SOURCE: Flint, Kate. “Blood, Bodies, and ‘The Lifted Veil.’” Nineteenth-Century Literature 51, no. 4 (March 1997): 455-73.

[In the following essay, Flint examines “The Lifted Veil” in respect to Victorian views on medicine, science, and psychology.]

On 17 March 1878 Edith Simcox paid a visit to George Eliot and her companion, George Lewes. Simcox recorded their conversation in her Autobiography: “I asked about the Lifted Veil. Lewes … asked what I thought of it. I was embarrassed and said—as he did—that it was not at all like her other writings, wherefrom she differed; she said it was ‘schauderhaft’ [horrible, ghastly] was it, and I [said] yes; but I was put out by things that I didn't quite know what to do with.”¹ “The Lifted Veil,” written in the early months of 1859 and first published in Blackwood's Magazine in June of that year, has long been a work that critics have not known quite what to do with. It has been seen as a Tale of Mystery and Imagination, in the style of Edgar Allan Poe; a short novel dealing with moral problems; an early example of the sensation fiction that was to become so popular in England during the 1860s. It has stimulated questions concerning the part it plays in George Eliot's career as a writer—particularly in relation to the fact that in this work she conspicuously and deliberately adopts a first-person male persona.² The relationship between gender and knowledge—important, as we shall see, to a reading of the tale in the context of medical science—is raised by the implications of the title itself. Veils are inescapably associated with eroticism, exoticism, and fetishism. To lift the veil is to peep at the forbidden, to access taboo knowledge; to occupy, by connotation, a masculine position.³ This is not to say, of course, that one relishes what one finds; this is the message of Shelley's sonnet where he advises one not to shed one's illusions: “Lift not the painted veil which those who live / Call life.”⁴ The horrors of looking, voluntarily or involuntarily, “behind the veil” inform the novella. Latimer, the narrator, does not welcome his unbidden powers of prevision; moreover, the fascination exerted on him by the Water-Nixie, Bertha, is in great measure due to the fact that hers is the only mind he cannot read: “my oasis of mystery in the dreary desert of knowledge.”⁵ George Eliot's story is, among other things, a dramatization of the folly of pursuing Woman on the grounds that she represents a mysterious Other.

In more formal terms “The Lifted Veil” provokes conjectures about the operations of fiction. Composed at a time when George Eliot was developing her theories concerning realism, the story bends laws of probability in order to investigate questions that are implicit throughout many of her later novels: what would happen if we could lift what Latimer calls “the curtain of the future” (p. 4)?⁶ If we could foresee the consequences of our actions, would we act differently? If sympathy toward others is a desirable thing, is it only possible to express this sympathy when we do not know as much as it would be possible to know about the other person? To what extent does personality color perception? All these questions tend toward a wider issue: if we could have more strongly developed powers of vision, if we could lay bare the future and the thoughts of others, as a physiologist can lay bare the hidden workings of the mysteriously veiled human body, would we choose to accept such powers?

This question goes beyond a poser for fiction. It is inseparably linked to a developing contemporary debate about the relationship between physiology and psychology. The Victorians were fascinated by the possibility, the necessity, of making things visible. Nowhere was this more true than in the sphere of medical science. This fascination evolved out of the work of Enlightenment scientists, who developed, as Barbara Stafford has put it,

proper and improper rituals for scanning, touching, cutting, deforming, abstracting, generating, conceiving, marking, staining, enlarging, reducing, imagining, and sensing. Constituting visual styles or manners of behavior, these procedures provided right or wrong sensory and intellectual strategies for “opening” recalcitrant materials and otherwise impenetrable substances. Normal or abnormal processes and modes for proceeding could assure one, or not, of getting a glimpse into secretive physiognomies. Body tropes thus provided critical clues for how insight might be gained into the interior of any concealed territory.⁷

The task of the medical clinic, as Michel Foucault wrote in The Birth of the Clinic, was “no longer … simply to read the visible; it has to discover its secrets.”⁸ The secrets of the body are complicated in their concealment, however, since they are apparently contained in two types of systems. On the one hand there is blood, muscle, bone, organs; on the other, the complex workings of the mind. For much of the nineteenth century the workings of body and mind were commonly believed to be inseparable.⁹ However, such assumptions did not pass unquestioned, and it is my contention that “The Lifted Veil” may usefully be read as an intervention in this scientific arena. Notably informed by contemporary science, it implicitly poses the question as to whether identical hypotheses and modes of investigation are indeed suitable when it comes to understanding the workings of the mind and of the body.

