I: Emotional Shock, Memory, and the Unconscious

To understand how George Eliot both responds to physiological psychology's interest in unconscious processes and contributes through her fiction to the growing idea of the psychic wound, we need briefly to review the state of Victorian thinking on the effect of shock on the mind. Since trauma theory of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries has been closely engaged with questions of memory dysfunction, we may begin by noting that memory did not figure prominently in emergent Victorian theories of psychic shock. Although mid-Victorian mental physiologists were very interested in memory and treated its curious workings extensively, and although medical treatises on railway shock and injury moved later in the century toward a focus on psychic rather than mechanical injury, very little sustained medical attention was paid to the effect of shock on memory.Footnote ⁷ By the 1890s, however, Freud and Breuer remarked that hysterics suffer mainly from reminiscences, and that hysteria starts always with a shock and is a disease of the memory – a marked departure in focus from their Victorian predecessors (Freud 16–17). That having been said, it is also true that unemphatic and loose connections between terror and memory disturbance are noted in medical case histories as early as the 1830s. Writing about a young woman, Mary Parker, who had two distinct selves, one of whom had no knowledge or memory of the other, T. O. Ward noted the disjunction in memory between one state of consciousness and another.

Ward draws attention to the relationship between such cases as Mary Parker's and conditions of hysteria and delirium occasioned by typhus. He also goes on to ponder their similarity to altered states induced by mesmerism, somnambulism, and even drunkenness, speculating about what could cause conditions of double consciousness in male as well as female patients: “the cases of double consciousness, hitherto published, have mostly occurred in young females in whom the uterine functions were disturbed, or, if in the male sex, where the nervous system had been weakened by excesses, terror, or other cerebral excitement” (Ward 458, emphasis added). While Ward does indeed countenance the idea that shock or terror may produce disturbances in “the Sensorium,” he is focusing less on describing what may happen to memory in the face of overwhelming experience than looking for a way to include male subjects in his understanding of double consciousness. Females suffer the condition by virtue of their unstable uterine economies; males have to be rendered unstable from without. The question of memory in such cases of double consciousness was greatly intriguing to the Victorians, as I discuss below, but until much later in the century the connections among terror and shock, dissociation, and amnesia were made only indirectly.

In the early 1870s, the physician Daniel Hack Tuke drew attention to the way in which powerful emotion could shock the mind:

A shock to the mind was thus known to produce numbing or stunning effects, even to the point where particularly powerful emotional experiences could induce a kind of trance or transfixed state. The connection between shock and altered consciousness is even more explicitly explored in George Beard's essay on trance and diminished responsibility. Best known for his coinage of the term “neurasthenia,” Beard was captivated by the phenomenon of trance, which he described as much like other “functional nervous diseases,” in that it may be induced physically or psychically. Psychical causes he construed as any influence that could powerfully excite emotion (Beard 6). “Under emotional trance are included cases that are caused by the so-called mesmeric performances, or through the feelings of fear, wonder, reverence and expectation, however excited” (8). Everyone has these emotions, he continues, and they undermine the authority of reason. Beard furnishes several examples of self-entrancement by terror: standing on a height, on a track as a train is approaching, being paralyzed by the outbreak of fire in a crowded building. “The one fact common to all these conditions is, that they exert some one or several emotions. . . to such a degree that the activity of the rest of the brain is suspended while these emotions are abnormally active, and consequently, the will loses control, and the subject acts automatically in response to external or internal suggestion, doing the very things he wishes to avoid doing, and unable to do what he most desires” (9). In a similar vein a decade later, contributors to the Lancet discussed what was called the “fascination of terror.”Footnote ⁸ Why were subjects attracted to their death on the top of precipices or waterfalls? The discussion suggests that extreme terror was itself understood to be a state of altered consciousness that induced sensational paralysis or nervous shock so that the subject behaved irrationally, as if entranced.

The relationship between memory and emotion is touched on in several mid-nineteenth century texts in physiological psychology. In The Emotions and the Will (1859), a thorough scrutiny of the effect of emotion on mind and body, Victorian physiologist Alexander Bain suggests that powerful emotion can either indelibly stamp on memory the events with which it is associated or destroy memory altogether. A section on the “intellectual influence of feelings” draws attention to the “intellectual efficacy” of powerful emotions: “By the power of mere excitement a painful incident will seize the attention and imprint itself on the memory” (Bain, Emotions 19). But he also acknowledges that strong feelings can “play the part of rebels or innovators against the canons of the past” and are “like destroying Vandals, who efface and consume the records of what has been” (20). While such statements seem to anticipate Freud's assertion that shock or fright of an overwhelming nature may cause the subject to dissociate from the knowledge of the overwhelming experience, Bain does not develop the idea of strong emotion as a cause for disruptions or inaccessible storage of memory. He is suggesting more conventionally that strong emotion interferes with rational, intellectual process. “Our feelings pervert our judgements by smiting us with intellectual blindness” he avers, and we may suffer “deep-seated intellectual corruption due to the ascendancy of the feelings” (21, 22).

