Did the Novelist Anticipate the Neurologist?: The

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by and rather proud of experiencing “visions.” to him, his propensity .... the pale grey eyes at once acute, restless, and sarcastic. they were fixed on me in half-smiling .... every hateful thought within her present to me . . . 'Madman, idiot! why ...
Did the Novelist Anticipate the Neurologist?: The Enigma of George Eliot’s The Lifted Veil Martin N. Raitiere

Literature and Medicine, Volume 30, Number 1, Spring 2012, pp. 144-170 (Article) Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press DOI: 10.1353/lm.2012.0005

For additional information about this article http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/lm/summary/v030/30.1.raitiere.html

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Did the Novelist Anticipate the Neurologist?: The Enigma of George Eliot’s The Lifted Veil Martin N. Raitiere

I. Credit for the first full clinical description of that fascinating subtype of epileptic fit called the complex partial seizure is regularly assigned to John Hughlings-Jackson (1835–1911) on the basis of papers he published in English medical journals from 1875 to the turn of the century.1 Hughlings-Jackson himself, punctilious to a fault about acknowledging his predecessors, noted that certain other clinicians, especially French students of epilepsy, had partially anticipated his insights regarding complex partial fits.2 But there can be little question that, particularly in the Anglophone literature, his studies of the entire spectrum of complex partial phenomena were pioneering efforts, and indeed, as works of clinical description, they remain unmatched today. We remain indebted to Hughlings-Jackson, justly regarded as one of the founding spirits of English neurology, for the comprehensiveness and sensitivity with which he studied the objective but especially the psychologically rich subjective aspects of the partial aura (the introductory phase of the seizure, the details of which the patient can frequently retrieve after the fact and disclose to others). These subjective experiences can include extraordinary distortions of time and memory such as déjà vu, of emotion, and of consciousness, including a phenomenon famously christened by Hughlings-Jackson as the “dreamy state.” The latter involves a condition of bifurcated or (to use the clinician’s own term) “double consciousness” in which the patient during the fit attends simultaneously to a complex hallucinated scene and to his actual environs, generally discriminating the two and maintaining some Literature and Medicine 30, no. 1 (Spring 2012) 144–170 © 2012 by The Johns Hopkins University Press

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awareness that the former is subjectively generated and not based in reality. So compelling and pithy was Hughlings-Jackson’s description of the “dreamy state” that his phrase has been adopted as valuable clinical shorthand by modern neurologists including at times nonAnglophone ones.3 Given Hughlings-Jackson’s achievement, it is all the more surprising that a major English writer of fiction should have published, some two decades before that clinician issued the major papers in question, a novella portraying a man afflicted by precisely the kind of “psychological” epileptic fits the clinician would later elucidate. I refer to The Lifted Veil, a novella published anonymously in August 1859 by Marian Evans Lewes, who had already published one novel under the pseudonym George Eliot and who would go on to achieve renown as a novelist under that name. This is not to say that there did not appear, both before and especially after Hughlings-Jackson’s medical work, other literary depictions of certain fragments of this provocative epileptic syndrome.4 However, none of these matches, in my view, the remarkable clinical accuracy of the complex partial spectrum, particularly in regard to the subjective or “psychological” aspects rendered by George Eliot in The Lifted Veil. Perhaps surprisingly, the role of epilepsy in this work has been entirely overlooked both by historians of neurology as well as by students of Victorianera medicine and indeed of George Eliot’s work. (However, another work of George Eliot’s, the novel Silas Marner, published two years after The Lifted Veil, features an epileptic whose symptoms have been recognized as such both by neurologists and by students of her work.5) This lacuna justifies, I hope, an essay devoted to the manner in which George Eliot developed the topic of epilepsy in her novella and the bearing of this complex and challenging fiction on the history of thinking about epilepsy in the nineteenth century. There is another reason for bringing George Eliot’s novella firmly into the orbit of nineteenth century thought on epilepsy. As I hope to demonstrate, she not only dealt comprehensively in this work with a species of seizure well before Hughlings-Jackson ushered it formally into the medical literature but also did so using language which is at times disconcertingly close to that which he would subsequently utilize. For example, she includes a description of an epileptic’s developing, within a spell, a split consciousness such that while preoccupied by a “wonderfully distinct [hallucinatory] vision” of a city hundreds of miles distant he does not lose track of his present surroundings— precisely the phenomenon Hughlings-Jackson would later depict as

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“double consciousness.” Indeed she thrice uses the very term “double consciousness” to describe this epileptic’s suspension between his intraseizure “visions” versus his extra-seizure view of reality. In a century besotted by the Doppelgänger, a number of writers employed the term “double consciousness” for various purposes, but I am not aware of any other example of its use in a specifically epileptic context prior to Hughlings-Jackson.6 Such anticipations of a clinical phenomenon and indeed of a phrase that would become, in that clinician’s hands after 1876, a term of medical art could be ascribed (or, if you like, dismissed) as lucky hits by an admittedly exceptional writer were it not for one additional curious fact. By the mid-1870s, i.e., long after The Lifted Veil had appeared and at precisely the time Hughlings-Jackson was beginning to publish his epochal essays on partial seizures, the clinician had knotted a friendship with George Eliot and her partner of a quarter-century, G. H. Lewes. Indeed, as entries in Lewes’s unpublished diary demonstrate, Hughlings-Jackson had been admitted to the elect company invited to the Leweses’ famous Sunday gatherings at their London home, “the Priory,” and regularly engaged in “medical chat” there and elsewhere with G. H. Lewes.7 Indeed, I shall explore the possibility that Lewes, who almost surely helped his notoriously out-of-wedlock “wife” to work up the intricacies of epilepsy for The Lifted Veil in 1859 and who continued to display a well-informed interest in certain features of that neurological disorder (devoting, for example, a chapter in one of his philosophical volumes to the motor “automatisms” of partial seizures8) had some influence upon Hughlings-Jackson’s own thinking about epilepsy. In the blizzard of condolence notes that descended upon the Priory after G. H. Lewes’s tragic death in November 1878 was one, as yet unpublished, from Hughlings-Jackson. In it the clinician recorded both his affection for and his intellectual debt to Lewes, reminding the widow that “[Lewes] always goodnaturedly encouraged me.”9 Such evidence suggests that Hughlings-Jackson, who remains almost entirely missing from their biographies, deserves more notice than he has received by students of the entwined lives of George Eliot and G. H. Lewes.10 The skein of personal connections eventually linking George Eliot, Lewes, and Hughlings-Jackson therefore raises the question whether those remarkable substantive and linguistic anticipations of the neurologist’s work in The Lifted Veil are really just lucky hits or something else. Is it possible that a trail of subterranean influence of some kind might stretch from George Eliot’s novella to the subsequent clinical descriptions of epileptic phenomena for which Hughlings-Jackson is