.....

In writing “The Lifted Veil” George Eliot, unlike a physiologist, is unhampered by laws of corporeal possibility. The novella provides a controlled space in which she can set up her own experiment, asking “what if?” At the same time, as we shall see, she carefully ties in to contemporary science the blood transfusion episode, the most ghoulish and incredible of all the scenes in the story—incredible since others than Latimer are witness to it, and thus it cannot be accounted for by hallucinatory peculiarities and coincidence. The novella's interrogations of the limits of positivism are dependent for their importance and credibility on this very definite scientific grounding.

Edith Simcox, like many subsequent critics, may have felt that “The Lifted Veil” was something of a cuckoo in George Eliot's fictional nest. In the autobiographical passage quoted above Simcox records Lewes's contribution to the discussion that she and the novelist were having: “He Oh, but the moral is plain enough—it is only an exaggeration of what happens—the one-sided knowing of things in relation to the self—not whole knowledge because ‘tout comprehendre est tout pardonner’” (George Eliot Letters, IX, 220). It is notable that Lewes felt that he could comment so confidently upon the text's import—even if his explanation may not be crystal clear to us—since his own connection to “The Lifted Veil” and its themes is a crucial one. For George Eliot's novella would have been impossible without Lewes's physiological researches, and in many respects her work should explicitly be seen as a dialogue with them.

Many of the critical problems posed around “The Lifted Veil” center on the quality of prevision. Yet prevision is not in itself a particularly strange characteristic. A term used, indeed, to describe visionary experience, it also has its function as a term within scientific and sociological investigation. Praising Auguste Comte in the final chapter of A Biographical History of Philosophy, which he published in 1845-46, Lewes maintained firmly that “the positive Method is the only Method … on which truth can be found is easily proved: on it alone can prevision of phenomena depend. Prevision is the characteristic and the test of knowledge. If you can predict certain results and they occur as you predicted, then are you assured that your knowledge is correct.”¹⁰ Prevision may be a goal not just of philosophical endeavor but of physiology. The more we know about the constitution of the body and the relations of its various parts, the more accurately will we be able to understand its functioning and diagnose and treat its disorders. The importance of the body and its indicative manifestations runs through “The Lifted Veil.” Latimer characterizes himself—once his affliction of penetrating, unbidden, into the mental processes of others becomes habitual—as suffering not so much from a mental aberration as from “the stamp of a morbid organisation, framed for passive suffering” (p. 20). He does not describe his strange “diseased participation in other peoples' consciousness” (p. 26) in supernatural terms but complains that it results from experiencing “the lot of a being finely organised for pain, but with hardly any fibres that responded to pleasure” (p. 36); he compares it, in language prefiguring the passage in chapter 20 of Middlemarch that contemplates the pain of having too keen a vision of human life, to “a preternaturally heightened sense of hearing, making audible to one a roar of sound where others find perfect stillness” (p. 26). Throughout “The Lifted Veil” (as indeed throughout all of George Eliot's subsequent fictions) the workings of the body are inseparably bound in with the emotions: thus Latimer looks back to the fading of what little happiness he has known in his marriage “as a man might look back on the last pains in a paralysed limb” (p. 47). Latimer's narrative gains credibility from the fact that he, schooled in science, confidently employs medical vocabulary not just in the examples cited but as he gives the specifics of three deaths: his brother's, through “a concussion of the brain” (p. 41); Mrs. Archer's (peritonitis); and his own foreseen demise, from angina pectoris. Moreover, George Eliot, via Latimer, drops a strong hint that not only are bodies important in their own right but that our comprehension of their workings may be analogous to our interpretation of texts: “We learn words by rote, but not their meaning; that must be paid for with our life-blood, and printed in the subtle fibres of our nerves” (p. 52). “The Lifted Veil,” in its very construction, is based on a paradigm of morbid anatomy: a narrative that keeps pace, to quote Lawrence Rothfield writing of George Eliot in a different context, with “the temporality of the body, its organic growth and decay, its duration of illness, its descent toward death, its complicated finitude: the narrative, in short, of a pathological organicism.”¹¹

The speculative, imaginative, fiction-creating mind, with its capacity for prevision, has the ability to travel backward and forward in time. But the human body has no such ability, and nor, suggests George Eliot through Latimer, can our deep-seated responses adjust themselves according to rational knowledge about the one thing that is certain, not speculative, about our futures: “Our impulses, our spiritual activities, no more adjust themselves to the idea of their future nullity, than the beating of our heart, or the irritability of our muscles” (p. 44). This language takes us straight into physiology, and the implications of the relation of “The Lifted Veil” to contemporary medical science, with its interest in the connections between mental and physical activity.

