Edwin Drood: Drowned?

An unfinished novel that continues to puzzle readers, Charles Dickens’s Mystery of Edwin Drood offers us an opportunity to explore and test the possible textual application of Abraham and Torok’s “phantom.” In creating a style adequate to describing the nineteenth century’s dissolution of previous cultural relations, which left their “cultural expressions and their myths as indecipherable to us as so many dead languages or undecipherable codices" (Jameson 1983: 69), Dickens confronted the emptiness of the alienated subject, trapped within a structure that no longer seemed to “fit” the hypothesized self. Certain recurrent character types, Wemmick, for example, in Great Expectations, or Grewgious, the “angular” guardian of Rosa in The Mystery of Edwin Drood, are distorted by professional activities until they seem mechanical in externals, but still embody, quite unexpectedly, a set of previous cultural relations like an inappropriate blueprint of decency; they have, against the odds, “good hearts” where one would expect to find only some sort of infernal machine or system of weights and pulleys.

In The Mystery of Edwin Drood this persistence of older social structures is actualized both in Grewgious and in the old cathedral town of Cloisterham, set against the “gritty" and illimitable aspects of London. As Jameson says, “Because we can no longer think the figures of the sacred from within, we transform their external forms into aesthetic objects, but also monuments, pyramids, altars, presumed to have an inside, yet housing powers that will forever remain a mystery to us” (ibid.: 252). Cloisterham is projected as a repository of enigmatic relics, both human and inhuman: in the Cloisters, the old stone of the cathedral, particularly its complicated structure of undercroft, passages, and tombs; in its associated eccentric figures, especially Durdles, the stone mason, but also the Topses and even Crisparkle, the minor canon whose muscular Christianity seems itself an impotent survival of lost, older value structures; in the Nuns’ House Ladies Academy, and in the gate house which stands between the cathedral close and the outer world of buses and trains, with one window looking out and another looking within, where Dickens locates the novel’s central character, John jasper.

In a word, a city of another and bygone age is Cloisterham, with its hoarse Cathedral bell, its hoarse rooks hovering about the Cathedral tower, its hoarser and less distinct rocks in the stalls far beneath. Fragments of old wall, saint’s chapel, chapter-house, convent, and monastery, have got incongruously 0r obstructively built into many of its houses and gardens, much as kindred jumbled notions have become incorporated into many of its citizens’ minds. All things in it are of the past. (Dickens 1972 [1870]: 14)

Except, of course, John Jasper. Jasper is an inversion of the other character type I have mentioned: whereas Wemmick or Grewgious have taken their external impress from the commercial or industrial disjunctions of the new age, while preserving archaic inner selves, jasper is constrained by economic circumstances to perform an ancient role, cathedral choirmaster, within which he riots in a new, perverted freedom. In understanding such inversion, Jameson’s explanation of the new subject is applicable:

The concept of reification . . . conveys the historical situation in which the emergence of the ego or centered subject can be understood: the dissolution of the older organic or hierarchical social groups, the universal commodification of the labor-power of individuals and their confrontation as equivalent units within the framework of the market, the anomie of these now “free” and isolated individual subjects to which the protective development of a monadic armature alone comes as something of a compensation. (Jameson 1983: 154)

This is the implicit occasion which brings into being Dickens's oppositions of old and new forms in The Mystery of Edwin Drood. Jasper’s “key note,” the secret he unknowingly carries, is struck early in the novel, when he explains himself to his nephew Edwin:

“I hate it. The cramped monotony of my existence grinds me away by the grain. How does our service sound to you?”

[Drood:] “Beautiful! Quite Celestial!"

“It often sounds to me quite devilish, I am so weary of it! The echoes of my own voice among the arches seem to mock me with my daily drudging round. No wretched monk who droned his life away in that gloomy place, before me, can have been more tired of it than I am. He could take for relief (and did take) to carving demons out of the stalls and seats and desks. What shall I do? Must I take to carving them out of my heart?" (Dickens 1972 [1870]: 11)

The outworn models of the past are ransacked by jasper’s alienated, opium-addicted, contemporary consciousness to discover an appropriate similitude, as though the monks had carved their demons out of boredom and ennui instead of illustrating their acceptance of the powers of darkness in a belief structure that is, to Jasper, as “indecipherable as a dead language."