The chapter on dread, terror, and fear in The Emotions and the Will characterizes these largely as states of anxious anticipation of or uncertainty about the future and holds that knowledge usually dispels fear. If undispelled, cumulative fear and dread themselves may weaken the system: “The question may be raised, how far mere intensity of sensation, viewed by itself induces the condition of dread. The nervous disturbance, due to a violent shock, would seem to be something akin to fear. As a weakening influence, it would pave the way for the state of fright; so that any suggestion of danger would find the system an easier prey” (159). In terms of the effect of fear on memory, he notes that past fear can make “a more indelible stamp than even an acute bodily infliction” (157). The power of associative memory is treated more fully in his earlier work, The Senses and the Intellect (1855), where he explains that “the passion of terror is connected with the things that have roused the feeling in the course of each one's experience,” and the reappearance of such things, even loosely connected in images in the mind to the initial scene of terror – such as “the approach of a hurried messenger with distracted countenance” – can cause the initial experience of terror to be revisited (Bain, Senses 603).

William Carpenter's influential Principles of Mental Physiology (1874) pays more attention to the nature of unconscious thinking and the cognitive evaluation evident in emotional memory. Carpenter links memory to emotion, not in the more obvious sense that “memory supplies the emotional glue which links past and present together,” but in the sense that emotions in the absence of conscious memory nevertheless do the work of thinking and remembering.Footnote ⁹ Citing a case from the Lancet (1845), Carpenter touches on the role of unconscious emotional memory. A young woman, who accidentally fell into a river and was nearly drowned, remembered nothing of her experience; indeed, she remembered nothing at all of her past life. Her entire memory appeared to have been effaced. Although she took pleasure in embroidery and worsted work, she had no recollection from day to day of what she had done, “and every morning began something new, unless her unfinished work was placed before her.” What Carpenter points out, however, is that while she remembered nothing consciously, she did demonstrate considerable emotional memory:

Carpenter shows that her ideas “manifested themselves chiefly in the form of emotions: that is, the chief indications of them were through the signs of Emotional excitement” (464). Furthermore, it was by means of an emotional experience that her memory was once more regained. One day, after experiencing a powerful feeling of jealousy because a young man paying attention to her had begun to notice another woman, she experienced a kind of fit, from which she awoke “no longer spell-bound.” The case demonstrates, says Carpenter, that “Memory is essentially an automatic form of Mental activity” (465). What also clearly emerges from his narrative, however, is that automatic memory takes account of and is informed by emotion. Carpenter's primary concern may be the automatic/volitional opposition but he recognizes that the subject may make unconscious yet cognitive assessments that express themselves in emotions. Emotions may thus carry the intelligence of cataclysm, even if conscious memory is inoperative.

Memory in relation to double consciousness and other altered states of consciousness was, in the Victorian period, a subject of great importance, not least because of the questions it raised about the coherence and governance of the self. Given the cherished notion of a unified self, a conscious and voluntary agent, evidence that subjects harbored knowledge unavailable to their ordinary conscious state was extremely threatening. To suggest that in states of altered consciousness, such as opium dreams, hypnosis, somnambulism, mesmerism, and so on, subjects could reveal aspects of the self – knowledges and behaviors of which the “everyday” self had no consciousness and over which it exercised no control – fanned ideas about the self as multiple and undermined the notion of will and consciousness as the prime movers in behavior.

The nature of unconscious mental action provoked much debate during the period, especially after the discovery of reflex response in 1833. This showed that a nervous impulse could be transmitted to the spinal cord resulting in an immediate action which the brain as such has neither chosen nor sanctioned. As Carpenter points out, the implications of such discoveries were not met with universal approval: The idea that the “[c]erebrum. . . may elaborate intellectual results without any consciousness on our own parts, is held by many Metaphysicians more especially in Britain, to be an altogether untenable and even a most objectionable doctrine” (515). Although Victorian physiologists and psychologists were reluctant to grant agency to unconscious mental process, it was not simply relegated to a form of automatism. Carpenter, among others, acknowledged the secret stores of creativity and the changes in attitude and thinking attributable to unconscious processes.Footnote ¹⁰ Among those who challenged the relegation of unconscious mental process to the realm of reflex or automatic action was George Henry Lewes, whose views on consciousness and unconsciousness are of particular significance in understanding George Eliot's representation of psychic shock and pain in her last novel.