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celebrated? This question generates others. If we possess two excellent descriptions of the same clinical phenomenon, one in a work of fiction and the other in formal medical discourse, do they both deserve equal weight as illuminating the condition in question? If the fictional description predates that in the medical literature, does it deserve to be noted as such in histories of the condition? Of course the problem would never arise if the fiction appeared after the medical report, especially if there were any possibility of the author’s having drawn upon material in the public domain: no matter how entertaining, the fiction would be likely considered derivative of the medical discourse. But what do we do when, as in the case of The Lifted Veil, the work of fiction appears before, not after, the primary objective discourse? Such a sequence may offend our sense of propriety, which generally calls for works of art, however aesthetically pleasing, not to make overly aggressive truth-claims in extrafictional domains such as medicine. In the following section of my essay, I shall defend the notion that The Lifted Veil should be regarded as an equal player with other nineteenth-century works on epilepsy, i.e., that its status as a work of fiction should be considered, with respect to the context of epilepsy, accidental rather than essential. I shall then go on to suggest a possible solution to those disturbing correspondences between George Eliot’s text and Hughlings-Jackson’s writings (which I do not regard as adventitious). I should like to make clear, however, that I am much less interested in getting my readers to embrace my particular solution to that puzzling overlap than simply in drawing their attention to the existence of the puzzle. Readers are free to come up with other solutions to the overlap in question; I hope only for their considered assent to the case that George Eliot possessed, for 1859, a grasp of a medical condition that, for the British Isles at least, was peculiarly good. How and indeed whether some of her insights percolated later into the consciousness of Hughlings-Jackson (who when George Eliot’s novella appeared was transitioning from medical school to the very beginnings of his career as a practitioner and had not published a word on epilepsy) should be regarded as subsidiary to that central issue. II. The Lifted Veil concerns a man named Latimer who is both troubled by and rather proud of experiencing “visions.” To him, his propensity for suffering from strange hallucinatory episodes constitutes proof of

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his possessing special supernatural powers, including those of reading the minds of others and of experiencing in the present matters that will come to pass in the future. Thus he is convinced that he has the gift of clairvoyance, a capacity of which more gullible Victorians of the mid-nineteenth century were rather enamored. Previous critics of George Eliot’s novella have not detected much irony in this work’s attitude toward the topic of Latimer’s clairvoyance. But whether she shared the credulity of those who accepted claims of clairvoyance (generally by “mesmerists”) may be doubted on external grounds alone. In G. H. Lewes she had an ally who was actively contributing to the process of winnowing pseudo- from true science. As early as 1852, Lewes had attacked what he called “The Fallacy of Clairvoyance.”11 And Eliot herself, through the 1850s and 1860s, regularly made witty criticisms of the contemporary fad for séances and related material.12 But our best guide to the question whether for George Eliot the pseudo- or para-sciences of mesmerism and clairvoyance enjoy equal status with enlightened study of the brain is The Lifted Veil itself.13 For she therein plays a kind of game with the reader, inviting him both to trust and to question Latimer’s account—and eventually unmasking him not as supernaturally gifted but as neurologically ill. A Crack-Brained Narrator Our appreciation of George Eliot’s strategy may be complicated by the fact that the person who is ill is the one telling the story.14 Yet even Latimer himself concedes that he has an “abnormal mental condition” (27), going so far as to call himself “crack-brained” (33). However, the author structures the plot in such a way as to imply that Latimer himself does not grasp the full extent to which his symptoms reflect brain pathology. Indeed, he has not an inkling as to the particular nature of that pathology. Our task as readers is to attend less to his own account than to clues within the story suggesting that the narrator is seriously unreliable.15 For what he believes to be truly clairvoyant visions turn out to be symptoms of a specific brain disorder—a form, the author cannily suggests, of epilepsy. The general category of epilepsy may initially bring to mind what George Eliot’s contemporaries called grand mal fits. Such spells involve obvious motor convulsions: the patient drops to the floor and, while fully unconscious, flails about wildly, frightening onlookers and often injuring himself. Yet another genre of epilepsy involves much

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less dramatic manifestations. In this genre, fits may be almost entirely subjective and emotional—a mid-twentieth century writer called them “psychic” seizures.16 Here the patient and not the audience is likely to be the terrified party. For while objective signs may include little other than behavioral arrest, brief loss of “contact” with onlookers and subtle motor “automatisms” such as lip-smacking or blinking, subjective symptoms may involve vivid hallucinations in several sensory modalities, temporal distortions, and intense emotional states—most often, a transcendent sense of terror; rarely, a sense of euphoria. Although some continental writers had begun to appreciate certain facets of this “subjective” species of epilepsy, it did not really crystallize as a distinct clinical entity until Hughlings-Jackson began to study it seriously beginning about 1875. Now let us see how in 1859 George Eliot suggests, without stating outright, that Latimer suffers from the kind of epileptic condition in question. The First Spell (in Geneva) Latimer’s brain disorder begins abruptly when he is sixteen years old and living in Geneva, where he has been sent by his father to complete his education. The paroxysms themselves are preceded by a “severe illness” (8), a well-known precursor, even in George Eliot’s day, of seizures. It is while convalescing from that illness with the help of his father, who has arrived from England to look after him, that Latimer has his first fit. His father having mentioned the possibility of a trip to Prague, Latimer is abruptly overtaken by a vision of that city, which he does not know at first hand: My father was called away before he had finished his sentence, and he left my mind resting on the word Prague, with a strange sense that a new and wondrous scene was breaking upon me: a city under the broad sunshine, that seemed to me as if it were the summer sunshine of a long-past century arrested in its course—unrefreshed for ages by the dews of night, or the rushing rain-cloud. . . .The city looked so thirsty that the broad river seemed to me a sheet of metal; and the blackened statues, as I passed under their blank gaze, along the unending bridge, . . . seemed to me the real inhabitants and owners of this place, while the busy, trivial men and women, hurrying to and fro, were a swarm of ephemeral visitants infesting it for a day. . . . (9)

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Latimer exits this disturbing visionary “scene” as abruptly as he entered it: “A stunning clang of metal suddenly thrilled through me, and I became conscious of the objects in my room again: one of the fire-irons had fallen as Pierre [Latimer’s servant] opened the door to bring me my draught. My heart was palpitating violently, and I begged Pierre to leave my draught beside me; I would take it presently” (9). Upon recovering full consciousness of his surroundings, Latimer is unsure what to make of the experience. He considers the possibility that he has simply had a dream: “Was this a dream—this wonderfully distinctive vision—minute in its distinctness down to a patch of rainbow light on the pavement, transmitted through a coloured lamp in the shape of a star—of a strange city, quite unfamiliar to my imagination? I had seen no picture of Prague: it lay in my mind as a mere name, with vaguely-remembered historical associations—ill-defined memories of imperial grandeur and religious wars” (9). But Latimer eliminates the dream hypothesis as inconsistent both with his memory for the sharp temporal boundaries of the experience (he recalls precisely the transition from ordinary consciousness to the “breaking-in of the vision”) as well as with his maintaining some awareness of his actual surroundings even within the fit. Thus Latimer’s vision does not supplant that of waking life (in which his servant and father move about) but instead coexists with it: “. . . while I was conscious of this incipient vision, I was also conscious that Pierre came to tell my father Mr. Filmore was waiting for him, and that my father hurried out of the room” (10, emphasis added). In depicting Latimer’s consciousness as divided between his actual surroundings and the hallucinatory content of his vision, George Eliot was providing a clinically accurate rendition of a partial seizure phenomenon. Later in the century, John Hughlings-Jackson wrote of the metaphorical “mental diplopia” (literally, double vision) of what we would call the partial fit: “. . . there is (1) the quasi-parasitical state of consciousness (dreamy state) [i.e., the “vision” itself], and (2) there are remains of normal consciousness and thus (1 and 2) there is double consciousness.”17 Although not in the context of his initial “vision,” Latimer later describes his condition as one that involves “double consciousness” (21, 35, 44)—the very term Hughlings-Jackson would employ years later. Looking back on this first fit, Latimer wonders whether his earlier illness had “wrought some happy change” in his physiology. Perhaps, he muses, that illness has somehow brought out a latent bent for poetry in him. Excited by the “blissful idea” that he might now pos-

