Flogging and Fascination: Dickens and the Fragile Will

"I tell you, Clara," said Mr. Murdstone, "I have been often flogged myself."

"To be sure; of course," said Miss Murdstone.

"Certainly, my dear Jane," faltered my mother, meekly. "But—but do you think it did Edward good?"

"Do you think it did Edward harm, Clara?" asked Mr. Murdstone, gravely.

"That's the point!" said his sister.

(54)

Charles Dickens, David Copperfield

In May 1850, Edward Vaughan Hyde Kenealy was sentenced to a month's imprisonment for assaulting his six-year-old illegitimate son, whose body was covered with bruises resulting, the surgeon surmised, from a rod or cane applied with "great violence" (qtd. in Mill, "Punishment" 1177). Commenting on the lenient sentence in The Sunday Times, John Stuart Mill asked why "the unbrutal part of the public—the part which does not sympathise with cruelty" should tolerate the flogging of children when the flogging of adults had become increasingly unacceptable ("Punishment" 1177). Like the brutal Murdstone in David Copperfield (1850), Kenealy's barrister, Mr. Whately, invoked a formative discourse of punishment, declaring that judge, jury, and counsel had all been flogged in their boyhood and were much the better for it (1178). In contrast, Mill argued that flogging was degrading and Whately's reasoning simply proved that his morals depended not on facts "but on other people's opinion" (1178). More recent accounts of Victorian flogging turn frequently to flagellant pornography in order to diagnose an enduring culture of flagellomania. Ian Gibson has suggested that this culture both "encourages sexual deviation" (309) and exemplifies Victorian hypocrisy, "sexuality masquerading as responsibility" (194), while Steven Marcus identified it as the upper classes' "last ditch compromise with and defense against homosexuality" (Marcus 260). Focusing on the relationships between discipline and self-discipline, the will and self-determination, this essay approaches the topic from a related, but different perspective, to consider the kinds of manliness and the models of the self that flogging was seen to produce or threaten.

Dickens follows up on Murdstone's succinct account of his psychogenesis by suggesting that flogging need not produce a brutally firm Murdstone: it might also produce a suggestible and passive David Copperfield or Pip. Beginning with the flogged child in David Copperfield, the handling of a series of fascinated characters in Dickens's later novels encapsulates anxieties about the will and the fragility of autonomy and self-determination. The rhetoric of fascination in these works describes tenuously bounded selves whose volitional capabilities are too weak to withstand the psychic influence of other characters. Taking its cue from the Dickensian collocations of flogging and fascination, this essay juxtaposes discourses of formation and spectacle constructed in the arguments over corporal punishment with physiological discussions of the will in order to draw out one aspect of the ascetics of Victorian manliness delineated by James Eli Adams: the self-mastery of the subject. That a "self-regulating will seems absolutely normative in Victorian rhetorics of masculinity," as Adams notices, has much to do with its role in asserting the boundaries of the individual (209). Moreover, as ways to understand social interactions and interpersonal relationships, the discourses of flogging and fascination underscore the profoundly anti-social nature of Victorian repression as described by John Kucich. In this light, the persistent doubling of characters in Dickens's novels not only figures the disavowals and projections necessary to enclosing an ideologically "clean" subject, but also, more fundamentally, implies the difficulty of enclosing a discrete subject at all.

I. Flogging

"Having been banished from court, and almost fallen into disuse in our criminal code," the birch, commented Chamber's Journal in 1857, "has found refuge in our great public schools, making Eton its headquarters" ("The Birch" 83). As William Collins Watterson has shown, the birch was a means of constructing aristocratic privilege, while John Chandos has shown that "the lore of the birch" was integral to the romance of the public school (227). In its less aristocratic incarnations of caning and whipping, flogging was also widely used in private schools and charity establishments.¹ According to the psychologist William Smith, writing in 1870, it was...