Jasper is immured in the outward self of ancient custom and propriety, below which is another “secret” self: he is able to maintain his front even when ravaged by opium or consumed with murderous passion for Rosa. Dickens dramatizes this immurement in the scene that stands at the emotional center of his narrative, when jasper acknowledges his passion, virtually admits Edwin’s murder, and threatens Rosa with the death of Neville Landless. In the garden, under the windows of the Nuns’ House, where he leans idly against the sundial to conceal his agitation from observers, jasper announces his violent adoration and induces a corresponding excitement in Rosa, not of erotic arousal but of terror.

“In the distasteful work of the day, in the wakeful misery of the night, girded by sordid realities, or wandering through Paradises and Hells 0f visions into which I rushed, carrying your image in my arms, I loved you madly.”

If anything could make his words more hideous to her than they are in themselves, it would be the contrast between the violence of his look and delivery, and the composure of his assumed attitude.

“I endured all in silence. So long as you were his, or so long as I supposed you to be his, I hid my secret loyally. Did I not?”

This lie, so gross, while the mere words in which it is told are so true, is more than Rosa can endure. . . . His preservation of his easy attitude rendering his working features and his convulsive hands absolutely diabolical, he returns, with a fierce extreme of admiration. . . . Her panting breathing comes and goes as if it would choke her; but with a repressive hand upon her bosom, she remains. . . . A film comes over the eyes she raises for an instant, as though he had turned her faint. (Ibid.: 171)

Jasper’s buried self, entombed within its protective carapace, is described as demonic, without restraint or limit; anomie is registered in the available vocabulary, which in Cloisterham is, of course, that of diabolism, the language of the gothic.

The film over Rosa’s eyes, one of the motifs of Edwin Drood, is a symptom of opium addiction and its appearance here represents the uncanny mesmeric power Jasper has over Rosa, but it also serves as an index of her blindness or lack of self-knowledge: Rosa cannot afford to see what her unconscious knows. Another instance of this occurs when Rosa is singing, watched by the music master.

The song went on. It was a sorrowful strain of parting, and the fresh young voice was very plaintive and tender. As jasper watched the pretty lips, and ever and again hinted the one note, as though it were a low whisper from himself, the voice became a little less steady, until all at once the singer broke into a burst of tears, and shrieked out, with her hands over her eyes: “I can’t bear this! I am frightened! Take me away!” (Ibid.: 51)

The silent process of handing over the secret, the operation of the phantom, is apparent when Rosa subsequently explains her fit to Helena Landless.

He terrifies me. He haunts my thoughts, like a dreadful ghost. I feel that I am never safe from him. I feel as if he could pass in through the wall when he is spoken of. . . . He has made a slave of me with his looks. He has forced me to understand him, without his saying a word; and he has forced me to keep silence, without his uttering a threat. When I play, he never moves his eyes from my hands. When I sing, he never moves his eyes from my lips. When he corrects me, and strikes a note, or a chord, or plays a passage, he himself is in the sounds, whispering that he pursues me as a lover, and commanding me to keep his secret. I avoid his eyes, but he forces me to see them without looking at them, Even when a glaze comes over them (which is sometimes the case), and he seems to wander away into a frightful sort of dream in which he threatens most, he obliges me to know it, and to know that he is sitting close at my side, more terrible to me than ever, (Ibid; 54)

The creation of a fictional object of dread operates in the same manner as the creation of an object of desire: “a narrative object becomes desirable whenever a character is observed to desire it” (Jameson 1983: 156). Jasper’s role as dreaded object is the result of considerable narrative investment of the kind quoted above, just as Rosa’s function as desirable ingenue is a matter of the effects she is represented as producing in others.

Jasper is closely associated with Mr. Sapsea, auctioneer and mayor of Cloisterham (hence representative of its public life), whose monument to his wife performs a double internment since she is entombed physically, but also in the inscription, as his reverential wife. Although he has never traveled, and his claim to knowledge of the great world is based simply on handling its objects, Sapsea’s name associates him pejoratively with the world of ships and foreign lands, which is generally in the novel given a positive weighting. The colonial experience becomes another “phantom” that dominates the action without being acknowledged to do so: Rosa falls in love with Tartar, a retired sailor, whose room is like the interior of a well-kept ship, and who takes her on an idyllic Thames river trip. (But we must note here the pejorative implication of his name too; to be a “tartar” is a negative aspect of the exotic and, surely, also conveys a peculiar sexual innuendo.) Neville and Helena Landless are obviously of “foreign” parts, in all senses, but behave with dignity and kindness; so it seems that the exotic world of the sea and foreign lands is some sort of positive figure, as opposed to the introversions of Cloisterham and the grimy trap of London. Even Edwin, the hollow victim, is booked for travel: if he had lived, he was to have set out for Egypt and embarked on schemes for colonial improvement.

