- 1 Richard D. Altick, Victorian People and Ideas; A Companion for the Modern Reader of Victorian Liter (...)
1During the Victorian period, social deviance became a source of growing interest and anxiety. The Victorians showed an unprecedented interest in everything that was abnormal, unnatural or immoral, in other words deviant, whether it be crime, prostitution, poverty considered as a social pathology, madness or hysteria. One of the reasons for this was that, as Richard Altick has shown, ‘the pressures for conformity were stronger than they had perhaps ever been.’1 The Victorian period was a time of intense reflection about normality and its bounds. As a consequence, anything that deviated from social norms was seen as particularly preoccupying. The heightened perception of deviance during that period can also be explained by the creation of a Metropolitan police force in 1829, as well as by the set-up of more precise statistics, both of which led to an increase in information about crime. This, in turn, gave the Victorians the impression of a worrying rise in criminality which they related to urbanisation and industrialisation. However, they considered that social deviance was no longer as threatening a phenomenon as before. They were convinced that all forms of deviance could be normalised, and that science and progress would enable them to come to grips with this social problem and eliminate it. This belief in normalisation, akin to the belief in domestication in Victorian colonial enterprises, also explains the unprecedented interest shown by Victorian society in social deviance. One last reason accounts for the importance of social norms and deviance during the Victorian period and that is the feeling of instability and loss experienced by the Victorians when confronted with the technical and social upheaval of the time. This upheaval gave them an acute sense of the relativity and diversity of their values, which brought about an active search for stable bearings and a wish to redefine a reassuring system of norms and deviance which could serve as a reference for everyday life. This last reason somewhat weakens the triumphant certainties about normalisation mentioned before.
2Social deviance is therefore essential during the Victorian period, and Charles Dickens’s novels are particularly interesting in this respect because they present an extraordinary range of very striking cases of norms and deviance. Our Mutual Friend, for instance, depicts dubious riverside characters, as well as a suspicious murder and an attempted murder. It also portrays seemingly perfect embodiments of Victorian orthodoxy, such as Lizzie Hexam and the ideal couple formed by Bella Wilfer and John Harmon, alias John Rokesmith.
- 2 John G. A. Pocock, The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law: a Study of English Historical Thoug (...)
- 3 Marie-Christine Leps, Apprehending the Criminal: The Production of Deviance in Nineteenth-Century D (...)
- 4 Pierre V. Zima, Manuel de sociocritique, Connaissance des Langues (Paris: Picard, 1985).
3The aim of this study is to take a closer look at the textual construction of these cases of norms and deviance. This approach is based on the theories of the historians John Pocock and Quentin Skinner according to whom writers, and in particular novelists, do not just record and reproduce the prevailing debates and definitions of their time, but contribute, through their writing, to the construction of communal representations, using the arguments and concepts available to them.2 The textual approach adopted here is also inspired by the work of Marie-Christine Leps who analysed the production of deviance in nineteenth-century discourse.3 This study finally uses the work of two other critics Philippe Hamon and Pierre V. Zima.4 Philippe Hamon tracked down the ways in which novel-writing combines or opposes systems of norms and deviance, and Pierre V. Zima analysed the semantic, syntactic and narrative construction of social norms and deviance in fiction. The aim of the present paper is therefore to examine this process of textual construction at work in Our Mutual Friend. This means taking a closer look at the components of the discourse on social deviance in this novel, in other words at the poetics of social deviance.
4Our Mutual Friend contributes to the construction and legitimisation of Victorian orthodoxy by condemning social deviance. However, it also deviates from this orthodoxy by combining and opposing systems of norms. Moreover, it contains troubling cases of downright subversion of established social patterns.
5Up to a certain point, Dickens’s writing belongs to what Philippe Hamon calls aesthetics of intensity, concentration and ideological focalisation. Indeed when condemning social deviance, it contributes monologically to the construction of Victorian orthodoxy. Hamon defines orthodoxy as an institutionalised set of values and system of valuations which expresses fixed distinctions between what is positive and negative, establishes models, dictates prescriptions and bans, and sets goals and means.5
6Our Mutual Friend partakes of the definition of Victorian orthodoxy by rejecting social practices which deviate from established rules and models. It thus reinforces Victorian social norms when it emphasises the torment endured by Bradley Headstone once he realises that his failed attempt to murder his rival Eugene Wrayburn has only resulted in bringing the latter and Lizzie Hexam together:
- 6 Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend, 1864–65 (The Oxford Illustrated Dickens, Oxford: OUP, 1998) IV, (...)
