CHAPTER 1

Critical and Imaginative Responses to "The Mystery of Edwin Drood"

So much ink and paper has in fact been expended on attempts to wrest from the portion Dickens completed the secret he took with him to the grave, that the only preliminary demand likely to be made by the prospective reader is my excuse for intruding where so many angels have delicately passed before.

Felix Aylmer, "The Drood Case"

The sheer bulk and variety of response to Charles Dickens’s last and, regrettably, unfinished novel — The Mystery of Edwin Drood — attests to its broad and apparently unfading appeal. The various responses to the text range from dramatic, musical, and film adaptations, sequels, continuations, and conclusions of the novel, parodies of the plot, television and radio dramas, and even several mock trials held to determine the guilt or innocence of the main character, John Jasper. The overwhelming amount of critical commentary alone would make the compilation of a comprehensive Drood bibliography a daunting project. Fortunately, however, Don Richard Cox did not allow what others might interpret as a Herculean task to stop him from compiling just such a bibliography. Cox points out in his preface to his 1998 annotated bibliography on The Mystery of Edwin Drood that this nearly comprehensive compilation lists “ninety” to “ninety-five percent” “of the Drood commentary that has ever been published” (ix). Because it is both a recent publication and a nearly complete work, Cox’s bibliography provides the best overview of Drood criticism now available.

It is important to note that Cox has divided the material on literary criticism and analysis into two sections — one from 1871 to 1939, the other from 1940 to 1997. This division, Cox explains in his preface, “reflect[s] the generally acknowledged shift in Dickens studies that comes with Edmund Wilson’s [1940] article, “Dickens: The Two Scrooges” (xi). Before the publication of Wilson’s article, Cox reminds us, the focus of most scholarship and debate was on finding a solution to the “mystery” (xi). Cox asserts that Wilson’s article goes beyond this narrow focus and “stresses the importance of this novel to our understanding of Dickens and his work” (xi). Furthermore, Cox uses this division in dates to emphasize another major change in Dickens scholarship — “the changing of the guard” that inevitably occurred as foremost scholars of the earlier era passed away, and new scholars with new insights came to the forefront (xi).

When reviewing the massive amount of commentary about Drood, a researcher should keep in mind what stimulated such an outpouring. Felix Aylmer explains the reasons for the overwhelming response to Dickens’s last novel in The Drood Case when he writes that “as the last work of our best-loved novelist and one of the most famous puzzles in literature, it is better known, and has won more critical attention, than any comparable book that can be cited” (1). Thus Aylmer observes that it was both Dickens’s character — or at the very least the reading public’s perception of his character — and the nature of his last work that engendered an entire industry of critical response to The Mystery of Edwin Drood. Dickens’s sudden death following a stroke, while in the process of composing the work, left his readers in a state of shock. The fact that Dickens had died while in the middle of writing a mystery fueled even greater curiosity about his unfinished novel. In order to satisfy not only the curiosity of the public but their own as well, many critics felt compelled to compose an ending to the work and, thus, provide some sense of closure to Dickens’s life and work.

The first of these “continuations,” as Cox points out, was written in 1870, the year of Dickens’s death. Surprisingly, it was a parody entitled The Cloven Foot written by Orpheus Kerr, the pseudonym of R. N. Newell (Cox xvii). The most bizarre continuation, The Mystery of Edwin Drood Complete. Part Second of the Mystery of Edwin Drood. By the Spirit-Pen of Charles Dickens, Through a Medium, was offered to the world by Thomas P. James, who swears Dickens, using James as a medium, wrote the remainder of the novel from beyond the grave (Cox 175). Several authors, obviously still intrigued by the mystery, have continued to write continuations. In fact, according to Cox, two of the best endings were published in 1980 — The Mystery of Edwin Drood by Leon Garfield and The Decoding of Edwin Drood by “husband and wife team mystery writers,” Mavis and Gordon Philo, who write under the pseudonym of Charles Forsyte (466). Cox points out that one of the strengths of these two conclusions is the authors’ ability to imitate Dickens’s style (170, 171).

Many critics were not so much interested in writing conclusions to the mystery as they were in arguing about the various solutions that were being offered, or quibbling over what they considered important issues in the novel that had never been satisfactorily addressed. According to Cox, it all started innocently enough in 1884 with the anonymous publication of an article in The Cornhill Magazine (xix-xx). This anonymous essay, which was later attributed to Henry Sutherland Edwards, merely suggests that “Datchery was a detective [. . .] hired by Grewgious” (Cox xx). In proposing this idea, Edwards had unwittingly stirred other Droodians to think about the role of Datchery, which, in turn, led them to ponder other questions, especially the central questions of whether Drood was actually dead and if he were, had Jasper done the dirty deed? As a result of this rethinking of various elements of the plot, a new school of thought emerged — that of the so-called “resurrectionists” — who asserted that Drood was not dead at all, an idea that refuted statements Dickens’s biographer John Forster had made (Cox xx).

One of the advocates of the resurrectionist theory was J. Cuming Walters. His book, Clues to the Mystery of Edwin Drood, was published in 1905, a seminal year in the history of Dickens scholarship. In that year, not only did Walters introduce a scandalous new interpretation of the role of Helena Landless, but two other major events occurred: “the Dickens Fellowship was formed and The Dickensian began publication” (Cox xxi). As Cox points out, when Walters’s book was published “there was an audience ready and waiting to scrutinize it” (xxi). According to Cox, Walters’s “theory” that Helena Landless was actually Datchery “in a white wig and trousers” “shocked many,” especially those “Dickensians who found this cross-dressing improper or even a little provocative” (xxi). Over the next three years, the debate grew so intense that B.W. Matz, the editor of The Dickensian, declared a moratorium on publication of Drood commentary, an edict that would not be lifted until 1911 (Cox xxii-iii). It was in that year that Henry Jackson, Professor at Cambridge University, published his scholarly treatise on the novel, About Edwin Drood. Cox contends that Jackson’s position as an esteemed professor gave a sense of “legitimacy” to the study of the novel (xxii). However, Jackson’s book — squarely on the side of Forster who had consigned Drood to the grave — also revived the debate with the resurrectionists. Letters and essays dealing with the topic of Drood once again began pouring into the offices of The Dickensian.

