For over a century serious Dickens scholars and amateur Droodians alike have speculated on every possible permutation of the plot of The Mystery of Edwin Drood. In view of the controversies which have invariably arisen over each new solution, it is surprising that one aspect of the story has provoked little debate: the marriages that, in typical Dickensian fashion, might conclude the novel. Although John Forster's resolution of the plot in his Life of Dickens has come under fire from all sides, few have challenged his conclusions on matrimonial matters: "Rosa was free to marry Tartar, and Crisparkle the sister of Landless, who was himself, I think, to have perished in assisting Tartar finally to unmask and seize the murderer."' Setting aside for a moment the question of whether Forster's predictions seem plausible, one still marvels at how casually they have been accepted.* Only a handful of twentieth- century commentators even deal with the problem at all; those who do unanimously accept Tartar, especially, as an "amans ex machina" introduced late in the story "to provide a love interest for Rosa." Drood after all offers an unsolved murder mystery, and with the unmasking of Dick Datchery and the criminal psychology of John Jasper left forever to the imagination, a wedding seems of slight importance.

But Drood, mystery though it be, is not simply an Agatha Christie type of puzzler. It is Charles Dickens's last work. As Angus Wilson argues, Dickens had included mysteries in his novels ever since Oliver Twist, and Wilson sees no reason to assume that "Charles Dickens in his last novel had departed completely from the kind of novels that he had previously produced, nothing to suggest that he was intent upon creating a novel whose major interest lay solely in suspense and mystery, ... less still upon writing the sort of complex technical mystery story which so many of the ingenious unravellers of Drood's puzzle have invented."

And during the latter part of his career love and marriage had taken on great significance for Dickens. J. Hillis Miller maintains that in his later novels Dickens repeatedly sets against man's destructive relationship to society "an increasingly profound analysis of the mystery of a direct relation between two people without intermediary: the relation of love." Certainly a substantial portion of the thematic texture of works such as Little Dorrit, Great Expectations, and Our Mutual Friend derives from the love relations of Arthur Clennam and Amy Dorrit, Pip and Estella, Bella Wilfer and John Harmon, Eugene Wrayburn and Lizzie Hexam. Their marriages—or the decision not to marry in the original ending of Great Expectations—constitute a resolution of the conflicts in their respective novels.

The major conflicts in Drood revolve around Rosa Bud. John Jasper is doubtless the most intriguing personality in the novel, but "Rosebud" stands at the center of a plot structure in which passion and sexual jealousy motivate much of the action. Edwin, Jasper, and Neville involve themselves one way or another in the pursuit of her affections. Jasper has apparently murdered in order to obtain them. Grewgious, who had aspired silently for her mother's love, is her guardian and substitute father. Helena becomes her close friend, and through the Landlesses Crisparkle and Tartar rally to her support. Were she merely a passive nexus for this complex of character relationships, she would deserve more study than she has received. But the novel in addition contains several indications that Rosa was to be an active heroine as well, the leading figure in a Bildungsroman. Her name, Rosa Bud, rather over- obviously suggests such an interpretation. Grewgious puns on the name when he tries to explain his singular course of maturation: "No personality is intended towards the name you will so soon change, when J remark that while the general growth of people seem to have come into existence, buds, I seem to have come into existence a chip. I was a chip— and a very dry one—when I first became aware of myself." When Drood opens, Rosa has spent almost her entire life in the womblike security of the Nuns' House. Dickens emphasizes the fact that she has never been forced to cope with any serious problems:

Thus Rosa had grown to be an amiable, giddy, wilful, winning little creature; spoilt, in the sense of counting upon kindness from all around her; but not in the sense of repaying it with indifference. Possessing an exhaustless well of affection in her nature, its sparkling waters had freshened and brightened the Nuns' House for years, and yet its depths had never been moved: what might betide when that came to pass; what developing changes might fall upon the heedless head, and light heart, then; remained to be seen (pp. 63-64).

Soon Edwin's disappearance and Jasper's advances force her to London and the realization that life has more unpleasant aspects than she had hitherto suspected. In a passage which gives chapter 22 its title she muses on the "gritty state of things":

"Cannot people get through life without gritty stages, I wonder!" Rosa thought next day, when the town was very gritty again, and everything had a strange and an uncomfortable appearance on it of seeming to wait for something that wouldn't come. No. She began to think, that, now the Cloisterham school-days had glided past and gone, the gritty stages would begin to set in at intervals and make themselves wearily known! (p. 197).

