THROUGH THE VEIL: VOICES OF THE AFTERLIFE IN GEORGE ELIOT’S THE LIFTING VEIL

Written between George Eliot’s early and late novels, The Lifted Veil (1859) departs from the typical third-person narration characteristic of the Victorian writer’s oeuvre. The story is told in the first person from the perspective of an eccentric young man named Latimer, an aesthetic choice that lends a confessional tone to the tale. Latimer possesses a special ability: he can read the future and foresee his own death. In many ways, the novella straddles dark fantasy and realism as it juxtaposes elements of Gothic fiction, such as Latimer’s interests in revivification, with an attentive depiction of the material reality. After all, The Lifted Veil reminds the reader that Eliot’s literary realism alternates between an accurate depiction of the external world and an investigation of human consciousness. Starting from these premises, in this essay I would like to argue that through the motif of the veil Eliot builds up a densely poetic narrative in which the boundary between art and fiction, reality and imagination is refracted. On the one hand, The Lifted Veil pushes realism to its limits much like Giuseppe Sanmartino’s famous marble sculpture Cristo velato (1753), foregrounding a narrative form replete with sensory vividness, especially for the visual, haptic and olfactory imagery that permeates the text. On the other hand, the novella serves a much broader purpose in that it may be read as an aesthetic experiment. Through the trope of the veil, Eliot acknowledges that scientific inquiry can expand the scope of literary writing, contributing to a more accurate form of realism.