California State University, Northridge the Charms Of
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CALIFORNIA STATE UNIVERSITY, NORTHRIDGE THE CHARMS OF ASSUMPTION: ROLE PLAYING IN DICKENS'S LATER NOVELS A thesis submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in English by Patrick Byron Hunter January 1988 The Thesis o~Patrick Byron Hunter is approved: Lawrence Stewart California State University, Northridge ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I most especially thank Dr. Harry Stone, whose brilliant expertise as a Dickensian and meticulous attention as an advisor helped to create many of this thesis's virtues and none of its flaws. I also thank Valerie, my dearest friend, whose insight inspired me to begin this thesis and whose support enabled me to finish it. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgments •• . iii Abstract • • • • • . • v Chapters: I. Introduction . • • • 1 II. Dickens and Role Playing • . 8 III. Expected Roles: Great Expectations •• • • • .18 IV. Behavioral Roles: Our Mutual Friend • • .34 v. The Impersonator . • • • ~ .45 VI. The Player Without a Role. • • .57 VII. Conclusion • • . .67 Works Cited. • • • • .70 iv ABSTRACT THE CHARMS OF ASSUMPTION: ROLE PLAYING IN DICKENS'S LATER NOVELS by Patrick Byron Hunter Master of Arts in English This thesis demonstrates how roles, or the facades which human beings project when interacting with others, provide an approach for understanding the characters and themes in Dickens's fiction written after 1857, from Little Dorrit to The Mystery of Edwin Drood. It argues that the characters in the author's final period desperately play roles to find fulfillment and also demonstrates how Dickens himself sought role playing to alleviate his own personal crises. ' ~ v The thesis approaches the fiction by categorizing roles into the two types: expected roles, or those roles demanded by society; and behavioral roles, or those structured, not by society, but by individuals. The thesis also traces the evolution of two character types in the later years: the impersonator, or the character who assumes a different name as a means of escaping his true identity, and· the player without a role, the character who, because he lacks a definite role, also lacks a sense of purpose or direction. Ultimately, the novels demonstrate that Dickens's view towards role playing is essentially comparable to Jung's: that each individual possesses both an inward self and an outward self, and a person only achieves a wholeness of self when both his internal identity and outward facades are harmoniously balanced. In the final period, attaining this balance becomes a prime conflict for Dickens's characters • • <l vi I. Introduction Only in recent decades have psychologists such as Eric Berne demonstrated the significance of role playing in our daily lives. And though a role, whether imposed from without or projected from within, can shape a person's most fundamental actions, most sociologists still have difficulty defining the term. For this paper, however, we can define a role as any consistent pattern of characteristics a person displays in a context (Biddle 58). Context certainly plays an important part in influencing any person's roles; how a male business executive, for example, acts with clients in his office will differ from how he acts at a bar with male friends, or how he acts at home with his wife. like most of us, he draws from his own personal repertoire whatever role is appropriate for the defined context. The many roles we enact daily can be categorized into one of two types: expected or behavioral. As the name implies, expected roles are those that any society exacts; in fact, they are the roles demanded and delineated by any group. behavioral roles, on the other hand, are never demanded by either a society or a group, but are those personal roles we create from individuals whom we admire and use as role models. Although these two types overlap; we can still distinguish them. Expected roles are, by definition, conventional and can aid a person to achieve higher status; behavioral roles, on the other hand, need not involve either status or convention. A person often learns his expected roles not only from other people, but from a variety of sources, including advertising, which can dictate social norms. A person learns his behavioral roles, however, directly from another human being, such as a parent, a friend, or any individual who serves as a role model. To expected roles, people attribute such virtues as responsibility and consistency; to behavioral roles, personality and character. Great writers have long recognized people's needs for roles--the most obvious example being Shakespeare when he wrote for Jacques the speech concerning the seven stages of man. Charles Dickens also gives roles prominence, even in his earliest fiction. Frequently, he creates figures 2 who perform certain roles badly, but who assume that what they project is perfectly