Marriage will erase the Bud and no doubt symbolize Rosa's attainment of a mature relationship with the world around her. It emerges, therefore, as a question inextricably bound up with the deeper meaning of the novel, a crowning expression of its themes and images. While an analysis of those themes and images cannot with certainty reveal who Rosa's husband was to be, it can point up the significance of each of the possible marriages as resolutions to both the novel's major conflicts and to Dickens's brilliant career.

Droods philosophic rather than literal mystery seems to be the same one that had absorbed its author's attentions from the outset: How is man to survive, both physically and spiritually, in a world increasingly fragmented, chaotic, and impersonal? The gritty stages must come; how can one deal with them? In previous novels Dickens had created powerful symbols for this growing lack of meaning in the cosmos—the railroad in Dombey and Son, the fog of Bleak House, the factory smoke of Coketown, the dust heaps of Our Mutual Friend. Drood is no exception. Here, however, the symbolism is twofold. Dickens introduces it in the novel's first paragraph, which describes one of John Jasper's opium dreams:

An ancient English Cathedral town? How can the ancient English Cathedral town be there! The well-known massive grey square tower of its old Cathedral? How can that be here! there is no spike of rusty iron in the air between the eye and it from any point of the real prospect. What IS the spike that intervenes' and who has set it up? Maybe it is set up by the Sultan's orders for the impaling of a horde of Turkish robbers, one by one. It is so, for cymbals clash, and the Sultan goes by to his palace in long procession. Ten thousand scimitars flash in the sunlight, and thrice ten thousand dancing- girls strew flowers. Then, follow white elephants caparisoned in countless gorgeous colors, and infinite in number and attendants. Still, the Cathedral Tower rises in the background, where it cannot be, and still no writhing figure is on the grim spike (p. 1).

Concerning this passage, Dickens noted in his Number Plans: "Touch the Key note" (see p. 220).

In one of the most perceptive readings of Drood to date, Charles Mitchell identifies the Sultan's procession and the Cathedral spire as manifestations of the warring inner and outer selves. Mitchell defines duality in Jasper, and all men, as follows:

The inner man is that part of a person which determines his being as an entity separate from the world around him. It includes those faculties which determine what is real within the individual consciousness, whereas the outer man is that part of a man which provides him with a reality outside his individual consciousness, in the world. In their ideal states the inner and outer parts of man are so balanced and blended that they cannot be distinguished analytically, but in fallen or corrupted man, these two conditions of self become separated. ... For Dickens the paradox of the dualistic self is that while the exterior man makes himself unreal by forsaking his inner self, the interior man makes himself unreal by-losing contact with the outside world.

The treatment of this duality and its representation in terms of two opposing symbolic patterns does not mark an innovation in Dickens's technique; the contrast between Gradgrind's Coketown and Sleary's Circus in Hard Times offers perhaps the closest analogue. But the manner in which Dickens views private and public man, imagination and social role, has altered significantly. Although he had always urged a balance of the two as the only path to survival, the primary danger of imbalance had previously emanated from the outer world. Institutions like the railroad, Chancery, or the Circumlocution Office threaten to overpower individuality and snuff out the imagination. The world of fantasy, fairy tale, and romance must subsume Gradgrindery, thereby humanizing it. And it is true that in Drood the Cathedral, and the whole ethos of Cloisterham it stands for, offer little hope for life. Cloisterham exists in a state of temporal stasis and physical decay. The narration provides extensive tours of its tombs and mouldering crypts. We learn that "All things in it are of the past." It is "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" (pp. 14-15). However, if living by the outer self leads to this death in life, the interior fantasy life no longer retains the beneficence of Sleary's. As Angus Wilson observes: "Fancy and wonder have been taken over by the black, the gothic and the evil forces of Jasper" (p. 24). The Arabian Nights fairy tale — that early nurturer of Dickens's own imagination — has metamorphosed into an opium dream of violent death. Cloisterham is stagnant but safe; the imagination has lethal tendencies.