The debate was in full swing again by 1912 when W. Robertson Nicoll’s The Problem of Edwin Drood was published. By relying on “statements by Dickens to family and friends” (Cox 336), Nicoll employs “biographical evidence to conclude that Drood was dead and that Helena was Datchery,” two of the burning questions that J. Cuming Walters had earlier posed in his Clues to the Mystery of Edwin Drood (Cox xxiii). Nicoll points out in his preface that not only does he explore some old questions about Drood, but that he also adds to the discourse in several ways. First of all, his book points out some textual errors in the first edition created by Forster, who “had ignored Dickens’s erasures, and had replaced all the omitted passages in the text” (3). To remedy this problem, Nicoll printed the passages that Dickens omitted in the later proofs (xi). In his book, Nicoll also published “for the first time Dickens’s notes and plans for the novel,” testimonies of friends and family, and “an account of the unacted play” about Drood coauthored by “Charles Dickens the younger and Joseph Hatton” (xii).

In the year following the publication of Nicoll’s book, the interest and commentary on Drood continued to grow. Cox observes in his introduction to the Drood bibliography that interest in Drood had grown so great at this juncture that members of the Dickens Fellowship “decided to capitalize on the furor and hold a public ‘trial’ of Jasper” (xxiii). Cox notes that the idea to conduct a trial “was in many ways an unprecedented event in the history of letters,” but conveys to some degree “how deeply feelings about [Drood] were running” (xxiii). Because of the amount and intensity of critical attention that Drood attracted at the turn of the century, critics now designate 1905 to 1914 as the golden age of Drood criticism (Cox xxv).

Early critical responses displayed a decidedly Pickwickian quality, insofar as their authors tended to focus on minor and sometimes even trivial details of plot and characterization. Like the members of the Pickwick Club who engaged in their pseudo-scientific investigations of relatively inconsequential phenomenon — such as Pickwick’s research on “Tittlebats” — these early critics exaggerated the importance of insignificant matters that later critics would largely ignore in lieu of more significant thematic and psychological studies (The Pickwick Papers 25). For example, Cox recounts that in the 1920s, critics, for the most part, abandoned their former plot debates and focused more on the themes in Drood. Aubrey Boyd was one of this new breed of critics who dismissed the importance of knowing Datchery’s identity and explored instead the “themes of mesmerism and orientalism” that he believed “were at the heart of the novel” (xxvi). Cox adds that Aubrey Boyd’s article “A New Angle on the Drood Mystery” was to be a major influence on Edmund Wilson (xxvi).

In the 1930s, Cox notes, Howard Duffield emerged as an important critic of Drood (xxix). According to Cox, Duffield was an “American physician” as well as a “sound literary critic,” who amassed a sizable collection of “materials related to Drood — a collection he later donated to the Dickens House Museum (xxix). Cox reports that Duffield’s major contribution to the study of Drood — in addition to his donated collection of materials — was his article “John Jasper — Strangler,” which identified John Jasper as a Thug and introduced a whole new way of reading the novel (xxix).

Edmund Wilson was strongly influenced by Duffield’s Thug theory and drew on it extensively as the basis for his seminal essay published in 1940, “Dickens: The Two Scrooges.” Cox comments on the tremendous impact this article has had on Dickens scholars, going so far as to declare that Wilson’s article is “the most influential Dickens essay of the twentieth century” (xxx). According to Wilson’s essay, which explains Duffield’s Thug theory in detail, Jasper belonged to an Indian cult whose members worshipped “Kali, the Hindu goddess of destruction” (Wilson 87). In his essay Wilson draws numerous analogies between Jasper and the typical Thug cult member. For example, as Wilson explains, both Jasper and the Thug are “devoted” kinsmen who hold “positions of honor in the community” (94). It is also believed that Thugs kill only travelers and then generally by strangulation. Wilson argues that Jasper does not deviate from these stipulated behaviors, since his nephew Edwin Drood is in fact a traveler on his way to Egypt, and that as earlier commentators had testified, Jasper does use his long black scarf to strangle his nephew.¹

Even though the elaborate Thug theory seems fairly far-fetched to the modern reader, Wilson points out in his article that Dickens would have been familiar with the cult, because two members of the British government, who had worked to suppress Thug activity during the 1830s, had written books — one a fictionalized account — about their experience (86). Furthermore, as Wilson notes, “Dickens himself had mentioned the Thugs in 1857 in connection with a garroting epidemic in London,” and his friend Edward Bulwer Lytton had also “considered using this theme” (86).

While Wilson’s exposition of Duffield’s Thug theory may help explain Jasper’s bizarre behavior, other aspects of Wilson’s essay seem even more significant, particularly his suggestion that students of Dickens should be interested in Drood because of “the psychological possibilities of [Jasper’s] character”(85). With this comment, Wilson invited other critics to explore the psychological dimensions of the novel. In fact, as pointed out earlier, Cox suggests in the preface to his Drood bibliography that Wilson’s essay prompted a “general shift in Drood commentary,” a shift that led critics to focus more on what Cox calls the “psychological motivation” for Jasper’s behavior (xxxi).

Victorians expressed a widespread interest in psychopathic murderers like Jasper. Richard D. Altick notes that Victorians actually enjoyed reading about murder: “shudder they did when they read of a fresh outrage; but it was an appreciative response, a form of pleasure. [. . .] the fact is that murder was above all a popular entertainment” (302). Along with Dickens, Robert Browning stands out as yet another Victorian artist who exhibits a keen interest in depicting psychopaths and their homicidal tendencies. Clearly, there is a relationship between Jasper and the psychopaths

Robert Browning depicts in his poetry, particularly the speaker in “Porphyria’s Lover” and the Duke of Ferrara, who is the speaker in Browning’s “My Last Duchess.” Like Jasper, the Duke and Porphyria’s killer are possessed by pathological jealousy and obsessed with the woman they love, so much so that they ultimately destroy the very thing they profess to love.

The psychological aspect of the Victorian murderer as embodied in Jasper was not the only area that Wilson explored. He also charted new territory in biographical criticism by suggesting that there was a correlation between Jasper and Dickens (102-03). Wilson’s influence can be traced in Edgar Johnson’s 1952 biography of Dickens — Charles Dickens: His Tragedy and Triumph — which, according to Cox, remains the definitive biography (xxxi). Johnson’s chapter, “The Dying and Undying Voice,” resumes the psychological analysis of Jasper that Wilson had introduced in “The Two Scrooges,” and further suggests that “Jasper may be the projection of a dilemma Dickens had partly symbolized in Hard Times, the position of the artist and his relation to Victorian society” (1123). Johnson further expands on this connection between Dickens and Jasper by suggesting that Helena Landless may have been a fictional Ellen Ternan, the young woman who many now believe was Dickens’s mistress (1123). If the link between the two women is accurate, Johnson suspects that Dickens may have been planning a “struggle of wills” to ensue between Jasper and Helena, similar to that which Dickens may have already experienced with Ellen (1123).

