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Proquest Dissertations Ixion's wheel: Masculinity and the figure of the circle in the novels of Charles Dickens Item Type text; Dissertation-Reproduction (electronic) Authors Dryden, Jonathan Norton, 1962- Publisher The University of Arizona. Rights Copyright © is held by the author. Digital access to this material is made possible by the University Libraries, University of Arizona. Further transmission, reproduction or presentation (such as public display or performance) of protected items is prohibited except with permission of the author. Download date 05/10/2021 15:01:01 Link to Item http://hdl.handle.net/10150/282341 INFORMATION TO USERS This manuscript has been reproduced from the microfihn master. UMI fihns the text directly from the original or copy submitted. Thus, some thesis and dissertation copies are in typewriter &ce, while others may be from any type of computer printer. The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. Broken or indistinct print, colored or poor quality illustrations and photographs, print bleedthrough, substandard margins, and improper alignment can adversely affect reproduction. In the unlikely event that the author did not send UMI a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if unauthorized copyright material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. Oversize materials (e.g., maps, drawings, charts) are reproduced by sectioning the original, beginning at the upper left-hand comer and continuing from left to right in equal sections with small overlaps. Each original is also photographed in one exposure and is included in reduced form at the back of the book. Photographs included in the original manuscript have been reproduced xerographically in this copy. Higher quality 6" x 9" black and white photographic prints are available for any photographs or illustrations appearing in this copy for an additional charge. Contact UMI directly to order. UMI A Bell & Howell Infonnation Company 300 North Zeeb Road, Ann Ailwr MI 48106-1346 USA 313/761-4700 800/521-0600 IXION'S WHEEL: MASCULINITY AND THE FIGURE OF THE CIRCLE IN THE NOVELS OF CHARLES DICKENS by Jonathan Norton Dryden A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of the DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements For the Degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY In the Graduate College THE UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA 1997 UMI Niuober: 9729515 UMI Microform 9729515 Copyright 1997, by UMI Company. All rights reserved. This microform edition is protected against wiauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code. UMI 300 North Zeeb Road Ann Arbor, MI 48103 2 THE DNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA ® GRADUATE COLLEGE As members of the Final Examination Committee, we certify that we have read the dissertation prepared by Jonathan Norton Dryden entitled "Ixion's : Masculinity and the Figure of the Circle in the Novels of Charles Dickens" and recommend that it be accepted as fulfilling the dissertation requi^ment for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Lynda^Zwinger^ Date C)\{yr(jLo ?- es Sherry Date 3 Donnell Date Date Date Final approval and acceptance of this dissertation is contingent upon the candidate's submission of the final copy of the dissertation to the Graduate College. I hereby certify that I have read this dissertation prepared under my direction and recommend that it be accepted as fulfilling the dissertation requirement. J ^ Mssert^ion Director ^ynda Zwinger Date 3 STATEMENT BY AUTHOR This dissertation has been submitted in partial fulfillment of requirements for an advanced degree at the University of Arizona and is deposited in the University Library to be made available to borrowers under the rules of the Library. Brief quotations from this dissertation are allowable without special permission, provided that accurate acknowledgment of source is made. Requests for permission for extended quotation from or reproduction of this manuscript in whole or in part may be granted by the head of the major department or the Dean of the Graduate College when in his or her judgment the proposed use of the material is in the interests of scholarship. In all other instances, however, permission must be obtained from the author. SIGNED: 4 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS In writing this dissertation I have incurred a number of debts and take pleasure in acknowledging them here. First I want to thank Lynda Zwinger for her encouragement and her intellectual support. Without them this dissertation never would have been written. I also wish to thank Charles Sherry and Patrick O'Donnell for graciously agreeing to serve on my committee and for providing invaluable commentary and advice. Several other people have offered me support throughout graduate school and the disseration process, and I here acknowledge my gratitude to them; Ruthe Thompson, Ann Brigham, Jill McCartney, Tom Olsen, Laurie MacDiarmid, David Peterson, Lori Snook, Sonia Cota-Robles, Stephanie Dryden, and Bill Hill. To my family I owe a special debt. No number of "thank yous" can adequately express how much I appreciate their patience and support. A large potion of the dissertation was written with the assistance of a generous fellowship from the University of Arizona Graduate College. 