So the usual Dickensian process reverses itself as it becomes necessary for the outer life to subsume fantasy, as the soil of the Cathedral town assimilates its legendary medieval inhabitants. Dickens also indicates that a very small layer of vitality suffices to redeem Cloisterham's decay: "The most abundant and the most agreeable evidences of progressing life in Cloisterham are the evidences of vegetable life in many gardens" (p. 15). A description of Minor Canon Corner, the residence of Septimus Crisparkle, one of the most positive characters in the novel, further illustrates this principle, using the symbolic terms of romance versus reality which prevail in Drood:

Swaggering fighting men had had their centuries of ramping and raving about Minor Canon Corner, and beaten serfs had had their centuries of drudging and dying there, and powerful monks had had their centuries of being sometimes useful and sometimes harmful there, and behold they were all gone out of Minor Canon Corner, and so much the better. Perhaps one of the highest uses of their ever having been there was that there might be left behind, that blessed air of tranquility which pervaded Minor Canon Corner, and that serenely romantic state of the mind—productive for the most part of pity and forbearance—which is engendered by a sorrowful story that is all told, or a pathetic play that is played out (pp. 39-40).

When abstracted to a story to move others, fantasy retains curative spiritual powers. But romance in the making often results from the most brutal individuality of its "heroes." To read romances may be necessary if one is to avoid desiccation of the soul; to live in one may well produce unhappiness and antisocial impulses. For example, Rosa and Edwin's betrothal furnishes the sentimental fantasy needed to leaven the confining routine of Nuns' House for both the students and their headmistress, Miss Twinkleton. Yet this situation, so romantic to others, leaves Edwin and Rosa miserable. Similarly, the music Jasper creates delights his nephew (and Cloisterham) as "Beautiful! Quite celestial," while torturing its maker: "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" (p. 11). One's own fantasies are inevitably distorted and thrown back in one's face by the pressures of unyielding external reality.

Through Jasper, particularly, Dickens links the expression of art with the story that is all told, the artist with the actor in the tale for whom its working out was sorrowful. He further implies that the fantasy-making inner self achieves its only contact with the outer world through artistic creation. Dickens's own art, which "dwelt upon the romantic side of familiar things,"8 might serve as a paradigm of this activity. However, if Jasper is, as Edmund Wilson and others have suggested, a pharmakos upon whom Dickens has loaded his guilt over the Ellen Ternan affair, the guilt may also have caused him to search out any connection between his "crimes" and his art. There is a definite suggestion that the impulses which make Jasper an artist may also make him a criminal. His highly developed inner self, the source of his music, is frustrated by the "cramped monotony of my existence" in Cloisterham. To free itself, the imagination must push back the restraints of public responsibility, so Jasper takes refuge in the opium dens of London, where he apparently conceives and rehearses the final break with external obligation—the murder of Edwin Drood, his beloved nephew.

Other characters in the novel who display artistic tendencies likewise suffer from ego-centered distortions of experience and lose sensitivity to the needs of others, although not to Jasper's homicidal extreme. Edwin's indifferent portrait of "Pussy" proceeds from a nature "too self-conscious and self-satisfied" (p. 169). He can neither accept his preordained future cheerfully nor take the pains necessary to alter it. The rudeness and casual bigotry he directs toward Neville also indicate a refusal to recognize the needs of anyone but himself. The clerk Bazzard feels humiliated about his subordinate position to his benefactor Grewgious, simply because the authorship of an unproduced tragedy, The Thorn of Anxiety, has given him a severe case of artistic snobbery. Even Sapsea, with his fantastic epitaph for his browbeaten wife and his wild reconstructions of events, may be considered an artist of sorts; there is no doubt of his utter selfishness and blindness to objective fact.1'

By using an Arabian Nights setting to symbolize the inner self in Jasper's dream, Dickens has created a handy metaphorical shorthand to differentiate the positive and negative capabilities of the imagination. Throughout the novel he merely splits the image, with the fairy tale, romance, or legend representing fantasy's innocent and therapeutic function, while the Orient stands for its dangers. The Cloisterham Cathedral and its environs similarly signify external reality and the predominance of the outer man. As Rosa begins her life journey, the characters she encounters display varying degrees of balance or imbalance between the two halves of self. While waging their own battles to gain an equilibrium, the other characters additionally serve as object lessons to guide Rosa in the formation of her personality. She must judge them only by their actions and words, but the reader receives instant insight into characters through the image patterns with which they are associated.