appropriate. _Such an approach serves for conveying an ironic or dramatic effect: Mr. Dombey, for instance, believes himself a perfect father and husband when actually he fails at both roles. Dickens also presents characters in conflict with their roles to convey humor; we laugh, for example, in chapter 23 of Oliver Twist, when Mr. Bumble woos Mrs. Corney, because both characters believe themselves to be passionate romantics, whereas actually they are a pair of grotesques: their actual identities absurdly contradict the roles they have chosen. If Dickens had employed role playing only in these ways, then a study this length would hardly be justified, for such role conflicts are plainly used to convey to the reader specific effects of humor or irony. After the period of 1857-1858, however, as Dickens underwent his own personal crises, he raised role playing to complex levels. Most important, his characters are more self aware, in that they recognize they are unsuited to their roles, and, consequently, many of them attempt (vainly) to resolve their conflicts by attaining other roles. Some, such as Pip, acquire new expected roles; others, such as Bradley Headstone and many other characters in Our Mutual Friend, assume behavioral roles from persons they have used as role models. Still others, such as John Harmon, seek new roles to the degree of impersonation, assuming 3 another identity, as a futile means of escaping themselves. Most miserable of all, however, are those, such as Sydney Carton, who lack any definite role, and with it, any sense of purpose or direction. As I suspect is already clear, I intend in this study to demonstrate how role playing, as well as its conflicts, provides a vital approach for understanding the characters and ~hemes that pervade the novels written after 1857. Critics have long recognized that characters in Dickens's later fiction suffer conflicts in their personal identities. Most of these critics, however, downplay the role playing aspects. They seem to presume that an individual's self can easily be separated from his various roles. Jung, however, believed that each individual possesses both an inward self and an outward self. When a person concentrates too much on his roles, his personae8, he fails to achieve selfhood, for he causes his individuality to be submerged. Similarly, when he ignores his personae, he also fails to achieve a complete sense of selfhood. An individual only achieves a wholeness of self when both internal identity and outward facades are harmoniously balanced, and achieving this balance is a prime source of conflict for Dickens's later characters. Curiously, I have found few, if any, Dickens critics who have attempted this sort of an approach in detail. J. Hillis Miller mentions roles only briefly in his classic study, Charles Dickens, The World of His Novels. He 4 describes the Dickensian hero as one who has "no inherited role which he can accept with dignity" (251), but uses such statements to support his primary analysis of how the characters suffer from alienation. And, regarding role playing, some of his claims need more support. He asserts, for example, that the "typical Dickens hero, like Pip, feels guilty because he has no status or relation to nature, to family, or to the community" (252). The source of Pip's guilt can be difficult to pinpoint, but, as I hope to show, Pip does not lack a defined status or a relationship to the community. On the contrary, he has the position of a blacksmith's apprentice, a role with a definite community status, and he feels guilty, not because he lacks a role, but partly because he hates the role he already has; hence, his weeping after confessing to Biddy his disgust "with my calling and with my life: (17: 155). We usually associate role playing with actors, and critics have long recognized the theatre's influence on Dickens's works. J. B. Van Amerongen's The Actor in Dickens vividly details the author's histrionic personality and also argues that most of what we find "objectionable" or "offensive" in the novels can be traced to theatrical influences (258). Several other critics have repeated this charge. Andre Maurois summed up many a reader's complaint when he wrote that Dickens presents characters only with outward signs; except in the case of 5 first person narration, Dickens rarely shows what a character thinks, only what a character does or says, often emphasizing gestures (120). Some have even found Dickens's techniques with his characters unrealistic, forgetting that the only reality we can ever know from other people is what they project to us. Criticism of this sort culminated with Robert Garis's work, The D'ickens Theatre, which seeks to demonstrate that, whenever anyone reads one of the novelists's works, he essentially enters the "Dickens Theatre" (24). Certainly such criticism is helpful, but it has little to do with why Dickens's characters are dissatisfied with their roles or why they try to attain new ones in the later novels.