Dickensblog

By Christy McDougall, guest blogger

(Contains spoilers for Our Mutual Friend)

If you are at all familiar with Our Mutual Friend, Dickens’ second-to-last book, you know that one of the big climaxes near the end (there are several of course; this is Dickens, after all) is the attempt by Bradley Headstone to murder Eugene Wrayburn. The first time I read the book, only a few months ago, it struck me quite strongly how the author used the attempt on Eugene’s life to save him. It is a prime
example of eucatastrophe.

J.R.R. Tolkien, in his essay “On Fairy Stories,” coined the term eucatastrophe, calling it “The consolation of fairy-stories, the joy of the happy ending: or more correctly of the good catastrophe, the sudden joyous ‘turn, […] a sudden and miraculous grace,’” where everything turns from terror and unhappiness to joy and relief. Recently it has more commonly come to be used to describe ultimate good coming out of a bad situation. This is the way in which I like to think of it and the way in which I apply it to Our Mutual Friend.

The two characters of Bradley Headstone and Eugene Wrayburn are a study in contrasts. Bradley Headstone: a low-class boy who pursued education and suppressed a “fiery (though smouldering)” nature to raise himself and become the schoolmaster he is at the time of the story. He is described as, above all, decent, “in his decent black coat and waistcoat, and decent white shirt, and decent formal black tie, and decent pantaloons of pepper and salt, with his decent silver watch in his pocket and its decent hair guard around his neck.” Over the course of the story, however, he gradually loses his self-imposed decency and becomes a maddened bull. Eugene Wrayburn: an upper-class young man, combining the elegance and indolence of a cat in the sun, wasting his life in boredom and dissolution, and doing it with exquisite insolence. He has a profession but does not pursue it. He seems to care for nothing and to find life a great bore.

Both Bradley and Eugene fall for the same woman, Lizzie Hexam, both in ways typical of their characters. Bradley falls violently into an overwhelming passion and believes he can force Lizzie into marriage with him by his very decency, as he forced himself into his repressive role of schoolmaster. Eugene finds himself drifting into an emotional connection he never expected and makes no effort to drift out again, unsure of what he is feeling, unsure of what it means, unsure of his intentions toward the lady, and hardly really caring, but finding himself pursuing some of his first unselfish actions for her. Perhaps it is only the threats and bullying of the wildly
jealous Bradley that spur him on to an active pursuit of Lizzie Hexam.

One evening, Bradley attacks him, fully intending to beat him to death, and dumps him in the river to drown. Eugene is rescued and slowly, over the course of months, recovers, but he is never the same man again. Bradley, haunted by the fear of discovery, eventually drowns himself.

It is clear that Bradley Headstone is the villain of the piece. Eugene Wrayburn, however, is far from the hero. He reminds me of a minor sort of Sydney Carton, neither so self-destructive nor so self-sacrificing as Sydney, wasting himself on idleness but not drinking himself to death, changed for the better by loving a woman but not willing to sacrifice himself for her. From the beginning, the majority of his actions are selfish. Unwilling to marry Lizzie because of the vast difference in their positions, he is also too captivated and selfish to go away and leave her in peace. Though poor Lizzie Hexam, loving him and knowing he will never marry her, begs him to leave and let her live in peace with only the memory of him, he knows he has power over
her and makes a reckless decision to see if he can get her to yield to him despite her goodness and purity. Eugene Wrayburn chooses himself over the good of the woman he loves, showing himself to be selfish and unthinking, no Sydney Carton at all at the final test. He is willing to degrade and destroy Lizzie Hexam for the sake of his own pleasure.

It is at this moment that Bradley strikes, and in so doing, he saves Eugene from himself and Lizzie from Eugene. This is the eucatastrophe of their story, the good catastrophe, the “sudden and miraculous grace” in a situation that appears to have no miracle, no goodness, and no grace. Bradley does a horrible thing, vicious and brutal and passionate and plain nasty, and because of it Eugene faces himself, confronts his own nature, realizes what he deserves, what Lizzie deserves, and devotes
what he thinks are his last breaths to doing what is right for her. I said above that because of the attack he is never the same man again; I meant he becomes a better man, a humble, unselfish man, a man who turns away from his own selfishness with a shudder and gives himself to the well-being of the woman he would once have degraded. All because a man who hated him tried to murder him. As the long-suffering protagonist in the biblical story of Joseph and the Coat of Many Colors says to the men who caused all his suffering, “As for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good” (Genesis 50:20). That is a eucatastrophe.