ジョージ・エリオットの実験 : 「引き上げられたヴェール」でみる全知の悲劇
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概要
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In her writing career, George Eliot rarely used an omniscient first-person narrator in fiction, which is not the case in "The Lifted Veil" (1859). This short story has received less attention than other her works, and yet it is heavily tinged with the author's interpretation of that kind of narrator. The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate Eliot's idea that knowing everything can be tragic. In "The Lifted Veil", the narrator is a clairvoyant, Latimer, who has the ability to know other people's streams of thoughts. Yet, on the other hand, the inner world of Bertha, his wife, is seldom open to his mind until the veil between the two is lifted and the pitiless thoughts of Bertha come into view. At the end of the story, a maid to Bertha confesses her employer's poison plan to kill Latimer, and he comes to know everything at last. The first section of this paper is focused on Latimer's special ability, and considers the reason why he regards ignorance as a benefit and salvation, with the aid of a remark he makes on his ability being a "curse" not a "gift". The subject of the next section is voice. Latimer can hear other people's inner voices, while Bertha's voice never reaches his ear. He has no way to know her mind, but the maid discloses Bertha's murderous design out loud. Just before this incident, the maid dies from a disease; however, she is revived for a moment by a blood transfusion. As soon as the male blood flows into her body, she has the power to speak and gets an authoritative voice. The background of the female authorized voice is also examined in the same section. In the final section, it is shown that George Eliot was influenced by some literary works and built her short story on them. In the frame of gothic novels such as Frankenstein (1818), there is an allusion to P.B. Shelley's sonnet, beginning "Lift not the painted veil those who live/ Call Life" (1824). It is worth noting that in the case of the sonnet, the poet indicates nothingness beyond the veil, while George Eliot describes what lays there as tragedy. Eliot rarely liked to use the omniscient narrator, which can be found in Scenes of Clerical Life (1858) or Middlemarch (1871-72). In the light of this fact, to focus on the narrator in "The Lifted Veil" gives a better understanding of George Eliot's attitude towards narrators in all her works of fiction.