take / This yearning self of mine and strangle it," she says to Zarca, "Die, my young joy—die, all my hungry hopes." She closes Book One with the words:

O love, you were my crown. No other crown
Is aught but thorns on my poor woman's brow.

It is clear from the beginning, then, that public duty and personal happiness cannot be reconciled. Fedalma, by the end of Book One, has committed herself to public duty, yet the tragic outcome of that commitment is foreshadowed when she says of Zarca,

The foreshadowing leads one to suspect that Eliot's recasting of this work after the completion of Felix Holt involved much more than just the form.

Despite her commitment, Fedalma's ambivalence continues in the books that follow. In Book Three she yearns for Silva, then reproaches herself for her infirmity—for being "clogged with self." When Zarca asks her, "Are you aught less than a true Zincala?" she replies, "No; but I am more. The Spaniards fostered me." In the middle of Book Three, after testing the primitive animal-like Hinda on what she would do if she had to choose between love and loyalty to the tribe (Hinda chooses loyalty to the tribe), Fedalma utters perhaps the most poignant description of her situation, a description one cannot help but feel the author identifies with strongly;

For her, good, right, and law are all summed up
In what is possible….
She knows no struggles, sees no double path:
Her fate is freedom, for her will is one
With her own people's law, the only law
She ever knew. For me—I have a fire within,
But on my will there falls the chilling snow
Of thoughts that come as subtly as soft flakes,
Yet press at last with hard and icy weight.
I could be firm, could give myself the wrench
And walk erect, hiding my life-long wound,
If I but saw the fruit of all my pain
With that strong vision which commands the soul,
And makes great awe the monarch of desire.
But now I totter, seeing no far goal.

Precisely because she can see the "double path," Fedalma knows that Silva, like Zarca, oversimplifies the situation, that he is unaware of the tragic consequences inherent in his decisions and actions. It is she who tells Silva that once one has made a decision there can be no return to what once was:

To her clear-eyed perceptions, Silva can only reply with sentimental, romantic platitudes:

Like Esther, Fedalma and Silva are given a choice of renunciations. Unlike Esther, both deny their personal past. In contrast to Felix Holt, however, the choices here carry far more serious consequences. Renunciation carried out with clear-eyed understanding is painful indeed; but renunciation carried out blindly and naively, as in Silva's case, will have disastrous consequences. Because of his tragic blindness, Silva kills Zarca, and in so doing forces Fedalma to commit herself irrevocably to the fulfillment of her father's dream, thus assuring the separation Silva sought to avoid. As a result, Silva's soul, in Zarca's words, "is locked 'twixt two opposing crimes," and Fedalma is committed to a dream she knows she can never bring into reality:

"Father," she says, "I renounced the joy; / You must forgive the sorrow." For her, there is only the ironic realization that she must share with Silva "each deed / Our love was root of." We are left at the end with a broken man, and a woman following a dream she knows to be an illusion, both gazing into the gathering darkness. It is a bitterly ironic ending for a woman who has been hailed an angel, a goddess, and a priestess. There is about her a terrible sense of futility and sterility, which, when taken together with the ending of Felix Holt, denies emphatically the supposed happiness of Romola in the role of Madonna. Her future, Fedalma says to Silva in their final meeting, is to keep her father's trust:

My life shall be its temple. I will plant
His sacred hope within the sanctuary
And die its priestess—though I die alone,
A hoary woman on the altar-step,
Cold 'mid cold ashes. That is my chief good.

That might be Fedalma's good, but as Middlemarch makes clear, it could never be Eliot's. The complete subjugation of personal passion in the name of duty is for her an untenable ideal.

At the end of The Mill on the Floss, Maggie is prepared to renounce all personal happiness….

But Eliot cannot condemn young Maggie to such a bleak future, to such a life of self-abnegation, so she puts her into a boat and mercifully allows her the oblivion of death. When Romola reaches a point of absolute self-despair after the death of her godfather, she too launches out in a boat, in this case hoping for the oblivion of death. Eliot cannot oblige her, but neither can she condemn Romola to a bleak future of self-despair, so she transforms her most unconvincingly into a Madonna, a practitioner of the Religion of Humanity. Only in The Spanish Gypsy, does Eliot finally have her young heroine confront fully the emptiness and bleakness, the nothingness of a future based on a denial of personal happiness. Here, as Fedalma is about to board her boat to cross to North Africa, there is no moment of tragic insight, no moment of consolation in memory, no oblivion of death. One experiences only the sense of a useless sacrifice produced by her total self-abnegation.

Eliot was able to have Fedalma face what she could not require either Maggie or Romola to confront because she had by now found an antidote to such a vision of existence in her personal happiness as wife and foster mother, and in the growing sense of security her ever-increasing fame was giving her, especially from 1866 on. Her return from the Continent in that year was a homecoming, Redinger suggests, "in harmony with the adult life she had created for herself." [Rudy Redinger, George Eliot: The Emergent Self, 1975]. In the killing of Zarca, I believe Eliot finally purged the sense of guilt she had felt over having betrayed her father. She had demonstrated what the consequence of following his code of morality would have been, and had asserted her right to the personal happiness she had found with Lewes. After The Spanish Gypsy, therefore, Eliot's gaze, as the ending of Middlemarch shows, turned outward and forward.

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The Spanish Gypsy and Other Poems

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A Brief Glance at George Eliot's The Spanish Gypsy