A Psychoanalytical Perspective: The Concept of Compassion in George Eliot’s The Lifted Veil

Abstract

The present paper aims to investigate the concept of compassion in George Eliot’s novella The Lifted Veil (1859). The central argument is that compassion is one of the essential conceptions that should take into awareness to probe and reveal the insight natural expressions of compassion in Eliot’s The Lifted Veil. The study sheds light upon the different forms of compassion such as sympathy, love and friendship and the major impact of each of them on the protagonists’ development. The study relies on the psychoanalytic perspective in analyzing the concept of compassion in Eliot’s The Lifted Veil. Psychoanalytic theories of compassion such as Personality Theory propose that compassion has significant impacts on the life of human beings. The study focuses on the various theories proposed by Sigmund Freud concerning early-childhood development which stress the seriousness of childhood stories and their struggles in the development of adults. In addition to that, the study is based on a close reading of Eliot’s literary texts and followed by a literary analysis of Eliot’s The Lifted Veil. The study focuses on Eliot’s The Lifted Veil and could be applied to other works. Moreover, the reading of Eliot’s novella The Lifted Veil could be used to promote her work as valuable to contemporary readers because of the ideas her work has on people.