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sess creative powers akin to those of Homer, Dante, and Milton (no sense aiming low), Latimer then attempts to bring on his “new gift” volitionally. However, this effort fails utterly: “my world remained as dim as ever, and that flash of strange light [i.e., that ‘patch of rainbow light on the pavement’ which remains among the ‘wonderfully distinct’ details of his vision] refused to come again, though I watched for it with palpitating eagerness” (10–11). The Second Spell (in Geneva) A few days later, while awaiting his father’s daily visit, Latimer has his second spell. Puzzling alone over why his ordinarily punctual father is running late, he is interrupted: Suddenly I was conscious that my father was in the room, but not alone: there were two persons with him. Strange! I had heard no footstep, I had not seen the door open, but I saw my father, and at his right hand our neighbour Mrs. Filmore, whom I remembered very well, though I had not seen her for five years. . . . but the lady on the left of my father was not more than twenty. . . . [Her] face had not a girlish expression: the features were sharp, the pale grey eyes at once acute, restless, and sarcastic. They were fixed on me in half-smiling curiosity, and I felt a painful sensation as if a sharp wind were cutting me. . . . ‘Well, Latimer, you thought me long [i.e., you thought I was running late],’ my father said. . . . But while the last word was in my ears, the whole group vanished, and there was nothing between me and the Chinese painted folding-screen that stood before the door. I was cold and trembling; I could only totter forward and throw myself on the sofa. . . . (11–12. Fourth ellipsis in text; others added.) Not fully recovered, Latimer struggles to comprehend what has happened. Again he hesitates as to whether he has a “strange new power” or, less happily, “a disease—a sort of intermittent delirium, concentrating my energy of brain into moments of unhealthy activity. . . .” In any event, this very spell has not fully resolved. “I felt a dizzy sense of unreality . . . I grasped the bell convulsively, like one trying to free himself from nightmare, and rang it twice” (12). After his servant has entered, Latimer attempts to be and to appear fully conscious

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(“‘I’m tired of waiting, Pierre,’ I said, as distinctly and emphatically as I could, like a man determined to be sober in spite of wine”). He inquires about his father, goes to his bedroom and somewhat mechanically rubs some “eau de Cologne” on his hands and forehead, then returns to the room in which the fit had begun. “Still enjoying the scent, I returned to the salon, but it was not unoccupied, as it had been before I left it. In front of the Chinese folding-screen there was my father, with Mrs. Filmore on his right hand, and on his left—the slim blonde-haired girl, with the keen face and the keen eyes fixed on me in half-smiling curiosity. ‘Well, Latimer, you thought me long,’ my father said. . . . I heard no more, felt no more, till I became conscious that I was lying with my head low on the sofa, Pierre and my father by my side” (12, ellipsis in text). We have here a series of two distinct spells bridged by a phase, apparently lasting some minutes, in which the afflicted Latimer is represented as partially aware of his surroundings. I shall refer to the series “initial vision—partial recovery—subsequent vision” as a single episode (although one could consider them two closely linked paroxysms as well). The series in question includes many clues that Latimer has had a two-part epileptic seizure. First, Latimer’s feeling during the initial scene “as if a sharp wind were cutting me” surely refers to the original meaning of the epileptic “aura”—a “wind” or “breeze.” Galen, the second-century physician, had used the Greek word “aura” in that sense as a metaphor for one of the common physical sensations the epileptic experiences in the remembered phase of a partial fit—a warm sensation arising from the abdomen to the head. The Leweses, who possessed texts by and commentaries upon Galen in their library, would be likely to have encountered contemporary discussions of the Galenic aura by medical writers on epilepsy.18 (It was not in Galen but in later writers that the term “aura” was applied to the entire remembered phase of an epileptic fit as distinct from that particular sensation.19) Second, Latimer’s noting, in the phase of partially impaired consciousness between the two full fits, a “dizzy sense of unreality” evokes another classic item from the lexicon of nineteenth-century epilepsy. Dizzy spells, or what the French clinicians called vertiges, were frequently mentioned as symptoms within the aura.20 Third, Latimer’s grabbing the bell “convulsively” reminds us that George Eliot was not above making puns.21 Fourth, the series “initial vision—partial recovery—subsequent vision” ends with Latimer’s sustaining frank loss

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of consciousness, a not infrequent conclusion to a partial seizure (“I heard no more, felt no more, till I became conscious that I was lying with my head low on the sofa . . .” [12]).22 The more innocent of George Eliot’s readers may have been as impressed as Latimer himself by the duplication of the same tableau within each of the two linked “visions.” In both cases, Mrs. Filmore and the “girl” (i.e., Bertha, who will eventually become Latimer’s wife) sit before the “Chinese folding screen” and Latimer’s father says, “Well, Latimer, you thought me long.” On such evidence Latimer, viewing the first of these experiences as a “prevision” of the second (13, 20), begins to view himself as something of a clairvoyant. As noted earlier, clairvoyance, a standard feature of the mesmerist’s toolkit, had great appeal for the Victorian groundlings. And yet Latimer himself will later bring up an alternative possibility: that such a “glimpse of the future” could represent “the mere diseased play of his own mind, [with] no relation to external realities” (20). We shall defer a final decision as to whether Latimer is truly clairvoyant or “diseased” until consideration of a later fit. But now let us examine more closely the provocative interval bridging the two linked “visions” within this second Genevan spell. A clinical sequence known to modern neurologists as well as to George Eliot’s medical contemporaries involves the semi-lucid interval joining together two complex partial fits. During such an interval, the patient, while somewhat more aware of his surroundings than when submerged within the fits proper, nonetheless does not regain full alertness. During this period he may carry out apparently volitional actions of which, however, he inscribes no clear memory. Jules Falret, a French clinician writing shortly after The Lifted Veil appeared, described the sequence thus: A remarkable phenomenon, which occurs frequently . . . in the interval between two complete attacks, may be noted in passing. In this case the patient may appear to have returned completely to his normal state: he enters into conversation with people around him; he carries out acts which seem entirely voluntary; he seems, in a word, fully at his baseline. But then the epileptic spell starts up again. Once it has stopped and the patient has truly regained his senses, one realizes with surprise that he has preserved no memory of his words or acts which date from the interval between the two spells.23

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This is, I think, precisely the phenomenon George Eliot wished to convey in describing Latimer’s behavior in the interval between his two full paroxysms: “I opened a case of eau-de-Cologne; took out a bottle; went through the process of taking out the cork very neatly . . .” (12). This process recalls the manual actions the patient may carry out with imperfect intentionality during the ictal or postictal phase or in the semi-lucid interval between two spells. Such actions, rather inaccurately called “automatisms,” raised an interesting clinical question with philosophical ramifications: to what degree precisely may the patient be said to act consciously during such an interval? This very issue was of great interest to G. H. Lewes. At different times in his career Lewes explored the general question of whether a gradient of intervening states obtains between the polar opposites of unconscious versus conscious, or involuntary versus voluntary, behaviors and actions. Early on he became convinced that such gradients exist and are of critical importance. In 1859, the very year of The Lifted Veil, Lewes drew such a conclusion as regards the dichotomy of involuntary versus voluntary behavior.24 Of most significance for the second Geneva episode of George Eliot’s novella, Lewes would, many years later, introduce the so-called automatisms of complex partial epilepsy as proof that a gradient, not an absolute distinction, obtains between unconscious and conscious behavior. These periictal motor behaviors, in his view, evidenced a level of alertness intermediate between the two.25 It seems likely that George Eliot, with some help from her partner, carefully designed Latimer’s motor actions in the semi-lucid interval between his initial and subsequent fits here as an illustration of the epileptic’s partially compromised consciousness. The Third Spell (in Vienna) As a love-triangle involving Bertha vis-à-vis Latimer and his brother, Alfred, develops, the story shifts to Vienna. Here, while paying a visit along with Bertha and Alfred to the Picture Gallery in the “Lichtenberg Palace,” Latimer has his third fit. It begins while he is contemplating Giorgione’s painting of a “cruel-eyed woman, said to be a likeness of Lucrezia Borgia” (18–19). “I had stood long alone before it, fascinated by the terrible reality of that cunning, relentless face, till I felt a strange poisoned sensation, as if I had long been inhaling a fatal odour, and was just beginning to be conscious of its effects” (19). He follows the others “dreamily,” “hardly alive” to his surroundings,