In addition to Johnson’s biography, another significant critical work on Drood appeared in the 1950s — The Drood Murder Case by Richard M. Baker. Baker’s book is a collection of five essays on Drood . What is significant about Baker’s work is that it continues to explore the psychological theme that, a decade earlier, Edmund Wilson had introduced. According to Bradford A. Booth, who wrote the introduction to Baker’s book, Baker is drawing a direct comparison between Dickens and Jasper by suggesting that in Drood Dickens “was examining his own psychological processes” (ix).

In the 1960s Felix Aylmer reemerged after a forty-year hiatus from publishing, promulgating a revolutionary interpretation of the novel. Aylmer asserts in The Drood Case that Jasper is innocent, a major deviation in thought from the traditionally-held view that Jasper had actually committed the ghastly murder. Aylmer had introduced this radical theory as early as 1924, but as Cox points out, it must have caught “readers by surprise,” because it “did not draw the fire one might have expected” (xxvi).

Although Aylmer took a different tack, his book was essentially an exploration of Jasper’s character, an area of critical concern that had moved to the forefront since Edmund Wilson’s 1940 essay had introduced the idea that Jasper’s behavior suggested a psychological depth that deserved examination. Other studies following Wilson’s lead appeared between 1959 and 1969. These studies will serve as the springboard for my analysis of the character of Jasper. Each of the studies explores Jasper as a man who possesses what Wilson calls a “dual personality” (92).

One of the articles from this period that explores the psychological dimension of Jasper’s character is Lauriat Lane’s “Dickens and the Double,” published in The Dickensian in 1959. Lane’s article examines several of Dickens’s characters who represent what he calls an “archetypal figure of the double” (47). Lane asserts that Jasper “is an example of the purely internal double” (52). He means, by this, that the feature of Jasper’s “doubleness [is] entirely within the character” and not represented by a separate character as we see, for example, in “Conrad’s The Secret Sharer “ (47). Because Jasper’s “outer moral self contrast[s] violently with [his] inner depravity,” Lane compares Jasper to other fictional “internal doubles,” such as “M.G. Lewis’s lecherous monk and Hawthorne’s guilty minister” (53).

Charles Mitchell’s “The Mystery of Edwin Drood : The Interior and Exterior of Self” in some ways echoes Lane’s study in that it examines closely the dualism in Jasper’s personality. However, Mitchell goes several steps further by asserting that there are several characters in the novel who suffer from a similar duality. Mitchell’s article, although not a Jungian study of Jasper, does point out that Jasper’s dualism is linked to his relationships with other characters, an aspect of the novel that I will explore in depth in later chapters.

In addition to the psychological studies of Jasper that appeared in the 1960s, Cox reports in the introduction to his Drood bibliography that this period also saw “the emergence of an important new Drood critic, Arthur J. Cox” (xxxii). One of Arthur Cox’s main contributions to Droodiana is his 1974 Penguin edition of the novel, which according to Don Cox, “has become the most popular edition of the book” (xxxii-iii).

From the 1970s to the present, critics have continued to investigate themes, symbols, and motifs found in the novel that have rarely, if ever, been explored. These would include studies of the novel’s Gothic elements, studies of the symbol of the river and the cathedral, and studies of the theme of imperialism (Cox xxxiii-vi). During this decade, Jim Garner also pointed out that Dickens may have taken the idea for the Drood plot from an infamous murder committed by a Harvard professor (Cox xxxiii). It is a well-known fact that Dickens had a life-long interest in criminal behavior, so this hypothesis is not without its proponents.

As the century drew to a close, little was being published on the psychological aspects of Drood. According to Cox, there was, however, a developing interest in the novel’s religious “themes of resurrection and redemption” and a burgeoning interest in the politically correct theme of homosexuality (xxxv-vi). Perhaps scholars began examining fresh topics because they found the psychological dimension to be thoroughly exhausted. Despite the reasons for its decline, I have decided to resurrect the psychological approach by examining Jasper from a Jungian point of view. While former psychological studies suggest that Jasper suffers from a dual consciousness, they fail to apply Jungian concepts to the novel as a way of explaining and understanding Jasper’s aberrant behavior. By relating Jungian concepts to the novel, this study will explore Jasper as one who suffers not so much from the debilitating effects of a dual consciousness, as one who cannot achieve psychic wholeness because he suffers from utter fragmentation.

As a Jungian fragmented self, Jasper suffers from what Carl G. Jung calls “dissociation of consciousness,” a malady of the self that may be brought about by underlying complexes, “repressed emotional themes that can cause constant psychological disturbances or . . . in many cases the symptoms of neurosis” (Man and his Symbols 24, 27). Jung asserts that “for the sake of mental stability [. . .] the unconscious and the conscious must be integrally connected [. . . ] [for] if they are split apart or ‘dissociated,’ psychological disturbance follows” (52). This study will show that Jasper lacks mental stability because his conscious and unconscious selves are torn apart and unable to integrate. Marie-Louise von Franz writes in “The Process of Individuation” (a chapter of Man and his Symbols) that psychological disturbances in cases of dissociation may take the form of “excessive daydreaming, which in a secret way usually circles around particular complexes” (213). As this study will show, Jasper suffers from excessive daydreaming and other psychological disturbances, exacerbated by his use of opium. He is also plagued by an overwhelming sense of boredom, an intense jealousy of his nephew Drood whose life holds exciting prospects, and an obsessional lust for his nephew’s fiancée, Rosa.

In Jung’s view, the chief goal of the individual is to achieve psychic harmony through a process known as “individuation [. . .] the conscious coming-to-terms with one’s own inner center [. . .] or Self” (Man and his Symbols 166). Throughout The Mystery of Edwin Drood Jasper interacts with a variety of characters, many of whom represent projections of his anima — what Jung and von Franz call the “personification of all feminine psychological tendencies in a man’s psyche” (177). For instance, Rosa Bud, Helena Landless, and Princess Puffer are anima figures that Jasper is incapable of integrating. In addition, Septimus Crisparkle, Neville Landless, and other male figures represent projections of Jasper’s shadow self. Jasper’s interaction with these characters reveals his unsatisfactory and frustrating attempts to achieve individuation.

