Masques et mascarades dans Romola par George Eliot : la traversée des apparences

• Main Author: Stéphanie Richet
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Presses Universitaires de la Méditerranée 2013-03-01
• Series: Cahiers Victoriens et Edouardiens
• Subjects: Florence; Renaissance; mask; carnival; appearance; manipulation
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/cve/295

Between opacity and transparency, exposition and dissimulation, the viewer’s gaze is blocked by illusionist devices that lure it. Masks and masquerades dramatize the lie of appearances. What is at stake is not just the mask, easily detectable because codified, of social conventions. Neither is it only the exhibited mask of carnivals. What is at stake is the mask as simulacrum, as a riddle to be deciphered testifying to the intention to deceive and manipulate. In Romola, the deceiver’s mask is the privileged instrument of treachery. It works on the mode of prestidigitation in that it relies on the displacement of attention, drawing the viewer’s gaze on a spectacular, yet spurious gesture, while the real action lies somewhere else. It proceeds of a trick or an alternate game of presence and absence.Identifying the mask so as to make it fall, revealing the invisible mask so as to turn it into a recognizable object, contribute to reestablishing the dramatic illusion and the awareness of the interplay between reality and fiction. The spectator must then be on the lookout for cracks in falsely transparent surfaces so as to unmask the traitor. This concept of apparition or exposition of cracks in the mask is illustrated by Piero di Cosimo’s painting, which lays bare the true character of Tito, the traitor.What is visible obviously has a major capacity for dissimulation. It partakes of the phenomenon of subjection as defined by Didi-Huberman. It makes things spectacular, exposed to gazes, while putting them underneath (sub-jectio), dissimulating them under the viewer’s gaze and therefore establishing a tension between depth and visibility.Masks, make-up and artifices create multiple layers in what is visible. What can be seen and what can be deciphered no longer coincide, therefore threatening the ambition of transparency claimed by realist fiction.