Italian Culture and Influences in Middlemarch

Abstract

This chapter examines the ways in which Italian life and culture repeatedly impinge upon the quotidian world of Middlemarch. Certain characters in the novel, in particular Dorothea, Ladislaw and some of the Middlemarchers, use, or attempt to use, aspects of Italian culture as hermeneutic devices in their readings of their fellow beings or the world around them. Italian life and culture enter the novel in a variety of ways, from vague prejudice to impassioned literary engagement and immediate sensory experience. There is an interlocking pattern of Italian references through which we observe the Middlemarchers as they interpret Ladislaw, Ladislaw as he sees Dorothea and Dorothea herself as she sees and attempts to understand Rome. The sections below touch upon the broad themes of British reactions to Italy and its culture, while the last section is a rather more extended discussion of Eliot’s use of Dante in her novel. This arrangement creates an overall progression from Italy seen in a negative light in the first two sections to a rather more positive and constructive view of it in the third. I begin, though, with a discussion of Eliot’s poem ‘How Lisa Loved the King’, written before she began work on Middlemarch, and which displays her continued interest in the past and recent history of Italy and contains the seeds of some of the Italian themes she was to develop in her last two novels.