Misdirections, Delayed Disclosures, and the Ethics of the Telling in Charles Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend

Abstract

This essay explores the ethics of the telling of Charles Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend from a rhetorical perspective to demonstrate the ethical implications of misdirections and delayed disclosures, which create a multi-layered author-audience relationship. Our Mutual Friend has received much critical attention but very little has focused on the ethical implications of form for the relationship between Dickens and his audience. By examining the techniques of synthetic functions of character, double communication, misdirections, delayed disclosures, and narratorial devices of uncertainty, this essay demonstrates the consequences (for the genre of realism, the ethics of readerly judgment, the ethics of performance and play) and the rewards of reconfiguring the novel through attention to the synthetic dimension of acts of reading, themes, and characters. I offer some new directions for understanding Dickens’s multi-layered relationships with his readers in Our Mutual Friend, including a focus on perception, interpretation, and judgment; the cognitive pleasure of dealing with techniques that offer both immersion and defamiliarization; and the explicit awareness of the meta-fictional engagement offered by Dickens as designer. I offer a new argument about the nuances of implied author–narrator relationships in heterodiegetic narration, about the significance of mimetic and synthetic components of readerly and textual dynamics and their implications for genre, and about the ethics of the telling in narratives whose effects depend on misdirection and reconfiguration.