Sympathy and Telepathy: The Problem of Ethics in George Eliot's The Lifted Veil

Abstract

Sympathy and Telepathy:The Problem of Ethics in George Eliot's The Lifted Veil Thomas Albrecht Presentiments are strange things! and so are sympathies; and so are signs. —Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre I. Sympathy and Antipathy If art does not enlarge men's sympathies, it does nothing morally. —George Eliot, letter to Charles Bray I have never been encouraged to trust much in the sympathy of my fellow men. —Latimer, in The Lifted Veil Although George Eliot's gothic novella The Lifted Veil is not ostensibly a work of realism, and although it has until recently been treated by critics as a marginal anomaly in Eliot's oeuvre, its themes are in several respects central to Eliot's work overall and to Eliot's ethics in particular. By the time she composed the story early in 1859, Eliot had developed in her essays and in her first full-length novel Adam Bede an ethics of art and aesthetics, specifically of realist art. This ethics is founded on emotional responses, what Eliot calls sympathy and compassion, by which she means a person's ability to feel and to suffer with another person. Her theory insists that art should give a reader or viewer access to the experiences, thoughts, and feelings of a great variety of different characters. Eliot proposes that our insights into the minds and experiences of these characters "extend" our sympathy for other people and for humanity in general, thereby producing [End Page 437] an ethical response in us. In her 1856 essay "The Natural History of German Life," for example, she writes, "The greatest benefit we owe to the artist, whether painter, poet, or novelist, is the extension of our sympathies. . . . Art is the nearest thing to life; it is a mode of amplifying experience and extending our contact with our fellow-men beyond the bounds of our personal lot."1 So whereas a critic like Walter Pater describes the experience of art as a retraction into the self ("What is this song or picture, this engaging personality presented in life or in a book, to me?"), Eliot describes it as an extension beyond the limitations of the self, as a coming up against some form of otherness.2 Most recent scholars working on The Lifted Veil have noted in passing that the relation between art and ethics is implicitly taken up in the novella; however, their analyses have largely sidestepped this issue and concentrated instead on contextualizing elements from the plot within such Victorian scientific theories and practices as mesmerism and animal magnetism, phrenology, clairvoyance, vivisection, blood transfusions, and physiological psychology.3 In this essay, I should like to bring critical attention to the ethical dilemma that is implicitly and explicitly raised in The Lifted Veil. I will focus in particular on the central conceit of telepathic power and on its equivocal relation to the moral value Eliot calls sympathy. The Lifted Veil is told retrospectively in the form of a confessional manuscript written by Latimer, an overly sensitive aesthete and misanthrope. As a young man, Latimer discovers that he is intermittently and involuntarily subjected to two kinds of clairvoyant powers: he has prescient visions of future events and telepathic access to the thoughts and feelings of those around him. His insights into what he describes as the pettiness, stupidity, and egotism of other people alienate him from all society. He eventually meets Bertha Grant, a beautiful young woman who soon after becomes engaged to marry his half-brother Alfred. He falls in love with Bertha, in part because "she made the only exception, among all the human beings about me, to my unhappy gift of insight."4 He has a prescient vision of an older Bertha as his wife, which reveals to him her cruelty and her hatred of him, but he nevertheless continues to love and desire her. Following Alfred's death in an accident, Latimer and Bertha are married and eventually come to live together in the state of mutual alienation anticipated in Latimer's vision. A visit from Latimer's childhood friend Meunier, now a renowned scientist, is the occasion for a gothic reanimation scene in which a recently deceased maid is momentarily...

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