Was it strange that the wretched man should take this heavily to heart? . . . he drooped his devoted head when the boy was gone, and shrank together on the floor, and grovelled there, with the palms of his hands tight clasping his hot temples, in unutterable misery, and unrelieved by a single tear.6
7Bradley Headstone’s spiritual and physical torment is in fact a traditional narrative pattern celebrating the triumph of morality.7 Our Mutual Friend also legitimises Victorian orthodoxy by condemning behaviours which deviate from accepted moral standards, for instance the Veneerings’ ostentatious and vulgar demonstrations of wealth, as well as the new standard of living of the Boffins. The behaviour of these nouveaux-riches is akin to aristocratic conspicuous consumption, and it violates the Victorian bourgeois ideal of sobriety. In Our Mutual Friend, numerous social events, such as the parties organised by the Veneerings, enable similar assessments of people’s conduct and the detection and rejection of deviations from the rules of polite society.
- 8 See Dickens, Our Mutual Friend II, 2: 241, and Marcus Stone’s revealing illustration entitled ‘The (...)
- 9 OMF I, 1: 1.
8The novel criticises attitudes which are not in keeping with social models of the time, such as the ideal of the gentleman, the domestic ideal, and the Victorian ideal of rationality. For instance, the lack of purpose and ambition of Eugene Wrayburn, which goes against the gentlemanly ideal of self-help, is presented in a negative light. The novel also provides negative descriptions of deviations from the Victorian ideal of the family, such as the complete domestic disorder which prevails in the Wilfer household. It denounces the faulty patriarchal authority of Jenny Wren’s father,8 as well as the dubious activities of Gaffer Hexam which place his daughter, Lizzie, in a double bind between her duty to her father and her allegiance to his authority on the one hand, and her rejection of his occupation on the other. This rejection is revealed indirectly through her bodily reactions in the novel’s first scene. Lizzie’s horrified gaze and her instinctive recoiling from the dead body betray the repulsion she feels for her father’s scavenging: ‘in the intensity of her look there was a touch of dread or horror.’9
9Finally, the defence of Victorian ideals of sincerity and authenticity implies a rejection of hypocrisy and of those who practise it. Our Mutual Friend thus draws a comic and satirical portrait of the Lammles and the Podsnaps who embody this moral flaw.
10The contribution of Our Mutual Friend to the textual construction of Victorian orthodoxy is reinforced by the rejection of behaviours which deviate from the Victorian ideal of rationality, such as passion and excess. Bradley Headstone is repeatedly depicted as unable to master his feelings. This gives him a constrained and uneasy appearance which contributes to his construction as a deviant character.
- 10 Leps 10–11.
- 11 Hamon 12.
- 12 Zima 124.
11The previous condemnations all take up common Victorian reasonings about social deviance. They reveal the novel’s presuppositions, defined by Marie-Christine Leps as the basic propositions from which all reasonings derive. These presuppositions embody the ‘truth’ of the period and they are used to reject any discourse which deviates from this doxa.10 Their reflection in the novel can be seen partly as the ‘social unconscious’ of the text as Hamon puts it,11 and partly as a deliberate strategy on the part of the novelist to win his readers’ sympathy by reproducing ideas that most of them shared.12
12In any case, Dickens’s characterisation in Our Mutual Friend definitely mirrors Victorian preconceptions about social deviance and its relationship with norms. Significantly, Lizzie Hexam, who is an embodiment of the Victorian ideal of femininity, is portrayed as a strong character, impervious to the contamination of deviance. On the other hand, the main narrative builds deviant characters, like Bradley Headstone or Rogue Riderhood, as creatures without any autonomy or coherence, unable to resist their negative impulses. Moreover, it deforms them before doing away with them altogether. Their discourse is that of melodramatic villains. The novel thus takes up common Victorian theories about deviance to build its characters.