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eventually finding himself on a terrace outside another Vienna palace. While walking half-consciously, he transits suddenly into another phase: Just as I reached the gravel-walk, I felt an arm slipped within mine, and a light hand gently pressing my wrist. In the same instant a strange intoxicating numbness passed over me, like the continuance or climax of the sensation I was still feeling from the gaze of Lucrezia Borgia. The gardens, the summer sky, the consciousness of Bertha’s arm being within mine, all vanished, and I seemed to be suddenly in darkness, out of which there gradually broke a dim firelight, and I felt myself sitting in my father’s leather chair in the library at home. I knew the fireplace—the dogs for the wood-fire— the black marble chimney-piece with the white marble medallion of the dying Cleopatra in the centre. Intense and hopeless misery was pressing on my soul; the light became stronger, for Bertha was entering with a candle in her hand—Bertha, my wife—with cruel eyes, with green jewels and green leaves on her white ball-dress; every hateful thought within her present to me . . . ‘Madman, idiot! why don’t you kill yourself, then?’ It was a moment of hell. I saw into her pitiless soul—saw its barren worldliness, its scorching hate—and felt it clothe me round like an air I was obliged to breathe. She came with her candle and stood over me with a bitter smile of contempt. . . . She was my wife, and we hated each other. (19–20, first ellipsis in text, second added) But this “hideous vision” then dissolves: “Gradually the hearth, the dim library, the candle-light disappeared—seemed to melt away into a background of light, the green serpent with the diamond eyes remaining a dark image on the retina. Then I had a sense of my eyelids quivering, and the living daylight broke in upon me; I saw gardens and heard voices; I was seated on the steps of the Belvedere Terrace, and my friends were round me” (20). Although upon recovery Latimer is fully convinced that he has had an authentic clairvoyant experience, he has in fact given us grounds to suspect the opposite—that he has had another seizure, which is to say a pathological brain event without predictive value. First of all, the “strange poisoned sensation . . . as if inhaling a fatal odour” recalls another well-known hallmark of the partial fit, the olfactory hallucination. This symptom was described by a number of continental clinicians whose work precedes The Lifted Veil. Later on, George Eliot’s countryman Hughlings-Jackson would quote “smell cases”

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from one of these clinicians, Théodore Herpin, and would document such hallucinations from his own case material.26 Second, the author once again emphasizes Latimer’s fluctuating (not absent) loss of consciousness while moving from the Picture Gallery to the Belvedere Terrace. In addition, Latimer experiences a hallucination in a second sensory modality at the initial moment of the succeeding full fit. Having sensed “an arm slipped within [his], and a light hand gently pressing [his] wrist” on the verge of his descent into a “strange intoxicating numbness,” Latimer believes that Bertha has in fact caught up to him and entwined her arm with his. Perhaps she has—except that the author has made a point of Alfred and Bertha’s having sauntered off without him some time earlier and that tactile hallucinations beginning in a limb are also not infrequently part of the epileptic aura.27 Having been introduced by such paroxysmal phenomena, Latimer’s ensuing encounter with Bertha in his father’s library shapes up as nothing less than imagined—as a complex visual and auditory hallucination. Indeed the prevailing affective tone of that encounter —fear or terror—comprises one of the commonest ictal emotions.28 Finally, Latimer’s eventual coming to “with eyelids quivering” suggests that his partial fit has once again terminated in a generalized seizure with total loss of consciousness. Latimer’s aura, the text suggests, has included hallucinations in not less than four modalities—olfactory, tactile, visual, and auditory—and has been pervaded, as partial auras frequently are, by profound fear. Does Latimer, upon recovering from this fit, look forward to the future with Bertha of which he has had an apparent “prevision” with elation or with despair? His feeling “a weird hell-braving joy that Bertha was to be [his]” indicates the former whereas his terming his encounter with her in the library a “hideous glimpse of the future” (20) suggests the latter. Thus he both hopes and fears that his clairvoyance will prove reliable. In the following passage, George Eliot has Latimer acknowledge his duplex perspective on the same possible outcome (of marriage, both blissful and hellish, to Bertha): Behind the slim girl Bertha, whose words and looks I watched for, whose touch was bliss, there stood continually that Bertha with the fuller form, the harder eyes, the more rigid mouth,—with the barren selfish soul laid bare; no longer a fascinating secret, but a measured fact, urging itself perpetually on my unwilling sight. Are you unable to give me your sympathy—you who read this? Are you unable to

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imagine this double consciousness at work within me, flowing on like two parallel streams that never mingle their waters and blend into a common hue? Yet you must have known something of the presentiments that spring from an insight at war with passion; and my visions were only like presentiments intensified to horror. (21)29 But are his presentiments in fact accurate? Latimer now approaches the crucial test of his competency as a clairvoyant. For the party is moving on from Vienna to Prague. What will happen when it gets there? If the actual city (which, remember, he has never previously visited) bears out the validity of his earlier vision, then he has supernatural powers and gets the girl—for better or worse. But if the actual city does not resemble that in his first vision, then he has no such powers and is suffering from a brain disease. The Fourth Spell (at Prague) Arriving at night and unable to see the city, Latimer is relieved (“it seemed like a deferring of a terribly decisive moment” [22]). But the following morning he discovers the actual city for the first time. With the rest of the party, he visits (as did George Eliot and G. H. Lewes in July 1858) the Jews’ Quarter in the Old Town. Then he puts himself to the trial. He will go to the Karlsbrücke, that “unending bridge” over the Moldau River on which his earlier vision, seeded by some “vaguely-remembered historical associations,” had centered (see his first vision, 9). As I expected, when we left the Jews’ quarter, the elders of our party wished to return to the hotel. But now, instead of rejoicing in this, as I had done beforehand, I felt a sudden overpowering impulse to go on at once to the bridge, and put an end to the suspense I had been wishing to protract. I declared, with unusual decision, that I would get out of the carriage and walk on alone; they might return without me. . . . I . . . set off . . . towards the bridge. I had no sooner passed from under the archway of the grand old gate leading on to the bridge, than a trembling seized me, and I turned cold under the mid-day sun; yet I went on; I was in search of something—a small detail which I remembered with special intensity as part of my vision. There it was—the patch of rainbow light on the pavement transmitted through a lamp in the shape of a star. (22–23, ellipses added)

