Naming and Language in Our Mutual Friend

Abstract

IN The Form of Victorian Fiction J. Hillis Miller states one of fundamental assumptions of Dickens and other great Victorian novelists is that each man finds himself from his birth surrounded by a transindividual mind, identical with words he learns, surrounds him, embraces him, permeates him, from first day of his life to end.' ' Miller goes on to say that, in his role of omniscient narrator, each Victorian novelist must identify himself in some way with this collective consciousness. Within a complex, social novel like Our Mutual Friend, however, this useful general concept needs further refinement, for here Dickens uses his role of narrating voice to expose dehumanizing effects of just such an identification with social voice. The narrating voice of novel stands apart from transindividual consciousness of society it describes; Dickens' narrator becomes, again to quote Miller, the community mind become aware of itself, liberated from its worship of false gods of money and work.2 The omniscient power of transindividual mind as Dickens portrays it within Our Mutual Friend thus becomes one of critical moral concerns of novel. Rather than force for furthering human unity and communication, transindividual mind within novel has become an amoral and inhuman force made up of words are cut off from feelings and experience because