Regarded with growing respect in scientific communities despite his essentially amateur status, Lewes had long disputed the idea that all conscious behavior was mental, and all unconscious physical. If there was, as he believed, unconscious mental behavior, it meant that “unconscious” was not simply a term to be applied to reflex action. Broadly characterized, Lewes's work in physiological psychology brought the unconscious and the bodily into the conception of mind. James Sully, himself a respected authority on the mind, drew attention to Lewes's distinctive emphasis on “the organic oneness, the interpenetration of the neural and the psychical” (Sully vii). In The Physiology of Common Life (1859–60) Lewes laid out an integrated and holistic approach to the mind: “I do not agree in this opinion respecting the Brain as ‘the organ’ of the Mind. One of the principal conclusions to which fact and argument will direct us in these pages will be, that the Brain is only one organ of the Mind, and not by any means the exclusive centre of Consciousness” (11). “Mind,” in Lewes's view, does not designate intellectual operations only. It includes “all Sensation, all Volition, and all Thought: it means the whole psychical Life; and this psychical Life has no one special centre, any more than the physical Life has one special centre: it belongs to the whole, and animates the whole” (Physiology 12).

Lewes takes the position that we do indeed “have sensations, which are not perceived at all, of which we are said to be wholly ‘unconscious’” (Physiology 59). It is not therefore correct to say that unless a sensation is perceived it does not exist (Physiology 53). Sensations that are unperceived are not necessarily lost: “they were not altered in character because their subsequent effects were not manifest in Thought; they were not without their influence in adding to the sum of general Consciousness” (Physiology 54). Part of the problem, Lewes realizes, lies in terminology. The term “consciousness,” for example, is prone to misconception. Those who aver that unless it is perceived, no sensation can exist are soon led to “glaring contradictions” in trying to write about “unfelt feelings” and “unconscious consciousness” (Physiology 50). As Lewes admits later in The Physical Basis of Mind (1877), however, the term “Consciousness” is too widespread to be changed; we should therefore specify a general and special use of it. “The general usage identifies it with Sensibility, in its subject aspect as Sentience, including all psychical states, both those classed under Sensation, and those under Thought” (Physical 356–57). In the “special usage it is distinguished by a peculiar reflected feeling of Attention, whereby we not only have a sensation, but also feel that we have it; we not only think, but are conscious that we are thinking” (Physical 357). Working with the general usage, Lewes thus proposes to think of consciousness and unconsciousness not as oppositions, the first as a mental and the second as a physical process, but as points on a spectrum of what he calls “Sentience,” which is defined as “the activity of the nervous system viewed subjectively” (Physical 364). The metaphor of darkness and light allows Lewes to explain that the relationship between consciousness and unconsciousness is only apparently that of opposites:

Instead of viewing the “Thinking Principle” as an “antecedent,” he regarded it as “a resultant, not an entity but a convergence of manifold activities” (Lewes, Foundations I: 133). “Consciousness” he argued, in the final, posthumous volume of Problems of Life and Mind, “is not an agent but a symptom.”Footnote ¹²

For the novelist similarly interested in unconscious processes, Lewes's conception of consciousness as a sum, product, symptom, and result opens up for scrutiny the way the mind-body works on many levels and allows exploration of a range of emotions and sensations whose effects are important but not necessarily “manifest in Thought” (Lewes, Physiology 54). The idea of consciousness as the “confluence of many streams of sensation,” and as a blending or struggling with unconsciousness means that the conscious self is at all times susceptible to the influence of the unconscious (65). In a recent essay on George Eliot's novelistic anatomy of consciousness in the context of Lewes's vivisection experiments, Richard Menke astutely observes that “[p]hysiologists could administer electric shocks but not emotional ones: Eliot appropriates the framework of Victorian physiology to go where science itself could not, to develop her own novelistic techniques for the close analysis of imaginary minds and bodies” (Menke 636).Footnote ¹³ Drawing on the idea of the novelist as an experimenter in the effects of emotional shock, and bearing in mind the Victorian discourses of shock, trance, emotional memory, and the unconscious discussed in this section, I turn now to George Eliot's exploration of Gwendolen's “whole Psychical Life.”