13So far, this study has shown how the novel uses social deviance to play an active role in the creation and promotion of sets of images, attitudes and values which integrate individuals into the modes of perception and beliefs of Victorian society. In this respect, it contributes to what Quentin Skinner calls the ‘normative vocabulary and grammar’ of its time.13
- 14 Altick. 176.
- 15 OMF I, 11: 129.
- 16 OMF I, 6.
14However, Our Mutual Friend is not quite as monologic as it seems in its support of Victorian orthodoxy. It also reinforces this orthodoxy by paradoxically pointing out the potential deviancies it contains. Dickens was aware that many of the Victorian moral standards ‘contained the seeds of their own negation’,14 and that taken to the extreme, virtues became vices, in other words, norms became deviancies. As a result, although the novel endorses, by and large, the Victorian code of respectability, it never misses an opportunity to expose its excesses. For instance, it sticks to the ideal of chastity up to a certain point (the ideal is embodied by Lizzie Hexam and Bella Wilfer), but it criticises it when it becomes prudishness. As an example of this, the novel satirises the efforts made by Mr and Mrs Podsnap to preserve their young daughter Georgiana’s innocence on sexual matters: ‘The question about everything was, would it bring a blush into the cheek of the young person?’15 Similarly, though it associates outright drunkenness with deviance, as in its condemnation of Jenny Wren’s father, the novel does not subscribe unreservedly to the ideal of sobriety advocated by Victorian temperance societies. It contains a warm description of the tavern of the Six Jolly Fellowship-Porters. Its bar is depicted as a haven compared to the rough world, a picture far removed from the principles of teetotalism.16
15Dickens’s denunciation of the New Poor Law in Our Mutual Friend can be read in the same light. He did not see himself as a radical thinker rebelling against the social order of his time but rather as a reformer. He just wanted to point out the potential deviancies of the social policies of his time as ideas which threatened to destroy Victorian society from the inside. In presenting the New Poor Law as Betty Higden’s tragic and false alternative between being starved and worked to death slowly in the workhouse or quickly outside of it, Dickens was only undermining specific aspects of Victorian social legislation but not the social legislation as a whole.
- 17 Hamon 102.
- 18 Hamon 116.
16These exposures of excesses inherent in Victorian orthodoxy reveal what Philippe Hamon calls aesthetics of ‘discordant punctuation.’17 These aesthetics can be felt even more clearly in cases where Our Mutual Friend actually moves away from Victorian orthodoxy by using ‘normative polyphony,’ in other words competing or even opposing normative systems.18
- 19 John Kucich. The Power of Lies: Transgression in Victorian Fiction. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1994.
- 20 OMF IV, 13.
17Dickens allows himself some liberties with the rules and models which govern Victorian society, for instance moral standards. A closer look at these slight breaches of rules reveals that the novel Our Mutual Friend skilfully combines and opposes several normative systems. Thus when John Harmon, the hero of the novel, starts by hiding his true identity from Bella Wilfer, he does not conform, as John Kucich has pointed out, to the Victorian ideal of sincerity but follows, instead, a mode of conduct akin to that of eighteenth-century aristocrats.19 Dickens’s writing therefore combines two contradictory sets of values, since John Harmon’s use of a false identity to seduce Bella Wilfer refers to eighteenth-century moral values, whereas the scene in which his real identity is disclosed fits into the Victorian ideal of sincerity.20 However, the subtlety of Dickens’s writing is that it does not simply oppose the two sets of values but makes eighteenth-century values of dissimulation the sine qua non for the final success of sincerity. It stresses the fact that if John Harmon had revealed his identity to Bella from the very beginning, he would never have won her confidence as he does by using dissimulation. Although it was written in 1864–65, Our Mutual Friend combines eighteenth-century and nineteenth-century moral standards, and the novelist cleverly draws from these two sets of values to build his main character. Moreover, in order to formulate this combination of moral standards, Dickens uses a literary pattern drawn from fairy tales or from Shakespeare’s comedy Measure for Measure, thereby introducing fantasy into the dominant mode of representation of the period, that is to say realism. The novel moves away from Victorian orthodoxy by bringing together antagonistic social and literary norms. Moreover, the use of a fairy-tale pattern seems to assert the superiority of literary norms over social norms.
