Common-law marriage

Marriage was "coverture," meaning "that the husband and wife are treated at Common Law as one person indivisible, the personal and separate existence of the wife being legally considered as absorbed and consolidated in that of her husband." In Romola Eliot shows, in contrast, the agonized and adamant resistance of Romola to any identification with her husband once she recognizes the selfishness of his aims. Romola shows a capitalist society in crisis, urged to transform itself by a recoil of religious idealism realized in Savanorola. The problem of aesthetic values caught into those of the market is embodied in Tito's beauty and his possession of jewels, which gives him access to power within such a culture. Both Savanorola and Tito come to grief; Romola finds salvation. In this novel George Eliot uses distance to explore dilemmas fundamental to her own society, but she does not indicate possible communal transformations. Instead a solution of a kind is reached by means of transfiguration: Romola rescues a child and his village and becomes a kind of madonna, freed from the exigencies of mar-445- riage and the dominance of men: father, confessor, brother, and husband all die ...»