II: Dread, Terror, and Clairvoyance

Gwendolen's climactic experience in the aftermath of Grandcourt's death is not the only (though it is the most intense) experience of terror and anguish that she undergoes. The horror of seeing the death is compounded by the fact that it is a culmination of much fear and dread, the convergence of her secret wishes for his death and the images of the face and fleeing figure that terrify her early in the novel. George Eliot begins by establishing Gwendolen as vulnerable to shock and terror. Her emotional volatility is prepared for in several references to her “susceptibility to terror” (51; ch. 6), introduced most memorably during the riveting scene in which she plays Hermione for a tableau. The “fits of terror” she experiences are like a “brief remembered madness,” an “unexplained exception from her normal life” (51; ch. 6), a marked contrast to her usual fearlessness and high spirits and her desire to appear “daring in speech and reckless in braving dangers” (51; ch. 6). How do we account for Gwendolen's dread, her terrified responses, particularly the early response to the painting in the tableau scene, where the face and fleeing figure become premonitory of Gwendolen's later climactic experience on the boat with Grandcourt? By means of this episode George Eliot appears to be establishing Gwendolen as clairvoyant about her own disastrous fate with Grandcourt.

Yet Gwendolen is not a visionary subject in the same way as Mordecai is, although, as I will go on to show, they are implicitly connected on a spectrum of what we may call heightened consciousness.Footnote ¹⁴ Gwendolen seems to produce the vision that haunts her and, in Grandcourt's drowning, to make real the dreaded spectre of the white face and fleeing figure. That is to say (in post-Victorian terms) she already has a labile image repertoire – akin to a symptom language – in which to express her feelings about Grandcourt. The incident of the panel that springs open during the tableau introduces the novel's exploration of the effects of shock on a particularly susceptible consciousness. If the painting provokes an exaggerated response in the way it springs into view, it is also terrifying because it is a return of something that has already caused Gwendolen fear. It is part of Gwendolen's psychic vocabulary, speaking for her in ways she cannot consciously articulate. In line with Bain's remarks on the powerful associations of past fear, and Carpenter's discussion of emotional memory, George Eliot shows how the reiteration of fearful images produces exponentially fearful responses. Having already seen the darkly suggestive painting, Gwendolen feels inexplicably haunted by it and so invests the face and fleeing figure with a kind of supernatural power. The panel that springs open functions like the unconscious that erupts with its fearful visions into Gwendolen's consciousness.

The novelist's foreshadowing of Grandcourt's death in the image of the face and fleeing figure hints that Gwendolen may be prone to second sight. Her possible clairvoyance thus puts her in company with Mordecai, a visionary of a different kind. Mordecai and Gwendolen are linked in that both respond to urgings and promptings that well up into consciousness. Both manifest what Lewes would call the “convergence of manifold activities” which make up consciousness. Indeed, George Eliot's famous observations in Daniel Deronda about second sight, though apparently about Mordecai, apply as well to Gwendolen:

George Eliot's narrator asserts that there are those who can visualize intensely and have the power to imagine what they yearn for. Modercai is an example, particularly in his prefiguration of Daniel as his successor. But the passage introduces the question of dread as well as yearning. The clause “the deed that they would do starts up before them in complete shape, making a coercive type” seems to apply less to Mordecai than to Gwendolen, who fantasizes Grandcourt's death and repeatedly sees the face and fleeing figure that so terrified her when the panel sprang open. In contrast to Mordecai, whose second sight is venerated, George Eliot pursues the inverse of prophetic vision in Gwendolen, whose narrow egotistic world contracts inward as much as Mordecai's widens out from his bodily suffering and personal circumstances. Gwendolen is one of those “quiveringly poised natures” prone to second sight through the promptings of dreaded visualizations. When the narrator speaks of natures with “manifold openings. . . where there may naturally be a greater and more miscellaneous inrush through a narrow beadle-watched portal,” there is no specification of the source of the inrush, which could signify signs in the external world or promptings from deep within.Footnote ¹⁵ The “miscellaneous inrush” may contribute to Mordecai's special antennae for the friend through whom he will transmit himself, but in the case of Gwendolen's sort of “second sight” the “manifold openings” refer to what wells up from within – the intelligence carried by unconscious, emotional memory.

