Articulating Social Agency in Our Mutual Friend : Problems with Performances, Practices, and Political Efficacy

The title of the first volume of Our Mutual Friend, "Between the Cup and the Lip," draws attention to the gap between intention and outcome: there's many a slip, so the saying goes, 'twixt the cup and the lip.¹ Dickens follows up this thematic signal with three short vignettes highlighting the role of intentionality in agency. In the first chapter, a dead body, the epitome of intentionless impotence, is ransacked by two unsavory rivermen. In the second chapter, a jaded solicitor regales a gathering of parvenus and their hangers-on with the story of an old miser's postmortem attempt to control his son and heir by fashioning a humiliating Hobson's choice in his will: marry a stranger of the father's choosing or forfeit the family fortune. When a missive about the heir, one John Harmon, interrupts this narration, we encounter yet a third approach to intentionality and agency, as the assembled company wonders whether the son's fate depends on his own will or on the father's:

"Already married?" one guesses.

Drowning, one might think, would close off the question of intentionality, just as it completes Mortimer's story. But clearly, as old man Harmon's example shows, death need not forestall the exercise of intentions. And, as it will turn out, the drowned man is not the heir John Harmon at all, but George Radfoot, a man Harmon killed in self-defense. In this way, the opening sets up questions about John Harmon's agency that will drive the rest of the plot of Our Mutual Friend.

These three vignettes obviously present a range of models for agency, from the abject powerlessness of the waterlogged corpse to the omnipotence of old Harmon's attempt to enforce his intentions from beyond the grave. In fact, the problem of agency permeates Our Mutual Friend. By using a variety of cases to foreground concerns about the scope and powers of social systems—economic, legal, and educational, as well as classist, gendered, and normative—to control and condition individuals, the novel rehearses one of the pressing issues for mid-Victorian England debates about morality and responsibility, that is, how to disentangle individual motive from social conditioning. Rather than figuring these as mutually exclusive terms, Our Mutual Friend repeatedly emphasizes the impossibility of distinguishing between self- and social determination when it comes to agency.

It would be difficult in this space to provide a plot summary of the novel that does adequate justice to this topic. A few examples may suffice to indicate its applicability (I have supplied a bare-bones version of the main story lines in the endnote here).³ Like old Harmon, some characters in Our Mutual Friend, such as the blackmailing Silas Wegg or the usurer Fascination Fledgby, not only behave transgressively but in doing so deploy both culturally sanctioned incentives and established institutional procedures to make puppets of other people. Others, like Headstone the social-climbing headmaster and Veneering the parvenu, align themselves with available social institutions to increase their own power and prestige. Still others, such as poor Betty Higden and hounded Lizzie Hexam, actively submit to the constraints of social structures and live their lives trying to find a measure of freedom within them. Still more complex forms of this implication of social conditioning with individual motive are exemplified in Charlie Hexam, whose very desire for respectability is the internalization of a social norm, and Eugene Wrayburn, whose ambiguous treatment of Lizzie can be traced to his submission to paternal injunction, class ideology, rationalized lust, and some desire to be free of all of these. Dickens complicates any understanding of agency as indexing individual motivation by focusing both on the difficulties in realizing intentions and on the social conditioning of individuals, with the ultimate effect of blurring the difference between autonomy and heteronomy.

This problem of distinguishing individual motive from social conditioning, frequently noted by Victorian philosophers, finds succinct expression in J. S. Mill's On Liberty:

A person whose desires and impulses are his own—are the...