In The Mystery of Edwin Drood, then, the colonial experience is implicitly represented as a healthy openness, an antidote to both the stifling past and the degenerate present of England. But two reservations must be entered: Rosa’s distaste for tombs is expressed in terms which remind us that these exist not only in Canterbury/Cloisterham, but quintessentially “out there” in Egypt; and the opium den (near the Thames, avenue to the outside world) in which Jasper indulges his secret habit is peopled by debased forms of “foreign” life, the Lascar and the Chinaman. Neville and Helena‘s frequently stressed darkness of complexion rules them out as sexual partners: why else would we find the introduction of a second hero figure, in Tartar, when that role is so capably and structurally filled by Neville. Here we can see the unadmitted cultural “secret" of racism at work: Dickens would not (perhaps could not) admit just why Neville wouldn’t do for Rosa, but he and his readers would have had a sure sense of the truth nevertheless. Since the patterning of the book opposes openness and the sea to the hermetic enclosures of the old city and death, it is possible to infer that the fate of Edwin Drood is to be entombed, as yet another secret. Jasper’s moonlight expedition with Durdles into the recesses of the cathedral only makes sense if this is the case, and his elaborate byplay with Durdle’s keys (to the crypt and, specifically, to Sapsea’s mausoleum) is another pointer to immurement (Dickens 1972 [1870]: 31).

Yet, as John Forster claimed, there is a strong suggestion that Edwin Drood has been drowned or disposed ofin quicklime (see Nicoll 1912: 23). There is also some mystification involving his belongings and the river. Of course, one can argue that, since Dickens aimed to mislead, such possibilities should not be seriously entertained. But this is not so much a speculation as an observation: while the book is structured by the entombment motif and the thematics of stone, the encrypted meaning of Drood’s name is drowned. The whole play of inner and outer, public and private, is thus given a further dimension in order to generate the uncanny effect expected in such a mystery story. Edwin is both entombed and drowned: drowned in person perhaps, but entombed as the absent presence, the unsayable Thing in the empty crypt.

Cloisterham is also a city of death: “a monotonous, silent city, deriving an earthy flavour throughout, from its Cathedral crypt, and so abounding in vestiges of monastic graves, that the Cloisterham children grow small salad in the dust of abbots and abbesses, and make dirt pies of nuns and friars” (Dickens 1972 [1870]: 14). The drive toward death that Dickens describes has affinities with Freud‘s theory of the death instinct, promulgated to explain instances of repetitive, obsessional behavior and, of course, central in considering the effect of uncanniness. This theory is relevant to the idea of the phantom, as Abraham observes in “Notes on the Phantom."

A surprising fact gradually emerges: the work of the phantom coincides in every respect with Freud’s description of the death instinct. First of all, it has no energy of its own; it cannot be “abreacted,” merely designated. Second, it pursues in silence its work of disarray. Let us add that the phantom is sustained by secreted words, invisible gnomes whose aim is to wreak havoc, from within the unconscious, in the coherence of logical progression. Finally, it gives rise to endless repetition and, more often than not, eludes rationalization. (Abraham 1987: 291)

The ineffectual, pointless, and neurotic nature of jasper’s phantom; his repetitive and obsessive behavior, his possession, as it were, by the stereotyped cultural demonism which unites the archaic traces of a lost religion in its negative aspects with the presumptively debased aspects of the contemporary “foreign" (the opium, the degenerate woman, the Chinaman, the Lascar), along with the inappropriate and hopeless passion for Rosa and the envy of his more fortunate ward, amount to a structure of this kind. But it would be incorrect to see jasper alone as haunted: the whole novel is haunted, by the twin “ghosts” of the archaic demonism inscribed in the town and of the “foreign” demonism characterizing contemporary London, as a doorway to the colonies through its great river and a shadow of cultural sterility falling across Cloisterham.