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The Movement of History in Our Mutual Friend

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 December 2020

William J. Palmer
William J. Palmer*
Affiliation:
Purdue University, Lafayette, Indiana
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Abstract

Dickens' Our Mutual Friend is an existential novel dealing with the struggles of the central characters to place, in Sartrean terms, existence before essence. This theme of self-definition involves characters singularly preoccupied with analyzing the deadness of past history and with rejecting the impositions of the past upon the present and the future. Boffin's historical reading and Lizzie Hexam's visions in the symbolic fire both reveal the necessity of change if there is to be an existential future. The main protagonist, Eugene Wrayburn, faced with the Shakespearean-Sartrean decision of whether or not to be in his sexual relationship with Lizzie, chooses to reject the pornographic cliches of Victorian sexuality and establish an existence for himself outside of the atrophied “Society” of the novel. Because of these decisions by the central characters to reject the dead history of the past, Our Mutual Friend is an optimistic statement of Dickens' belief in the power of the individual to regenerate a dead world.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 89 , Issue 3 , May 1974 , pp. 487 - 495
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1974

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References

Note 1 in page 495 Our Mutual Friend, The New Oxford Illustrated Dickens (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1952), p. 5. All subsequent references to this work are from this edition and are noted by book, chapter, and page number within the text.

Note 2 in page 495 Charles Dickens: The World of His Novels (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1958), p. 296.

Note 3 in page 495 Existentialism and Humanism, trans. Phillip Mairet (London: Methuen, 1948), pp. 26–27. “If one considers an article of manufacture … a paper-knife—one sees that it has been made by an artisan who had a conception of it. . . and [of] the pre-existent technique of production that . . . is, at bottom, a formula. . . . Let us say, then, of the paper-knife that its essence—that is to say the sum of the formu lae and the qualities which made its production and its definition possible—precedes its existence. . . . Here, then, we are viewing the world from a technical standpoint, and we can say that production precedes existence.”

Note 4 in page 495 Then down a green plain, leaping, laughing they run, And wash in a river and shine in the sun;

Then naked & white, all their bags left behind, They rise upon clouds, and sport in the wind. And the Angel told Tom, if he'd be a good boy, He'd have God for his father & never want joy.

Note 5 in page 495 The Other Victorians (London: Wiedenfeld and Nicolson, 1966), pp. 105, 136–38.