SOURCE: Hertz, Neil. “Behind ‘The Lifted Veil’: Rousseau.” In Meridian: Crossing Aesthetics, edited by Werner Hamacher, pp. 42-62. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003.

In the following essay, Hertz determines the influence of Jean-Jacques Rousseau on “The Lifted Veil.”

When her readers refer to someone called “George Eliot,” are they speaking of an author or of a narrator? That is, are they speaking of the person responsible for the plotting of the fiction they are reading, or are they referring to the voice they hear in their mind's ear, telling them the story? It is never hard to answer this question case by case: sometimes it's the one, sometimes the other. That the question can be asked at all, though, is because in all her fictions but one, George Eliot's narrator goes unnamed and practically uncharacterized: the exception is the story I shall be concerned with in this chapter, “The...