- 21 Beth Kalikoff. Murder and Moral Decay in Victorian Popular Literature (Ann Arbor, Mich: UMI Researc (...)
- 22 OMF II, 1: 218.
18The same kind of ambiguous normative polyphony can be found in Our Mutual Friend’s combination of competing discourses on the origins of social deviance and on ways of controlling and suppressing it. These combinations produce ambiguity and, once more, the novel moves away from established discourses. By portraying the schoolmaster Bradley Headstone as a deviant character who tries to murder his rival Eugene Wrayburn, it appears to fit into the second pattern of perception of deviance highlighted by Beth Kalikoff in Murder and Moral Decay in Victorian Popular Literature, that is to say criminals who disturbingly seem to originate from the supposedly respectable middle-class.21 The narration is however more complex than that. Indeed, it points out incidentally that Bradley Headstone is ashamed of his origins as a ‘pauper lad’,22 an allusion which places him at the limit of Victorian orthodoxy, thus connecting him with the first group of deviant characters identified by Kalikoff, in other words a group situated at a respectable distance from the norm. The novel disturbingly combines these two very different perceptions of criminality, the first of which mirrors the 1850s while the second dates back to the 1830s and 1840s.
19Furthermore, the deaths of Gaffer Hexam, Bradley Headstone and Rogue Riderhood, and the mutilation of Eugene Wrayburn seem to be a kind of narrative retribution for their illegal activities or actions, thereby contributing to the rejection of deviations from accepted social rules. Interestingly however, the punishment of these characters for their illegal activities is moral and providential rather than legal. Dickens resorts to poetic justice, that is to say natural law or the law of God rather than the law of Justice. His novel follows the rules of melodrama rather than social rules. This undermines Victorian faith in science and progress as infallible means of coming to terms with all forms of deviance and of normalising any individual who deviates from accepted standards of behaviour. Similarly, as far as the means of suppressing deviance are concerned, Our Mutual Friend alludes to various bodies in charge of controlling, doing away with or at least containing deviance, such as the police station, the police officer, Mr Inspector or the coroner. However, these various representatives of law and order do not prove very successful at solving the Harmon mystery, and this also makes the novel’s contribution to the textual construction of Victorian orthodoxy rather ambiguous.
- 23 See volume 4 of Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor which is devoted to social groups (...)
20Another case of ambivalence resulting from normative polyphony appears in Dickens’s description of street people. Indeed when he was writing Our Mutual Friend, the normative discourse which prevailed on street people was that of the sociologist Henry Mayhew.23 In the 1850s, Mayhew had described this population as archaic, anarchic, barbarous, and resistant to assimilation and acculturation. According to him, the problem with this social group was that it appeared impossible to normalise, and that its material, spiritual and moral poverty defied the ideas of progress and civilisation. To boot, instead of disappearing as the living conditions of the Victorian population as a whole improved, this group seemed to be increasing, thus belying the equation between material and spiritual progress. Consequently, the question about these people was whether they could eventually be normalised, or whether they really were impervious to progress, and therefore irreducibly deviant.
