Desire and the ideology of violence: America in Charles Dickens's 'Martin Chuzzlewit.'

Criticism, Fall, 1994 by Robert E. Lougy

You preachers of equality, the tyrannomania of impotence clam-

ors out of you for equality: your most secret ambitions to be ty-

rants thus shroud themselves in words of virtue. Aggrieved con-

ceit, repressed envy--perhaps the conceit and envy of your fa-

thers--erupt from you as a flame and as the frenzy of revenge.

Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathrustra(1)

1

Jacques Lacan has described with some eloquence how our lives are surrounded or "enveloped," even before we are born, by symbolic structures that precede our entrance into this world:

Symbols in fact envelop the life of man in a network so total

that they join together, before he comes into the world, those

who are going to engender him "by flesh and blood"; so total

that they bring to his birth, along with the gift of the stars, if

not with the gift of the fairies, the shape of his destiny; so to-

tal that they give the words that will make him faithful or

renegade, the laws of the acts that will follow him right to

the place where he is not yet and even beyond his death.

(Ecrits, 68)

Dickens too was fascinated with the various configurations that destinies can assume and with how we are born into a network of signifiers that govern not only our birth into the social order, but also our exit from it. Intrigued by the ways in which we are the unconscious heirs of codes and laws that constitute human culture, Dickens realizes that the shape of our destiny, if not bestowed by the stars or fairies, is the gift of equally ambiguous or mysterious forces. This fascination is evident in Dickens's earliest writings--for example, the "Madman's Manuscript" in The Pickwick Papers--but it seems particularly true of Martin Chuzzlewit. Although the original title and epigraph for the novel were deleted by Dickens before it was published in its three-volume format in 1844, their presence within the genealogy of the text, like those buried archeological artifacts that Freud compared to the unconscious, enables us to trace the evolution of the text's form and to see how sharply it focused from its very beginning, in fact, on questions of genealogy, kinship, and family structure. The original title charted out for its readers those family dynamics that would be explored in the rest of the novel, making it clear that if they wanted to understand the House of Chuzzlewit, they had to read all of the history in front of them, for it alone provided "a Complete Key to the House of Chuzzlewit": "The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit / His Relatives, Friends, and Enemies. / Comprising All His Wills and Ways: / With an Historical Record of What He Did, and What He Didn't: / Showing, Moreover, Who Inherited the Family Plate, Who Came in for the Silver Spoons, / The Whole Forming a Complete Key to the House of Chuzzlewit."(2)

And while the title of Martin Chuzzlewit announced to its readers those questions of kinship and family that the rest of the novel would continue to explore, the epigraph that Dickens had intended to use--"Scene: your own house. Characters: yourselves"--apprised them of the fact that even as they read the history in front of them, they too were implicated in its narrative, since it told of matters concerning not only the House of the Chuzzlewits, but their own houses and themselves as well.(3) The first chapter develops these questions yet still further, tracing the relationship between the Chuzzlewits and what Dickens refers to as "the antiquity of the race," as it follows the lineage of the Chuzzlewit family back to Adam and Eve. Martin Chuzzlewit is in fact haunted by the ways in which violent and unconscious aggressive traits are passed on from one generation to the next. Tracing through the Chuzzlewits as Ur-family how particular characteristics of the human race, the "hereditary tastes" of each generation, are passed on "through the lives of their unconscious inheritors" (2, emphasis mine), the narrator reminds us of how such characteristics or "tastes" are phylogenetically and ontogenetically encoded in our history.(4) He reflects, for example, on how the roots of human "violence and vagabondism" (1) can be traced back to Cain and Abel and to other subsequent "divers slaughterous conspiracies and bloody frays" (1). Guy Fawkes's otherwise total inexplicable place in the Chuzzlewit family tree makes sense as an ancestral presence whose regicidal history anticipates other narratives of Oedipal desire and conflict (especially the story of attempted parricide involving Jonas and Anthony Chuzzlewit) woven into the English sections of the novel. As such, he is a mysterious ancestor not only in the Chuzzlewit family tree, but in all family trees and thus is also present in the American sections as well. For by the time young Martin and Mark Tapley arrive in America, Guy Fawkes is already there, his history anticipating those transgressions against authority and patriarchy that have been written into America's myths of its origin and destiny.

The unconscious, Freud reminds us, is eternal and timeless, and both the English and American sections of Martin Chuzzlewit chart the return of ancient and powerful stories plotted along what Ellie Ragland-Sullivan has referred to as the "path of repetition in the here and now."(5) However, in the American episodes of the novel, these timeless stories assume their own particular paths and narrative patterns. The stormy and complex history of Dickens's relationship with America resembles that of a painful love affair, for it is a tale of love and hate, dreams nurtured and then betrayed. The editors of the third volume of the Pilgrim Edition of Dickens's letters, by far the single most important source for anyone interested in the full history of that relationship, suggest that Dickens's response to America moved from "delighted gratification at his welcome to disenchantment and even repulsion."(6) As they also point out, "English travellers naturally read each others' books" (L, viii), and Dickens too, prior to his first American visit, read the writings of those who had preceded him to America, including Harriet Martineau's three-volume work, Society in America (1837) and Retrospect of Western Travel (1838) and Marryat's A Diary in America (1839). After he returned from America, he also spoke warmly of Mrs. Trollope's Domestic Manners of the Americans (1832).