By the end of the novel, hopes of his ever achieving individuation are lost as he plunges deeper into fragmentation and madness.

Encouraged by the psychological studies that have already been done, I hope to build on the psychological insights they provide and, through a Jungian interpretation of the novel, offer yet another way to participate in the imaginative experience that Dickens offers us in The Mystery of Edwin Drood.

CHAPTER 2

John Jasper — Portrait of a Psychopath

If it is true that no other Victorian novelist relied as often as Dickens did upon man’s homicidal proclivities, it is also true that no popular or would- be popular novelist of the sixties and early seventies wholly overlooked the possibilities of the subject.

Richard D. Altick, Victorian Studies in Scarlet

A number of critics have commented on Dickens’s fascination with the criminal mind, a fascination that he chose to animate in the array of criminal characters he created. Philip Collins has devoted a book-length study to the subject. In Dickens and Crime Collins asserts that John Jasper is the final in a long line of criminal characters who populate Dickens’s fiction beginning with Bill Sikes in Oliver Twist (296-97). But Collins also emphasizes that this particular villain stands apart from the rest because he “is still more intelligent, more complex psychologically, more respectable, and more ambiguous in his relation to society, than his predecessors” (296-97). Wendy Jacobson astutely points out in her essay “The Genesis of the Last Novel: The Mystery of Edwin Drood “ that although Sikes and Jasper appear on the surface to be utterly different, that “they are both wrought from the same source: from the figure of the man whose evil pursues and destroys him, the man who kills the thing he loves” (206-07). Edmund Wilson maintains in his essay “Dickens: The Two Scrooges” that with the creation of John Jasper Dickens was “carrying the theme of the criminal, which has haunted him all his life, to its logical development in his fiction. [ . . .] to explore the deep entanglement and conflict of the bad and the good in one man” (99). Angus Wilson echoes this sentiment in his introduction to the Penguin edition of the novel, pointing out that in his estimation The Mystery of Edwin Drood depicts Dickens’s “preoccupation” with the “fight between the forces of Good and Evil as exemplified in contemporary society, with particular emphasis upon the analysis and personification of Evil” (14). Angus Wilson also records in his introduction that statements by Dickens's “lifelong friend and biographer John Forster” (15) validate that with John Jasper, Dickens intended to create “a divided man whose evil side was cut off from his everyday self” (23). Robert Barnard notes Jasper’s insidious hypocritical nature, observing that “[. . .] to the world John Jasper is a man of piety, diligence and sense of duty, but in his heart he is tormented, lustful and murderous” (134).

Based on the statements of these critics, it is possible to surmise that Dickens had ambitious plans for Jasper. Because Jasper embodies many of the same conflicts that riddled Victorian society, it is possible to see him as a personification of those contradictory elements. Therefore, Jasper, on one level, may function as a vehicle whereby Dickens explores, not only clashing forces within the man himself, but discordant characteristics of Victorian society as a whole. Through this complex criminal character it may be possible that Dickens was exploring unsettling features of the Victorian mind, such as repression, hypocrisy, and malaise.

If, in fact, Jasper is a man in conflict with himself, he reflects the same divisiveness and identity crisis that permeated Victorian England. As the culture around him was undergoing tremendous social upheaval, so, too, was he attempting to endure his own tormenting psychological and spiritual crisis. Comments by various critics of the period help to substantiate this view. For example, Masao Miyoshi in her introduction to The Divided Self: A Perspective on the Literature of the Victorians quotes A. N. Whitehead as saying that during the nineteenth century “each individual was ‘divided against himself’” (ix). Miyoshi observes that as a result of this internal conflict, the Victorian period was an age of great “perplexity” and “confusion” (ix). Many of the characteristics of the age that Walter E. Houghton explores in The Victorian Frame of Mind — characteristics such as isolation, hypocrisy, religious doubt, and ennui — are the very features of Jasper’s life that Dickens chooses to explore in The Mystery of Edwin Drood. Jasper, whose own psyche is racked with confusion and turmoil, epitomizes the very nature of the society in which he finds himself. He tries to present a face of respectability to the community, while hiding a dark, secret self. Miyoshi has observed that Jasper may in fact be a precursor of the Jekyll-and-Hyde characters that emerged in the “dual personality novel” of the late nineteenth century (278).

Like Robert Louis Stevenson’s Jekyll-and-Hyde character, Jasper is also a psychopath who possesses what Dickens would call the “criminal intellect” (Drood 233). On the surface, Jasper appears to be an upstanding member of the Cloisterham community, routinely carrying out his duties as cathedral choirmaster and busily demonstrating his affection for his nephew Edwin Drood. However, Dickens shows us right from the start that Jasper is in no way a conventional character or conventional criminal for that matter. He is in reality an opium addict who frequents the seamy opium dens of London. As Peter Ackroyd points out in his biography of the novelist,

Dickens had first-hand experience of opium dens (1046). With his American friend, J.T. Fields, Dickens reportedly visited an opium den that may have become the model for the one Jasper visits (Ackroyd 1046).

And it wasn’t just opium dens that attracted Dickens. He was interested in all aspects of criminal life. Richard D. Altick asserts that “of all Victorian writers, Charles Dickens was the most powerfully attracted by crime” (127). According to Altick, Dickens had been interested in the world of crime from his youth and got his first taste for sensational crime by reading the penny dreadfuls (71). It was an appetite that continued to grow throughout his life. To illustrate that Dickens had more than a passing interest in crime, Jacobson provides a partial listing of his large collection of books on prisons, criminals, and accounts of criminal trials (158-59). Collins reports that “at one period [Dickens] even contemplated becoming a paid Metropolitan Magistrate:

[. . .] [an] ambition [that] came to nothing, for he lacked the necessary qualifications [...]” (1).

It is, therefore, not insignificant that the last days of Dickens’s life were spent creating a criminal character whom many critics consider his most complex. This may be the case because Dickens was so in tune with popular taste and understood that his middle-class audience was generally looking for three characteristics in their reading material — what Altick lists as “melodrama, suspense, and murder” (74).

But Dickens was also weaving his tales of “melodrama, suspense, and murder” with an eye to de-romanticizing criminal behavior. According to a lecture given by Professor Styron Harris, Dickens’s crime fiction was to a large extent a reaction against the Newgate Calendar school of fiction, one of the most popular forms of fiction of his day, but one that tended to glorify crime and the life of the London underworld. While proponents of the Newgate Calendar school defended their work by saying they were depicting the reality of the criminal world, Dickens thought there should be made available to the public a more balanced treatment of the criminal element.

