To begin with the end, the overall statement of this paper is that the characters in Charles Dickens′s Our Mutual Friend are for the most part inconsistent. In order to clarify this assertion to the reader, I will at first provide an overview of how Dickens′s characters were received by various critics. This will be the foundation for my claim that his characters are not realistic since they are only described from the outside and, thus, character-development is only achieved by means of the plot. This lack of introspection derives from the fact that Dickens′s focus as a writer was surely on social issues and not on character-development. That Dickens was a great novelist will not be questioned, seeing that, despite this lack of interiority and the ensuing incoherence of the characters to the critic, his characters work during the experience of the first reading. This I will show by examining the character of Eugene Wrayburn in Our Mutual Friend, whose final catharsis is approved of by the reader at first, but has to be highly doubted at second sight, as his actions and thoughts do not justify his reformation to a person of integrity. A thorough study of Wrayburn′s character will reveal that he is a sadist who exults in humiliating other people and wielding power over them, which will raise the question whether he has to be considered as a villainous rather than heroic character.
I will then investigate the character of Bradley Headstone, who appears to be the villain of the subplot revolving around Lizzie Hexam. This analysis will lead to the discovery that Headstone is not so much of a villain but has to be seen as a victim of society and its machinery. Headstone′s story has to be seen as tragic since he succumbs to his violent passions and lets them drive him to despair and the edge of reason in the end. In addition, I will juxtapose Wrayburn′s character to that of his opponent Headstone and thus illustrates the fact that, while we do not get an insight into Wrayburn′s emotions and therefore cannot understand his deeds, Headstone′s actions and motivations are rendered plausible for the reader by the way Dickens describes his character, from the outside as well as from the inside. [...]
Table of contents
1. Introduction
2. General aspects on Dickensian characters
3. Eugene Wrayburn – Catharsis or conundrum?
3.1. The Wrayburn-dilemma
3.2. Fascination Wrayburn – The man without designs
3.3. Wrayburn’s ‘reparation’ – A farce
4. Bradley Headstone – Villain or victim?
4.1. The social inferiority-complex
4.2. The tragedy of a “curious monomaniac”
5. The clash of the classes and a cry for help
5.1. Sadism meets the inferiority-complex
5.2. Bradley Headstone – Guilty of emotion
6. Conclusion
7. Bibliography
1. Introduction
To begin with the end, the overall statement of this paper is that the characters in Charles Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend are for the most part inconsistent. In order to clarify this assertion to the reader, I will at first provide an overview of how Dickens’s characters were received by various critics. This will be the foundation for my claim that his characters are not realistic since they are only described from the outside and, thus, character-development is only achieved by means of the plot. This lack of introspection derives from the fact that Dickens’s focus as a writer was surely on social issues and not on character-development. That Dickens was a great novelist will not be questioned, seeing that, despite this lack of interiority and the ensuing incoherence of the characters to the critic, his characters work during the experience of the first reading. This I will show by examining the character of Eugene Wrayburn in Our Mutual Friend, whose final catharsis is approved of by the reader at first, but has to be highly doubted at second sight, as his actions and thoughts do not justify his reformation to a person of integrity. A thorough study of Wrayburn’s character will reveal that he is a sadist who exults in humiliating other people and wielding power over them, which will raise the question whether he has to be considered as a villainous rather than heroic character.
I will then investigate the character of Bradley Headstone, who appears to be the villain of the subplot revolving around Lizzie Hexam. This analysis will lead to the discovery that Headstone is not so much of a villain but has to be seen as a victim of society and its machinery. Headstone’s story has to be seen as tragic since he succumbs to his violent passions and lets them drive him to despair and the edge of reason in the end. In addition, I will juxtapose Wrayburn’s character to that of his opponent Headstone and thus illustrates the fact that, while we do not get an insight into Wrayburn’s emotions and therefore cannot understand his deeds, Headstone’s actions and motivations are rendered plausible for the reader by the way Dickens describes his character, from the outside as well as from the inside. This discrepancy between the portrayal of Bradley Headstone and Eugene Wrayburn and the ensuing polarisation of sympathies, i.e. pro Wrayburn and contra Headstone, will urge me to the assertion that the ending of this subplot, that is, Wrayburn’s marriage with Lizzie Hexam and Headstone’s ostracism and downfall, are absolutely inconceivable and not justified in the action. I will prove that Dickens was biased from the first himself, for it is only his description of the characters which makes the reader approve of Wrayburn and dislike Headstone, and not their deeds. Seeing this, Bradley Headstone can only be seen as victim to an all-embracing conspiracy consisting of society, his own passionate feelings and even his creator, and he is therefore the only real hero in Our Mutual Friend.