The importance of conventional medical science in relation to “The Lifted Veil” has hitherto been passed over in favor of more tendentious forms of inquiry. Beryl Gray has usefully illuminated some of the ways in which George Eliot's novella relates to practices that lay on the very borders of acceptable science in the 1840s and 1850s, particularly mesmerism, animal magnetism, and clairvoyance.¹² “Indications of claire-voyance witnessed by a competent observer,” George Eliot wrote in a 22 April 1852 letter to George Combe, “are of thrilling interest and give me a restless desire to get at more extensive and satisfactory evidence” (George Eliot Letters, VIII, 45). She had become familiar with such highly topical subjects in the 1840s through her friendship with Charles and Arthur Bray. In 1851 Charles Bray had introduced her to Combe, the Edinburgh phrenologist, with whom she corresponded until her relationship with Lewes put an end to the connection.

In “The Lifted Veil” phrenology seems an effective diagnostic tool. Mr. Letherall, a friend of Latimer's father, takes the “small head” of the boy “between his large hands, and pressed it here and there in an exploratory, suspicious manner—then placed each of his great thumbs on my temples” (p. 6), before detecting supposed deficiencies and excesses of sensibility and prescribing a course of scientific, classificatory education that ran counter to the young Latimer's natural inclination toward unpractical literary pursuits—but this education effects no conspicuous change in his innate disposition. Through Combe, George Eliot became alerted to the work of William Gregory, Professor of Chemistry at Edinburgh University. As Gray has noted, in his Letters to a Candid Inquirer, on Animal Magnetism (1851) Gregory writes of the experiences of one of his patients, “Mr. D.,” who became clairvoyant when in deep mesmeric sleep, developing the capacity to describe accurately places he had never seen, such as Cologne, and people he had never met—in a manner very like that in which Latimer intensely visualizes Prague before he has traveled there.¹³ Moreover, Professor Gregory believed strongly in the possibility of “sympathetic clairvoyance,” the ability both to read the thoughts of others and to see into the future, for: “If past occurrences leave a trace behind them, may not ‘coming events cast a shadow before?’” (p. 159). “The Lifted Veil” undoubtedly owes a good deal to George Eliot's interest in the moral and metaphysical questions raised by such quasi-scientific investigations and speculations. But the relationship between “The Lifted Veil” and more mainstream science is much closer than has previously been recognized, and the main agency of that closeness is G. H. Lewes.

The most sensational scene in “The Lifted Veil” occurs near the end when the doctor, Meunier, performs an experiment on Bertha's maid and companion, Mrs. Archer. This is not a scene that critics have dwelt on with any comfort-if, indeed, they have chosen to confront it at all. “The blood transfusion incident is a piece of tawdry melodrama, a grotesque and infelicitous flaw, a fiction,” writes Terry Eagleton, stating further that “we can't believe it; and yet of course we must, for this is a ‘realist’ tale, and within those conventions what Latimer as observer says goes. It must have happened-Bertha must therefore be guilty-and yet, somehow, it didn't” (p. 58). Eagleton wriggles out of this problem by suggesting that here we have nothing less than the theoretical problem of realist fiction to ponder upon: how do we know that what Latimer writes is “truth”? How do we account for Latimer's previsionary powers having failed him with regard to his wife, except by recourse to an explanation that reads into his specific situation a paradigm for the fact that all narrative fiction must pretend “not to know,” to some extent, in order to function as a narrative?¹⁴

Other critics are less subtle than Eagleton but no less dismissive. Judith Wilt, seeing the novella as a mid-nineteenth century staging post between Frankenstein and Dracula, labels the transfusion “the most splendidly Gothic scene of all.”¹⁵ A “lurid scene,” Mary Jacobus calls it.¹⁶ Beryl Gray passes hastily over it in her “Afterword” to the Virago edition, after having initially termed it a “ghoulish, quasi-scientific resurrection from the dead”: “On the surface, the transfusion of Dr. Meunier's own blood straight into the neck vein of the corpse does seem preposterously melodramatic, but it is described quite perfunctorily. The narrative drives on towards the climax, which is not the momentary success of the operation, but the shock of the posthumous release of Mrs. Archer's malice.”¹⁷ And even in the article where she concentrates on George Eliot and science in relation to this novella, Gray writes of the author's “unorthodox means” and remarks that the operation emulates “that remarkable efficiency displayed by many a Gothic doctor when coping with macabre apparatus” (“Pseudoscience,” p. 420). Jennifer Uglow and U. C. Knoepflmacher perhaps come nearest to offering satisfactory remarks about the episode. Uglow writes that the culminating scene of the novel is one that serves to contradict the wish of Latimer's father and of his teacher, Dr. Letherall, “to correct the boy's over-sensitivity by a dose of scientific education …. by a nice twist of the plot, George Eliot shows that they were wrong to see science as devoid of imagination, for in the end, through the activities of Meunier, it will be used to break the barriers of normal reality in the most terrifying way.”¹⁸ And Knoepflmacher, in a thoughtful chapter on The Lifted Veil, notes that Meunier's response functions as a comment on the limitations of pathological investigations and that this points forward to George Eliot's later fiction: “‘life for that moment ceased to be a scientific problem for him,’ as it will be for that other physician in Middlemarch who must adjust his scientific view of woman.”¹⁹

