SOURCE: "'Girls and Their Blind Visions': George Eliot, Hysteria, and History," in Sexing the Mind: Nineteenth-Century Fictions of Hysteria, Cornell University Press, 1995, pp. 229-72.

In the following excerpt, Ender contends that George Eliot's Daniel Deronda exemplifies the problematic manner in which hysteria—as an illness that simultaneously resists and demands interpretation—informs both the content and the structure of literary representation.

What in the midst of that mighty drama are girls and their blind visions? They are the Yea or Nay of that good for which men are enduring and fighting. In these delicate vessels is borne onward through the ages the treasure of human affection.

—George Eliot, Daniel Deronda

The scandal and transgression associated with George Sand's name lie for the nineteenth century not so much in her works, where in spite of certain "confusions" morality is preserved, as in the apparent immorality of her existence. In...