Our Mutual Friend: The Rhetoric of Disaffection

Abstract

Our Mutual Friend deserves more respectful consideration than it has received from what may be called the George Eliot school of criticism. Of that, Henry James’s original contemporary review in The Nation,¹ though particularly stringent, is representative, with its reliance on what at that date (1865) are already orthodox assumptions about the kind of realism proper to the novel as an intelligent art form. When he objects that ‘A story based upon those elementary passions in which alone we seek the true and final manifestation of character must be told in a spirit of intellectual superiority to those passions…’,² he offers us, as over the larger part of his essay, mere assertion (i.e. about one given artistic method being solely allowable). By contrast, the exuberant affirmation of G. K. Chesterton³ hardly takes account of palpable differences of tone between this work and its predecessors, differences which constitute a difficulty with which the book recurrently confronts us and of which it is surely impossible for the attentive reader not to be aware: namely, that of relating, one to another, the fictive modes by which its interests are presented. Such a reader must find himself asking, ‘Is this really one unitary (and therefore meaning-full) vision of life, when we are given on one side, for example, Mr Boffin enacting his charade of miserdom as in the pantomime version of a fairy-tale and on another the kind of realism which portrays — with a beautiful closeness of true-to-life imitation — a new social type in the languid aristocratic aimlessness of Eugene Wrayburn and Mortimer Lightwood?’