The Narrator as Medium in George Eliot's "The Lifted Veil"

A common critical approach to "The Lifted Veil," George Eliot's tale of a man cursed by powers of telepathy and premonition, is to read it as an allegorical investigation of the workings of fictional narrative itself. As this argument goes, Latimer's magical access to others' minds mimics authorial omniscience and in this respect, as some accounts further argue, allows for Eliot's interrogation of her own artistic practice.¹ While agreeing that the story is a self-conscious fiction, I want in this paper to delineate that self-consciousness not by viewing Latimer as a figure for the author, but rather by focusing on what he unambiguously is—a narrator—and by scrutinizing his capacities, goals, and effects in that position. Reading this story, I propose, we are invited to attend closely to Latimer as narrator, in the specific sense of deliverer or conduit of Eliot's story— of the figure who relays her story to us. In this way, "The Lifted Veil" reflects the increasing cultural salience in the mid-nineteenth century of people who act as go-betweens in the dialogues of others—that is, people who mediate communications between senders and receivers.

Perhaps the first new and noteworthy type of human-mediated communication in the Victorian period was the electric telegraph, which gained a foothold in Britain during the 1840s and required an operator to transmit messages between parties. An even more spectacular form of message-sending to emerge around this time was modern Spiritualism, the practice of using séances to contact the dead. The typical medium of Spiritualist communications was female, since women were supposed to possess traits vital to the enterprise: a ready relinquishment of personal will, which made them smooth thoroughfares for the spirits' volitions; and nervously delicate constitutions, which attuned their bodies to subtle transmissions from the other world. The latter, nervous sensitivity facilitated what was sometimes called the medium's sympathy with the thoughts and feelings of spirit-communicators (a concept to which I'll return later).² Some men also practiced mediumship, one of the most famous being Daniel Dunglas Home; yet the association of women with the vocation was strong enough to brand many of these men as effeminate (Skultans 23).

"The Lifted Veil" has been seen as revealing Eliot's interest in mesmerism and clairvoyance (Gray; Bull); yet her writing of the story during the highpoint of Spiritualism, the 1850s, suggests that movement as an immediate impetus. Indeed, we know from her letters that she was alert to Spiritualism in the years shortly before as well as after the writing of her story.³ What's more, Latimer's "morbidly sensitive nature," his "fragile, nervous, ineffectual self," and his "half-womanish, half-ghostly beauty" connote the séance medium's particular milieu and feminine attributes (69, 68). Certain parts of his story further imply Latimer's connection to the ghostly. Notably, his first prevision, of Prague, is of a gloomy netherworld caught out of time and teeming with what he calls "ephemeral visitants" (63). Later, he describes Bertha's image of him, with his morbid sensitivity, as—quite strikingly—that of a "miserable ghost-seer, surrounded by phantoms in the noonday" (85). But Spiritualism exerts a thematic influence on this story in ways that have less to do, finally, with plot points or imagery than with the narrative's formal and rhetorical qualities. For Latimer of course never acts spiritualistically within the plot; yet in conferring upon him the markers of the occult woman, Eliot intimates his potential to be a medium of communication—a potential that is then realized not within but rather through or across the bounds of the story. That is to say, if narrators in general are always mediating figures—in the sense that they mediate stories from authors or senders to readers or receivers—"The Lifted Veil" accentuates Latimer's function as narrator by accentuating his mediumistic qualities.

My argument entails three further claims. First, the mediatory function of narrator became especially available for contemplation when Eliot was writing because of novel and sensational...