When I was in grad school, I had a seminar on Victorian literature with Professor Robert Lougy. It included George Eliot, and I didn't like her novels much: too long and mannered for my taste. I don't really remember much from that seminar: we read Middlemarch, I know, and The Mill on the Floss. Did we read Silas Marner? Probably. What else? I can't remember.
But these days I assign my students an Eliot short story in our British Women Writers class: in our anthology is "The Lifted Veil," an atypical Eliot story that includes gothic elements. The supernatural isn't the only thing that's atypical, as far as I can remember from that long-ago seminar; it's the darkness of the narrator's vision.
Here's what the narrator, Latimer, says in the beginning of the story -- it's been bothering me because it seems so timely:
While the heart beats, bruise it,--it is your only opportunity; while the eye can still turn towards you with moist timid entreaty, freeze it with an icy unanswering gaze; while the ear, that delicate messenger to the inmost sanctuary of the soul, can still take in the tones of kindness, put it off with hard civility, or sneering compliment, or envious affectation of indifference; while the creative brain can still throb with the sense of injustice, with the yearning for brother recognition,--make haste,--oppress it with your ill-considered judgments, your trivial comparisons, your careless misrepresentations.
But these days I assign my students an Eliot short story in our British Women Writers class: in our anthology is "The Lifted Veil," an atypical Eliot story that includes gothic elements. The supernatural isn't the only thing that's atypical, as far as I can remember from that long-ago seminar; it's the darkness of the narrator's vision.
Here's what the narrator, Latimer, says in the beginning of the story -- it's been bothering me because it seems so timely:
While the heart beats, bruise it,--it is your only opportunity; while the eye can still turn towards you with moist timid entreaty, freeze it with an icy unanswering gaze; while the ear, that delicate messenger to the inmost sanctuary of the soul, can still take in the tones of kindness, put it off with hard civility, or sneering compliment, or envious affectation of indifference; while the creative brain can still throb with the sense of injustice, with the yearning for brother recognition,--make haste,--oppress it with your ill-considered judgments, your trivial comparisons, your careless misrepresentations.
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