If Mordecai is a case of a heightened consciousness, attuned to its yearning for the “friend” who will continue his work, Gwendolen's consciousness is similarly sensitive, only her visions are shaped by dark fantasies and dread rather than yearning. “I saw my wish outside me,” are Gwendolen's anguished words after Grandcourt's drowning, but they could just as well be uttered by Mordecai after encountering Daniel in the bookstore (596; ch. 51). Critics of the novel, most famously F. R. Leavis, have asserted that it falls into two halves, one dealing with Gwendolen's courtship and marriage, and the other with “the Jewish sections” and Daniel's discovery of his origins. The connection between these parts – and particularly between Mordecai and Gwendolen, who seem worlds apart – may indeed reside in George Eliot's interest in consciousness and the ways it is informed by unconscious fears and yearnings, memories, and evaluations. Rather than designating the unconscious as a separate place, an entity, George Eliot, like Lewes, emphasizes its continuity and connection with consciousness. This version of the unconscious thus accounts for both Mordecai's prophetic spirituality and Gwendolen's superstitious dread.

Because Gwendolen has so often been regarded by critics as a diseased sensibility, an hysteric, it is worth emphasizing that although Gwendolen and Mordecai occupy different positions on the spectrum of “quiveringly sensitive” natures, in neither case is the condition presented as pathological. Indeed, Daniel does initially think that “Mordecai might be liable to hallucinations of thought – might have become a monomaniac on some subject which had given too severe a strain to his diseased organism” (423; ch. 40), but that view is subsequently abandoned; correspondingly, the narrator implicitly normalizes rather than pathologizes Gwendolen's disturbed consciousness. Athena Vrettos usefully points out that Gwendolen's visions constitute a challenge to the privileged spiritual discourse of Mordecai, Mirah, and Deronda, thereby threatening to undercut the novel's dominant narrative voice (69). Vrettos reasons that if Gwendolen is diseased, the status of prophetic vision is called into question: “Eliot's rhetoric encodes the possibility that all visionary powers are functions of nervous disease” (75). This judgment seems to fly in the face of the well-known passage I quoted in which the narrator specifically insists on the sanity and rationality of those subject to visions. Rather than setting Gwendolen up as a diseased subject, the narrator calls her an “intense personality” (235; ch. 24), which suggests that certain ordinary tendencies are exaggerated or writ large in her make-up. I would argue that if Gwendolen's visions threaten to undercut the dominant narrative voice, they do so because they betray George Eliot's interest in Gwendolen's interior struggle, and her haunted and troubled consciousness, as ultimately more compelling and problematic – because more ordinary – than Mordecai's visionary spirituality.

In line with the idea of “manifold openings” George Eliot also suggests that it is the very unpredictability of her self that causes Gwendolen fear: she experiences at times a “subjection to a possible self, a self not to be absolutely predicted. . . [which] caused her some astonishment and terror” (114; ch. 13).Footnote ¹⁶ As Josephine McDonagh has pointed out, there is a pervasive emphasis in the novel on “a level of experience that is somehow beyond consciousness” and that “rather than a mechanism of harmonious unity, the individual memory is seen to be a disruptive, fracturing force, unsettling the surface of individual consciousness” (88–89). There are, indeed, a great many occasions on which George Eliot writes of Gwendolen's “native terror” and propensity for dread. Along with triumph, for example, Gwendolen also feels terror when Grandcourt resumes his pursuit of her.

Gwendolen's expectation of triumph is mixed with the “dread of a crisis” and her nature is one of those in which “exultation inevitably carries an infusion of dread ready to curdle and declare itself” (357; ch. 31). Later the narrator refers to Gwendolen's “disposition to vague terror and “vague, ever visiting dread” (474; ch. 44, emphasis added and 362; ch. 35). Gwendolen is said to be “governed by many shadowy powers” and to invest with “shadowy omnipresence any threat of fatal power over her” (474; ch. 44).

Along with physiological and psychological investigations into the emotions, the Romantic fascination with terror, fear, and awe in the sublime suggests itself as a relevant context for George Eliot's representation of Gwendolen's dread and terror. We remember that Gwendolen doesn't like big wide spaces because they make her feel diminished.

The sense here is of a Romantic or Kantian sublime that inspires trembling as it dwarfs and diminishes the subject. The sublime offered intimations of an immense and awful external power that provoked awe and terror, “intimations of a metaphysical force beyond rational knowledge and human comprehension” (Botting 4).Footnote ¹⁸

The way George Eliot figures dread is not dissimilar, I would argue further, from the Kierkegaardian understanding of it in The Concept of Dread, a work spelling out the idea of trembling at the void, the abyss, which is the underside of freedom and choice.Footnote ¹⁹ It is pertinent that whenever in the early parts of the novel Gwendolen feels power, or a sense of mastery and triumph, she also experiences a concomitant backlash or dread. Fear and trembling seem to follow her unconscious sense of the possibility that she may be denied freedom, that she is vulnerable and not powerful. Her fear of powerlessness makes her feel diminished and speck-like at times. Though she lays claim to power, as a woman and a class outsider, in fact she wields very little of it in the world and has quite circumscribed choices.

