Profs & Pints San Francisco: George Eliot and Hidden Mental Life

Profs and Pints San Francisco presents: “George Eliot and Hidden Mental Life,” on an acclaimed, boundary-pushing Victorian writer’s exploration of consciousness, with Summer J. Star, an associate professor of English at San Francisco State University who teaches courses on Victorian poetry and novels.

[Tickets available only online, at https://www.ticketleap.events/tickets/profsandpints/sf-george-eliot .]

George Eliot's adult life was deemed scandalous by many in Victorian England. Born Mary Ann Evans in 1819, she published under a male pen name, lived with an already married man, and, after his death, married a man more than 20 years her junior.

In her work, however, Eliot was very much a part of the intellectual life of her period, and she closely followed her era’s scientific debates. Among those close to her were scientists beginning to articulate new theories of consciousness to explain human traits like our ability to multitask, hold two competing feelings at once, or have motivations known only to ourselves.

Gain insights into how Eliot’s narrative writings were influenced by new ideas about the mind with Professor Summer Star, a scholar especially focused on the impact that nineteenth century theories of consciousness had on fiction and poetry. You’ll emerge from Dr. Star’s talk with a richer understanding of Victorian literature as well as a much deeper appreciation of Eliot works such as Middlemarch, which has been called the greatest English novel.

Dr. Star will start by discussing Western culture’s struggles to discuss the “unconscious”—the mental operations that occur below the level of conscious awareness—before anyone had even come up with the term.

Then we’ll look at the theories of the unconscious that Eliot would have been exposed to through her romantic and intellectual partnership with one of her era’s leading physiologists, George Henry Lewes, as well as her close friendships with two others, William Carpenter and Herbert Spencer. We’ll talk about how Eliot would have been struck by new terms, such as “non-conscious cerebration” or “latent mental modification,” being applied to mental processes, and fascinated by their potential to deepen character psychology.

From there we’ll examine how Eliot explored the Victorian frontiers of non-conscious thought through her narrative techniques, which offered readers startling glimpses of regions of thought previously seen as private, individual, and secret. We’ll look at how newfound awareness of these realms of thought would have affected readers’ notions of responsibility, authenticity, and the possibility of ever truly knowing oneself. You’ll learn how Eliot through Middlemarch not only evoked the scientific debates over her time but also waded into them with rigor and confidence as a curious, brilliant, empathetic and courageous writer. (Advance tickets: $13.50 plus processing fees. Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID. Doors open at 5:30 and the talk begins at 6:30. Parking available nearby at the Mason O'Farrell garage.)

Image: An 1860 portrait of George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans) by Samuel Laurence (Public domain / Wikipedia/ Tint added).