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Long regarded an aberration in George Eliot’s realist canon, The Lifted Veil has increasingly been reconsidered in light of Eliot’s moral aesthetic. Latimer’s clairvoyance, in concert with his position as the only first-person protagonist-artist in Eliot’s oeuvre, led to compelling analyses of the ways in which the novella’s glaring depiction of the protagonist’s failed sympathy betrays Eliot’s aesthetic dilemma. Departing from the prevailing critical tendency to view Latimer as foremost a rhetorical device for grappling with Eliot’s aesthetics of sympathy, this essay construes the novella’s thematization of sympathy in terms of Latimer’s characterological embodiment. A close-up of Latimer as a character reveals the extent to which he becomes subject to the dehumanizing discourse which hinders sympathy. Yet beyond its critique of the habits of thought that debilitate the self’s ethical relation with the other, The Lifted Veil engages the reader in the moral force of the rare moments in which the subject works around egoistic impulses to bring about a sympathetic encounter. While Latimer’s use of the term “intoxicate” betrays the fallibility of his claims for passivity in forming sympathy, the novella emphasizes, through these moments, the subject’s agency in the openness to the possibility of sympathy as being crucial to forming a responsive fellow feeling.