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It appears, then, that Latimer has earned his certificate in clairvoyance. For his earlier vision of Prague has proved trustworthy—a verisimilar account of the real city. Latimer’s re-experiencing the circumstantial detail of the “patch of rainbow light” (compare 9) may therefore carry with us the same kind of evidential power that it carries for him. And if he is in fact clairvoyant, then he will get the girl: “I felt [certain] from that moment on the bridge at Prague, that Bertha would one day be my wife” (24). But not so fast: the author has carefully framed Latimer’s second perceptual event involving that “patch of rainbow light” as transpiring within another seizure. For immediately prior to that event, “a trembling seized [him], and [he] turned cold under the mid-day sun” —apart from the pun, we have here a second allusion to a not uncommon sensation reported by partial-fit patients within their aura. Galen had spoken of the aura as a “cold vapor,” an expression translated by Latin writers as aura frigida.30 And George Eliot’s qualifying Latimer’s second perception of that “patch” of light as taking place inside a seizure may lead us to question whether he is in fact clairvoyant at all. For if Latimer is now re-experiencing a visual detail comprising a part of his earlier spell—which earlier spell by his own account bore little resemblance to Prague (10)—then he is tautologically appealing for proof of his vision to a another closely related hallucination and not to a waking reality extrinsic to his spells. Ultimately, then, he has no extraepileptic evidence for the verisimilitude of his epileptic vision. George Eliot would seem to be emphasizing that Latimer has an ungrounded conviction, intra-paroxysmally, that he has previously seen something. But that is precisely the definition of a déjà vu experience—in which a feeling, however strongly held, that one has previously beheld a certain item or scene is not warranted by the facts.31 The same may be said to apply to Latimer’s second vision, the two-part spell in Geneva. The narrator draws the conclusion that the duplicated scene involving his vision of his father and Bertha on the sofa signifies that the first part foretells the second. But if both parts comprise a reiterated hallucination (book-ends within the same seizure), then the first part has no predictive value at all. The second tableau is not an extra-ictal fulfillment of the first but an intra-ictal reprise. So much for Latimer as clairvoyant.32 There is one additional means by which George Eliot undercuts her narrator’s claim to supernatural powers. On two separate occasions, each time producing a string of similes, Latimer likens his direct perception of others’ “stream of thought” to a specifically auditory event:

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“an importunate, ill-played musical instrument, or the loud activity of an imprisoned insect . . . a ringing in the ears not to be gotten rid of . . . a preternaturally heightened sense of hearing . . . a roar of sound where others find perfect stillness” (13, 19). But what he takes as evidence of special powers, the informed reader may recognize as a particular kind of epileptic aura. About two decades following The Lifted Veil Hughlings-Jackson and William Gowers would publish cases involving a species of epileptic fit heralded by “noises in the ear” such as “hissing,” “ringing,” “rustling,” “a rushing sound,” “singing in the ears.”33 Can it be that Latimer, in his classic manner, has misinterpreted as laden with supernatural meaning such an epileptic symptom? May not the reader who is onto George Eliot’s game reverse the process, viewing what is most relevant to her narrator’s true condition not the paranormal “tenor” of his similes (special powers) but the naturalistic and indeed epileptic “vehicle” (a “ringing in the ears” generated within his brain)? The Interictal Man The second half of The Lifted Veil concerns less Latimer’s fits than his between-the-fits (inter-seizure or interictal) personality. Here too, George Eliot may have been inspired to some degree by writers on epilepsy, many of whom speculated that patients afflicted by that episodic condition acquire a habitual, stable personality configuration. Commonly noted in the constellation of such traits were moodiness and suspiciousness.34 Latimer—a “self-centred negative nature,” one prone to “a suffering selfishness instead of an enjoying one,” a “being finely organised for pain, but with hardly any fibres that responded to pleasure” (15, 25, 24)—seems conceived after such a nineteenth-century model of the interseizure personality. It is true that Bertha ends up hating Latimer, but there are suggestions such as the episode of the opal ring (17) that she begins with genuine feeling for him and only recoils from him later as a result of prolonged exposure to his chronic coldness and paranoia. Only after living for some years in proximity to such a husband—who admits he is “sickly, abstracted, and, as some [suspect], crack-brained”—does Bertha begins to meditate “how the incubus could be shaken off her life” (33). Thereafter she contrives the revenge leading up to the macabre conclusion of the novella, one owing more to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein than to ordinary physiology. Latimer’s “diseased consciousness” (14) has not only contaminated

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his perceptions but also destroyed his bond with his wife, as well as with the rest of humanity. III. I have made the case for George Eliot’s The Lifted Veil as a remarkable compendium of clinical thinking circa 1859 regarding a kind of epilepsy, the defining features of which, although glimpsed in part by a number of continental clinicians, did not truly coalesce as a distinct entity in the medical literature until Hughlings-Jackson began addressing this condition in 1875. Once acknowledged, the overlap between her fictional production and Hughlings-Jackson’s views generates a number of critical puzzles. Some of these lend themselves more easily to answers than others. Luckily one of these questions admits, I think, of a clear-cut answer. It concerns the general means by which George Eliot managed to achieve some working familiarity with the latest medical literature on epilepsy. I think it is safe to say that George Eliot’s partner served her as a conduit for this material in general. Lewes, who from the mid-1850s nurtured a serious interest in neurophysiology, making a non-negligible contribution himself to the field by writing several relevant papers for presentation at annual meetings of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, who published highly informed popular accounts of neurobiological matters in his Physiology of Common Life (1859–60), and who worked neurophysiological topics deep into his philosophical series of volumes titled Problems of Life and Mind (1874–79), was well positioned to serve as such a conduit.35 In The Lifted Veil George Eliot not only drew directly on Lewes’s pages on blood transfusion in his Physiology of Common Life for the Gothic conclusion of her story but also acknowledged her partner’s general influence by including a figure, Charles Meunier, a sensitive and successful physiologist, who is transparently a stand-in for Lewes.36 G. H. Lewes’s interest in epilepsy, on view, as we have seen, in the third volume of Problems of Life and Mind (Lewes 1877), also renders him an attractive candidate as a mediator between the epileptic aspect of The Lifted Veil and the relevant later work of Hughlings-Jackson. As I have noted, Lewes by the mid-1870s had formed a relationship with Hughlings-Jackson himself. This was precisely the time during which the clinician was moving from the motor fit-centered epileptic paradigm evident in his 1870 “Study of Convulsions”37 to the significantly

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more complex and subtle one, centered as much on “psychological” as on motor phenomena, which produced his great papers on partial fits.38 Given Lewes’s superb knowledge of European medical writers, generally more attuned to those very “psychological” features than their British counterparts, as well as his many personal relationships with a number of important continental clinicians (C. F. O. Westphal, for example, had happily escorted him on a tour through his Berlin psychiatric wards in 187039), Lewes could clearly have played a role in advancing his young friend Hughlings-Jackson from his initial to his mature paradigm of epilepsy.40 Is this, then, where we should leave the issue of the remarkable overlap between George Eliot’s The Lifted Veil and Hughlings-Jackson’s classic studies on partial fits? This would involve crediting Lewes as a link between the two productions and casting him as an assiduous background researcher both for the early work by his partner and for the mature work of Hughlings-Jackson. Perhaps this is credit enough. But I am not sure that we should leave the matter there, if only because it assigns G. H. Lewes the modest role of being an excellent citation manager for two of the most creative workers of his day. There is another possibility. We have thus far portrayed George Eliot and her partner as carrying out, for the topic of epilepsy, the same kind of zealous research program she brought, perhaps not always for the better, to other fictional endeavors.41 But The Lifted Veil may have sprung from a less intellectually disinterested source. This possibility grounds its author’s original interest in partial fits in her contentious relationship with a friend who may himself have had that very condition. I have argued elsewhere that Herbert Spencer (1820–1903), the Victorian philosopher, who was troubled for much of his life by an illness that had paroxysmal features, one which almost all of his contemporaries and all of his students from his death to the present have regularly dismissed as hypochondriasis, in fact suffered from partial seizures.42 Spencer, I have suggested, developed his extraordinary secretiveness (for example, he recalled and destroyed the “vast bulk” of his correspondence43) by way of hiding a malady of which even the most benign variants in Victorian times carried considerable stigma. It is not, I think, an accident that the morose, obsessive, and probably impotent figure of Latimer bears a resemblance to the notoriously asexual Spencer.44 In the years and months prior to The Lifted Veil, Spencer had acted nefariously towards George Eliot on a number of occasions, spurning her offer of love in 1852 (eventually blaming her lack of “physique” for a deficit that may have been his)