2. General aspects on Dickensian characters
As a matter of fact, the opinions on Dickens’s characters are as broadly faceted as the characters themselves. It is therefore without question that among those various characters, he created some powerful ones as well as some that are less convincing. To assert that Dickens was inapt in creating credible, true-to-life characters would be as inadequate as maintaining the very opposite of this, that is, that Dickensian characters are convincing down the line. The truth, as so often, lies somewhere in between. In this part of my paper, I want to provide a comprehensive outline of how various critics, from Dickens’s age up to the 20th century, took in his special way of describing his characters and letting them act. This differentiation of positive and, above all, critical views on this issue will be the basis of the argumentation regarding the essential question of this paper: are the characters in Our Mutual Friend, exemplary of which I will investigate Bradley Headstone and Eugene Wrayburn, realistic characters? Are there actions and developments believable?
A legitimate question is, of course, what is meant by ‘realistic’? If one tries to attribute the criterion of realism to a character in a work of fiction, one will soon find out that this is as subjective a thing as can be. It depends on the imagination and emphasis of the readers to judge whether a character seems to be realistic for them or not, and this has always something to do with the inner faculties of the audience, their claim on what a realistic character would and should do or think. An appropriate definition of what renders a character realistic is given by Henry James and his concept that a realistic and believable character is he or she “who represents nature (83)”[1]. Considering this, it should be very easy to decide whether a character is convincing and whether his or her portrayal is successful, for the only thing to decide is the question whether they represent nature. But, what is nature? Again, this is something that has to be decided by the readers themselves, something that depends on their attitude towards life.
On the whole, one might say that a realistic character is a person whose actions and thoughts are comprehensible for the reader. If the readers can say to themselves that they are able to understand why a character in a novel acts this or that way, in other words, if they are able to comprehend a character’s motives and designs, this character has to be seen as a plausible, convincing, and therefore realistic character. Of course, one person might find plausible what another considers inconsistent. Nevertheless, this is exactly the point, for realism underlies subjectivity.
As stated above, Dickens’s characters were appreciated as well as scorned by the critics, and a lot of black-and-white painting has been involved by those who tried to explain what they thought of Dickens’s characters. The young Henry James, for instance, seemed to delight in pulling Dickens’s characters to pieces. He stated that especially the characters of Dickens’s later novels were just grotesque figures and eccentric surfaces with nothing inside. He called them ‘figures’, which, in contrast to ‘real characters’, were only superficial outlines and facades without any depth. The following quotation reveals his cynic charge of Dickensian characters:
“We are convinced that it is one of the chief conditions of his [Dickens’s] genius not to see beneath the surface of things. […] He has added nothing to our understanding of human character (83).”
On the whole, their is some fundamental truth in this statement which cannot be denied, that is, that Dickens on the one hand has the gift of describing his characters from the outside, of, as W. Bagehot describes it, “taking hold of some particular traits, and making a character out of them (87)”, whereas, on the other hand, he is unable to (or at least, he simply does not) explain or visualize the psychological features of his characters, their emotions, motives and understanding of life. One of the best assessments on the issue of Dickensian characters comes from George Eliott:
“We have one great novelist who is gifted with the utmost power of rendering the external traits of our town population; and if he could give us their psychological character – their conceptions of life and their emotions – with the same truth as their idiom and manners, his books would be the greatest contribution Art has ever made to the awakening of social sympathies. But […] he scarcely ever passes from the humorous or external to the emotional and tragic, without becoming […] transcendent in his unreality (44).”[2]
R.H. Horne ascribes this lack of psychological aspects in Dickens’s characters to the fact that Dickens understands the individual solely as a social being und thus subordinates introspection to the interaction of the characters. This involves that he never develops a character from within but only lets him or her react on external impulses. Consequently, one of the main deficiencies of Dickensian characters is the inability to change by their own motivation. The process of self-realisation is only triggered by outside influences, for instance when someone holds a virtual mirror up to a character’s face (as is the case with Bella Wilfer in Our Mutual Friend) or when the character escapes death within a hair’s breadth, two motives which Dickens employs strikingly often in his novels. However, this does not astonish if one takes into account the fact that Dickens’s characters seldom develop in the action but rather through it, an opinion which among others George Gissing shared. On the one hand, he concedes Dickens the ability to portray his characters precisely, but on the other he criticises the fact that he only depicts them from the outside. In addition, Gissing asserts that Dickens fails when he analyses the character as the narrator (cf.92). In a way, this may sound contradictory, for who but the author him- or herself should be able to analyse the characters in a novel? However, this would explain why it is so hard to understand motives and feelings of some of the characters in for instance Our Mutual Friend, that is, because Dickens simply fails in describing them plausibly.
