“Idiots talk . . . of Energy”: The Anti-Work Ethic and Narrative Form in Our Mutual Friend

Heidi Hyun-Jin Lim, Washington University - St. Louis    

This paper is part of a larger project on the enervated male protagonist and his influence on narrative form over the course of the last few decades of the nineteenth century and the first few of the twentieth. In this part of my project, I begin to trace the influence of enervated male characters on the Victorian novel form, particularly the marriage and vocation plots. In “Dickens’s Idle Men,” David Trotter argues that the marginal, idle characters in Dickens’s novels provide moments of “absolute failure to produce meaning,” which “dissociates the lazy gentlemen… from the novel’s characters, whose narrative destinies require of them some measure of intentionality” (203). That is, unlike the central characters who must act with some degree of intent in order to serve their narrative functions, the idle men at the periphery of the narrative are permitted to signify nothing beyond their mere idle presence. Trotter further presses on this figure’s narrative (non)function to suggest that “their idleness, like that of the flâneurs, only in a more radical fashion, constitutes an implicit reproach to narratives which endorse strenuous self-making” (204). The presence of the idle figure is directly at odds not only with narrative and signification in general, but with the conventional Victorian narrative of progress specifically. In response to Trotter’s argument, my project asks the question, what happens if this idle gentleman is not a marginal character but the main protagonist? What does this do to narrative form? First, due to his stance of passive inactivity, the tired man becomes in many ways his own blocking character, to borrow a term from theatrical tradition, getting in the way of his own narrative destiny and ultimately turning the plot into one of deferral. What is important to note here is the difference between deferral and rebellion. Unlike the rebel figures who actively reject societal expectations and live out radical, and often doomed, narratives, the passive idlers simply defer, as long as possible, the fulfillment of societal and narrative expectations, making their plots perhaps not as tragic, but more complicated in terms of narrative closure. The tired male figure is also important because of the way in which he not only complicates the Victorian fictional narrative, but also troubles the Victorian masculine narrative. Following the claims made by James Eli Adams and Herbert Sussman in their influential works on Victorian masculinities, and various historians of the topic as well, I take as my premise the way in which Victorian masculinity was understood as a lifelong process of proving one’s manhood by checking off the correct boxes over the course of a lifetime. Based on this premise, I examine the tired male protagonist’s inability or refusal to prove that he is a manly man by doing the things every Victorian man ought to do.

Our Mutual Friend (1865) perfectly illustrates the ways in which I see tired masculinity mattering for Victorian fiction and Victorian masculinities. In the parallel plot structure of the John Harmon plot and the Eugene Wrayburn plot, the novel juxtaposes the conventional Victorian masculine plot with a plot of deferred masculinity. The Harmon plot is in many ways the conventional Victorian novel plot. A young male protagonist seeks his fortune, proving his worth through hard work and good values, and wins a virtuous, pretty wife in the process. What I find most noteworthy about the Harmon plot is its many false endings. John Harmon’s attainment of each milestone of conventional masculine and narrative development is spread out over the span of many chapters. A little over three quarters into the book, we come across what may well have been the final chapter in a conventional Victorian novel plot. Having proven his professional and personal worth, John Harmon wins the hand of Bella Wilfer, and the two are wed in a delightfully intimate little wedding, complete with a miscellaneous loiterer adding local color to the scene. However, the Harmon plot has not yet been completed. Not only does Bella need to continue proving that she is no longer money-hungry, but she must, a few chapters (and more months) later, show that she is capable of producing a potential heir to the family fortune, which also must be officially regained, more chapters later, from the temporary stewardship of the Boffins. Through this scaffolded structure of Harmon’s rise to manhood, the Harmon plot emphasizes the four things a man must acquire in order to complete his masculine narrative: a means of living, a wife, a child, and a familial legacy. And “dear John” dutifully meets all four conditions, in stark contrast with the belated and much belabored masculine plot of Eugene Wrayburn.

First, Wrayburn is a failure professionally. Wrayburn’s anti-work sentiment prevents him from reaching the first of the middle-class masculine milestones, that of a secure profession. Soon after their first appearance in the novel, Wrayburn and his partner in bachelorhood,@ In her book Queer Dickens, Holly Ferneaux provides an extended analysis on the role of bachelors and their nontraditional families in the works of Dickens. Mortimer Lightwood, have a conversation about how little work they have and how much they hate it when they do have it (34-5). In fact, they seem to vie over who has less work and who hates it more, engaging in a repartee of competitive laziness. Later, while talking to Jenny Wren and Lizzie Hexam, Wrayburn declares himself “the idlest and least of lawyers” (267). And indeed, Wrayburn’s most impassioned moments, certainly much more passionate than his scenes with Lizzie, are his two memorable speeches, one on energy and the other on bees. “Then idiots talk,” says an irate Wrayburn, very early in the novel, “of Energy. If there is a word in the dictionary under any letter from A to Z that I abominate, it is energy. It is such a conventional superstition, such parrot gabble! What the deuce!” (35). Later, to an increasingly confused Noddy Boffin, Wrayburn asks, on the subject of bees, “they work; but don’t you think they overdo it? They work so much more than they need—they make so much more than they can eat—they are so incessantly boring and buzzing at their one idea till Death comes upon them—that don’t you think they overdo it?” (115). Why overdo it?—this is the sentiment driving the Wrayburn plot.

