4 - Overwhelming emotion and psychic shock in George Eliot's The Lifted Veil and Daniel Deronda

Summary

“FINELY ORGANISED FOR PAIN”: THE HORROR OF AMPLIFIED EMOTION IN THE LIFTED VEIL

There is much pain that is quite noiseless; and vibrations that make human agonies are often a mere whisper in the roar of hurrying existence.

George Eliot, Felix Holt, the Radical

[N]o living being can penetrate the consciousness of another.

Alexander Bain, The Emotions and the Will (1859, 49–50)

The intricate relationship of emotion to thought, memory and judgment – indeed all processes of cognition – is the subject of much of George Eliot's fiction as well as being part of its avowed practical project. Following her agnosticism and her belief in human community and fellow-feeling as the well-spring of moral values, her manifesto as a fictional artist is to arouse and educate emotions, particularly the capacity to feel sympathy, in her readers. The primacy of affective life is so powerfully asserted in her fiction that it is not entirely surprising to find George Eliot discussed in the company of Spinoza and Darwin in a recent academic textbook on the emotions. Lydgate's project as a scientist is to get to the core physiology of emotion: “to pierce the obscurity of those minute processes which prepare human misery and joy, those invisible thoroughfares which are the first lurking-places of anguish, mania, and crime, that delicate poise and transition that determine the growth of happy or unhappy consciousness.” The Finale of Middlemarch (1872) reflects on Dorothea's diffusive influence, regretting her anonymity but offering the consolation that there was no life “possible to Dorothea which was not filled with emotion.”