“Before the Labour of Choice”: Susceptibility and the Franchise in The Lifted Veil and The Mill on the Floss

Many scholars and readers see George Eliot as the Victorian era’s great, conservative apostle of sympathy. Through analysis of The Lifted Veil and The Mill on the Floss, this article isolates a more fundamental affective disposition in her thought, which Eliot named “susceptibility,” and distinguishes it from sympathy. Susceptibility involves a character’s long retention of her earliest impressions and the interpersonal ties associated with them, particularly when those others to whom she remains attached come to seem unworthy. Eliot emphasizes both the toxic nature of those bonds and their role in subject formation. Framing analysis of this disposition in terms of debates around franchise reform in the 1860s, the article shows how the susceptibility displayed by Eliot’s early protagonists will come to structure her response to those who resisted suffrage demands by working-class Britons. Close readings draw on a variety of sources, including archives of parliamentary debates, Sophocles’s Antigone (which Eliot deploys as an allegorical pretext), and theoretical concepts from Hegel and Lacan. The article argues that the agonizingly divided nature of susceptible subjectivity enables those characters to see through dubious accusations that the entrance of workers into the franchise was akin to invasion by a foreign army.