Not only did Dickens conceive of fictional criminals, he also took a keen interest in actual criminal events, attending public executions, writing letters stressing his view that executions should be conducted privately, and publishing articles about crime in his journal Household Words. In one of his more famous articles, “The Demeanour of Murderers,” Dickens explicitly states his belief about the nature of the criminal. Much of what he says here can be applied to Jasper. Referring to an infamous trial of the 1850s, Dickens explains to the public that they should not be duped by the alluring charm, cheerfulness, and superficial composure of the alleged poisoner Dr. William Palmer. Rather, Dickens advises his readers to keep in mind that this man is a master of chicanery who uses his appealing traits to entrap his unwitting victims. One of the most insightful comments Dickens makes in this essay has to do with the poisoner’s ability to beguile his victims by pretending to profess friendship for them. Dickens asserts that while the criminal claims to be devoted to his victims, he is quietly stirring arsenic in their tea. Dickens maintains that criminals can murder their victims without pangs of conscience because they lack an essential aspect of their humanity that Dickens calls “sentiment” (505). From the explanation that Dickens offers, sentiment is synonymous with empathy and compassion. Dickens doesn’t venture a guess as to how these criminals lose their ability to feel, but it may tie in with his belief, as expressed in Drood, that the “criminal intellect” is a “horrible wonder apart” which even criminal experts “perpetually misread, because they persist in trying to reconcile it with the average intellect of average men” ( 233). In other words, the criminal mind does not partake of the normal human process of thinking and feeling. Because of some unknown factor — perhaps a wound to the psyche — the criminal mind remains for Dickens “a horrible wonder apart.”

Although Dickens’s article on murderers appeared in 1856, it is possible to link several of its themes with those we see at work in Drood. For example, as Felix Aylmer points out in The Drood Case, Dickens describes aspects of Jasper by using the word “good.” The description of Jasper from the novel runs as follows:

Mr. Jasper is a dark man of some six-and-twenty, with thick, lustrous, well-arranged black hair and whisker. He looks older than he is, as dark men often do. His voice is deep and good, his face and figure are good, his manner is a little sombre. (43)

Aylmer cites Dickens’s use of the word “good” to support his argument that Jasper is innocent of any criminal behavior and, above all, innocent of the murder of his nephew. Surely, Aylmer maintains, Dickens would not employ the word “good” if he did not in fact mean to imply that Jasper is a good man. It is obvious to me after reading “The Demeanour of Murderers,” however, that Dickens is using the word “good” to show that Jasper is superficially appealing, just as the poisoner William Palmer standing in the docks during his trial became appealing to the courtroom audience because of his good looks, charm, and calm demeanor. Perhaps Dickens is using the word “good” as an ironic allusion to his earlier description of criminals, reminding the circumspect reader to pay close attention to what Jasper says and does. Lauriat Lane argues in “Dickens and the Double” that Dickens likewise employs the word “decent” to describe Bradley Headstone, a murderer and central character in Our Mutual Friend whose hypocritical double life in many ways mirrors that of Jasper (50). Lane observes that Headstone’s “decency is surface-deep,” an assessment that could just as easily be applied to the deceptive Jasper (50). It is interesting to note that in the evolution of Dickens’s criminal characters, one-dimensional characters like Bill Sikes and Fagin would eventually give way to the more complex and conflicted Headstone and Jasper.

In his crime fiction, Dickens exhibits his keen interest in exploring the criminal’s ability to employ hypocrisy and subterfuge to achieve evil ends. Altick points out that Dickens and his contemporaries “had sometimes dignified their use of murder by attempting to depict ‘the criminal mind,’ a topic which understandably had a special attraction for the Victorians” (83-84). The question follows why did the Victorians, and Dickens in particular, find the topic of murder so provocative? Altick suggests that the Victorians found “sensational murders” supplied “excitement, or in more strictly psychological terms the alternative outlet for innate aggressive impulses, which in other eras were provided by fierce political-religious controversy or by wars [. . .]” (288). He further explains that “the Victorian psyche may have found murder to be a kind of immoral equivalent to war” (288). It is also possible to see a connection between Altick’s idea and that of Houghton who states in The Victorian Frame of Mind that many Victorians were suffering from a general malaise (333). The ennui that Houghton describes is a facet of life that Jasper also wrestles with. He openly admits that he is in fact bored with his life, confessing to Drood that he hates “the cramped monotony of [his] existence,” the “daily drudging round” of his life as a “monotonous chorister and grinder of music” (Drood 48,49). Would Jasper’s boredom at least partially explain his motive for killing Drood? Is he, like other Victorians described by Altick, turning his “innate aggressive impulses” outward toward Drood in order to eliminate his sense of ennui (288)?

Jasper’s sense of malaise is also a symptom of a fragmented self that is struggling to achieve individuation. As explained in chapter one, Carl G. Jung defines individuation as “the conscious coming-to-terms with one’s own inner center (psychic nucleus) or Self” (166). In Jung’s view, the chief goal of the individual is to achieve the psychic harmony that results from the process of individuation. Marie-Louise von Franz, a colleague of Jung’s, points out in “The Process of Individuation” that one of the impediments to achieving individuation may be “a deadly boredom that makes everything seem meaningless and empty” (166-67). By his own admission Jasper suffers from just such an overwhelming sense of boredom.

Houghton argues that in addition to feeling bored, Victorians of “the upper levels of social and intellectual life suffered from a marked feeling of impotence and timidity” (332). It is apparent that Jasper also suffers these feelings of inadequacy; in fact, his very words support this interpretation. For instance, when he provokes Neville Landless into a confrontation with Edwin, it is on the basis that Edwin has an exciting life waiting for him. As Jasper explains to the already alienated Neville, “the world is all before [Edwin] where to choose. A life of stirring work and interest, a life of change and excitement, a life of domestic ease and love!” (Drood 100-01). In contrast, Jasper emphasizes that he and Neville have nothing “but the tedious, unchanging round of this dull place” to be endured each waking hour (101). To overcome his feelings of impotence, Jasper takes opium and enters into a fantasy in which he rules as Sultan.

As a powerful Sultan, Jasper exercises — at least within the realm of his imagination — the power to grant life or death. Jasper repeatedly engages in this depraved fantasy so that he may rehearse the murder of his nephew. As Jasper explains to the opium woman, he relishes the rehearsal of the act — though he never discloses to her the nature of the act — and the journey he repeatedly takes in his imagination (269).

