The Rhetoric of Mystery in The Mystery of Edwin Drood

Sammendrag:

This study explores Charles Dickens's growing unease with his own rhetorical and authorial strategies, as seen in his last, unfinished novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870). As a comparison, I have selected Hard Times (1854), the Dickensian novel in which an authorial pressure is the most clearly felt and most often resisted. When Dickens comes to write Edwin Drood, it is as if that earlier novel is haunting him, not as an example to be emulated but as a strategy to react against, even to reject.

On the surface the two novels have several features in common, not least their engagement in social issues, such as industrialism, education, and the empire. Yet that fact only serves to highlight their different rhetorical strategies. Where the earlier novel immediately plays on a series of governing dichotomies (such as "Facts" as against "Fancy"), and proceeds to preach at the reader, the latter immediately establishes what I would term a rhetoric of mystery, even mystification. The dualism of the earlier novel has in Edwin Drood been internalized.

In Dickens's last novel, the reading process is arduous and without clear pointers, at times almost deceptive. Initial appearances are undercut and apparent dichotomies are blurred. Where Hard Times insistently and systematically separates people, places and ideas into dualistic categories, Edwin Drood sets up these dichotomies only to pull the rug from under the reader's preconceived notions by subverting them. Where the reader of Hard Times all too often is treated like "a heedless little creature very apt to go wrong" (to cite a line from Edwin Drood), the reader of the latter novel is instead treated like an adult, i.e., a fully responsible moral agent living in a morally and spiritually uncertain world.

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