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Although George Eliot scholarship has been developing its discussions with a variety of topics, the relation between Eliot and science has not yet been much explored. To enrich current Eliot scholarship, this essay examines Eliot’s Romola (1862) within the Victorian thermodynamic popularization rhetoric, which connects thermodynamics to society. In the mid-nineteenth century, Victorian physicists have suggested a conceptual link between thermodynamic principles and society as a way of social prophecy: whether society goes toward order or disorder. While taking into account the nineteenth century thermodynamics’ definitions of order and disorder, this essay more importantly draws upon Belgian physicist Ilya Prigogine’s (1918-2003) reconceptualized thermodynamics that complicates the classical thermodynamics and suggests the alternative term: the spontaneous order out of disorder. This theoretical term will be further applied to the analysis of the main historical event – Dominican friar Girolamo Savonarola’s social renovation – in Renaissance Florence in Romola. In analyzing the chained process of the spontaneous order out of disorder in the evolution of Savonarola’s reform, I argue that the microscopic evolving process of Savonarola’s renovation represents a macroscopic social evolution in Florence, which undergoes the continual evolving process, as well. At the end, I conclude that Eliot’s recreation of Renaissance Florence in Romola is her own attempt to prophesy the directions and ways of social evolution in the middle of rapid change and increasing complexities during her times. Therefore, this essay is an interdisciplinary case study that intersects in the three different areas of literary analysis, historical study, and thermodynamic theory.
