Gypsies and the British Imagination, 1807-1930 by Deborah Epstein Nord

Author:Deborah Epstein Nord
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: LIT004120, Literary Criticism/European/English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh, SOC008000, Social Science/Ethnic Studies/General
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2008-11-27T16:00:00+00:00

To help me bless a race taught by no prophet

And make their name, now but a badge of scorn

I’ll guide my brethren forth to their new land,

Where they shall plant and sow and reap their own,

Where we may kindle our first altar-fire

From settled hearths, and call our Holy Place

The hearth that binds us in one family.

That land awaits them: they await their chief—

Me, who am imprisoned. All depends on you.28

Fedalma must dedicate herself to a project of nationalism, imagined in The Spanish Gypsy much as it is in Theophrastus Such, as an effort to build a “birthplace of common memories and habits of mind, existing like a parental hearth.”

Duke Silva, Fedalma’s lover and, by association, the inevitable enemy of her people, argues for the Millite position: the primitive tie of blood and the call of birth must not be given primacy. “Love comes to cancel all ancestral hate,” Silva proclaims, “[s]ubdues all heritage, proves that in mankind / Union is deeper than division” (SG 288). The freedom to choose one’s destiny is crucial to Silva, and so he decides to join the Zincali, to become a Gypsy, so he can marry Fedalma and support her people’s just cause. Eliot stages what amounts to a refutation of Silva’s belief in individual liberty, however, when the Zincali hang his uncle, the Prior, and Silva, feeling betrayed and enraged by the people with whom he has chosen to ally himself, murders Zarca, the father of his beloved Fedalma. This act establishes a permanent enmity between the lovers, demonstrates the impossibility of choosing identity and ignoring birth, and bestows the leadership of Fedalma’s people wholly on her. Obliged to take her father’s place, she haltingly but dutifully proceeds to set sail with her people for an unknown homeland in Africa. Not dead like Maggie Tulliver, her sacrifice is only partial: she will keep faith with her father’s dream and “plant / His sacred hope within the sanctuary,” but will die a “priestess,” a “hoary [white-haired] woman on the altar-step” who has become the “funeral urn,” the “temple” of her father’s remains (SG 370). Heroic but celibate, she will not achieve the synthesis of personal happiness and vocational success that Will Ladislaw enjoys or even the surrogate parenthood and communal integration of Silas Marner.

Fedalma is linked to the other “imprisoned” heroines of Eliot’s works not because of her typicality or her ties to a knowable community, but because she is denied individual liberty and the fulfillment of personal desire, as a result of her dedication to the imagined community of nation. Gender, then, complicates the philosophical debate that informs The Spanish Gypsy. For women, the two poles of individual liberty and devotion to the general good seem farther apart than they ever do for men in Eliot’s fiction; indeed, for the likes of Maggie, Dorothea, and Fedalma, they seem always to be at odds. What has confounded readers and critics of The Spanish Gypsy, however, is that the general good and allegiance to community for

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