Much has been written about the repeated references to the East in Drood, but because they occur in a nominal mystery, they have usually been taken literally as clues rather than metaphorically.10 But although the literal explanations often become farfetched, tracing the East as a symbol leads one consistently to those who become so wrapped up in their dreams that they ignore the needs of others, feel utterly superior to them, and therefore claim in certain circumstances the right to do violence to them. Jasper, in whom the imbalance is most extreme, fairly reeks of the Orient (and finds Cloisterham the most confining). He has a dark complexion, smokes opium among Chinamen and Lascars in a den toward which he travels "eastward and still eastward through the stale streets" of London, and, according to Howard Duffield, exhibits characteristics of a member of the Indian Thugee cult." Edwin plans a career as an engineer in Egypt. Neville Landless comes from Ceylon and has a "tigerish" element in his blood which manifests itself through a violent, ungovernable temper. Like Jasper's, his frustrations arise from a feeling of superiority to his surroundings, where he was brought up "among abject and servile dependents, of an inferior race" under the "strong hand" of a tyrannical guardian. Although actually sprung from the Norfolk yeomanry, Bazzard has "a general air of having been reared under the shadow of that baleful tree of Java which has given shelter to more lies than the whole botanical kingdom" (p. 90). Sapsea declares he has put his finger on 'Pekin, Nankin, and Canton.' It is the same with Japan, with Egypt, and with bamboo and sandalwood from the East Indies" (p. 26). The pompous philanthropist Honeythunder, who wants to remake the world in his own distorted image, is one of "your regular Professors of all degrees (who] run amuck like so many mad Malays" (p. 152). He is also connected with certain oriental charities which bring the Landlesses under his doubtful tutelage.

Since Dickens's primary concern in Drood is the danger of the self detaching itself from reality, he portrays fewer characters who suffer a deficiency of imagination and fantasy; but those he does offer all have affinity with Cloisterham. "Stony" Durdles becomes almost indistinguishable from the tombs he tends. The angular Grewgious is surrounded with images of sand, woodenness, and dryness. His dwelling at Staple Inn, an "ancient" "smoky nook," seems a kind of Cloisterham— Metropolitan Branch, and Dickens links the two in his initial description: "In the days when Cloisterham took offence at the existence of a railroad afar off, ... in those days no neighboring architecture of lofty proportions had arisen to overshadow Staple Inn. The westering sun bestowed bright glances on it, and the southward wind blew into it unimpeded" (p. 88, my italics). Miss Twinkleton, proprietress of the Nuns* House, hilariously bowdlerizes any romantic stories Rosa manages to obtain.

Even at their most unimaginative, however, these characters appear comic rather than threatening. They do not produce the blighting effect of a Dombey Senior or Gradgrind, while Jasper menaces many of the other main characters, an indication of how radically Dickens has shifted ground. Moreover, Grewgious and Miss Twinkleton show signs of righting the disharmony in their personalities. She attains a tenuous balance through a complete split, forming "two states of consciousness which never clash." By day the matter-of-fact schoolmistress, she is by night a sentimental gossip, harboring memories of an amorous season at Tunbridge Wells. But for Grewgious Dickens offers hope of a genuine reintegration of inner and outer man. Rosa's plight revives in him the feelings of love he never permitted himself to express to her mother, and the narrator informs us that "there are such unexplored romantic nooks in the unlikeliest men" (p. 99). Some of those with excessively developed inner selves, most notably Neville and Edwin, also struggle to regain equilibrium, but Dickens gives them a much rockier path.

There are, however, two characters who have already achieved a harmonious being by overcoming, respectively, Eastern and Cloisterham tendencies: Helena Landless and Minor Canon Crisparkle. Neville's account of their childhood reveals that his twin was once more "tigerish" than he. Yet as an adult, in Crisparkle's words, "Your sister has learnt how to govern what is proud in her nature. She can dominate it even when it is wounded through her sympathy with you" (p. 155). A member of the Cathedral clergy, Crisparkle has somehow escaped its deathly shadow. (Significantly, six elder brothers have died in infancy.) He inhabits that same Minor Canon Corner which bygone romance has so pleasantly varnished. His healthy ego is symbolized by his vigorous swimming through which, Mitchell observes, he dives "into the deep waters of self' (p. 245). It seems probable that he and Helena may wed at the end of the novel, perhaps providing a model for Rosa and her prospective mate in their efforts to achieve a similar harmony.

