ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at the ways in which Romola, this learned woman, this dutiful daughter of an educated man, finds herself mapped within physical space. In the strangely ambivalent inside/outside spaces of the novel, the romance plot, in which the mark of a woman's success is, as Maggie Tulliver realizes, attracting a man and, ultimately, having a child is transformed in Romola into an emphasis on stepmothers, adopted children and all-female households. Walking, wandering, breaking through or opening up the walls shapes a process by which Romola makes foreign, outside spaces her own, in a sense domesticating them. For Romola, the streets and piazzas of Florence create a space of both growing freedom and deadly imprisonment, as did the walls of her father's library. Romola goes 'out without saying anything more' to Tito, and admits for the first time during her walk 'not only that Tito had changed, but that he had changed towards her'.