Jasper’s admission that he consistently nurtures the fantasy that we are led to believe is the rehearsal of his nephew’s murder supports an observation made by Arthur J. Cox in his article “The Morals of Edwin Drood.” Cox argues that Jasper is a murderer similar to Headstone in Our Mutual Friend, who, we are told, is a criminal who “struggles” to achieve murder (34). As a prospective murderer, Headstone does not look for ways to avoid carrying out the murder but, according to Cox, exults in the “state of mind which the contemplation and commission of the act engenders” (34). In a similar way, Jasper, who may not have an exciting career ahead of him in Egypt as Drood anticipates, can rehearse in his imagination the details of the planned murder and eventually carry them out as a means of mitigating the crushing and unshakable malaise and impotence that mark his life. Cox further explains this theory by analyzing the type of relationship Jasper has with Drood, describing it as an almost erotic type of love: “The lover looks towards his sweetheart because she is the implied fulfilment of his desires; and Jasper looks towards Drood for much the same reason. His contemplation of the murder and of his victim is pleasurable to him, even if painfully so, because it enables him to feel something” [emphasis added] (36). Jasper is so bored that he feels almost nothing. One of the few activities he can engage in that provides him with a sense of being alive is his oft-repeated fantasy of Drood’s murder. Cox asserts that Jasper is actually elevating his life to a new plane by engaging in his dark fantasies about Drood. Although he may appear to go about his duties in automoton-like fashion, according to Cox, Jasper’s “murderous resolution [. . .] [has] raised him above the petty conditions of his existence into a purely spiritual — that is, unconditioned — kind of life” (36). Jasper, therefore, by means of his fantasies, acquires what Dickens would refer to as “the demeanour of murderers,” a state of utter hypocrisy that allows him to appear to be a devoted uncle on the surface, while secretly, in the core of his being, contemplating the murder of the very nephew he claims to adore.

Jasper exhibits the “criminal intellect” through his actions, words, and even in his fantasies. But beyond the criminal dimension of the man, and integral to an understanding of the character, is his disintegrating psychological state. Jasper’s psychological fragmentation is evident from the outset of the novel. Dickens shows us from the beginning that Jasper is a man who leads two lives. We see him first in the London opium den, secretly feeding his opium appetite, far away from the cathedral town of Cloisterham where he is employed as Lay Precentor, or choirmaster. It is in the close, dark, wretched opium den that the narrator allows us a glimpse inside Jasper’s “scattered consciousness” (Drood 37). In his opium-induced fantasy, Jasper imagines a colorful, majestic procession complete with a “Turkish” “Sultan,” “dancing-girls,” “white elephants,” and flashing “scimitars” (38). There is, however, a perverse tone to this vision, for despite all of its exotic magnificence, there is the menacing image of a “rusty spike” and the narrator’s or Jasper’s suggestion that “it is set up by the Sultan’s orders for the impaling of a horde of Turkish robbers, one by one” (37).

This provocative peek into Jasper’s opium dream makes it evident that his fantasies revolve around violence and death. The fact that the violence and death are accompanied by a clamorous celebration suggests that violent fantasies offer him some sort of perverse pleasure. Thomas De Quincey states in Confessions of an English Opium Eater that an opium user’s dreams, or even his daydreams, are a reflection of his interests and preoccupations (5). We can infer from the content of Jasper’s fantasy that he is preoccupied with visions of public executions set in a barbaric non-western culture. For some mysterious reason he associates capital punishment with celebration. It is as though the contemplation of large-scale murder is tantalizing to him.

Jasper’s fantasies illustrate the prevalence of violent themes in his unconscious. On several occasions, in his waking life, we also see manifestations of his otherwise hidden savage nature. Sometimes his violent proclivities are revealed by a mere word, look, or gesture, but at other times they reveal themselves in outright acts of physical violence. For example, in the opening chapter Jasper sees a Chinaman in the opium den with him. Suddenly, without warning, Jasper “pounces on the Chinaman, and, seize[s] him with both hands by the throat [. . .]” (39). The opium woman must interpose in order to keep them from hurting each other. In a later scene, Jasper again displays his violent temper, angrily vowing to “shed the blood” of Deputy, who appears to be spying on Jasper and Durdles during their nocturnal trek through the cathedral crypt (159). Jasper grabs Deputy by the throat, and Deputy, in turn, “screws his body, and twists, as already undergoing the first agonies of strangulation” (159). Durdles must remind Jasper to “recollect” himself and thus jolts Jasper out of his enraged state (159). Symbolically, Jasper’s genuine dark inner self begins to emerge once he loses control of his temper, and he must be called back to reality in order to impose once again the repressed Jasper. The nature of Jasper’s attack on these two victims also calls to mind Howard Duffield’s Thug theory. 1 If, in fact, Jasper is a Thug, who murders by means of strangulation, these two scenes could be foreshadowings of the method Jasper employs to kill Drood.

Thus, it is not only in his fantasies that Jasper resorts to violence. His reverie, however, provides him with a way to rehearse without detection what he intends to do eventually in reality. It is noteworthy that Jasper’s fantasy of violence is interrupted by the intrusive image of the cathedral tower which brings his perverse reverie to an abrupt halt and preempts the imagined execution. He awakes in the throes of an opium stupor “shaking from head to foot,” feeling frustrated and disappointed that his fantasy of a “writhing figure” on the “grim spike” remains unsatisfied (37). The image of the cathedral tower may be a symbol of Jasper’s conscious spiritual life that is struggling to prevail over his dark side. It also reminds him that he must soon return to his dissatisfying and boring life at the cathedral. Collins suggests that because of Jasper’s work he is “associated with his society’s highest values, in their most traditional and dignified setting” (297). Because of that association, his attraction to the squalid opium den also suggests a rift in his personality. At the very least, his double life is a form of blatant hypocrisy. But even worse, it is a manifestation of the degree to which his self is unraveling.