With Drood only half completed, it is difficult to tell how much of a struggle Rosa was to have in reconciling her self with the world around it, or even if she was to accomplish the reconciliation. But the beginnings of a struggle are clearly indicated. At Nuns' House Rosa is a "fairy- figure," selfish with the child's innocent egocentrism, not that of the maladjusted adult. Since her desires have as yet met little opposition, however, her ability to cope with a reality which frustrates the inner self has not been tested. The testing begins when her marriage to Edwin moves out of the vague future and into the imminent present. A conversation in which the two manufacture a fictitious fiancée for Edwin extremely unlike herself allows Rosa, under the cover of "let's pretend," to express her dissatisfaction at the prospect of being carried off to Egypt to live among "Arabs, and Turks, and Fellahs, and people," and especially the Pyramids (p. 21). In her ability to laugh at Edwin's conceited fantasies about his Eastern adventure—he plans "to change the whole condition of an underdeveloped country"—Rosa may seem more realistic than he. Yet during the entire exchange she is chewing on Lumps-of- Delight, "a Turkish sweetmeat, sir." She only rejects Edwin's East, including its unromantic "boilers and things," because it is not hers, does not fulfill her own inner fantasies.

The nature of those fantasies emerges more clearly when she runs up against the gritty stages after her flight to London. Seeking an escape from an evermore unbearable reality, she finds Lieutenant Tartar, the near-unanimous choice for Mr. Rosa Bud. While there can be no doubt that Rosa becomes infatuated with Tartar almost instantly, the images that surround him suggest that her attachment is not altogether healthy. I have purposely refrained from mentioning Tartar in reference to the Cloisterham/East dichotomy thus far, because he at first seems an exception to it. Although he appears to be a thoroughly admirable and well-balanced young man, Dickens has overwhelmed him with both Eastern and fairy tale associations. His name, Duffield remarks, is "as redolent of the East as a whiff of hashish" (p. 582); it is moreover a name that Carlyle, who influenced Dickens considerably, frequently uses to characterize particularly barbarous Orientals. His deep tan suggests naval voyages to tropical, possibly Indian, climes. When Rosa ascends to his rooftop garden apartment, she seems "to get into a marvelous country that came into sudden bloom like the country on the summit of the magic beanstalk" (pp. 187-88). There he serves her "a dazzling enchanted repast," consisting of "wonderful macaroons, glittering liqueurs, magically preserved tropical spices and jellies of celestial tropical fruits" (p. 192). And when, during their schooldays, he saved Crisparkle from drowning, he struck out for the shore "like a water-giant" (p. 184).

Yet Tartar displays no evidence of the psychological disturbances which trouble all other characters in the novel who are linked with the East. One possible explanation is that he has no psyche to disturb. Dickens never allows us inside Tartar's personality, and his characterization is far less realistic than that of the other major figures. In fact, he seems too marvelous to be true. In keeping with his beanstalk country abode, his activities take on an almost supernatural quality. He could save Crisparkle despite the fact that Septimus was at the time "a big heavy senior" and Tartar "the smallest of juniors" (p. 184). He travels from his chambers to Neville's by scampering over the housetops. Even in the pragmatic business of keeping an orderly house, he is all superlatives: "Mr. Tartar's chambers were the neatest, the cleanest, and the best-ordered chambers ever seen under the sun, moon, and stars" (p. 188). His enchanted viands "displayed themselves profusely at an instant's notice." His garden in the air above the dingy environs of Staple Inn recalls the gardens that expressed the hidden vitality of Cloisterham; the scarlet runners into which he ducks to "go below" exactly parallel those in the garden of Cloistcrham's theater, which receives "the foul fiend, when he ducks from its stage into the infernal regions, among scarlet-beans, or oyster-shells, according to the season of the year" (p. 15). The theatrical devil associates Tartar both with the world of artistic fancy and with the dangers of that world.

I would therefore suggest that Tartar is not a person at all, in the sense that Rosa or Jasper or Edwin is a person, but a fantasy come to life, appearing magically when the need arises like a friendly wizard or Cinderella's fairy godmother. (Significantly he and that other walking fiction, Dick Datchery, are the only characters whose first appearance Dickens fails to note in the Number Plans.) Certainly he fulfills many of Rosa's daydreams. No sooner has she heard the story of his rescue of Crisparkle than she muses, "If Heaven ... had but sent such courage and skill to her poor mother's aid!" (p. 185). Later, as he escorts her to his chambers, she wonders what the passersby think, seeing her "contrasted with the strong figure that could have caught her up and carried her out of any danger, miles and miles without resting" (p. 187). Her realization that the gritty stages cannot be entirely avoided is prompted by Tartar's failure to call upon her after their rowing expedition on the Thames. She recovers her spirits only by "lighting on some books of voyages and sea- adventure" (p. 202). Through this device Dickens indicates that Rosa's passion for Tartar is not far removed from her passion for those tales of romance of which she imagines him a hero.