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and later playing a key role, when rankled by her early success, in disingenuously making the true identity of George Eliot available to Victorian gossip-mongers. The Lifted Veil, composed just as her cherished pseudonym was unraveling, may on one level represent payback for Spencer’s malfeasances. In this reading, it answers Spencer’s action by unmasking him, or rather someone much like him, in turn as a querulous and needy epileptic intermittently subject to pathological “visions.”45 But I do not ask that the reader endorse, on the strength of the cursory overview presented in the last paragraph, the hypothesis that Herbert Spencer served as a living, breathing embodiment for the Leweses of partial fits well before Hughlings-Jackson came along. That hypothesis, with its own byways and challenges, including the complex issue of Spencer’s own relationship with Hughlings-Jackson, requires a full exposition elsewhere.46 We can subtract the issue of Spencer’s contribution (if it is there at all) entirely from the present discussion without in the least impinging on the nexus of substantive relationships linking George Eliot’s precocious novella to Hughlings-Jackson’s clinical work. I am, again, much less invested in your acceding to my own explanation for that nexus than in your granting that, however it came to pass, one of England’s greatest novelists anticipated a classic production by one of England’s greatest neurologists. Its comprising a fiction rather than a formal medical report should be considered an incidental aspect of its relationship to nineteenth-century neurological discourse. NOTES 1. Hughlings-Jackson’s key publications on the complex partial fit are included in his Selected Writings (hereafter, SW) vol. 1. The earliest relevant paper, “On Temporary Mental Disorders after Epileptic Paroxysms,” was published in 1875 (see SW 1:119–34) and perhaps his greatest single publication on the topic, “On a Particular Variety of Epilepsy (‘Intellectual Aura’), One Case with Symptoms of Organic Brain Disease,” appeared in 1888 (see SW 1:385–405). 2. For his praise, for example, of Théodore Herpin, see SW 1:469–71. 3. For a classic account of the “dreamy state,” see in particular SW 1:385–405 passim. He had first mentioned “double consciousness” as such in late 1876; see Ibid. 1:274. For the use of the term “dreamy state” in non-Anglophone literature, see for example Brunet Bourgin et al., “Crises partielles complexes avec dreamystate.” As the distinction between simple and complex partial seizures is sometimes difficult to draw (the latter requiring the somewhat nebulous criterion of “impaired consciousness”) and indeed postdates Hughlings-Jackson, I shall not utilize it programmatically in this essay. About 80% of complex partial fits arise from the temporal lobes; thus a rough synonym for the condition, emphasizing anatomic

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source rather than symptom profile, is temporal lobe epilepsy. For a good popular overview of the condition, see LaPlante, Seized. 4. For initial orientation to the vast topics of epilepsy as treated in literature and the arts and as playing a role in the lives of individual writers and artists, see LaPlante, Seized, passim or Wolf, “Epilepsy in Literature: Writers’ Experiences and Their Reflections in Literary Works.” 5. For a brief discussion of Eliot’s title character Silas Marner as epileptic, see Wolf, “Epilepsy and Catalepsy in Anglo-American Literature,” 290–91. Another neurologist with an interest in the arts, F. Clifford Rose, concludes that Silas’s illness “cannot be recognized as a specific disorder”—not even, it seems, as epilepsy (see Rose, “Silas Marner, George Eliot and Catalepsy,” 431). This agnostic position is rather puzzling. It seems to derive from Rose’s asking himself the question whether Silas Marner “has” catalepsy, observing (correctly) that the semi-technical term “catalepsy” could mean many different things, some affiliated with epilepsy and some not, and imputing to George Eliot confusion regarding not only that item but also Silas’s illness in general. While lack of precision with regard to the term catalepsy was endemic, there is no reason to assume that the overall portrait of Silas’s condition is similarly imprecise. Notwithstanding further possible distinctions, I fail to see any ambiguity in the depiction of Silas as epileptic. 6. A non-exhaustive list of writers speaking of “double consciousness” prior to The Lifted Veil includes: Herbert Mayo in 1838, musing on certain behavioral spells resulting from “depression of the cerebral forces” (The Philosophy of Living, 145–47); Charles Darwin, picking up the term from Mayo, also in 1838, but only in his famous Notebook M, not published until the late 20th century (Notebooks, 279–88 passim); J. A. Symonds, in a lecture delivered at Bristol in 1851 although not published until 1871 (Miscellanies, 158, 160–63); Sir Henry Holland, one of the Leweses’ personal physicians, in 1858 in commenting upon “certain states of mental derangement” (Chapters on Mental Physiology, 196). None of these writers explicitly addressed “double consciousness” in the narrow Jacksonian sense; indeed while they glanced at epilepsy their cases tended to concern what we now call dissociative identity disorder, a largely psychogenic condition that has very little overlap with partial seizures. 7. For permission to cite from G. H. Lewes’s journals and diaries as well as from other unpublished material, I am indebted to the staff of the George Eliot and George Henry Lewes Collection, General Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut. Entries in journals and diaries shall generally be referenced by date only. One or both of the Leweses had Hughlings-Jackson at least four times to the Priory or dined with him elsewhere: see Lewes’s diary entries for June 1 and December 7, 1873; February 14, 1875; and February 20, 1876. Lewes at least twice had “medical chat” with Hughlings-Jackson (see entries for April 6 and December 16, 1876). Many years later, James CrichtonBrowne recalled that “[s]everal times” during 1876 and 1877, his physician friends Hughlings-Jackson and Clifford Allbutt (the latter once viewed incorrectly as one of George Eliot’s models for the character of Lydgate in Middlemarch) asked him to tag along for a Sunday visit to the Priory (What the Doctor Thought, 277–78). We may conclude that Hughlings-Jackson had by 1876 become one of the Sunday regulars. 8. See Lewes, The Physical Basis of Mind, 305–409. 9. Hughlings-Jackson to Marian Evans Lewes, December 2, 1878 (Beinecke Library). 10. The neurologist is mentioned once in Gordon Haight’s standard biography (Haight, George Eliot, 504) and three times in his nine-volume edition of her correspondence (in Eliot, The George Eliot Letters, see 6:14 n5, 367; 9:97). 11. Lewes, “The Fallacy of Clairvoyance,” 305. Further contempt for the dupes of spiritualism appears in untitled pieces by Lewes in The Leader on March 1 and June 21, 1856. See also the following note.

