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unambiguous, predictable, and in total interpretative control of the other discourses in Middlemarch that the novel survives, to be read and re-read, without ever being finally closed or exhausted. "33

Unless one shares McCabe's theoretical stance, it is hard to see why it seems necessary to defend Eliot's narrative voice. Which is just as well as I remain entirely unconvinced that the narrator of Middlemarch is not in possession of all the relevant facts about her

characters and their situation.

liiThe Lifted Veil the narrator occupies a very different position. Latimer is a sincere narrator whose reliability there are nevertheless grounds to doubt. In using this narrative voice, Eliot is able to distance herself, both morally and intellectually, from the claims Latimer makes. Eliot is at some pains to emphasise this distance. After his mother's death Latimer’s strongest affections are for Meunier and for Bertha. The former he says was stimulated by 'sympathetic resentment' (P. 10), rather than anything more generous. And his explanation of his obsession with a woman whom he knows to be devoid of what he thinks to be 'the highest element of character’ does him no more credit. He says

"there is no tyranny more complete than that which a self-centred negative nature exercises over a morbidly sensitive nature perpetually craving sympathy and support." (P. 22)

And it comes as a jolt that he is so cold towards everyone else. Poor old Mrs Filmore, his near neighbour from boyhood ’whom he remembered very well', is written off as an 'uninteresting acquaintance', and his 'involuntary intrusion into the souls of others' causes him only 'weariness and disgust'. He is a man seemingly without any of the compassion and human fellowship which Eliot explicitly values so highly.

Similarly, she could not have endorsed this stubbornly unintelligent response to science

"I had no desire to be this improved man; I was glad of the running water; I could watch it and listen to it gurgling among the pebbles, and bathing the bright green water-plants, by the hour together. I did not want to know why

it ran; I had perfect confidence that there were good reasons for what was so very beautiful." (P. 8)

George Eliot certainly didn't think science was dull. Nor did she think that it was right to divorce the imagination from science. Indeed, as Uglow perceptively remarks in a slightly different context,

"...by a nice twist of the plot, George Eliot shows that they were wrong to see science as devoid of imagination, for in the end, through the activity of Meunier, it wül be used to break the barriers of normal reality in the most terrifying way."34

And there must be wry humour when Latimer, reflecting on his visions of Prague, speculates

"No, it was not a dream; —was it the poet's sensibility, now manifesting itself suddenly as spontaneous creation? Surely it was in this way that Homer saw the plain of Troy, that Dante saw the abodes of the departed, that Milton saw the earthward flight of the Tempter. (P. 13)

Surely it was not! 35 Lest there should be any doubt that the humour cuts against Latimer, his thought continues

"When my mind had dwelt for some time on this blissful idea it seemed to me that I might perhaps test it It was all prosaic effort, not rapt

passivity, such as I had experienced half an hour before. I was discouraged; but I remembered that inspiration was fitful" (P. 14)

34uglow George Eliot (P. 118)

35one is reminded of the humour directed at Ladislaw, when he defines a poet in terms of sensibility rather than poetry. Gilbert and Gubar take Latimer's poetic pretensions more seriously than I do, and they see the link with Middlemarch in different terms.

"Granted poetic abilities but denied the power to create, Latimer lives out the classic role of women who are denied the status of artist because they are supposed somehow to become works of art themselves. ("You are a poem," WiU informs Dorothea in

Middlemarch.)"

But this is an unwonted dip into po-faced ideology on their part. To make that interpretation stick, there has to be a very bleak subtext to the exchange between Dorothea and Ladislaw. It may be that Dorothea's second marriage confirms, rather than redeems, her tragedy. But that is not because Ladislaw is a conventional repressive male. He may be insubstantial, but there is no ironic reversal in Dorothea's judgement that "...he was a creature who entered into every one's feelings, and could take the pressure of their thought instead of urging his own with iron resistance." Nor is there good reason to think that Dorothea is a poet manqué. When she says she is sure she 'could never produce a poem' I do not think that is an expression of unfulfilled yearning which Ladislaw is crushing. The gently deflating remark,

"But you leave out the poems, said Dorothea. "I think they are wanted to complete the

poet."^^

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