31 pages • 1 hour read
The Lifted Veil
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Themes
Public Personas, Private Thoughts, and Marriage Traditions
Latimer’s experiences with double consciousness and his powers of insight allow him to perceive the thoughts and emotions of those around him. Throughout The Lifted Veil, Latimer struggles to reconcile the public personas, actions, and behaviors of his family and companions with the often cruel, narrow-minded, and vapid thoughts he perceives them to have. The discrepancy and dishonesty ultimately force Latimer to withdraw from public life and pursue an isolated and distrustful existence.
Latimer's power for insight makes him realize the gap between a person’s public actions and spoken words, which often reflect culturally codified manners, and their true thoughts and emotions (14). Latimer in effect sees an individual’s private and public life in the same moment, giving him unique insight into the hypocrisies of Victorian society in a way reminiscent of the novelist herself. Latimer’s initial inability to perceive Bertha’s thoughts and emotions provides a lens through which to examine this theme. In accordance with Victorian etiquette surrounding courting, their relationship exists solely in the public sphere before their marriage; similarly, Latimer at this point can’t discern Bertha’s thoughts and can therefore appreciate the mystery of Bertha’s public persona. However, their marriage brings each character’s private life into the other’s awareness, and Latimer’s power of insight extends to Bertha. The private sphere of marriage and domesticity is thus connected to Latimer’s despair at knowing a person too thoroughly. In this way, Eliot comments on the nature of Victorian society, which relied upon public persona and manners to structure social relations, with potentially disastrous results when two people entered into marriage and let the facades drop. This phenomenon relates directly to Eliot’s life, as her partner of many years, George Henry Lewes, was unable to divorce his wife despite irreconcilable differences. Lewes and Eliot lived in a common-law marriage arrangement at odds with the social norms that Victorian society expected people—particularly women—to conform to (Karl, Frederick. George Eliot: Voice of a Century. W. W. Norton & Company, 1996).
Latimer loves the public Bertha—or at least the inherent ambiguity of this kind of public performance—but not her private identity. Bertha herself is keen to protect her inner life from scrutiny as demonstrated in her discussion of what she desires in a marriage partner. Bertha wants to marry someone she has “quiet contempt” for (26), as she believes it more elegant and less emotionally taxing to be involved with someone she hates. Rather than risking the emotional candor of love, she can instead rely on her charming public persona to protect her innermost thoughts and sense of identity. When Latimer finally gains insight into Bertha, he sees artifice, vanity, and pettiness (32). These are presumably qualities that she wished to hide from her husband, but paradoxically, they are also qualities that the sharp divide between the public and private spheres encourages people to develop. Latimer’s mistake is believing that the shallowness of Bertha’s public persona conceals some deeper character, when in reality Bertha is so preoccupied with social expectations that her entire personality is shaped around them.
In constructing The Lifted Veil around this theme, Eliot comments on the nature of Victorian marriages and the damaging expectations of a society intent on maintaining public displays of amiability. The traditional course of a couple’s relationship is revealed to be potentially destructive: quick engagements, coquetry, distance, and propriety all work to keep two individuals from truly knowing the other until after marriage is entered into. At that point it is too late, as evidenced by Latimer’s inability to fully separate himself from Bertha without disgracing both of them in the eyes of their social circle. Eliot comments on the binding nature of marriage during her time and the outdated, ineffective ways that people decided upon their partners. The Lifted Veil, with its inclusion of emerging scientific practices and this exposé on marriage relations, is Eliot’s way of chronicling the changing tides of Victorian society.
Hope and the Power of Foresight
Latimer’s power of foresight gives him visions of cities, scenes, landscapes, and interactions that he takes to be inevitable. After his first vision of Prague, Latimer experiences a vision of Bertha as his future wife that suggests her cruelty, hatred, and contempt for him. Despite this, Latimer pursues their relationship in the hope that he will experience happiness and love with Bertha before the vision comes true. In this, Latimer displays the temptation to indulge in present hopes and experiences over the certainty of an unhappy future.