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12. See especially her 1865 review of William Lecky’s The Influence of Rationalism, reprinted in her Selected Essays, 389–404. “No séances at a guinea a head for the sake of being pinched by ‘Mary Jane’ can annihilate railways, steam-ships, and electric telegraphs. . . . These things are part of the external Reason to which internal silliness has inevitably to accommodate itself” (393). For a sampling of other references indicating the Leweses’ contempt for such “silliness,” see Eliot, The George Eliot Letters, 2:267; 3:335; 8: 38, 41, 45, 74; Lewes, Letters, 1:218, 2:133–34. 13. Recent work on The Lifted Veil has been valuable for demonstrating the author’s awareness of contemporary pseudoscience but has not indicated her ultimately critical evaluation of such material within the novella. See for example Gray, “Pseudoscience and George Eliot’s ‘The Lifted Veil’”; Gray, afterword to Eliot, The Lifted Veil; Bull, “Mastery and Slavery in The Lifted Veil.”; Small, introduction to Eliot, The Lifted Veil/Brother Jacob. Other influential readings of the novella include Knoepflmacher, George Eliot’s Early Novels, 128–61, and Gilbert & Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic, 443–77. For further citations of secondary work see n. 15 below. 14. All references to the novella will be to Eliot The Lifted Veil/Brother Jacob and page references will be incorporated into the text. 15. The term “unreliable narrator” was coined by Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction. Students of the novella who miss the unreliable nature of Latimer’s account are at risk of endorsing positions that vastly underestimate George Eliot’s artistry. For example, Jane Wood reads the work as a semi-sympathetic study in the problem of the “hypersensitive male in a culture of manliness” (see Wood, “Scientific Rationality and Fanciful Fiction: Gendered Discourse in The Lifted Veil”). But to claim that Latimer represents a “pathological ‘other’ to the more robust and extrovert masculinist culture against which it is constantly measured” (ibid., 166) misconstrues, I think, the target of the author’s wit. George Eliot ironizes at the expense of Latimer much more than at the expense of the hypothesized masculine culture. This is not by any means to say that a feminist reading of The Lifted Veil is not possible but that its terms would be different than those proposed by Wood. Eliot’s appropriation for her own purposes of a neuropsychiatric vocabulary traditionally wielded by male physicians—her assumption, in effect, of the traditional male role of the diagnostician—itself has feminist application. 16. See Lennox, Epilepsy, 2: 227–321 passim. Note that this term no longer has much currency in clinical neurology. 17. See Hughlings-Jackson, SW 1:468. 18. See Galen De locis affectis 3.11 (many editions). The Galenic source of the aura was frequently mentioned by nineteenth-century writers on epilepsy. In works preceding The Lifted Veil, see especially Herpin, Du pronostic et du traitement curatif de l’épilepsie, 382–430 passim; see also Sieveking, On Epilepsy and Epileptiform Seizures, 12–13. For nineteenth-century references to the Galenic aura in works postdating The Lifted Veil, see, e.g., Gowers, Epilepsy and Other Chronic Convulsive Diseases, 40–41. The Leweses had in their library a number of works by or pertaining to Galen including vol. 1 of his Oeuvres anatomiques, physioloques et médicales as well as Daremberg, Exposition des connaissances de Galen sur l’anatomie, la physiologie, et la pathologie du système nerveux (see Baker, Library #536, #775). Daremberg’s 1841 Exposition does not, however, discuss the aura. Further, De locis affectis, the work containing Galen’s discussion of the aura, is not in vol. 1 of Galen’s 1854–56 Oeuvres but in vol. 2, not mentioned in Baker Library. However Baker’s invaluable work does not comprise a complete listing of all volumes that may at some point have been in the Leweses’ library. 19. See Temkin, The Falling Sickness, 259–60. 20. Contemporary French and, following them, English clinicians frequently assumed that vertigo was epileptic in nature; at the time of The Lifted Veil, the distinction between epileptic and non-epileptic vertigo had not yet been figured out. (Prosper Ménière, the writer after whom the most common cause of non-epileptic vertigo has been named, did not publish his key article until 1861.) Accordingly

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Herpin uses vertige to indicate a disturbance of consciousness (as in a complex partial seizure) rather than a narrowly defined sensation of rotation, as in the modern sense; see Herpin, Du pronostic, 65–66, 453–55. For secondary literature on this important point, see Bladin, “History of ‘Epileptic Vertigo,’” and Eadie & Bladin, A Disease Once Sacred, 67–68. For a sampling of other pre- The Lifted Veil writers on epileptic vertigo, see, e.g., Sieveking, On Epilepsy and Epileptiform Seizures, 22, 55, 57–59; Radcliffe, Epilepsy and Other Convulsive Affections, 150–51. With this as with the other complex partial features to be discussed below, it is not possible or, I think, necessary to identify specific sources upon which George Eliot drew for The Lifted Veil. 21. The text includes a number of other punning allusions to epileptic fits. Thrice the narrator describes his clairvoyant powers as “fitful” (11, 13, 33); once, at the onset of a spell, “a trembling seized [Latimer]” (23). When likening Latimer’s unusual behavior to that of Torquato Tasso, Bertha notes that this sixteenth-century poet, whose late-life insanity was a staple of the Romantic writers, had had a “mad fit” (26–27; all emphases in this note are added). Of course a “fit” could be almost anything that is paroxysmal—such word-play only acquires epileptic resonance as a consequence of the work’s pervasive if subliminal attention to that particular condition. 22. Complex partial fits may or may not terminate in a full-blown grand mal seizure, a sequence the modern neurologist would describe as the partial fit’s being followed by a secondary generalized tonic-clonic seizure. 23. See Falret, “De l’état mentale des épileptiques,” 431, my translation (emphasis in text is added). 24. This is a primary concern of Lewes, “Voluntary and Involuntary Actions,” a review of Alexander Bain’s The Emotions and the Will (1859). 25. Lewes, Physical Basis of Mind, especially 389–409. 26. Olfactory hallucinations were noted as a likely epileptic symptom by a number of French clinicians, e.g., Esquirol, Mental Maladies, 147 (but he misunderstood their significance, viewing them as prodromal to rather than an integral part of the fit). Hughlings-Jackson quoted “smell cases” from Herpin, Des accès incomplets d’épilepsie: see SW 1:469. He also adduced olfactory symptoms from his own case-material: see SW, e.g., 1:464 (a smell “like camphor or ether”), 1:472 (“a horrid smell of dirty burning stuff”). 27. Auras beginning unilaterally with, e.g., a peripheral sensation in the hand or arm, were discussed by a number of writers preceding The Lifted Veil: see especially Herpin, Du pronostic, 389–430 passim (with many citations from earlier authorities). Later on, William Gowers discussed such sensations in detail (Epilepsy and Other Chronic Convulsive Diseases, 44–54). In modern series of patients, these socalled somatosensory auras occur much more frequently in focal epilepsies arising in a centroparietal than in a temporal lobe location—but such a distinction was not known to the writers available to the Leweses. 28. Of writers preceding or roughly contemporaneous with The Lifted Veil, see, e.g., Sieveking, On Epilepsy and Epileptiform Seizures (“The premonitory symptom is generally accompanied by a sense of fear and terror” [16]), and Falret, “De l’état mentale des épileptiques” (patients during an attack appear to betray “painful preoccupation or profound terror [une profonde terreur]” and retrospectively report having experienced “a painful dream” and “profound emotional suffering” [665–66]). Of later writers, Hughlings-Jackson frequently mentions fear or dread as an ictal emotion: see, e.g., SW 1:459, 464, 468; 2:88, 107. In modern studies, some 10–15% of patients experience fear as part of their aura: among others, see Biraben et al., “Fear as the main feature of epileptic seizures.” 29. Note that George Eliot in this passage may have subtly expanded the extension of the term “double consciousness” beyond its narrowly epileptic mean-

