Abstract
This study of missing bodies in Victorian fiction commenced with the enigmatic fate of M. Paul Emanuel in Charlotte Brontë’s Villette. Perpetually shipwrecked, M. Paul is purposefully suspended in the narrative. Originally planning to have her hero killed off, Brontë appeased her father’s desire for the heroine’s potentially happy ending by producing a plot “puzzle” that all readers must attempt to solve for themselves: is M. Paul dead or does he return to Lucy Snowe? Writing Death and Absence demonstrates that the desire for return, for resurrection, is embedded in Victorian fiction. The fact that death is not always final in literature, and that readers can participate in resurrecting a character from mortal oblivion, is innately satisfying. We can thereby understand Rev. Brontë’s displeasure with Villette’s original ending.1 As this study has shown, missing bodies, fictional autobiographies, and the textually dead or missing all demand some form of obituary or embodiment. It is appropriate, then, that Writing Death and Absence concludes with a dramatizes an eternally “missing” character.
Keywords
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsPreview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Earle Davis, The Flint and the Flame: The Artistry of Charles Dickens (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1963), 283
Sylvère Monod, Dickens the Novelist (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1968), 502.
Steven Connor, “Dead? Or Alive?: Edwin Drood and the Work of Mourning,” Dickensian 89 (1993), 92. I am indebted to Connor’s argument regarding the fragment and endings.
For a helpful discussion of writing and mortality, see J. Gerald Kennedy, Poe, Death, and the Life of Writing (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987).
G.K. Chesterton, Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens (London: Dent, 1933 edition), 223.
For a brief assessment of aesthetic views regarding Dickens’s intended conclusion to the novel, see David Parker’s “Drood Redux: Mystery and the Art of Fiction,” Dickens Studies Annual 24 (1996): 185–95.
Charles Dickens, The Mystery of Edwin Drood (London: Penguin, 2002), 60. Subsequent references will cite this edition.
Nancy K. Hill, A Reformer’s Art: Dickens’ Picturesque and Grotesque Imagery (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1981), 136. Incidentally, Dickens authored his own will (which is an appendix in Forster’s biography) and burial arrangements. Though most of his requests were carried out, his burial wishes were overlooked, and instead of being buried at Rochester Cathedral (the model for Cloisterham) next to his father, he was interred in Westminster Abbey in accordance with his family’s wishes. It is an ironic turn in the life of a man who so desperately tried to author his own exit.
Anny Sadrin, Parentage and Inheritance in the Novels of Dickens (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 121.
Walter Ong, Interfaces of the Word: Studies in the Evolution of Consciousness and Culture (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), 238.
G. K. Chesterton, Charles Dickens (New York: Dodd Mead, 1906), 243.
Angus P. Collins, “Dickens and Our Mutual Friend: Fancy as Self Preservation,” Études Anglaises 38, no. 3(1985): 257–65. Quote from 258.
Copyright information
© 2012 Jolene Zigarovich
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Zigarovich, J. (2012). Edwin Drood: The Preeminent Missing Body. In: Writing Death and Absence in the Victorian Novel. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137007032_6
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137007032_6
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-43521-0
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-00703-2
eBook Packages: Palgrave Literature CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)