21Even if Dickens does not refer to Mayhew directly in Our Mutual Friend, the sociologist’s ideas underlie the descriptions of street people in this novel: Gaffer Hexam, the riverside man, Mr Venus, the preserver of animals and birds, Silas Wegg, the balladmonger, Betty Higden, the mangle keeper and Jenny Wren the doll’s dress-maker, belong to this group. At first sight, Rogue Riderhood and Gaffer Hexam fit into Mayhew’s categories, as Gaffer Hexam’s physical appearance and aversion for writing and schooling show. The very first description of Gaffer echoes Mayhew’s depiction of street people as an antisocial and even sub-human group which stood apart from the rest of society and could only be described in anthropological terms:
Half-savage as the man showed, with no covering on his head, with his brown arms bare to between the elbow and the shoulder, with the loose knot of a looser kerchief lying low on his bare breast in a wilderness of beard and whisker, with such dress as he wore seeming to be made out of the mud that begrimed his boat, still there was business-like usage in his steady gaze.24
22In this description however, the expression ‘business-like’ jars with the rest of the picture and relates Gaffer to one of the key values of Victorian orthodoxy, that is to say work. In spite of the nuance, ‘like’, the word ‘business’ is somewhat disturbing because it establishes a connection between Gaffer’s dubious activities and regular work. The word ‘business’ either subversively assimilates ordinary Victorian business to the suspicious activities of riverside scavengers, or it encourages the reader to consider these activities as no less respectable than any other kind of work. The novel is ambiguous in this respect. The reader is nonetheless induced to consider Gaffer in a more positive way, because in spite of his appearance and activities, his roughness is tempered by his undeniable affection for his daughter Lizzie, as his discourse in the very first chapter testifies. Furthermore, other characters belonging to the category of street people, like Jenny Wren or Betty Higden, do not fit into Mayhew’s theories on spiritual and moral regression. As a result, apart from the case of Rogue Riderhood, Dickens’s discourse is less peremptory than Mayhew’s regarding the imperviousness of street people to any civilising influence. It even uses them provocatively to question the very idea of civilisation.
23This normative dialogism enables Dickens to deviate from outside norms, in other words from Victorian orthodoxy, and the result of these deviations is either to assert the superiority of aesthetic norms over social norms or to produce a problematic horizon of expectation for the reader. In both cases, polyphony produces ambivalence. Nevertheless, Dickens does not always resort to ambivalence in order to deviate from Victorian orthodoxy. At other times, he discards all possible ambiguity and chooses to subvert accepted social patterns.
24These subversions are partly achieved through disturbing focalisation. Our Mutual Friend takes some liberties with the Victorian ideals of womanhood and domesticity expressed in literary works like The Angel in the House (1854–63) by Coventry Patmore, or Of Queen’s Gardens by Ruskin (1865). At the end of the novel, Bella Wilfer is described as a perfect wife and mother. However, she does not immediately fit into this model. The novel first describes her as whimsical, coquettish and capricious. Just like John Harmon, the hero, she is not quite the perfect heroine of an unproblematic normative system. Neither of them is completely exemplary or univocal. Nevertheless, although she deviates somewhat from the accepted canon at first, Bella seemingly ends up becoming an ideal mother and housewife, as the following scene suggests:
Mr Boffin, submitting to be led on tiptoe to the nursery door, looked in with immense satisfaction, although there was nothing to see but Bella in a musing state of happiness, seated in a little low chair upon the hearth, with her child in her fair young arms, and her soft eyelashes shading her eyes from the fire.25
Figure 1
- 26 Jane Rabb Cohen argues in Dickens and His Original Illustrators (1980), that ‘although some comment (...)
25The novel seems to be finally enhancing the Victorian domestic ideal. However, the illustration of this scene by Marcus Stone (fig. 1) is rather more problematic. Mr Boffin is depicted staring at Bella who is unaware of his gaze, and the ornament on the mantelpiece representing a semi-naked woman seems to suggest that his gaze is somewhat voyeuristic. This kind of interpretation either undermines to some extent the narrative picture created by Dickens, or it leads to a more complex reading of this idyllic scene as an imperfect realisation of Victorian norms.26 This disturbing interpretation seems to be confirmed by a similar scene earlier in the novel depicting Eugene Wrayburn observing Lizzie Hexam who is unaware of his gaze:
She had no other light than the light of the fire. The unkindled lamp stood on the table. She sat on the ground, looking at the brazier, with her face leaning on her hand. There was a kind of film or flicker on her face, which at first he took to be the fitful firelight; but on a second look, he saw that she was weeping. A sad and solitary spectacle, as shown him by the rising and the falling of the fire.27
26A parallel can be drawn between the two scenes in so far as Lizzie and Bella both embody the Victorian model of womanhood and domesticity, this model being extended to the working class character Lizzie, described repeatedly as an ideal daughter, sister and even as a motherly figure: ‘ . . . I knew a little sister that was a sister and mother both.’28 However, once more, the narration and the corresponding picture by Stone somewhat undermine these ideals. This new scene is perceived through the eyes of Eugene Wrayburn, and the voyeuristic and sensual dimension of his perception appears in the following paragraph:
. . . he looked long and steadily at her. A deep rich piece of colour, with the brown flush of her cheek and the shining lustre of her hair, though sad and solitary, weeping by the rising and falling of the fire.29
27In Our Mutual Friend, Eugene Wrayburn’s gaze is doubly transgressive since he is looking at Lizzie while she is in a moment of abandonment, and since his gaze is directed from a public into a private space. In the nursery room scene, Mr Boffin is also looking into one of the most private parts of the house from a more ‘public part’ of the building. The corresponding illustration by Stone hints at this subversive reading of the scene, since it depicts Lizzie Hexam in exactly the same posture as the semi-naked sculpture on the mantelpiece in the nursery room. It seems to be inviting the reader to undress Lizzie with his eyes, just as Eugene Wrayburn is doing (fig. 2).