Despite Wrayburn’s disdain for hardworking insects, however, the novel opens with a scene of work. The first image that readers of the novel see is that of Gaffer and Lizzie Hexam on the river, Lizzie rowing while her father intently scans the water for salvageable matter, human or otherwise. In describing the father and daughter, the narrator carefully points out two things: the lack of various tools of the trade that could have been used to identify their profession (15), and the “business-like usage” (16) of both Lizzie and Gaffer. Even though there are no outwardly obvious markers of a recognizable occupation, we still know they are working. But how exactly do we know?

The activity of Lizzie and her father is marked as work in part through the intensity and deliberateness of their actions. Gaffer’s work is described in consistently vague terms, but this vagueness is simultaneously coupled with repeated expressions of how hard he is working. Furthermore, both Lizzie and Gaffer show through the expertness of their actions that the activity was one of “usage.” Whatever it is they may be doing, they do it frequently and regularly, and they do it because it is useful. Following established routines and customs and being useful, in addition to intensity and earnestness, serve as markers for activities that can be categorized as work. And these characteristics represent conventional ideas about the so-called Victorian gospel of work—keep your head down, be useful, and you will be rewarded. However, what are we to make of the fact that this gospel is evangelized in the opening scene by such unlikely members of the flock? In his article, “Work in Our Mutual Friend,” Brian Cheadle argues that starting perhaps with Great Expectations, there seems to be in Dickens’s novels a change from earlier descriptions of healthy work as the only possible means toward fulfillment to increasing anxiety about the possibility of getting tainted by work, resulting in fewer instances of positive work appearing in the novels. Our Mutual Friend is in many ways the culmination of this trajectory.@ See also Laura Fasick’s chapter on Dickens in Professional Men and Domesticity in the Mid-Victorian Novel.

Parallel to this increasing unease about work on the part of Dickens was the increasing presence of the “unlikely idle hero,” which Chris Louttit, in his chapter on “Dickens’s Idle Men,” traces through several of Dickens’s novels. In these idle men, we are given an alternative to the gospel of work. If Our Mutual Friend began with the disconcerting scene of the Hexams’ work, it ends with the unlikely bonding moment between Lightwood and Twemlow. United against the “voice of society” in their opinion on Wrayburn’s marriage to Lizzie, Mortimer and Twemlow leave the society party together, each going off to their respective bachelor abodes. What I would like to note in this final scene are the common traits of the two men, Lightwood and Twemlow, and Wrayburn, the man who connects them. For most of the novel, these three men are confirmed bachelors who have uncomfortable or nonexistent relationships with their families, and also confirmed idlers who don’t do a whole lot of work. Twemlow’s comment about himself is telling. Encountering Fascination Fledgeby at Riah’s (supposed) place of business, Twemlow confides, “I am even a poorer man of business than I am a man, sir … and I could hardly express my deficiency in a stronger way” (625). Twemlow’s deficiencies as a man of business are tied to his deficiencies as a man. For instance, his completely unmanly unproductivity is manifested both in his lack of occupation and lack of children. He produces nothing, professionally or biologically, and he does not even carry on the lineage that is his only claim to social usefulness, for he will not have a son who will inherit Twemlow’s role as close relation to Lord Snigsworth at fashionable dinner parties. Yet, while not many would tout Twemlow as the hero of the novel, with his unmanly unimportance and unassuming harmlessness, he is clearly the superior alternative to the energy and guff of the Veneerings and Podsnaps of his world. In Our Mutual Friend, being a non-working, unproductive member of society does not preclude one from being the moral center of the novel.

Nor does it preclude one from being the hero of at least half of a novel. The Wrayburn plot is certainly the place in which the novel’s at times hostile attitude toward work is the most clearly represented. Wrayburn with his languor, idleness, social ease, and respectable family background is contrasted with Bradley Headstone’s earnestness, hard work, social discomfort, and working-class background. When contrasted this way, outside the context of the novel’s plot, it may be easier to find greater sympathy for the hardworking young man of humble beginnings who is dutifully achieving the major milestones toward respectability and success as a Victorian man (in the tradition of David Copperfield, for instance) than for the idle, flippant, young man of fashionable society who is no good for anything (more along the lines of James Steerforth or Richard Carstone). However, when the supremely virtuous Lizzie chooses Wrayburn over Headstone, and is not proven to be wrong in her choice (i.e. he doesn’t ruin her, as we are used to so many upper-class men doing to lower-class women in novels), what are we to make of this reversal of the earnest young man and decadent dandy dichotomy?

