ABSTRACT
The sound-track of Romola is a very insistent one. In her portrayal of Savonarola, George Eliot can be said to emulate the historian Jacopo Nardi, who makes a brief, beneficent appearance in the last numbered chapter of Romola. The brief moment of Florentine history with which Romola is concerned is dominated by Savonarola, whose subtle and mysterious, movingly powerful personality is distilled as the influence of a voice—a voice that, in the course of the novel, penetrates, swells, fades and is eternally silenced. Although Savonarola speaks gently to her, the inherent authority that characterizes this phase of his career symbolically forces Romola to renounce her own 'proud erectness', and fall to her knees 'in a new state of passiveness'. Tito's self-identification with Bacchus is corroborated both by his intoxicating, amorously ecstatic evocations to Romola of the south, and by his delight in noisy, feast-day confusion.
