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

Criticism, Fall, 1994 by Robert E. Lougy

Language itself testifies, however, to separation and difference, and, having fallen into speech, Dickens's America, contrary to its own professions, is not Rousseau's pastoral or pre-festival landscape. Rather, in drawing upon the authority of Rousseau, Locke, and others, America denies, through its historical documents and archives, such as The Declaration of Independence, the legitimacy of England's authority. Mid-nineteenth century America is still reenacting, Dickens suggests, its earlier battles with England, battles which were themselves but repetitions of still earlier conflicts structured along kinship lines and reflecting those Oedipal antagonisms and desires identified by Dickens in the introductory chapter. Repetition, Freud tells us in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, enables us to remember or recollect what would otherwise remain repressed, and the most important narratives of America's history, Dickens suggests, are not those that are publicly celebrated, but rather those repressed narratives of desire that are plotted out along lines of repetition.

But just as the opening chapter of Martin Chuzzlewit identifies lacunae--for example, Toby Chuzzlewit's lineage--within those ambiguous documents and legends concerning the Chuzzlewit family history, so too does this particular narrative of America's history, telling of unconscious scenarios and conflicts, find only indirect articulation. Bevan observes that America was born late enough to "escape the ages of bloodshed and cruelty through which other nations have passed" (239), but the novel suggests otherwise, arguing that America perpetuates or repeats those patterns of aggression and violence inscribed in its myths of origin and beginnings. Guilty of the parricide celebrated in such myths (like Freud, Dickens--through the Jonas and Anthony Chuzzlewit story--reminds us that guilt arises not from the act committed but from the act desired), America is caught up within patterns of repetition in which Oedipal conflicts are reenacted in the hostile disputation between "the old World and the New" (449). In its antagonism towards the "old world," and its continued resistance to external change and the forces of acculturation, America in Martin Chuzzlewit seems frozen at a particular point in its history, compelled, like the hysteric, to repeat or relive this moment through various substitutive reenactments of it. And as such, those various incantations heard within the American dialogue are all versions of the same choric refrain.

As emissaries from the old world and thus the most visible threat to the desires and dreams of the new world, Martin and Mark bear the brunt of most of this violence and aggression. Such is the case, for example, with the "Le-vee" scene, often criticized for its lack of credibility, where the Americans see Martin and Mark off to Eden and thus to what the Americans believe will be their certain death. Readers have observed that it is unlikely that such a gathering would have been held to bid farewell to someone as unknown as Martin, and thus have found Dickens guilty of awkwardly inserting his own American experiences into the novel. But the demands of realism in Dickens's novels almost always defer to his stronger imaginative impulses, and this ceremonial farewell ritualistically enacts those aggressive tendencies towards Mark and Martin evident throughout much of their stay in America. When Martin and Mark return from Eden, thus repeating in their own way young Bailey's return from the dead and the return of Anthony Chuzzlewit's voice--through the intercession of Lewsome and Chuffey--from beyond the grave, the Americans are not only surprised but disappointed as well: when young Martin observes that "we've come back alive, you see" (463), Captain Kedgwick replies: "'It ain't the right thing I did expect.... A man ain't got no right to be a public man, unless he meets the public views. Our fashionable people wouldn't have attended his Le-vee, if they had know'd it'" (463). As the narrator observes, "nothing mollified the captain, who persisted in taking it very ill that they had not both died in Eden" (463).