Yet this blood transfusion is no melodramatic invention on the author's part: it is very much in keeping with the theme of medical investigation and questioning that has been raised by Latimer's own condition. Indeed, rather than being sensationalist and improbable, Meunier's experiment is directly linked to contemporary physiology. When Latimer introduces Meunier in his story as a young man with whom he became friendly in Geneva, he lets us know that he describes him under a pseudonym: “I shall call him Charles Meunier; his real surname—an English one, for he was of English extraction—having since become celebrated. He was an orphan, who lived on a miserable pittance while he pursued the medical studies for which he had a special genius” (p. 9). George Eliot had, it would appear, a particular prototype in mind for Meunier. Born in Mauritius in 1817, Charles-Edouard Brown-Séquard was the son of a French mother and of a captain in the American merchant marine who died before his child was born.²⁰ Sometime before the end of 1838 the family's friends clubbed together to send this academically promising boy from Mauritius to Paris, where he quickly passed his baccalaureate and enrolled in the École de Médecine. He had notably little money to live on and seems to have been something of a social outsider at the time. By 1846 he had begun his experiments in blood transfusion, using the bodies of animals who were on the point of death.

Two of his experiments are of particular interest. In June 1851 Brown-Séquard “was provided with the decapitated corpse of a healthy young murderer of twenty, freshly guillotined” at eight in the morning. By nine p.m. the muscles had lost their irritability (the irritability of muscles figuring in George Eliot's terminology in “The Lifted Veil” concerning the instinctual movements of the body). “Brown-Séquard had two medical friends, Dr. Bonnefin and Dr. Deslauriers, draw half a liter of blood from his own arm. They defibrinated the blood [that is, rid it of the properties that cause clotting] … by beating and strained out the clots through linen.” This blood, “at 19°, a temperature considerably below normal body temperature, was slowly injected into the radical artery” of the corpse's arm “over a period of ten minutes and allowed to flow out of veins which had been opened. In about 45 minutes at least twelve separate muscles had once more become irritable,” or responsive to sensation, again (Olmsted, pp. 41-42).

Later the same year Brown-Séquard attempted an experiment on a dog suffering from peritonitis—the same ailment from which Mrs. Archer expires. He waited until all movement had stopped, the dog had emptied itself of fecal matter and urine, its pupils had dilated, and he could no longer hear the heart beat. At this point he made a transfusion of blood from another, live dog into the right carotid artery. The first sign of temporary recovery was the recommencement of the heartbeat, and then, albeit aided at first by artificial respiration, the dog began to breathe again, and eventually “all the main functions of animal and organic life returned to it. Although feeble, the animal raised itself on its forepaws and wagged its tail when stroked.” Four or five hours later it died: “I almost said, died again.” Brown-Séquard wrote up this experiment in an article of 1858, “Research into the possibility of temporarily bringing back to life individuals dying from illness,” which appeared in his own newly launched magazine, Journal de la Physiologie de l'homme et des animaux, available to Lewes at the time he was putting together The Physiology of Common Life (1859), and hence also potentially familiar to George Eliot. Brown-Séquard concluded his account with a speculation:

Would it be possible to extrapolate from these experiments some consequences relating to the combined application of transfusion, artificial respiration and the blood-letting of the jugular, to the human dying from inflammatory, or other, ailments? It is evident that, in the vast majority of cases, it would be useless, if not cruel, to keep from death, for what would have to be a very short length of time, an individual of our species whose irreparable physical injuries condemned them to die. But one could have cases in which it mattered that understanding, speech, the faculties of the senses and voluntary movement were given back to the suffering patient. For, the facts mentioned in this study, in showing that all functions of animal life can be reestablished for several hours in animals in which their agony had already almost completely ensured that death had taken place, make it extremely probable that the intellectual faculties, the faculties of the senses, speech, etc., may be re-established, for several hours, in those sick people who have just lost the use of their faculties.²¹

Such methods were to provoke speculation in other medical researchers, notably in France (and as a sidenote, it is worth noting that the transfusion scene itself in “The Lifted Veil” evidently stimulated French artistic imagination: a painting depicting it, La Transfusion du Sang, by H. É. Blanchon, was hung in the French Salon in 1879).²² A. Vulpian, in his Leçons sur la physiologie générale et comparée du système nerveux faites au muséum d'histoire naturelle (1866), recounts yet another of Brown-Séquard's experiments, in which he transfused blood into the neck arteries of a decapitated dog. After several minutes the muscles of the eye and the face showed that “brain functions had been reestablished.” “Perhaps,” continues Vulpian, “I might be taxed with temerity in putting forward the idea that this experiment might be successful with a Man. If a physiologist tried this experiment on the head of an executed criminal, a few moments after death, he would perhaps be witness to a great and terrifying spectale. Perhaps he could give back its brain functions to this head, and reanimate the eyes and the facial muscles, movements which, in Man, are provoked by the passions and by the thoughts of which the brain is the seat.”²³ Such an idea was taken up by S. Weir Mitchell, medical practitioner and writer of a substantial amount of sensationalist, sometimes comic, and habitually gruesome fiction, in his 1870 short story for the Atlantic Monthly, “Was He Dead?”²⁴ This tale contains a certain amount of discussion between medical men about the way in which blood transfusion raises questions relating to individual identity, and a recitation of experiments that have been carried out on men and dogs in the past, before the men carry theory into practice and transfuse blood into the corpse of a recently hanged man, a known criminal who, revivified in this way, confesses to the murder of an elderly woman for which an innocent young man has already been hanged.

George Eliot, however, has already seized on the imaginative possibilities of such a resurrection. She would certainly have been familiar with Brown-Séquard's work. Although she and Lewes were in Germany when Brown-Séquard gave his series of six lectures on the Physiology and Pathology of the Nervous System at the Royal College of Surgeons in May 1858, Lewes cites the Journal de la Physiologie (which he had in his own library) at some length in his chapter on “The Structure and Uses of our Blood” in The Physiology of Common Life. Moreover, at the time “The Lifted Veil” was published, Brown-Séquard had not only lectured in London but had conducted a fashionable Harley Street practice: Blackwood's readership might well have recognized something of his identity in Meunier.

The Physiology of Common Life came out in 1859, the same year as “The Lifted Veil.” Lewes's interest in the relationship of the life of the mind with that of the body had, as we shall see, a good deal in common with the broad preoccupations of George Eliot's novella. Although disclaiming that blood may be any more significant in its vital properties that any other part of the human organism, Lewes records the beliefs of those who have thought otherwise, including William Harvey, who first developed a theory of the blood's circulation. In The Physiology of Common Life Lewes quotes from Harvey's Anatomical Exercitations concerning the Generation of Living Creatures (1653): “Life consists in the blood (as we read in Holy Scripture), because in it the Life and Soule do first dawn and last set. … The blood is the genital part, the fountain of Life, primum vivens, ultimum moriens.”²⁵ And Lewes himself attributes considerable vital force to this fluid, describing its circulation through the body as “a mighty river of life … the mysterious centre of chemical and vital actions as wonderful as they are indispensable, soliciting our attention no less by the many problems offered to speculative ingenuity, than by the important practical conclusions to which our ideas respecting the Blood necessarily lead” (Physiology, I, 239). It is striking that Latimer's affliction of prevision is described by George Eliot in terms that are highly similar to those in which Lewes writes of the circulation of blood. Latimer asks whether the reader is “unable to imagine this double consciousness at work within me, flowing on like two parallel streams which never mingle their waters and blend into a common hue?” (p. 32). This closely echoes the passage in The Physiology of Common Life that describes the circulation of the blood in highly suggestive terms:

If for a moment we could with the bodily eye see into the frame of man, as with the microscope we see into the transparent frames of some simpler animals, what a spectacle would be unveiled! Through one complex system of vessels we should see a leaping torrent of blood, carried into the depths and over the surfaces of all the organs, with amazing rapidity, and carried from the depths and surfaces through another system of vessels, back again to the heart: yet in spite of the countless channels and the crowded complexity of the tissues, nowhere should we detect any confusion, nowhere any failure. Such a spectacle as this is unveiled to the mental eye alone, and we cannot contemplate it, even in thought, without a thrill.