One of the most differentiated discussions on the issue is provided by G.H. Lewes. On the one hand, he agrees with most of Dickens’s critics when he states that seen for themselves, his characters are artificial and untrue. According to Lewes, Dickens created not individuals but only abstract models of characters (cf.86). This view he shares with T.H. Lister, who maintains that Dickensian characters are “rather outlines, very clearly and sharply traced, which the reader may fill up for himself; and they are calculated not so much to present the actual truth as to suggest it (79).”
Both Lewes and Lister stress the fact that Dickens’s characters are meant to be allusions, that he only wanted them to be outlines and hollow shapes which the reader has to fill up with his or her own conceptions and expectations. Thus, the typical, universal traits of a character are employed as a means of activating the readers’ fantasy and remembrance of their own experiences. According to Lewes, the reader projects his or her experience into the picture that Dickens evokes with his artificial characters. As a result, a character seems to be realistic and true for the reader, and he or she does not realise that it is not the portrayal of the character itself which is realistic, but that they themselves fill up the empty outline with their ideas of how it should be like (cf.86). This concept is crucial to the understanding of some of the characters in Our Mutual Friend, since it explains why they appear to be comprehensible and natural at first but are awfully disappointing at second sight, since their motivation and action ceases to be intelligible.
“This glorious energy of imagination […] made his creations universally intelligible, no matter how fantastic and unreal. […] Their falsity was unnoticed in the blaze of their illumination. […] Universal experiences became individualised in these types; an image and a name were given, and the image was so suggestive that it seemed to express all that it was found to recall, and Dickens was held to have depicted what his readers supplied (86).”
Charles Dickens, a fake? This depends on the question whether he actually intended his characters to make the impression which Lewes describes in the passage above. However, Dickens did not deliberately try to let his characters appear to be misleading or hollow. It just was not his central focus, for his emphasis was rather on social issues. E.E. Stoll argues as follows:
“No third author in English or perhaps in the world has successfully distinguished and differentiated so many characters, in so large a measure, by their vocabulary, accent, cadence, and rhythm, by the tone of voice, the trick of utterance (126).”
These are obviously only superficial, external traits of the characters. Seeing this, it appears as if Dickens created his characters according to the principle ‘quantity instead of quality’. If his main stress had been on the psychological development of his characters, if he had wanted them to develop themselves by means of self-realisation, he certainly would not have created such a multitude of them. Consequently, his main emphasis was without doubt on the interaction of his characters, his individuals were developed by their life and society and often failed for this very reason.
“Dickens [zeichnet] nicht die schillernde Psychologie des empirischen Individuums (die “Person”) nach. Seine Charaktere erhalten vielmehr ihre energetische Wirklichkeit durch die Integration in die Konkretheit der Romanwelt (126).“
Dickens’s variety of different characters surely is impressive, however, if one values literary characters by the premise ‘what does this character add to my understanding of human nature’, like James does, Dickens’s characters are neither interesting nor fascinating. It is only their fate, only the things that happen to them from the outside that affect the reader, and whether this is enough in a post-realistic age may be doubted.
On the whole, the question whether a character is believable for the reader, whether his portrayal evokes a sufficient amount of credibility through the representation of or, at least, allusion to reality, is solely a question of the attitude or focus of the readers themselves. Accordingly, the depiction of the characters, for instance whether they are intended to represent a psychologically complex person or rather gain their impact by means of compound interrelation, just depends on the focus of the author.
3. Eugene Wrayburn – Catharsis or conundrum?
3.1. The Wrayburn-dilemma
Who is Eugene Wrayburn? At first sight, this question seems to answer itself. Eugene Wrayburn has an upper class educational background. His family being affluent and his father keeping his children in tutelage, it has been fixed even before his birth that he should become a barrister.
“I hate”, said Eugene, […], “I hate my profession (page 19).”[3]
Eugene is pressed into a certain scheme, no matter whether he actually likes it or not. This determination of his life, the fact that his father has arranged everything for him beforehand and still tries to prescribe to him whom he has to marry, makes Eugene the eccentric fellow he is. As some kind of self-defence, he takes refuge in a bitter cynicism which has self-destructive tendencies. He is unable to stand up against his father and his designs for him and has surrendered totally to his fate. There seems to be nothing in this world that could interest let alone fascinate him and he consequently indulges in his own bitterness and eccentricity. The interesting thing about him is that he is fully aware of himself and his weird behaviour:
“I am in a ridiculous humour,” quoth Eugene, “I am a ridiculous fellow. Everything is ridiculous (166).”
[...]
[1] Unless otherwise stated, all page references given parenthetically within this chapter refer to I. Leimberg and L. Cerny. Charles Dickens – Erträge der Forschung. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1978.
[2] Robert Garis. The Dickens Theatre. London: Oxford University Press, 1965.
[3] Unless otherwise stated, all page references given parenthetically in the rest of this paper refer to Charles Dickens. Our Mutual Friend. Oxford World’s Classic. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.
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