inwardness as inextricable from the ways it is consciously or unconsciously presented to others, and this sense of the self as a role-or as a series of roles-led to a much stronger interest in psychic mechanisms than in the individuals within which these mechanisms are discontinuously played out. To appreciate Dickensian psychology, one must look beyond individual characters to his distribution of psychological dynamics across a range of complicating psychic models. His use of doubles and of diffusive subplots, for instance, fragments
-399- psychological dynamics in various ways, as does his tendency to proliferate related character types and his strong interest in states of altered consciousness. While this decentering psychological approach lends itself to diverse kinds of insight, Dickens is especially perceptive, as one would expect, about such things as displacement and sublimation, or about personality diffusion. 'I think there's a pain somewhere in the room,' says one exemplary subject, Mrs. Gradgrind, 'but I couldn't positively say that I have got it.'
One of the clearest instances of Dickens's more refractive view of the psyche is his perspective on what Freud called the death wish. Dickens's speculations on the death wish are, in fact, among his most important contributions to nineteenth-century thinking about the nature of subjectivity. In general terms, Dickens idealizes a kind of desire so intense as to seek its fulfillment beyond the limits of the self, in an expenditure of energy that thrills at risking personal coherence or safety. His raptures about acting itself always convey this delight at surpassing individual boundaries: 'Assumption has charms for me-I hardly know for how many wild reasons-so delightful, that I feel a loss of, oh! I can't say what exquisite foolery, when I lose a chance of being someone in voice, etc., not at all like myself.' The novels' complex fascination with death revolves around Dickens's perception that a certain kind of human desire abhors all limits and prefers a liberation from the constraints of identity congruous, ultimately, with death. When Anthony Chuzzlewit dies, we are told: 'The principle of life, shut up within his withered frame, fought like a strong devil, mad to be released, and rent its ancient prison-house.' In this sense, Dickens's protagonists' war on their own self-interest can be said to have a libidinal as well as a moral purpose. At the same time, however, Dickens recognized that human beings recoil from the extremity of their own desires for self-transcendence, and seek to retain the exhilaration of such desire in some more safely individualized form. Dickens's own temperament brings to the foreground this psychic division: the same man who wandered restlessly around London, who delighted in acting out the murder of Nancy, and whose morbidity took a hundred bizarre forms ('Whenever I am at Paris, I am dragged by invisible forces into the Morgue,' he wrote in The Uncommercial Traveller), is also the man who idealized marriage and domestic retirement. The novels often revolve systematically around metaphors of imprisonment and release, as a way to formulate this psychic dilemma thematically. -400-
One solution-stageable only within Dickens's diffuse, theatrical conception of the psyche-is to present an illusory psychic synthesis by distributing death drives and life drives to different phases of his narratives. House's remarks on the murder of Nancy call attention to such narrative self-division: 'How utterly remote are these scenes and this state of mind from the earnest moralities of the Preface! To understand the conjunction of such different moods and qualities in a single man is the beginning of serious criticism of Dickens.' Another is to project a single character's conflicting psychic impulses outward across a series of parallel characters. Among the many implications of Dickens's use of doubles, for instance, is that they sometimes express the secret envy of the protagonist for the villain's psychological affinities with violence and death. Many of Dickens's uncannily reckless villains-Quilp in The Old Curiosity Shop is the most extreme example-make the death drive vicariously enjoyable. Still another solution is to conceive single actions that seem to perform both life and death drives at once, even if they fail for that very reason to produce readily imitable moral formulas for behavior. Sidney Carton's enigmatic martyrdom, at the end of A Tale of Two Cities, is represented as both a fulfillment of his long-standing self- destructive impulses, and a moral recovery of himself. Carton's ambiguous, problematic kind of heroism is modeled on a formula Dickens began with Mark Tapley in Martin Chuzzlewit-Mark obsessively and paradoxically seeks to gain glory for himself through adventurous forms of self-sacrifice. One of the most consistent and affirmative ways Dickens represents psychic «integration» is through characters whose heroic self-sacrifice or self-repression seems to embody irreconcilable attitudes toward human boundaries: impulses toward a purifying expenditure of self, and toward a conserving restraint of desire.
Dickens multiplies the psychological significance of death in yet other ways, which makes it difficult to contain Dickensian psychology even within a more expansive model of the death drive like this one. Dickens's devotion to death, in some cases, represents simply a transmogrified Christian conception of transcendence. Death is imagined as a kind of passage to heaven-or at least, to a better place than earth. A more metaphysical undercurrent, however, is the notion that a brush with death provides psychological contact with some kind of foundational reality. As J. Hillis Miller puts it, death in Dickens is represented as 'the mysterious origin of life, and no life that ignores its origin can be other than empty and false.' For this reason, perhaps, near-death -401- experiences are often the prelude to spiritual rebirth in Dickens. Scrooge's self-reformation in 'A Christmas Carol,' is the most famous example of such rebirth, but in the later novels these kinds of experience are quite common, especially in A Tale of Two Cities and Our Mutual Friend. The notion of death as a passageway to truth is not a new idea, but it does have a particular function in Victorian literature generally-not only in Dickens, but also in Tennyson, Arnold, George Eliot, and others. The emphasis in these writers' work falls on mourning and rebirth as a communal ritual, one in which social bonds are strengthened through a shared secularization of moral faith. This communal ritualization of death is central to Dickens's deathbed scenes (and it was restaged outside his novels in the uncanny public spectacles of mourning his readers indulged in for Little Nell, for Paul Dombey, and for Jo in
Besides stretching psychological resolutions across the boundaries of individual psyches-into nonindividualized patterns of communal ritual, or into seemingly contradictory psychic performances-Dickens also refracted psychological states through subtle patterns of symbolic displacement. Thus, for example, the characteristically Victorian guilt over sexual desire that seems to haunt his own life (biographers note his contorted emotional involvement with his sister-in-law, Mary Hogarth, his tendency to carefully controlled, mock infatuations, and the mysterious affair with Ellen Ternan that broke up his marriage) is dissolved in the novels through purely symbolic sexual liberations. In
An unresolvable, refractive, but purely aesthetic tension in Dickens's work that has helped widen his appeal is its striking combination of realism and fantasy. Dickens's admirers have often valued very different aspects of his novels along this axis. His realism is so scrupulous that it has inspired legions of Dickensians to hunt down the originals of the various characters and settings in the novels. More important, it has made Dickens perhaps the most important literary reference point of -402- the Victorian period for historians and sociologists. The partisans of the «unreal» Dickens, however, celebrate his propensity for exaggerations and distortions, which sometimes reach hallucinatory proportions. Among other things, his taste for the uncanny, the improbable, and the grotesque has led to powerful kinds of symbolism that are not available to narratives more bound by the everyday-thus, the fog in
