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Full Description
The negative historical judgment given to George Eliot's 'The Lifted Veil' amounts nowadays to a gross critical blunder, and in the last three decades the story has been firmly reinstated in Eliot's major canon. The premise of the present book is that George Eliot's oeuvre is a compact macrotext where themes, motifs, patterns and cultural and personal archetypes recur with variations, and that 'The Lifted Veil' functions as the linchpin of this oeuvre. A sequential approach to the story is authorized by the use of a mimetic enunciation that simulates a gradual 'definition' of events, places, and characters as they have appeared to the narrating 'I' in the course of time until the moment of the enunciation. Contextualizing 'The Lifted Veil' means placing it within Eliot's oeuvre and against the background of Victorian mid-century fiction; in a further meaning, seeing it as intersecting various contemporary genres and subgenres, such as that of the European and American 'literature of the veil', that of the archetypal icon of the femme fatale, that of Wilkie Collins's 'dead secret' novels. The most significant facet that critical literature on 'The Lifted Veil' has tended to overlook is however the encrypting of the experience of a failed religious conversion and the foreshadowing of the search for a spiritual and racial identity of Daniel Deronda, the hero of Eliot's final novel.
Contents
Introduction
CHAPTER I
'Restless weary wanderings'
Apprenticeship
The road to 'The Lifted Veil'
CHAPTER II
The title
The epigraph
Narration, metanarration, technique
Times, names, places
'Full of German lyrics'
Prevision
The religious trail
A Jewish epiphany?
Bertha in Geneva and Vienna
CHAPTER III
The two cultures
The mesmeric theme
Tasso
The poisoning woman
The blood transfusion
CHAPTER IV
The aftermath
The road to 'Daniel Deronda#
'The Lifted Veil' - The 1878 Text