Figure 2
28In Our Mutual Friend, Dickens also undermines Victorian orthodoxy stylistically. He defeats the Victorian ideal of transparency and rationality by deliberately introducing opacity to protect the mystery of art and of the human being from the prying curiosity of social sciences. In the novel, the scientific discourse of the legal profession proves unable to unravel the complexity of the Harmon mystery. Consequently, Our Mutual Friend actively contributes to the failure of the ideal of rationality by asserting the superiority of literature over scientific discourse. Dickens also undermines Victorian orthodoxy by using tropes. Indeed if Podsnappery is considered not as a mere epiphenomenon but as a metaphor of Victorian society as a whole, the novel takes on a distinctly provocative dimension.
29The overall structure of Our Mutual Friend can also be considered in a subversive light, since it gave the lie to dominant utilitarian theories which claimed that if every individual calculated his own interest, the sum of all these individual interests would coincide with the interest of society as a whole. In the novel, two plots run alongside each other. One of them is devoted to the wealthy world of the Boffins and the Veneerings, and the other to the miserable world of Lizzie Hexam and Jenny Wren. However, the prodigious accumulation of wealth in the first social sphere does not prevent in any way the extreme poverty of the other sphere, thus belying utilitarianism.
30Moreover, narrative patterns in Our Mutual Friend do not systematically reinforce Victorian values and preconceptions. They sometimes discuss and question them. Exemplary women, like Lizzie Hexam or Jenny Wren, are not always able to promote the moral elevation of their nearest and dearest. Lizzie Hexam does not manage to draw her father away from his dubious activities, nor does Jenny Wren succeed in bringing her drunken father back onto the right path. Similarly, the hero John Harmon falls in love with a heroine who does not quite fit into the angel in the house ideal. This contradicts the Victorian preconception that men are instinctively attracted to women who fit into this model. These narrative patterns contrast with the purely monologic patterns analysed earlier.
31Such unsettling subversions produce ambivalence, but at a higher level than the normative dialogism studied previously. They clash with Dickens’s equally strong support of Victorian orthodoxy, making the novel problematic as a whole.
32These conclusions show that Our Mutual Friend illustrates what George Levine pointed out about realist writing in the nineteenth century:
- 30 George Levine, The Realistic Imagination: Essays on the Problem of Realism in Relation to Science, (...)
Nineteenth-century realism deliberately subverts judgements based on dogma, convention, or limited perception and imagination. What seems clear becomes cloudy as we see more and more from different perspectives. Even as they articulate social codes, these novels complicate them, engaging our sympathy with lost women, tyrannical husbands, murderers, revolutionaries, moral weaklings, rebellious girls, spendthrifts and dilettantes.30
33However, the present study has gone beyond this mere observation to analyse the complexity stressed by Levine at work at the semantic, syntactic, stylistic and narrative level. Finally, it has tackled Our Mutual Friend as what John Pocock calls ‘a discursive context,’ that is to say as a forum where norms and deviance were articulated and debated in a process of textual construction which included contradictions, doubts, conflicts and compromises, leading to the set-up, discussion or subversion of the dominant social model or Victorian orthodoxy.
Flux RSS