(I, 271; emphasis added)

Yet the “uninterrupted throbbing stream” of life (I, 241), to quote Lewes again, is itself not unmitigatingly positive in its associations. Blood also carries with it the connotations of a pollutant, and hence its representation carries with it a range of superstitions and taboos. These are briefly alluded to when Latimer refers to the Faust myth: “It is an old story, that men sell themselves to the tempter, and sign a bond with their blood, because it is only to take effect at a distant day” (“The Lifted Veil,” p. 31). As Lewes reminds us, “by some the Blood is regarded as the source of all diseases” (Physiology, I, 239). It bears associations of violence, wounds, and the shedding of waste products. Furthermore, it differs from the other major category of pollutant, the excremental, precisely because of something that is latent in those lines from Harvey: its relationship to sexual difference. For blood not only flows through each living being's veins, but it also is shed by the menstruating woman. The threat it presents in this connection has been summarized by Julia Kristeva in Powers of Horror: she differentiates blood from “excrement and its equivalents (decay, infection, disease, corpse, etc.),” which “stand for the danger to identity that comes from without: the ego threatened by the non-ego, society threatened by its outside, life by death. Menstrual blood, on the contrary, stands for the danger issuing from within the identity (social or sexual).”²⁶ Blood is troublesome because it belongs to the category that Kristeva designates as the abject: for her it is “not lack of cleanliness or health that causes abjection but what disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules” (p. 4).

Blood transfusions, especially when they are between a man and a woman, as in “The Lifted Veil,” provide a powerful image for this disturbing challenging of symbolic as well as physical boundaries. Medical writings, moreover, helped to sexualize the practice of blood transfusion, since it was most commonly carried out on women who were about to give birth or who had just given birth. It was recommended, too, that men rather than women supply the vital fluid, since they were less liable to faint.²⁷ This challenging of boundaries is most famously played upon in Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897). In that novel the implications of blood transfusions are unmistakably sexualized. Dr. Seward writes in his diary, after his blood has first been used to reanimate Lucy's white, wan body, that “it was with a feeling of personal pride that I could see a faint tinge of colour steal back into the pallid cheeks and lips. No man knows till he experiences it, what it is to feel his own life-blood drawn away into the veins of the woman he loves.”²⁸ There is an illicit thrill involved in this exchange of fluids: Professor Van Helsing reminds Seward not to breathe a word about the transfusion to Lucy's fiancé, Arthur, since it would engender jealousy. In this context one might usefully recall the remark made by Ernest Jones in his 1931 study On the Nightmare that “in the unconscious mind blood is commonly an equivalent for semen.”²⁹ Moreover, as Elisabeth Bronfen has pointed out, the “artificial reanimation” that takes place in Dracula “is also a representation of paternal birthgiving (‘a feeling of personal pride’), pitched against natural decay, and implicitly against the maternal function.”³⁰

In “The Lifted Veil” the mingling of bodily fluids in Mrs. Archer's body, ensuring her temporary resurrection, reveals her intense hatred for Bertha. “The scene,” as Mary Jacobus puts it, “presents as self-evident the proposition that women are murderously commonplace, morally debased, loving neither men nor each other, but only themselves; and that this essential, unredeemably carnal feminine nature persists even beyond death—residing in the body itself” (Reading Woman, p. 269). But the transfusion leads to more than this. Mrs. Archer's words are not so much inward looking as oracular, pointing an accusing finger at Bertha, pronouncing the authoritative evidence for her mistress's murderous intentions toward Latimer. The intake of male blood, through the combined power of Meunier's body and profession (for class as well as gender boundaries are traversed in this transfusion), gives Mrs. Archer new power to speak. This is something that may be related back to the way in which this text functions as an experiment, among other things, in George Eliot's awareness of the complications involved in a woman author writing with masculine authority—whether one takes “masculine” in the sense of personal identity or dominant discourse.