Thus Tartar combines Eastern and fairy-tale images because he is a living symbol of both the virtues and perils of the imagination. The beanstalk country can enchant a visitor and allow him to transcend his limited reality, just as the reading of a romantic story can. And Dickens, far from desiring its extinction, places upon it the benediction, "May it flourish for ever!" (p. 188). But to live there continually surpasses the power of mortals. Even the original country at the summit of the magic beanstalk was ruled by a brutal, man-eating ogre. To ignore this reality leads to unrelievable frustration and the warped soul of a John Jasper. Helena, generally a voice of reason, warns Rosa that Tartar's little world is "like a dream," and the opening chapter has vividly illustrated the consequences of living in a dream. The narrator also observes: "But Mr. Tartar could not make time stand still; and time, with his hard-hearted fleetness, strode on so fast, that Rosa was obliged to come down from the beanstalk country to earth, and her guardian's chambers" (p. 192). As Mitchell glosses this passage: "One must descend back to the level of ordinary reality outside the fantistic [sic!] self' (p. 244).

Although Tartar's symbolic associations cannot conclusively prove that he will not marry Rosa, they do demonstrate that such a marriage would represent a regression in Dickens's art, a return to the fairy-tale endings of Pickwick or Oliver Twist in which the heroes encounter the evil in the world only to be whisked away in the nick of time to an island of safety. In the early Dickens the harsher aspects of reality remain, but the protagonists are permitted to escape them. To allow Rosa to retreat to the country on the summit of the magic beanstalk would, however, place the ending of Drood in a wholly different category from that of Little Dorr it, in which Amy and Arthur Clennam go down into the streets where "the noisy and the eager, and the arrogant and the froward and the vain, fretted, and chafed, and made their usual uproar,"13 or that of the novel's immediate predecessor Our Mutual Friend, in which Eugene Wrayburn decides to remain in England and face society's scorn at his putative misalliance with Lizzie Hexam. Nor does such a withdrawal seem consistent with Drood's death-laden atmosphere and its distrust of the lands of romance.

But if not Tartar, who? He is usually awarded Rosa by default, since there seems to be no one else left for her. Actually several other potential mates exist, although they labor under the shadow of death. Neville Landless is the obvious choice. He loves Rosa and is struggling manfully to subdue his Eastern impulses in order to become worthy of her. If the resulting marriage appears rather conventional—it was the ending adopted in the 1935 Universal film version of Drood—it is at least consistent both with the novel's themes and those of Dickens's later works. However, Neville becomes surrounded with an aura of doom after Edwin's disappearance brings him under suspicion. There are repeated references to his declining health and wasted appearance. The strain of his battle with his inner self could prove fatal. Death even more strongly threatens another of Rosa's potential husbands: Edwin Drood. Yet if he is alive, his marriage to Rosa might provide the most satisfactory conclusion of all. While this is not the place to enter into the controversy between the "Resurrectionists" and those who believe Edwin murdered, it does not seem impossible that the eponymous hero would have returned alive. Jasper, from his actions, certainly must believe he has murdered his nephew; but he has lived through the incident so often in his opium dreams—and is likely to have fortified himself with the drug before attempting the actual deed—that he might fall into a stupor with the murder half-completed, finishing it in the world of fantasy, not fact. An injured Edwin could then escape, perhaps with the aid of Deputy or the Princess Puffer. His disappearance might be attributable to a post-attack illness or amnesia, or a flight to his position in Egypt to escape Jasper's threat yet avoid denouncing him.

