Mastery and slavery in the lifted veil

Essays in Criticism

Volumn 48, Issue 3, 1998, Pages 244-261

  Bull, Malcolm ^a  

^a WOLFSON COLLEGE   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 0013532971     PISSN: 00140856     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1093/eic/48.3.244     Document Type: Review

References (25)

1. B. M. Gray, 'Pseudoscience and George Eliot's "The Lifted Veil"', Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 36, (1982), pp. 407-23
2. Henry James, Literary Reviews and Essays ed. A. Mordel, (New York, 1957), p. 291
3. William Gregory, Letters to a Candid Inquirer on Animal Magnetism, (1851). References in the text are to this edition
4. The George Eliot Letters, ed. Gordon S. Haight, 9 vols., (New Haven, 1954-78), II, p. 126
5. George Eliot may also have read the immediately preceding essay in the Quarterly Review which discussed the career of Isaac Casaubon, see M. Bull, 'Edward Casaubon and Isaac Casaubon', Notes and Queries 243, (1998), pp. 218-19
6. George Eliot, The Lifted Veil, (1985), p. 16. Subsequent references in the text are to this edition
7. Although female magnetizers were not unknown, it was far more common for women to be magnetized by men; see Adam Crabtree, From Mesmer to Freud: Magnetic Sleep and the Roots of Psychological Healing, (New Haven, 1993), pp. 91-105
8. Latimer therefore occupies what was usually a female role, a fact that supports interpretations of the story in terms of gender relations, e.g. S. M. Gilbert and S. Gubar in The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination, (New Haven, 1979), ch. 13
9. For an account of the evolution of these terms see Adam Crabtree, From Mesmer to Freud, and Multiple Man: Explorations in Possession and Multiple Personality, (Toronto, 1985)
10. C. A. F. Kluge, Versuch einer Darstellung des animalischen Magnetismus als Heilmittel, 2nd ed., (Berlin, 1815). The references are listed in the index, p. 475
11. G. W. F. Hegel, The System of Ethical Life, (Albany, 1979), p. 125
12. G. W. F. Hegel, The Philosophical Propaedeutic, (Oxford, 1986), p. 62
13. G. W. F. Hegel, The Philosophy of Mind, (Oxford, 1971), p. 104
14. G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, (Oxford, 1977), p. 126. In The Philosophy of Mind the result of the masterslave dialectic is interpreted not as this 'unhappy consciousness' but, more positively, as 'universal self-consciousness'
15. This brief summary follows the account in the Phenomenology of Spirit (pp. 111-20) rather than the simplified versions in the Philosophical Propaedeutic and The Philosophy of Mind. For a full discussion of the relationship between animal magnetism and the master-slave dialectic in Hegel see M. Bull, 'Slavery and the Multiple Self', New Left Review, 231 (forthcoming), and Seeing Things Hidden: Apocalypse, Vision, and Totality, (forthcoming), ch. 6
16. G. H. Lewes, Biographical History of Philosophy, 4 vols., (1845-6.)
17. For an alternative account of the power-knowledge relationship see Terry Eagleton, 'Power and Knowledge in "The Lifted Veil"', Literature & History 9, (1983), pp. 52-61
18. Quarterly Review 93, (1853), p. 509
19. Plutarch, Moralia, 354c
20. J. C. Colquhoun, Isis revelata: an enquiry into the origin, progress, and present state of animal magnetism, (Edinburgh and London, 1836), 2 vols
21. Rosemary Ashton, George Eliot: A Life, (1996), p. 220
22. Kate Flint, 'Blood, Bodies, and The Lifted Veil', Nineteenth-Century Literature 51, (1997), pp. 455-473
23. Colquhoun, Isis revelata, v. 2, p. 52
24. Cf. Gregory, p. 295
25. Letters, V, p. 380