5 For Kerie, Ben, and Seth 6 TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT 7 1. INTRODUCTION 8 2. "VEELS WITHIN VEELS": MASCULINITY AND THE CIRCLE IN THE PICKWICK PAPERS 31 3. "THE CIRCLE OF MY LIFE"; HOLDING AND DISPOSING MASCULINITY IN DA VID COPPERFIELD 81 4. "THE CENTRE OF TRUTH" AND THE WHIRLING GRINDSTONE: INCORPORATION AND MASOCHISM IN A TALE OF TWO CITIES 129 5. ENTERING PIP'S "CIRCLE OF LIGHT": FANTASY AND BEATING IN GREAT EXPECT A TIONS 175 6. WORKS CITED 230 7 ABSTRACT This dissertation investigates through a close reading of four novels-FAe Pickwick Papers, David Copperfteld, A Tale of Two Cities, and Great Expectations— the way in which masculinity and authorial subjectivity in Dickens's novels are bound to the figure of the circle, an image which functions both as a figure for an ideal narcissistic unity and as a sign of the individual's subjection to the metaphoric and metonymic movement of langiiage within the symbolic order; what Jacques Lacan has identified as "symbolic necessity." I demonstrate this double function of the circle by showing how orality in Dickens's work belongs to a chain of images that include pretty lips, rings, necklaces, fur ringed boots, as well as the grinding wheels and gears of the legal system. As Dickens's career progresses, the novels become more and more haunted by the sense that the magic circle of personal fantasy is inhabited by the violent, whirling motion of the law and language. My argument culminates in readings of A Tale of Two Cities and Great Expectations which show how male masochism in Dickens's novels is not so much a negation of paternal power and privilege as it is a consequence of the latter's introjection within the subject as fantasy, a fantasy in which the subject is fastened, as in Pip's fever dream, to "a vast engine, clashing and whirling over a gulf" 8 INTRODUCTION A fictive tale... has the advantage of manifesting symbolic necessity more purely to the extent that we may believe its conception arbitrary. Jacques Lacan, "Seminar on The Purloined Letter'" Uproarious was the mirth of the round table. Long after the ladies had retired, did the hot elder wine, well qualified with brandy and spice, go round, and round, and round again; and sound was the sleep and pleasant were the dreams that followed. Charles Dickens, The Pickwick Papers Dare I hint at that worse time when, strung together somewhere in great black space, there was a flaming necklace, or ring, or starry circle of some kind, of which / was one of the beads! And when my only prayer was to be taken off from the rest, and when it was such inexplicable agony and misery to be a part of the dreadful thing? Charles Dickens, Bleak House A recent review in The Dickensian of Herbert Sussman's Victorian Masculinities: Manhood and Masculine Poetics in Early Victorian Literature and Art points to the need in nineteenth-century studies for an "investigation of masculinity" that would consider the novels of Charles Dickens (Booth 217). Sussman's book, which traces the ways Carlyle, Browning, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, and Pater utilize the metaphorics of the monk and monasticism to construct a new form of masculinity for the industrial age, does not address the problem of masculinity in Dickens work. Sussman's book belongs to a growing interest in masculine subjectivity which was initiated to a large extent by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's study of homophobia and homosocial desire in Between A/en; a study in which Dickens's work figures prominently. Through her readings of Our Mutual Friend and Edmund Drood Sedgwick argues that Dickens's writing near the end of his career constructs "paranoid" plots that thematize homophobic relations between men and that conserve male power through the "traffic in women." Though Sedgwick's work on 9 Dickens may explain in part why Sussman's book and Richard Dellamora's Masculine Desire, a study of Victorian sexual politics, neglect Dickens's novels, her readings are not exhaustive accounts of Dickens's representation of masculinity. One area of Dickensian masculinity that Sedgwick leaves untouched is the presence of what Theodore Reik has identified as "masochistic phantasies" in the "novels of Charles Dickens" (387). Recent studies by Carol Siegel and Kaja Silverman have explored the ways male masochism may undermine conventional conceptions of normative masculinity that uphold patriarchal power structures. For Siegel male masochism is "a model of transgression whose willing inversion of patriarchal values, including a jubilant offering up of self, could unsettle the dominant discourse on masculinity" {Male Masochism 141).
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