Jasper’s inability to reconcile his dark secret self with his outer self is typical of individuals who are suffering from what Jung calls “dissociation of consciousness” (Man and his Symbols 24). According to Jung, this malady of the self may be brought about by underlying “complexes — repressed emotional themes that can cause constant psychological disturbances or even, in many cases, the symptoms of neurosis” (27). In addition, Jung asserts that “for the sake of mental stability and even physiological health, the unconscious and the conscious must be integrally connected and thus move on parallel lines. If they are split apart or ‘dissociated,’ psychological disturbance follows” (52). Von Franz maintains that one such psychological disturbance that may threaten an individual’s “inner balance comes from excessive daydreaming, which in a secret way usually circles around particular complexes” (213). Von Franz adds that "daydreams arise just because they connect a man with his complexes; at the same time they threaten the concentration and continuity of his consciousness” (213).

Through his opium-induced fantasies, Jasper reveals himself to be a victim of just such complexes. Ironically, despite Jasper’s ability to create a sense of outer harmony in his role as choirmaster at the cathedral, he is unable to extend that harmony to include his inner life. This disharmony between his outer and inner self further exacerbates the fragmentation of self from which he already suffers.

Questions arise as to what traumatic event, or events, may have triggered Jasper’s complexes and what sorts of “repressed emotional themes” reside in Jasper’s unconscious. Several critics have used the scant clues available in the text to develop some rather elaborate theories regarding the nature of what Jung would refer to as Jasper’s “repressed emotional themes.” Because Jasper is an opium user, it is logical to wonder whether the opium use led to his psychological problem, or if he began taking opium in order to soothe his emotional problem. S. J. Rust theorizes Jasper may have developed a taste for opium in his childhood while living in the East with his parents. Rust proposes that Princess Puffer was at one time Jasper’s nurse and that she unwittingly introduced an opium “draught” into his milk as a way to soothe the pain he experienced from the heat of the orient and from normal childhood complaints such as teething (98). According to Rust’s theory, Jasper’s parents would have eventually discovered that the medicine contained opium and, in horror, would have dismissed the nurse. Rust wonders whether Jasper’s craving for the drug would have emerged later in life and what effect the opium would have “on one of Jasper’s temperament — musical and introspective” (98). Rust’s theory is intriguing, but it remains purely speculative because the extant text provides few, if any, clues to support it.

What other situations or events might have driven Jasper to the opium dens? De Quincey points out that opium eliminates hunger pains, and the opium woman, Princess Puffer, tells Jasper during the opening scene that opium “takes away the hunger as well as wittles [. . .]” (38). But from what Jasper tells Drood about the “pain” he has that leads him to take opium, it seems more likely that Jasper’s pain is not physical, but emotional and psychological (47). John Beer in “Edwin Drood and the Mystery of Apartness” reinforces the view that Jasper’s pain is emotional by suggesting that Jasper is impelled to visit the opium den by “a driving force of the heart” (170). Furthermore, Beer explains that it is a “misdirection of this force — and the subsequent need for relief that drives him to the opium den [. . .]” (170).

Beer’s explanation of Jasper’s opium habit helps support the idea that Jasper suffers from a wound to the psyche, a wound for which opium provides at least a temporary respite. But John S. DeWind notes that Jasper’s attempt to use opium as an escape from his emotional torment paradoxically leads him back to the very pain he is trying to escape. “[. . .] If Jasper finds freedom in the unconscious,” DeWind asserts, “his experience of it oddly mirrors his conscious life, for at least in part his unconscious life is one of endless and exact repetition” (179). Opium becomes for Jasper, then, a double-edged sword — one that provides comfort for a short time, but one that ultimately leads him back to the painful reality of his monotonous life, because the visions it elicits are a series of repetitions of the same journey, and the same event — the imagined murder of his nephew.

Perhaps Jasper did suffer a psychological trauma that led him to take opium. According to von Franz, “a wounding of the personality and the suffering that accompanies it” generally initiate the process of individuation (166). She adds that “this initial shock amounts to a sort of ‘call,’ although it is not often recognized as such” (166). If in fact Jasper suffered such a wound, the question presents itself as to the nature of the wound. One may speculate that it stems from his feelings of being trapped in a boring and unsatisfying life. Jasper’s wound may also be aggravated because of the frustration he feels when faced with the knowledge that Rosa is forever unavailable to him because of her betrothal to Edwin, a betrothal arranged by the parents of Rosa and Edwin when they were yet children. According to von Franz, once the wound to the personality has occurred, “the ego feels hampered in its will or its desire and usually projects the obstruction onto something external” (166). Jasper’s egotistical desire to marry Rosa is frustrated by her betrothal to Edwin, but rather than blame the parents who arranged the engagement, Jasper blames Edwin. Thus, in Jasper’s view, Edwin has become the external obstacle that prevents Jasper from openly wooing Rosa. Edwin’s insouciant attitude toward Rosa may also further irritate the frustrated Jasper, who secretly lusts after his nephew’s fiancée. It must be frustrating for Jasper to be so madly in love with Rosa and yet be forced to stand by and watch his flippant nephew Edwin take her love for granted. By projecting onto Edwin his own frustrations rather than properly integrating them, Jasper plunges deeper into fragmentation and dissociation of consciousness.

Jasper’s fragmentation is also illustrated by the isolated life he chooses to lead, much of it spent in his Gate House, which becomes a tiny fortress where he barricades himself against the encroaching world. Jacobson notes the irony of this situation, pointing out that Jasper is “trapped as much by his inner life as by the narrow limitations of the cathedral precincts” (“Genesis” 200). At one point, the narrator describes Jasper’s Gate House as a lighthouse, where Jasper’s “lamp burns red behind his curtain” (154). Generally, the image of a lighthouse has positive connotations. Lighthouses are symbols of hope and life, but the narrator tells us that Jasper’s home stems “the tide of life” (154). How then could a wicked man’s home be analogous to a lighthouse? Charles Mitchell provides an astute explanation for this comparison in “The Mystery of Edwin Drood: The Interior and Exterior of Self:”

It is appropriate that Jasper’s dwelling be compared to a lighthouse, because his solitary existence is situated on the dangerous line of demarcation between inner and outer self. He lives a life at the edge of the land, the outer world; and that edge is the danger zone for the self since there it begins contact with an inimical outer world [. . .] or there it has to submit its unlimited dreams to the limits of a finite reality [. . .]. (243) This explanation also helps support the contention that Jasper’s isolated self is in danger of continued fragmentation, because he shows no signs of submitting “to the limits of a finite reality” but, rather, chooses to encourage the very fantasies that fuel his twisted desire to commit murder and thus break away from civilized moral constraints. And, of course, the more he engages in his fantasies, the more alienated he becomes from himself and from his fellow human beings.