Yet in the long run a pathologized reading of “The Lifted Veil” invites interpreting the novella not just in the light of experiments in transfusion and, by extension, the way in which making the inner voice public may involve entering a masculine world: the work may also usefully be placed back in the context of The Physiology of Common Life as a whole, which entails more than looking at the physical and figurative broaching of gender boundaries, even if the gendering of knowledge may still be at stake. Lewes's text, like George Eliot's story, is concerned with the relationship of the normal and the abnormal, the connections between mind and brain and between cerebral activity and physical functions. George Eliot shows not just in this novella but in subsequent writings that it is essential to acknowledge, as Lewes does in his physiological and psychological works, the interrelations of mental and physical processes. But this does not mean that one should seek to be able to subject aspects of the mind's operations to detailed scientific scrutiny in order to unveil them. Latimer's “superadded consciousness” is in many ways a dramatization of the desire voiced by Lewes: “If for a moment we could with the bodily eye see into the frame of man.” But the experiment does not necessarily yield wondrous results, even if the promise of just such a revelatory experience is what any imaginative novelist holds out. Rather, through Latimer's unveiling of others' thoughts, George Eliot suggests that the experience might be a tawdry rather than a miraculous one; instead of providing a welcome, miraculous revelation:

it urged on me the trivial experience of indifferent people, became an intense pain and grief when it seemed to be opening to me the souls of those who were in a close relation to me—when the rational talk, the graceful attentions, the wittily-turned phrases, and the kindly deeds, which used to make the web of their characters, were seen as if thrust asunder by a microscopic vision, that showed all the intermediate frivolities, all the suppressed egoism, all the struggling chaos of puerilities, meanness, vague capricious memories, and indolent make-shift thoughts, from which human words and deeds emerge like leaflets covering a fermenting heap.

(pp. 19-20)

The weaknesses of Latimer's brother's character, for example, may be read not through ordinary behaviorial gestures, “but in all their naked skinless complication” (p. 21).

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In the chapter in The Physiology of Common Life entitled “Feeling and Thinking” Lewes makes it extremely clear that he regards his own task as a physiologist as essentially different from that of the psychologist. While mind and body are for him in constant interplay, “our science does not pretend to cope with the mysteries of [the psychologist's]” (II, 3). In going along with this, as she does, George Eliot is tacitly contesting the orthodoxy of her time that a woman's mental processes may be explained by the functions of her body. Lewes continues by noting that although the mysteries of the mind's workings will most probably forever remain unsolved, the labors of physiologists have in the meantime “made it possible that there should be at least a science of those vital phenomena connected with the Nervous System; and ‘thus,’ to use the fine expression of Professor Huxley, ‘from the region of disorderly mystery, which is the domain of ignorance, another vast province has been added to science, the realm of orderly mystery’” (Physiology, II, 3-4). Yet it is important that this sense of mystery is acknowledged. It is as orderly mystery, “The Lifted Veil” suggests, that the workings of the minds of others are perhaps best preserved. This is consonant, in fact, with George Eliot's views concerning other contemporary scientific developments. Following the publication of On the Origin of Species later that same year, on 5 December 1859 she wrote to Barbara Bodichon that “to me the Development theory and all other explanations of processes by which things came to be, produce a feeble impression compared with the mystery that lies under the processes” (George Eliot Letters, III, 227).

In “The Lifted Veil” George Eliot implicitly questions the idea that mental processes may most usefully be understood by examining a conjectured continuous relationship between mind and body. In so doing she conspicuously interrogates the positivistic implications and desires of contemporary physiological science. Moreover, in arguing that we perhaps would not want to see where we might be able to see—if science would allow us to—George Eliot's novella challenges that often-assumed Victorian drive toward making things visible. By establishing the precise scientific context of “The Lifted Veil” and demonstrating George Eliot's knowledge of contemporary medical debate, we can see this work as a deliberate questioning of the desirability of specularity. Rendering “the invisible visible by imagination,”³¹ she suggests, is far more valuable as a tool for understanding the human mind than is lifting aside the fleshly veil and looking within with the bodily eye.

Notes

1. Edith Simcox, quoted in The George Eliot Letters, ed. Gordon S. Haight, 9 vols. (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1954-78), IX, 220.

2. See Carroll Viera, “‘The Lifted Veil’ and George Eliot's Early Aesthetic,” Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, 24 (1984), 749-67; and Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1979), pp. 443-77.

3. For a full discussion of the implications of veil imagery, see Gilbert and Gubar's chapter; see also Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “The Character in the Veil: Imagery of the Surface in the Gothic Novel,” PMLA, 96 (1981), 255-70.

4. Percy Bysshe Shelley, “Sonnet, ‘Lift not the painted veil …,’” in Poetical Works, ed. Thomas Hutchinson, new ed. corrected by G. M. Matthews (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1978), p. 569.

5. George Eliot, The Lifted Veil (London: Virago, 1985), p. 26. Further references are to this edition and appear in the text.

