OUR MUTUAL FRIEND
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progression, or family of notes throughout the work. He uses double–
ness, although far le...o;s simply, as Chopin uses thirds in an etude
for thirds, in which the thirds are neither the melody or the musical
significance of the piece, but the necessary medium of both.
To begin with, the characters group naturally into pairs-which
is,
of course, true of many novels. But where were there ever so many
pairs, and pairs of pairs, and new pairs formed after a reshufHing
of old pairs?
But
this
is
only one aspect of doubleness. Let us consider the
many examples of duplicity, disguise, false claims, hourglass reversals,
and dual natures. John Harmon appears under two assumed names.
We do not even know who he really
is
for a great part of the book.
He exchanges clothes with a physical, double, or
Doppelganger
whose corpse is wrongly identified as Harmon. Harmon also puts on
false whiskers and a wig in another disguise. Headstone duplicates
Riderhood's clothes in order to make him appear Eugene's murderer.
Even Sloppy has
his
disguise.
We find further examples of duplicity in Mr. Boffin's pretense
of turning miser; in the Larnmles' deception of each other into mar–
riage on the grounds of imaginary wealth; in Fledgeby's concealed
traffic in "queer bills"; in Riah's enforced false front, etc.
Doubleness appears again as character duality. Charlie, with his
mixture of "uncompleted savagery and uncompleted civilization,"
provides a good specimen of a divided nature-also Eugene, also
Mortimer, among others. Then there is Twemlow who
is
meek, down–
trodden, and vague until at the end he takes his tremendous stand in
defense of the principles that make a gentleman.
The most grotesque use of doubleness is found in reversals of
the natural role: Bella calls her Pa her younger brother, "with a
dear venerable chubbiness on him"-although much of the time she
patronizes him in an unpleasantly arch and incestuous way as if
he were a faithful but unimportant lover; Lizzie loves her brother
as a son; Jenny Wren, the Doll's Dressmaker, treats
her
alcoholic
father as
if
he were a bad little boy-but Jenny
is
all doubleness,
with her double life of visions, her crippled legs and vigorous hair,
her precocious insight.
It is easy to cite many simpler instances of two-ness, such as the
two wills, the two John Harmons, the Boffins' parlor-half of Which,