Latimer’s desire for Bertha is motivated by two emotions: jealousy and curiosity. Bertha coyly flirts with both brothers and sparks Latimer to ever-increasing jealousy with her pending marriage to Alfred. Additionally, Latimer’s inability to perceive Bertha’s thoughts and emotions before their marriage comes as a relief and elicits curiosity about her inner world. Because he does not know for certain that Bertha is playing with his emotions, Latimer can hope that she will someday love him, and that hope is strong enough to dispel the warning of his vision of their marriage.
Latimer claims that “The fear of poison is feeble against the sense of thirst” and that his desire for Bertha is too demanding an emotion to deny based on the prospect of future unhappiness (20). He plans to marry her when given the opportunity regardless of what the outcome might be. Eliot is here commenting on the expectations individuals ascribe to their potential partners and demonstrating how attachment can blind those who choose to ignore warning signs. Latimer knows his visions come true—as the ones of Prague and of his father, Mrs. Filmore, and Bertha in the sitting room have already done—but is too caught in his poetical, hopeful nature to accept the possibility of Bertha’s cruelty. For Latimer, Bertha before their marriage is a kind of poem—a mystery and a temptation that Latimer cannot resist.
The irony is that Latimer’s insistence on experiencing some degree of happiness with Bertha is what consigns him to a life of depression, apathy, and isolation. Bertha has always thought of him in a degrading way and often ridiculed him, but it isn’t until after their marriage that Latimer’s insight gives him the proof of the depth of her feelings. Choosing to indulge in daydreams, hopes, and present uncertainties results in Latimer spending his entire adulthood disappointed—a warning against being too idealistic when it comes to admiring a person that one doesn't truly know. At the same time, Eliot suggests that a certain amount of deluded hope is inevitable: “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” (29). For Latimer, the idea that he will be unhappy with Bertha is both as inevitable and as inconceivable as death itself.
Consciousness and Death as a Lifted Veil to Expose Truth
Latimer’s experience with double consciousness closely parallels his experiences with death. From Latimer’s first experience with insight following his deathly illness to Mrs. Archer’s accusations against Bertha, the phenomenon of death is a precursor to shared consciousness between two individuals.
Latimer’s illness in Geneva instigates his experiences with double consciousness, in which the perception of other people’s thoughts overlays his personal consciousness (his thoughts and emotions). Though Latimer initially assumes that his near-death experience will allow him to access the latent poetical abilities he has long wished for, he quickly finds that his body’s experience of illness is connected to his mind’s perceptive powers. Here, Eliot suggests that the body’s near-death experience can open the consciousness to other paths of perception otherwise inaccessible. Likewise, Latimer is present at his father’s death and perceives how his proximity to the event affects his consciousness: “In the first moments when we come away from the presence of death, every other relation to the living is merged, to our feeling, in the great relation of a common nature and a common destiny” (31). Latimer believes that death lifts barriers of consciousness and allows for enhanced experiences of community and emotional sympathy. Latimer is only able to perceive Bertha’s thoughts after this experience with his father’s death.
Death is therefore what connects Latimer’s powers to the larger environment of Victorian science—particularly its investigation of human consciousness. Outdated as the “science” of phrenology is, its association of character with skull shape implies that consciousness is at least partly physical in origin. This reflected 19th-century advances in the understanding of the brain and nervous system as well as the era’s growing materialism (e.g., Darwinian theory). In describing Mrs. Archer’s death, Eliot uses the phrase “the dark veil had completely fallen” (41), connecting the veil as Latimer has thus far understood it—as the barrier between individual consciousnesses—to include death as the ultimate separation (and perhaps cessation) of consciousness. However, this materialist understanding of consciousness did not entirely supplant religious ideas of the soul and in fact existed alongside quasi-scientific theorizing about the soul and life after death; public interest in spiritualism—seances, mediums, hypnosis, and other altered states of consciousness—reached its peak in the mid- to late-Victorian era.
Mrs. Archer’s death and resuscitation reflect these tensions and the questions about consciousness that they provoke. Meunier revives Mrs. Archer through physical means, but Latimer describes the moment with spiritual (though tempered) language: “The eyelids quivered, and the soul seemed to have returned beneath them” (41). Likewise, Mrs. Archer returns from the dead with hitherto unknown information, but it is information that she herself learned in life rather than in death. Despite Latimer’s powers of insight, some elements of human consciousness thus remain a mystery as the story closes.
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