Even the novel’s use of the word “earnestness” is unusual. Several times in the course of the plot, Wrayburn presents a slightly more earnest side of himself, much to Lizzie’s delight. But of course, the whole point of the effectiveness of Wrayburn’s momentary earnestness is that it is so unlike him. And indeed, we come upon Wrayburn joking about earnestness with Lightwood, deflecting his friend’s request to be “earnest for a minute” by connecting earnestness to the domestic knickknacks Wrayburn has purchased in jest, “the happy influences of the little flour-barrel and the coffee-mill” (319). This scene makes light of the ways in which domestic influences can inspire earnestness in otherwise flippant young men, casting a shadow over the earlier scene of “redemption” between Wrayburn and Lizzie. To be fair, though, Wrayburn’s lack of earnestness does not seem entirely lamentable, because the alternative that the novel presents is so awful. While visiting Wrayburn to stake his claim on Lizzie, Headstone tells Wrayburn that he is “bitterly in earnest against” his rival (329). Later on, when declaring himself to Lizzie, Headstone tells her, “if it is any claim on you to be in earnest, I am in thorough earnest, dreadful earnest” (441). Suddenly, earnestness seems positively menacing.

In this and other ways, Headstone serves to render several traits of earnest, hardworking Victorian manliness, deadly. In fact, the word used most often, so often that it becomes meaningless, to describe Headstone is “decent”: “Bradley Headstone, in his decent black coat and waistcoat, and decent white shirt, and decent formal black tie, and decent pantaloons of pepper and salt, with his decent silver watch in his pocket and its decent hair-guard round his neck, looked a thoroughly decent young man of six-and-twenty” (245-6). But what is made clear is that this decency is achieved through the “[s]uppression” of “what was animal,” “what was fiery (though smoldering)” (246). Even if a person exerts the ultimate Victorian virtues of self-control and self-discipline to perform his social and occupational duties, there is always the possibility of something unsavory lurking underneath. Over the course of the latter half of the novel, Headstone the decent young man and Headstone the man of “ungovernable rage and violence” are shown to be two sides of the same coin, indeed with so little distance between the two that he can “suddenly chang[e] his tone” (442), effecting a rather Jekyll and Hyde-like transformation that is physical as well as temperamental. Much like Robert Louis Stevenson’s later literary incarnation of doubleness, Headstone roams the streets in a state of passion at night, but then, each morning, he turns back into a decent young man, only to wait for night once again: “Tied up all day with his disciplined show upon him, subdued to the performance of his routine of educational tricks, encircled by a gabbling crowd, he broke loose at night like an ill-tamed wild animal. Under his daily restraint, it was his compensation, not his trouble, to give a glance towards his state at night, and to the freedom of its being indulged.” (601-2). In contrast to such a man, Wrayburn’s wishy-washy lack of purpose becomes almost a positive trait. If a man having clear goals in life means that he may be hiding a monstrous underside in order to achieve his goals, an indecisive man may be better, or more accurately, less bad. And so, along with Lizzie, the narrative chooses Wrayburn as the protagonist of his plot.

But what are the consequences, for both Lizzie and the narrative, of having Wrayburn as the leading man? A leading man who doesn’t lead can only lead to a plot of deferral. As mentioned earlier, deferral does not imply taking a stance with regard to the expectations or behaviors in question, in the form of either compliance or rejection. It is simply a putting off until a future date something that is acknowledged as potentially inescapable. This idea of deferral is easily identifiable in Wrayburn’s attitudes toward work and marriage. Rather than refusing to comply with his father’s expectation that he become a barrister, Wrayburn becomes one, but then, once in that position, he does not do any work. Marriage is the other area in which Wrayburn practices his discipline of deferral. In response to his father’s request that he marry a woman “with some money” (170), Wrayburn seems to take a stance of rejection, saying he would do “[a]nything to carry out M. R. F.’s arrangements, I am sure, with the greatest pleasure—except matrimony” (172). However, the truth of the matter is that he has his sights already set on two ways through which he can defer marriage without rejecting it wholesale. The novel’s central discussion about marriage occurs after Wrayburn and Lightwood have set up “a bachelor cottage” (168). Later on, Wrayburn further introduces all sorts of “domestic virtues” (317-8) into the rooms the two bachelors share. By not only firmly setting himself up as a bachelor with his male friend, but also turning their domicile into some sort of simulacra of the domestic influence a wife is supposed to impart, Wrayburn wastes time, effort, and money he doesn’t have making himself as married as possible without actually marrying a woman, much in the way he pretends at having a job.