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ing. Whereas the first spell in Geneva exactly acts out Hughlings-Jackson’s intrafit “mental diplopia,” this passage, perhaps more ambitiously, depicts Latimer as almost permanently divided between his intra-fit “presentiments” versus his extra-fit “passions.” But this distinction may be overly fine and in any event the derived meaning retains an epileptic context. 30. See Galen De locis affectis 3.11 on “a sort of cold vapor” [auran tina psuchran]. On the use of aura quaedam frigida to translate Galen’s expression, see Herpin, Du pronostic, 391–94, 396, 398, 404, which gives a host of references, particularly from sixteenth- and seventeenth-century medical literature. As Herpin demonstrates, the sensation of a “froid glacial” or “vapeur froid” kept its currency in the nineteenthcentury French clinical community (ibid., 409–21 passim). For modern mention of a viscerosensory sensation of cold within the partial aura, see Gloor, “Role of the amygdala in temporal lobe epilepsy,” 512. 31. I defer to the medical literature in using déjà vu as a convenient umbrella term for a family of different temporal distortions commonly experienced in the complex partial aura. (Related but less well known phenomena include jamais vu, the illusion of unfamiliarity in a familiar setting.) But the term déjà vu does not occur in the epilepsy literature available to the Leweses and what George Eliot does with Latimer’s distortions of time does not necessarily fit precisely within that category as strictly defined. (There were descriptions of déjà vu prior to The Lifted Veil, e.g., in Wigan, The Duality of the Mind, 84–87. Wigan, however, had not seen this as a specifically epileptic symptom. Credit for viewing déjà vu as a symptom of epilepsy usually goes to Hughlings-Jackson who addressed the issue in some detail, though not under that name, in the 1870s and 1880s.) Latimer’s belief in his clairvoyant powers bears some resemblance to another, less commonly attested and possibly underreported variant, the delusion of prescience (see Rahey and Sadler, “Prescience as an aura of temporal lobe epilepsy”)—except that Latimer’s delusion about such powers obtains as much between as within his fits. 32. In such replicated ictal scenes as that involving the “patch of rainbow light,” George Eliot may also have been drawing upon the clinical finding that, for a given epileptic, intra-fit hallucinations are “reproduced with remarkable uniformity [une singulière uniformité] in the same patient at each new attack” (see Falret, “De l’état mentale des épileptiques,” 664–65; this very passage was quoted later by Hughlings-Jackson, SW, 1:251). The principle of uniformity from ictus to ictus was also clearly enunciated by other writers including Herpin, Des accès incomplets d’épilepsie, 3, 66, 76–77. In the case of George Eliot’s fictional account, the principle of uniformity from seizure to seizure is relative and not absolute: Latimer experiences nearly the same hallucination in the two Prague-related fits and in the two parts of the second Geneva spell—but those two series differ from each other. 33. Gowers, Epilepsy and other Chronic Convulsive Diseases, 68–69; see also his “Gulstonian lectures on epilepsy,” 435. There had been passing allusions to such auras going back to Arataeus but, so far as I know, no systematic or focused account of them in the English medical literature until about 1876, when Hughlings-Jackson published two cases (see his “On cases of epileptic seizures with an auditory warning,” not included in SW). 34. Chiming in with Esquirol, who had found that many epileptics were “irritable, peculiar, and easily enraged,” Wilhelm Griesinger noted that “[the] latter trait of character—a dominant, suspicious, discontented, misanthropic perversion of sentiment, sometimes even actual melancholia with suicidal tendency—is observed in a great many epileptics.” See Griesinger, Mental Pathology and Therapeutics, 404. This was a translation of the second edition of Griesinger’s standard textbook, Die Pathologie und Therapie der Psychischen Krankheiten (1845, second edition 1861), definitely known to Lewes, for Lewes referred to the French translation of the textbook (see Physical Basis of Mind, 437n). Among modern clinicians the question

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whether patients with complex partial fits develop a stable interseizure personality configuration has led to a debate the lineaments of which cannot be examined here. 35. For many years there was no satisfactory account of G. H. Lewes’s work on brain-behavior relationships, nearly all workers on the topic viewing him, with some condescension, as a glib science journalist. This has finally begun to change; see for example Rylance, “Convex and Concave: Conceptual Boundaries in Psychology, Now and Then (But Mainly Then).” But there remains much to do. 36. For the novella’s debt to Lewes on blood transfusion, see Flint, “Blood, Bodies, and The Lifted Veil.” In the fiction, Meunier is a student of medicine and a keen physiologist who comes to have “a European reputation” (37); The Physiology of Common Life, in the course of publication when The Lifted Veil appeared, would eventually achieve just such a reputation for Lewes. 37. See his SW 1:8–36. 38. The shift in question has been less well explained than expertly described, e.g., by Temkin, The Falling Sickness, 328–46 and Dewhurst, Hughlings Jackson on Psychiatry, 79–90. We lack, in my view, a full understanding of what factors led to the evolution of his views on epilepsy, particularly the movement from an exclusively motor to an inclusively motor-plus “psychological” paradigm. 39. See Lewes’s Journal XII, entries for March 18 and April 3, 1870, as well as diary entries for the same dates (Beinecke). 40. The influence of Lewes upon Hughlings-Jackson has been almost entirely neglected. One might begin by assaying the similarity between Lewes’s critique of T. H. Huxley’s “automaton” theory which holds that higher organisms’ apparently intentional movements may persist in the absolute absence of consciousness (Lewes, Physical Basis of Mind, especially 389–409) and Hughlings-Jackson’s critique, in roughly contemporaneous papers, of the notion that epileptic “automatisms” indicate absolute absence of consciousness. Both were converging on exactly the same position, that consciousness is not an absolute but a graded concept which includes subliminal forms. On the face of it, since Lewes (ibid., 401) quoted one of the neurologist’s papers, he would seem to have been the debtor. But the matter is likely to be much more complicated. In the forthcoming work quoted in n. 46 below, I have adduced evidence suggesting that the influence was fully reciprocal. 41. More than one reader has felt that she overdid the homework for Romola, her historical novel of Renaissance Florence. 42. See Raitiere, “Did Herbert Spencer Have Reading Epilepsy?” 43. See Francis, Herbert Spencer, vii, 329. 44. The novella includes a hint or two that Bertha has also had to deal with her husband’s impotence. Latimer emphasizes that he is “without appetite for the common objects of human desire” (32), that he cannot be expected to act according to “the logic of one who [has] desires to gratify” since he “[has] no desires” (33). For Spencer’s asexuality, cf. Francis, Herbert Spencer, e.g., 7, 101. 45. The case for Spencer’s having epilepsy and serving as a model for George Eliot’s Latimer was first presented in Raitiere, “Did Herbert Spencer Have Epilepsy? Some Links involving John Hughlings-Jackson, G. H. Lewes, and George Eliot.” The more recent paper, “Did Herbert Spencer Have Reading Epilepsy?”, lends additional specification to the neurological syndrome afflicting the philosopher. The argument is fully developed in Raitiere, The Complicity of Friends. 46. See Raitiere, The Complicity of Friends.

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