Having established that Gwendolen is prone to emotional shock, and having put her in a situation of limited choice where she harms herself by accepting Grandcourt's proposal after she has promised Lydia Glasher that she would reject him, George Eliot proceeds to explore the compounding mental pain that increasingly plagues Gwendolen. In the context of this adumbration of psychic pain, the narrator refers to Gwendolen's anguish as a “hidden wound” (482; ch. 45). This is an important phrase, which has been much seized upon by critics of the novel. Whereas for Louise Penner, the hidden wound has its roots in some putative past sexual abuse by her stepfather, for Susan Weisser (and earlier, Jacqueline Rose [105–22]) responding to Freud's construction of sexuality, the wound is female sexuality itself. Weisser explains that “to be sexual is to be wounded; to be woman is to be wounded; to be spiritually whole, one must be sexually lacking. Gwendolen's womanhood, then, is a wound that must remain hidden” (Weisser 11). I suggest that “wound” be understood in a rather more literal way. In my reading of the novel's concern with consciousness and unconsciousness, the hidden wound seems to be a signification of psychic as opposed to physical injury. “Hidden” and “invisible” apply in this way to interior or psychic processes elsewhere in the novel, for example in the headnote to chapter 16: if “the narrator of human actions” were to do his work like the astronomer, he would “have to thread the hidden pathways of feeling and thought which lead up to every moment of action, and to those moments of intense suffering” (139). “Hidden” and “invisible” also imply the work of the unconscious in consciousness, as in “dark rays doing their work invisibly in the broad daylight” of “more acknowledged consciousness” (518; ch. 48).

Gwendolen's hidden wound is most obviously the effect of terror in response to external events such as the panel that springs open, or the arrival of the “poisoned gems,” which leaves her pallid and shrieking. But George Eliot places great emphasis in this novel on the power of what we may call internal events. Later in the novel, Daniel's mother voices a view particularly apposite to Gwendolen's distress. She complains that without our consent, “events come on us like evil enchantments: and thoughts, feelings, apparitions in the darkness are events – are they not?” (540–41 ch. 52). The experience of our own unsolicited feelings may count as events that transfix or bind us as if by spells. Like the Princess Halm-Eberstein, who implies that she feels guilty about concealing the nature of Daniel's origins from him, Gwendolen is plagued by a dread of wrongdoing, and, in the case of Lydia Glasher, the sting of remorse following the deliberate injury of another. The “poisoned gems” send her into a state of hysterical nervous shock because she is already primed internally by apparitions signifying her remorse. In Gwendolen's growing crisis of conscience and consciousness, George Eliot explores the notion of psychic injury as the confluence of internal and external events. Gwendolen is assailed both by external shocks and by internal hauntings to the point (after Grandcourt's drowning) that the distinction between internal fantasy and external occurrence becomes blurred.

III: Gothic Haunting

I have been suggesting that George Eliot's representation of Gwendolen's interiority demonstrates the workings of unconscious feelings, sensations, and images in accordance with Lewes's explanations of mind and consciousness. I want to argue further, however, that her exploration of psychic wounding as a haunted state is imaginatively and rhetorically aided by the tradition of Gothic fiction and the ghost tale. While there is relatively little in the way of an established medical discourse of psychic shock in relation to memory disturbance at the time the novel is written, the discourse of literary terror and haunting was highly developed and could be enlisted to perform the work of psychological representation. As many critics have observed, the trajectory of the ghost story from the beginning of the nineteenth century to the end is the movement from external supernatural haunting to internal psychological haunting. Ronald Thomas claims that “[a]s a result of the dramatic movements in intellectual history which have come to be called ‘natural supernaturalism,’ ‘religious humanism’ or ‘secularization,’ the nineteenth century reassigned more and more phenomena hitherto considered supernatural to a new but as yet undefined place in the human psyche” (6).