And when he does settle on a woman, he chooses someone who is ineligible in so many ways to be his socially and paternally accepted wife.@ That Wrayburn’s “M. R. F.” later accepts Lizzie as his son’s wife is a rather startling instance of Dickensian deus ex machina, and inconsequential to Wrayburn’s earlier wooing of Lizzie. By rejecting the ready-made wife presented by his father and selecting a woman who is beautiful, industrious, and virtuous, but completely ineligible because of her class and poverty, Wrayburn once again makes a choice that for one, defers his marriage with a more eligible woman, since he is distracted by Lizzie, and two, defers even his marriage with Lizzie because of her inherent ineligibility. In short, Wrayburn becomes his own blocking character. Through the various choices he makes in his life, Wrayburn makes it increasingly difficult for himself to live the life of the conventional Victorian man, as expected of him by his father.

Of course, when it becomes impossible to defer the inevitable specter of marriage any longer, Wrayburn marries. However, the marriage is odd, to say the least. The marriage ceremony happens while Wrayburn is more or less a reclining body, and he continues to be one after the marriage. While lying half dead, Wrayburn is married to Lizzie entirely through other people’s words and actions, which are admittedly (and purportedly?) interpretations of his will but also save him from having to do any work himself, as when Lightwood speaks on behalf of his friend or when, during the marriage ceremony, the matrimonial bond is made by proxy: “As the bridegroom could not move his hand, they touched his fingers with the ring, and so put it on the bride” (823). His marriage to Lizzie is brought about almost entirely through the agency of others—at his behest, to be sure, but with no actual exertion on his part. This of course is a striking contrast with the very controlled, very willed nature of John Harmon’s marriage to Bella. Wrayburn’s lack of exertion continues after the marriage as well. Right after the marriage, when Lizzie expresses belief in his “purpose and energy,” rather than showing the willpower to rise to the occasion of his new wife’s hopes and expectations, Wrayburn says, wistfully, and yet somewhat whimsically. “I hope so. But I can’t summon the vanity to think so. How can I think so, looking back on such a trifling wasted youth as mine! I humbly hope it; but I daren’t believe it. There is a sharp misgiving in my conscience that if I were to live, I should disappoint your good opinion and my own—and that I ought to die, my dear!’” (825). Death seems to appeal more to Wrayburn than the thought of real work.

And, indeed, marriage is not enough to turn Wrayburn into a properly married, productive member of society. Eve Sedgwick’s analysis of the way in which Wrayburn is violently forced back into heteronormativity in Between Men is well known (177). However, as many critics have since pointed out, Sedgwick somewhat exaggerates the extent to which Wrayburn is reassimilated into the institutions that he has rejected up to that point. Months after the perhaps touching but most certainly unconventional marriage ceremony, Mr and Mrs John Harmon receive “a visit from Mr and Mrs Eugene Wrayburn,” where Wrayburn is shown to be entirely dependent on his wife (886), and despite his feeble protests that he will “do that better thing [Lizzie] suggested—for [her] sake,” once Lizzie leaves with Bella, we discover “Eugene lying on his couch in his own room upstairs” (886). If, in order to subdue Wrayburn into marriage, he had to be turned into a broken body in the care of his wife (with troubling echoes of the household of Mr. Doll and Jenny Wren), it appears that his invalid state puts him back into a situation quite similar to his unproductive bachelor days. Can marriage to Lizzie be considered a reformation of the delinquent dandy when the prerequisite condition for his marriage renders him unable to work or produce value? And (speaking of producing things) if, considering Harmon and his bouncing baby, Wrayburn has not achieved the major milestone of producing a child and heir, can his masculine narrative even be said to be complete? Or is the odd marriage to Lizzie yet another deferral in Wrayburn’s masculine anti-narrative of endless deferral?

Sedgwick concludes her chapter on Our Mutual Friend by foreseeing Wrayburn’s future “in the enforcing position of paterfamilias, a position that will lend retroactive meaning and heterosexual trajectory to his improvised, provisional relationship with Mortimer and his apparently aimless courtship of Lizzie” (179). However, what guarantee is there that Wrayburn will allow his masculine narrative to play out to its seemingly inevitable conclusion? In his final appearance in the novel, Wrayburn tells Lightwood, “We are shepherds both. In turning to at last, we turn to in earnest… Now, I have had an idea, Mortimer, of taking myself and my wife to one of the colonies, and working at my vocation there” (887). Wrayburn hits all the right notes, namedropping his wife and speaking of “turning to,” “in earnest” at that, and “working at [his] vocation.” But, of course, in reality, Wrayburn is back together with his bachelor friend Mortimer, languishing in true dandy form on a sofa. When Lizzie returns from her brief outing with Bella and asks her husband, “What have you been doing?” his response is, naturally, “Nothing” (888).