The alchemy of writing: George Eliot’s representations of gender in "The lifted veil"

Alchemy is “the branch of study and practical craft [...] concerned with the nature and transformation of physical substances”. Aiming to obtain “the elixir which would prolong life indefinitely, alchemy pursues “a panacea or universal remedy” through the distillation or extraction of so-called “quintessences”. The process may be intended also in figurative terms as a “seemingly magical or miraculous power of transmutation”, and thus represent “a metaphor for the soul being freed from a dead, leaden state of mind, to that of realising its own light nature”. In the present context, the seven stages of the alchemical process are used to investigate George Eliot’s writing and explore her engagement with different languages, cultural practices and references, combined magically to create the communicative event, a quintessence in itself. More specifically, this study focuses on Eliot’s aesthetic output in her representation of masculinities and femininities in a novella entitled "The Lifted Veil" (1859).