George Eliot's use of the Gothic looks back to an “already psychologized” Gothic in the work of the Brontës and forward to Henry James, who, as David Trotter points out, used it as a way to talk about serious terror (468).Footnote ²⁰ Think for a moment of the bare bones of Gwendolen's story: a young woman, usually self-possessed and imperious, is terrified, almost petrified, by the image of a face and fleeing figure. She is then courted by a powerful and well-placed man. His previous lover and mother of his children extracts from her a promise not to marry him, but, pressed by her own needs, she eventually decides to break her promise and go ahead with the marriage. The Furies cross her threshold and the curse comes upon her when her predecessor sends her the family diamonds with an upbraiding letter. Coerced by her husband, she accompanies him on a yachting expedition during which he drowns and she sees, as predicted, his “white face” in the water. This is exactly the kind of plot one might find in the later Bulwer Lytton or Le Fanu. It hints at the power of presentiment, but stops short of asserting that anything supernatural has taken place. Just so, the narrator teases us with the possibility of a supernatural element at work in releasing the panel that terrifies Gwendolen, and reminds us of Gwendolen's presentiment of the uncanny face and fleeing figure.

Several critics have remarked on the affinities of Daniel Deronda with Gothic fiction.Footnote ²¹ The insistent language of terror and dread, haunting, spectre and apparition, place Gwendolen's story in the tradition of the ghost tale and suggest her gothicized interior world. I have already shown the frequency with which George Eliot refers to Gwendolen's vague and native terror; these references to terror are linked increasingly to a discourse of the spectral and phantasmatic. When Grandcourt releases her from all financial worries, Gwendolen “had a momentary phantasmal love for this man who chose his words so well,” but in her married life, she soon begins to experience “hidden rites” that go on in the “secrecy of her mind” that have the effect of “a struggling terror” (576; ch. 55). Phantasmal love gives way to phantasmagoria of fear, hate, and revenge. Gwendolen's fantasies “possess her like phantoms,” says the narrator: “[f]antasies moved within her like ghosts, making no break in her more acknowledged consciousness and finding no obstruction in it: dark rays doing their work invisibly in the broad daylight” (518; ch. 48). This passage also recalls Lewes's use of the darkness/light analogy and the idea of consciousness and unconsciousness as an unbroken stream. In the reference to fantasies and ghosts, along with “no break in her more acknowledged consciousness,” and the images of light and dark, we see the convergence in George Eliot of the manifold discourses of Lewes's psychology and the Gothic.

Conflicting forces in Gwendolen are further dramatized as a contest between personified emotions: “In Gwendolen's consciousness Temptation and Dread met and stared like two pale phantoms, each seeing itself in the other – each obstructed by its own image and all the while her fuller self beheld the apparitions and sobbed for deliverance from them” (577; ch. 55). Gwendolen's dreams are described in increasing detail, as if her terrified consciousness plays out its anxieties in them.Footnote ²² In the scene following Grandcourt's death, George Eliot's deployment of a gothic vocabulary intensifies: Gwendolen is like one of the “sheeted dead, shivering, with wet hair streaming, a wild, amazed consciousness in her eyes” (587; ch. 55). When Daniel sees her the next morning, she looked like “the unhappy ghost of that Gwendolen Harleth whom Deronda had seen turning with firm lips and proud self-possession from her losses at the gaming-table” (590; ch. 56). What is distinctive about George Eliot's language of ghosts and apparitions is the third-person narrator who wields it. This eminently reasonable, sophisticated, wise, and knowledgeable commentator, who moves in and out of the minds of her characters, is not herself colored by the heightened language she deploys. In this way she differs from the first person narrators of Jane Eyre, Villette, Bulwer Lytton's A Strange Story, or even The Lifted Veil. While the narrative is overtly propelled after Grandcourt's drowning by the ethical question of Gwendolen's guilt in not saving him, the narrator also necessarily focuses on consciousness and the registration of shock, states of abstraction, the absence or fragmentation of self, and the incessant reliving of the inassimilable moment.