6. See Gillian Beer, “Myth and the Single Consciousness: Middlemarch and The Lifted Veil,” in This Particular Web: Essays on “Middlemarch,” ed. Ian Adam (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1975), pp. 91-115; and Terry Eagleton, “Power and Knowledge in ‘The Lifted Veil,’” Literature & History, 9 (1983), 52-61.

7. Barbara Maria Stafford, Body Criticism: Imaging the Unseen in Enlightenment Art and Medicine (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1991), p. 17.

8. The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Pantheon, 1973), p. 120.

9. See Robert M. Young, Mind, Brain, and Adaptation in the Nineteenth Century: Cerebral Localization and Its Biological Context from Gall to Ferrier (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970).

10. G. H. Lewes, A Biographical History of Philosophy, 4 vols. (London: Charles Knight, 1845-46), IV, 256.

11. Lawrence Rothfield, Vital Signs: Medical Realism in Nineteenth-Century Fiction (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1992), p. 106.

12. See B. M. Gray, “Pseudoscience and George Eliot's ‘The Lifted Veil,’” Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 36 (1982), 407-23.

13. See William Gregory, Letters to a Candid Inquirer, on Animal Magnetism (London: Taylor, Walton, and Maberly, 1851), pp. 425-40.

14. This is, of course, no more than an application of the meditation on Latimer's part that George Eliot inserts into the text: “So absolute is our soul's need of something hidden and uncertain for the maintenance of that doubt and hope and effort which are the breath of its life, that if the whole future were laid bare to us beyond today, the interest of all mankind would be bent on the hours that lie between; we should pant after the uncertainties of our one morning and our one afternoon; we should rush fiercely to the Exchange for our last possibility of speculation, of success, of disappointment; we should have a glut of political prophets foretelling a crisis or a no-crisis within the only twenty-four hours left open to prophecy. Conceive the condition of the human mind if all propositions whatsoever were self-evident except one, which was to become self-evident at the close of the summer's day, but-in the meantime might be the subject of question, of hypothesis, of debate. Art and philosophy, literature and science, would fasten like bees on that one proposition which had the honey of probability in it, and be the more eager because their enjoyment would end with sunset” (pp. 48-44)

15. Ghosts of the Gothic: Austen, Eliot, and Lawrence (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1980),p. 185.

16. Reading Woman: Essays in Feminist Criticism (NewYork: Columbia Univ. Press, 1986), p. 269.

17. Gray, “Afterword” to The Lifted Veil, pp. 69, 87.

18. Jennifer Uglow, George Eliot (London: Virago, 1987), p. 118.

19. U. C. Knoepflmacher, George Eliot's Early Novels: The Limits of Realism (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1968), p. 148.

20. For biographical details, see J. M. D. Olmsted, Charles-Édouard Brown-Séquard: A Nineteenth Century Neurologist and Endocrinologist (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1946).

21. E. Brown-Séquard, “Recherches sur la possibilité de rappeler temporairement à la vie des individus mourant de maladie,” Journal de la Physiologie de l'homme et des animaux, 1 (1858), 672 (my translation).

22. George Eliot, who had been told of this work by Emilia Pattison, commented in a 12 June 1879 letter to William Blackwood: “I call this amusing—I ought rather to have said typical of the relation my books generally have with the French mind” (George Eliot Letters, VII, 165).

23. A. Vulpian, Leçons sur la Physiologie générale et comparée du système nerveux faites au muséum d'histoire naturelle (Paris: G. Baillière, 1866), p. 460 (my translation).

24. See [S. Weir Mitchell], “Was He Dead?” Atlantic Monthly, 25 (1870), 86-102. I am most grateful to Lucy Bending for drawing this story to my attention.

25. George Henry Lewes, The Physiology of Common Life, 2 vols. (Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood, 1859) I, 254.

26. Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1982), p. 71.

27. See Charles Egerton Jennings, Transfusion: Its History, Indications, and Modes of Application (London: Baillière, Tindall, and Cox, 1883), pp. 3, 22, 35.

28. Bram Stoker, Dracula, ed. A. N. Wilson (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1983), p. 128.

29. On the Nightmare (London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-analysis, 1931), p. 110.

30. Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity, and the Aesthetic (Manchester: Manchester Univ. Press, 1992), p. 317.

31. This phrase is in fact Lewes's, from an essay of 1865, demonstrating still further the two-way circulation of ideas in this personal and intellectual partnership (see “Imagination,” in The Principles of Success in Literature, ed. T. Sharper Knowlson [London: Walter Scott, 1898], p. 55).