English, Department of

 

Date of this Version

2009

Document Type

Article

Citation

The George Eliot Review 40 (2009)

Comments

Published by The George Eliot Review Online https://GeorgeEliotReview.org

Abstract

George Eliot's Romola (1863) reflects her interest in using musical metaphor to explain how relationships are formed. She explores more fully than she has done before this point in her career how language and the human voice function as music; she theorizes the function of voice more explicitly than she had done before as she examines how it can possess the listener and incite people to action.

There are very few scenes of actual musical performance in Romola and in George Eliot and Music, Beryl Gray correctly observes that the few musical scenes we are given are unsatisfying. It is entirely possible that Eliot cannot realistically render the scenes of actual musical performances because of the 'cultural gulf' between her world and that of Renaissance Florence;l because so little evidence of the popular music from that time was available, her research could not help her. Yet Eliot's failure, if it is a failure, to make us hear Renaissance Florence has little impact on her use of music in the novel. At this point in her career, Eliot is less concerned with scenes of musical performances than with exploring how she can use musical language to explain emotional issues that otherwise would be inaccessible to language. In this sense, Romola is one of her most musical novels. It is through musical metaphor that Eliot communicates to her readers what it is like to be acted on by a powerful force such as Savonarola or to be so damaged that your life has only one consuming and destroying aim.

Influenced by G. W. F. Hegel and Ludwig Feuerbach, Eliot sees music as the language of the heart or soul.2 Hegel values music because it is not dependent on physical expressions (it is not bound by the laws of physics, for example), and can, therefore, express a wider range of emotions. For Feuerbach music is essential because it is pure feeling; it is a 'monologue of emotion' and emotion, or '[f]eeling speaks only to feeling; feeling is comprehensible only by feeling, that is, by itself - for this reason, that the object of feeling is nothing else than feeling'. 3 Eliot draws on these ideas when she uses musical metaphor to access some of the power of music to represent emotions directly; Karol Berger's A Theory of Art, which discusses the power of music in explicitly Hegelian terms, addresses the functions of the various artistic media and informs my discussion of Eliot's use of language. He summarizes his argument about what the different media can accomplish as follows:

While visual media show us objects we might want without making us aware of what it would feel like to want anything, music makes us aware of how it feels to want something without showing us the objects we want. In a brief formula, visual media are the instruments of knowing the object of desire but not the desire itself, tonal music is the instrument of knowing the desire but not its object.

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