The passage about Temptation and Dread I cited earlier shows how the treatment of Gwendolen's troubled consciousness is simultaneously harnessed to a discourse of morality and conscience. George Eliot's fiction shows an abiding interest in consequences and particularly the laws of cause and effect. Deeds have an “after-throb,” as she says in a headnote to chapter 57 (598). Her interest in that “after-throb” is part of her moral understanding of determinism, which urges us, because actions have consequences, to consider carefully how we act. George Eliot retains her focus on consequence as the inevitable result of action and reaction along with her interest in psychic suffering. There are two different though related discourses at work here –conscience and consciousness – the first of which tends ultimately to subsume and short-circuit the explanatory power of the second. That is, the narrative of psychic suffering is converted into an allegory of “Better” and “Worse” selves, or, as we saw in a previous passage, Temptation struggling with Dread. Lisbeth During, who writes about the relationship of dread to moral conscience remarks astutely in passing that with “the figure of Gwendolen Harleth, George Eliot has trespassed into areas of interior trauma and psychic unfreedom which her chosen secular morality cannot encompass” (94). I take issue with this formulation because it seems to me that George Eliot has not trespassed but deliberately gone forth into the area of psychic shock and injury. However, I would certainly concede that it is not an open-ended exploration. George Eliot is ultimately less interested in Gwendolen's wounded psyche than in her potential guilt and responsibility for her own pain and suffering. Daniel advises her to see her “present suffering as a painful letting in of light” (388; ch. 36), a coming to consciousness, in terms of the novel's imagery, of that which has been operating in the darkness. He exhorts her to turn the promptings of her unconscious – her fear, dread, and emotional memory – into conscious resolve:

As often in George Eliot's work, emotion and sensibility are likened to senses like hearing and seeing, sources of information about the internal world on which meditation can set to work in order to convert unconscious to conscious knowledge. No longer anarchic and destabilizing, unconscious fantasies and emotions become serviceable informants.

Underlining Daniel's advice, the morbid epigraph to the novel as a whole reads:

The epigraph refers unmistakably to the way Gwendolen is desperately driven to break her promise to Lydia Glasher and is avenged by her own soul – an exemplification of the “ayenbite of inwyt,” the sting of remorse. When Gwendolen betrays her promise to Lydia Glasher, “the vision of her past wrongdoing and what it had brought on her came with a pale ghastly illumination over every imagined deed that was a rash effort at freedom, such as she had made in her marriage” (576; ch. 54). Here her vision and illumination dovetail with Daniel Deronda's story and highlight George Eliot's multifaceted conception of his role in the novel. For as many critics have noted, Daniel's function as the eponymous central figure is not only to come to recognize who and what he is and accept the vocation that goes with that achieved identity; he also functions as a reluctant mentor and confessor for Gwendolen. In this role he is not just a listener, but a judge, focused on her guilt or innocence. His sympathy is at best grudging; that is, he responds to Gwendolen as a woman caught up in a salutary if painful crisis of conscience. The narrative seems committed to Daniel's view that Gwendolen needs the experience of suffering and remorse to become a better woman. At the same time, therefore, as George Eliot travels some way on the interesting question of Gwendolen's susceptibility to fright and terror, and the convergence of external and internal shocks to the psyche, she also sets the exploration of psychic suffering and its effects in a discourse of conscience and morality.

George Eliot's representation of psychic shock, although arguably a precursor of later theories of trauma, differs significantly from them, perhaps most markedly in her emphasis on the responsibility and agency of the wounded subject. The eminence (and yet abidingly controversial nature) of trauma theory today speaks to what Mark Seltzer has called a “wound culture” in which relief or healing is sought for haunting psychological injuries, and along the way accountability established for their perpetration; evidence of wounding and those responsible for inflicting it is found in the victim's unwitting witnessing, apparently inaccessible to memory except through hypnosis and therapeutic recovery. While George Eliot shows Gwendolen's suffering from overwhelming emotional shock, the shock and horror is more about discovering what transgressions we may commit; less about what is inflicted upon us from without: George Eliot's is less a “wound culture” than a conscience culture. In making the judgment that Gwendolen is not so much a witness to the cataclysms of history as to the fantasmatic power of the unconscious, we engage the oppositions in current trauma theory, which continue to structure debates over whether the mind is a passive registrant or an active participant in the traumatizing event. Is the trauma a “purely external event coming to a sovereign if passive victim”? Or is it also a product of what lies within, shaped by symbolic elaboration and psychosocial factors?Footnote ²³

Notwithstanding the emphasis on conscience, however, and the focus in the final pages of the novel on a Gwendolen coming to her moral senses, George Eliot does give us an intimate and powerful representation of her heroine's psychic suffering in the aftermath of intense emotional experience. Interested in the relationship between consciousness and conscience, George Eliot has interpreted emerging theories of unconscious mental process (particularly those developed by Lewes) in terms of the motifs, language, and accoutrements of the Gothic tradition and ghost tale in order to delineate the psychic space of aftermath. In so doing she tells us what it means to live through an overwhelming experience that one cannot quite assimilate, and what kinds of effects that has on consciousness, memory, and self-apprehension.