ABSTRACT
Chapter IV analyses the emotional reverberations of ‘The Lifted Veil’ (LV) in George Eliot's (GE) letters and journal, and shows that the story's black mood was not completely exorcized and that it lasted, intermittently, until her death. All the works written by GE after LV are accurately examined to demonstrate the permanence and the variations of the main themes and motifs broached in the story, such as vision, prophetism, solipsism, suicidal drives, brothers and siblings, Eros and Thanatos, mental adultery, the femme fatale, etc., and the extent to which ‘The Lifted Veil’ illuminates GE's subsequent fiction. The object of this chapter is to show that Latimer reappears, camouflaged, in the protagonists of the subsequent novels, and in particular that there is a strong link between him and Daniel Deronda, Eliot's final hero, and that Deronda ‘explains’ Latimer and reorients Latimer's failed search for his existential and racial identity.