The return-to-life theme pervades Dickens's works from the moment Mr. Pickwick steps out of prison until Lizzie Hexam pulls Eugene Wrayburn out of the river. And it is only one of several recurring Dickensian motifs that Edwin's reappearance and eventual marriage to Rosa would continue. Although they do break off their engagement, many characters in previous novels have likewise overlooked the lover close at hand, only to return to him or her after gaining a few lessons from life, e.g., David Copperfield and Agnes, Arthur Clennam and Amy Dorrit, Estella and Pip, Bella Wilfer and John Harmon. Another significant plot pattern occurs in the romances of a number of Dickens's female protagonists. Their future husbands are, like Edwin, threatened with death or assumed dead. Florence Dombey believes Walter Gay drowned for a great part of Dombey and Son. Allan Woodcourt in Bleak House is also shipwrecked, though Esther knows of his survival. Presumed dead, John Harmon assumes the alias Rokesmith, thus allowing his betrothed, Bella Wilfer, to fall in love with him outside the constraints of their arranged marriage. This situation resembles that of Edwin and Rosa, just as Bradley Headstone suggests John Jasper. A marriage between Edwin and Rosa would therefore telescope the Harmon-Wilfer and Wrayburn-Hexam-Headstone love plots of Our Mutual Friend into one. Here mystery connoisseurs might object that Dickens would not have repeated situations from his preceding novel for fear of destroying Drood's surprise. Yet it is clear that the problems of making an arranged marriage work were still on his mind at the time of the novel's inception, and he had asserted that the Harmon mystery itself was made to be seen through. In July 1869 he wrote to Forster: "What should you think of the idea of a story beginning this way?—Two people, boy and girl, or very young, going apart from one another, pledged to be married after many years—at the end of the book. The interest to arise out of the tracing of their separate ways and the impossibility of telling what will be done with that impending fate." The idea was supposedly- discarded, but it could linger as an underplot, bringing Edwin and Rosa together at the end of Drood.

Such an underplot would fit the specific themes of the novel as well. The arranged marriage demands too much of the external self from Edwin and Rosa. The wish-fulfillment love of a Tartar (or of Helena Landless, Tartar's equally exotic counterpart in Edwin's affections) may oblige the inner self too much, but a betrothal from birth represses it unfairly. That it is their lack of free will in the matter, not each other, they most object to becomes clear in one of Edwin's conversations with his uncle: "Isn't it unsatisfactory to be cut off from choice in such a matter? There, Jack! I tell you! If I could choose, I would choose Pussy from all the pretty girls in the world" (p. 10). Allowing Edwin and Rosa the freedom to choose one another would provide a reconciliation of inner and outer selves appropriate to the resolution of their personal conflicts and those of the novel as a whole. Edwin's last recorded thoughts suggest that, if he were to survive, he would reconsider the termination of his engagement:

Edwin Drood passes a solitary day. Something of deeper moment than he had thought, has gone out of his life; and in the silence of his own chamber he wept for it last night. Though the image of Miss Landless still hovers in the background of his mind, the pretty little affectionate creature, so much firmer and wiser than he had supposed, occupies its stronghold. It is with some misgiving of his own un- worthiness that he thinks of her, and of what they might have been to one another, if he had been more in earnest some time ago; if he had set a higher value on her; if, instead of accepting his lot in life as an inheritance of course, he had studied the right way to its appreciation and enhancement (p. 124).

Dickens has, nevertheless, carefully prepared a lime pit and a hidden ring; and though he often employs coincidences he rarely resorts to red herrings. Hillis Miller has said of this novel, "What is beneath the surface, in Drood, is completely destructive, completely other than the daytime life of the surface. In no other novel by Dickens are the symbolic opposites further from one another and less reconcilable" (p. 321). Perhaps Edwin is dead, and Neville will die, and the stairway to the beanstalk country will close to Rosa. We cannot know the extent to which Dickens's newfound fear of the imagination's demonic potential might lead him to despair of love and art. The Cloisterham sterility may have to smother them utterly if it is to neutralize the malignant East; the force which snuffed out the first six little Crisparkles may leave Rosa husbandless and childless. Whichever possibility Dickens might have chosen, the mystery of Rosa Bud's husband remains inextricable from the meaning of The Mystery of Edwin Drood. Either her marriage to Edwin (or Neville) after each had achieved a balance of inner and outer selves, or her final lack of a mate would be consistent with the development of Dickens's later fiction and with the thematic structure of the existing half of the novel. Only a marriage to Tartar would mark a regression in technique and an evasion of the dark questions Drood raises. Ironically, it is this latter solution, most derogatory to our opinion of its author's powers at the conclusion of his career, that too many commentators on Drood have unthinkingly adopted.