Latimer's complaint: masturbation and monomania in george eliot's the lifted veil

Abstract

Critical analysis of The Lifted Veil has traditionally tended to draw on biographical details from Eliot's life in order to explain the construction and actions of Latimer, her male narrator. Such an approach, however, closes off other avenues of investigation. It is appropriate, therefore, to consider the construction of Latimer without automatic reference to the life of his creator, whilst retaining a consciousness of the discourses within which Eliot is likely to have participated.Through her contact with freethinkers, scientists and pseudo-scientists, as well as through her work as editor of The Westminster Review, Eliot was ideally placed both to participate in contemporary thought on science and spirituality, and to appropriate their discourses in her fiction. Ostensibly a narrative about clairvoyance, The Lifted Veil may with equal ease be read as a medical text, which examines the pathology of monomania, delusion and masturbatory insanity through the first person narrator, Latimer. This article will consider the symptomatology of Latimer's unnamed medical condition with particular reference to the mid-Victorian debate on masturbation and insanity. The article will make reference to a variety of medical writings from the period. These will include those by British physicians William Acton, whose important work The Functions and Disorders of the Reproductive Organs was published in 1857, as well as those by James Copland and Henry Maudsley, and the influential continental specialist Samuel-Auguste Tissot.