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

Criticism, Fall, 1994 by Robert E. Lougy

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I have always been haunted by this image, and during one

period of my life it kept recurring in my dreams: A person

finds himself in a world of children, from which he cannot

escape. And suddenly childhood, which we all lyricize and

adore, reveals itself as pure horror.

--Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting(19)

In Kundera's novel, a group of children hound Tamina, one of its central characters, to death; and just as Dickens's Americans desire the deaths of Mark and Martin, so too does America in Martin Chuzzlewit, compulsively fixed or frozen on images of rebirth and a new childhood, reveal itself as "pure horror." The grotesque in Dickens often assumes the form of something that seems to exist outside of nature and whose misshapen or distorted gestures and appearance reveal a psychic imbalance or disequilibrium. This is particularly the case in Dickens with the adult who has failed to outgrow childhood or the child who has never known childhood. In the case of the latter, we only have to think of the memorable Smallweed family in Bleak House--"little old men and women there have been, but no child, until Mr. Smallweed's grandmother, now living, became weak in her intellect, and fell (for the first time) into a childish state."(20) Similarly, examples of infantilism as an image of the grotesque abound in Dickens, including Harold Skimpole of Bleak House and Fledgeby and Bella Wilfer's father in Our Mutual Friend, men whose boyishly pink and beardless faces suggest something more than an hormonal inadequacy.

But in such cases, the grotesque is associated with particular individuals or families. In the American episodes of Martin Chuzzlewit, on the other hand, Dickens turns his attention to a whole nation. For if the Americans mythicize themselves as children, Dickens explores the soft underbelly or psychic inversion of this myth, locating evidence of this infantilism not only in the excremental vision of the American newspapers, but also in the voracious orality of its citizens. "What culture consciously prohibits," writes Catherine Clement, "it creates in the form of abnormality," and the abnormal, as gesture and act, discloses the site of the prohibited in Martin Chuzzlewit.(21) Two scenes in particular stand forth as such sites, examples of Roland Barthes's "text of bliss," that which "discomforts [and]...unsettles the reader's historical, cultural, psychological assumptions, the consistency of his tastes, values, memories" (The Pleasure of the Text, 14). In Martin Chuzzlewit, as in the dream, the site of the repressed is acknowledged by the overdetermined moment, as it escapes through flaws or torn seams upon the surface of the text. The first such is the dining scene at Mrs. Pawkins's boarding house: "all the knives and forks were working away at a rate that was quite alarming; very few words were spoken; and everybody seemed to eat his utmost in selfdefense, as if a famine were expected tomorrow, morning, and it had become high time to assert the first law of nature" (232). This pre-Darwinian "first law of nature" is taken to its grotesque extreme, stripped of all restraint or facade: