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

Criticism, Fall, 1994 by Robert E. Lougy

In his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, Marx does not raise the question of incest, but he similarly argues that human history is the story of our origins or beginnings in nature and also of our alienation from it. Marx points out, for example, that when we observe that "man's physical and spiritual life is linked to nature," we are really only saying that "nature is linked to itself, for man is a part of nature."(9) Yet, Marx also stresses the fact that human history involves our estrangement from nature: "the nature which comes to bear in human history," he writes, "the genesis of human society--is man's real nature; hence nature as it comes to be through industry, even though in an estranged form, is true anthropological nature" (90, emphasis Marx's). We can come into full realization of consciousness, Marx argues, only within a social community that enables us to realize our "natural" or human capabilities. Transcendence of alienation is brought about not through an attempt to escape or flee from the human, but rather by embracing its possibilities within a society forged through history as shaped by the activity of men and women: thus Marx defines "communism" as the "complete return of man to himself as a social (i.e., human) being--a return become conscious, and accomplished within the entire wealth of previous development." It is, he suggests, "the genuine resolution of the conflict between man and nature and man and man" (84), a state in which humanism and naturalism are no longer at odds, but rather are the equal of one another.(10)

Dickens, as one might expect, approaches these questions from different angles than either Rousseau or Marx, but the questions themselves are strikingly similar. Magnet points out, for example, that Martin Chuzzlewit focuses "on how radically far from being a pure production of nature the truly human being is" (321). In the America of Martin Chuzzlewit, however, Rousseau's festival becomes the psychic inversion of itself, an abnormal or grotesque celebration of a vision of community that even as it attempts to reject the human has its origins in Oedipal violence and transgressive incestuous desires. Similarly there is in Martin Chuzzlewit no resolution, genuine or otherwise, of that conflict between man and nature that Marx speaks of, even though the Americans speak ad nauseam of their reintegration back into a natural realm or kingdom. Anticipating various modern and postmodern novels that have explored the ways in which psychoanalytic dynamics are textualized within the body politic of a nation, Martin Chuzzlewit suggests if we wish to understand the ways in which the repressed is inscribed as narrative within America's history, we must regard its language, myths, and legends as symptomatic gestures that disclose a desire whose presence remains repressed.(11) "The powerful fiction," suggests Peter Brooks, "is that which is able to restage the complex and buried past history of desire as it covertly reconstitutes itself in the present language."(12) Martin Chuzzlewit, I will argue, exemplifies such "powerful fiction" as it too restages this past history of desire. In so far as I will be examining those psychoanalytic dynamics of repression as they are inscribed in Dickens's fiction, I am pursuing paths of inquiry travelled earlier by others, going back at least as far as Edmund Wilson's ground-breaking "The Two Scrooges" and including a number of more recent studies.(13) The distinctions between the directions of their inquiries and my own will, I trust, be evident. Jacques Lacan taught his students that "you must start from the text, start by treating it, as Freud does and as he recommends, as Holy Writ. The author, the scribe, is only a pen pusher, and he comes second.... please give more attention to the text than the psychology of the author--the entire orientation of my teaching is that."(14) Following Lacan's advice, I too would argue that the text always knows more than the author does. I am interested in exploring the particular nature of the repressed desire that we find in Martin Chuzzlewit and the ways in which it drives the plot of the American sections of the novel. For although this history constitutes the repressed or "censored chapter" of the novel, it is neverthless a story that makes itself known.