Von Franz argues that a craving for isolation is yet another feature of the fragmented self (216). De Quincey also notes that a habitual user of opium “[...] naturally seeks solitude and silence, as indispensable conditions of those trances, or profoundest reveries, which are the crown and consummation of what opium can do for human nature” (43). He adds that “music even, [becomes] too sensual and gross” for those under the influence of opium (43). De Quincey’s comment about music certainly applies to Jasper, who tells Drood how “devilish” the cathedral music sounds to him (Drood 48). In describing how unbearable the sound of music has become for him, Jasper reveals yet another way in which he is alienated even from himself, insofar as the vocation to which he once devoted his life has deteriorated into nothing more than an annoying reality to be endured.

Over the course of several months following Drood’s disappearance, Jasper’s desire for isolation increases dramatically. The narrator describes him as Impassive, moody, solitary, resolute, concentrated on one idea, and on its attendant fixed purpose that he would share it with no fellow creature, he lived apart from human life. Constantly exercising an Art which brought him into mechanical harmony with others [. . .] it is curious to consider that the spirit of the man was in moral accordance or interchange with nothing around him. (264)

This passage illustrates not only Jasper’s alienation from the community, but also his monomaniacal concentration on his “one idea” that is stated in his diary entry that he shows Crisparkle. According to that chilling entry, Jasper vows that he “never will relax in [. . .] [his] search;” that he “will fasten the crime of the murder [. . .] upon the murderer” and that he “devote[s] [him]self to his destruction” (Drood 201). According to von Franz, the “dark side of the Self [. . .] can cause people to ‘spin’ megalomaniac or other delusory fantasies that catch them up and ‘possess’ them” (216). Jasper is so possessed. His psyche suffers from fragmentation to the degree that he is not able to accept in his conscious mind the awful truth that he is in fact the perpetrator of the reprehensible crime against Drood. He has, therefore, woven a fantasy that compels him to pursue doggedly whoever he imagines did commit the crime. Symbolically, this is an attempt at self-integration, for if Jasper could accept the reality of his crime, he would come face to face with his true self. Von Franz points out that even the dark side of the self, once it has been acknowledged, can bring with it a wealth of insight (175). Von Franz also observes that confrontation with and recognition of “evil” is inevitably a painful process, but one that is essential to the continuing maturation of the self (167).

Unfortunately, in the extant portion of Dickens’s final novel, Jasper never realizes self-integration. On the contrary, there are several instances in which his self-disintegration is strongly evident. For example, when Rosa’s guardian, Hiram Grewgious, delivers the news to Jasper that Drood and Rosa have broken their engagement on the very day that Drood has disappeared, Jasper falls in “a heap of torn and miry clothes upon the floor” (Drood 192). Lawrence Frank, commenting on this scene, explains that Jasper at this point “undergoes a process of total disintegration, collapsing into the abyss of his self” (226). The news means, of course, that Jasper had no reason to murder his nephew. Frank observes that Jasper’s “identity, fragile and confused as it is, has been defined by the bizarre triangle uniting Rosa, Drood, and himself . . .” (226). Now, however, Frank continues, “with the disappearance of Drood and with the breaking of his engagement to Rosa, the entire edifice — so inverted, fantastic, and self-destructive — collapses” (226).

Jasper is indeed a complex character. In his positive roles he is choirmaster, music teacher, and guardian to Drood. But his sinister side reveals that he is a hypocrite, a mesmerist (a topic that will be more fully explored in the next chapter), and a drug addict, who engages in ritualistic fantasies of death and execution, fantasies that paradoxically, as Lawrence Frank points out, both “sustain” and “torment” him (227). Jasper reflects the most negative aspects of Victorian culture — its hypocrisy and duality, its repressive nature, and its debilitating malaise. But Jasper moves beyond mere hypocrisy, repression, and ennui into a darker realm of psychosis, megalomania, and utter fragmentation. Through his opium use he may be attempting to escape the constraints of Victorian society, but he can never escape the labyrinth of the self.² He is incapable of achieving psychological maturation and individuation because he fails to identify the real nature of his quest, which, in Jungian terms, is to explore the labyrinth of the psyche in search of his true self and, as a result of that journey, ultimately discover some sense of order and harmony.

CHAPTER 3

Jasper Confronts the Woman Within

“Every man has his own Eve within him.” With that German proverb, Wilfred L. Guerin approaches the subject of the anima, that mysterious, multifaceted feminine personality, which, according to Carl G. Jung, resides within the psyche of every man (Guerin 181). Because this image can manifest itself in sometimes contradictory ways and through a variety of emotions and attitudes, it is, in Guerin’s estimation, “the most complex of Jung’s archetypes,” those primordial images that populate humankind’s unconscious (181). The disparate forms the anima takes in literature and art — ranging, Guerin notes, from “Helen of Troy [and] Dante’s Beatrice [to] Milton’s Eve” — attest to her complexity and universal appeal (182).

Whatever form the anima takes, she is, as Guerin points out, the quintessential “life force or vital energy” of man (181). This quintessential feminine force may manifest itself in both positive and negative ways. Whether negative or positive, the anima is, as Von Franz argues, the “personification of all feminine psychological tendencies in a man’s psyche, such as vague feelings and moods, prophetic hunches, receptiveness to the irrational, capacity for personal love, feeling for nature, and — last but not least — his relation to the unconscious” (177). The anima may appear as seductress, virgin, “Sapienta” (wisdom), or as a demonic figure, such as a witch (Man and his Symbols 185). In The Mystery of Edwin Drood the anima figure comes to life in all of these roles through three characters — Rosa Bud, who is a complex virgin-seductress figure, Helena Landless, who represents wisdom, and Princess Puffer, who exhibits the traits of the witch or the Terrible Mother.

All of these female figures, whether angelic or demonic, play the traditional role of the anima in John Jasper’s life. According to von Franz, the positive anima typically functions as “guide, or mediator, to the world within and to the Self” (183). It is her job, von Franz continues, “to put a man’s mind in tune with the right inner values and thereby open the way into more profound inner depths” (180). In other words, she helps guide a man to discover his best self. On the other hand, the negative anima can be so destructive as to lead a man to his death.

How the anima appears is dependent, von Franz maintains, on the role the mother played in the man’s life (178). Because we are dealing with John Jasper’s character and his anima, it is important to try to glean from the extant text of The Mystery of Edwin Drood what sort of relationship he had with his mother. Unfortunately, the text does not reveal much. Despite the paucity of clues, however, it is interesting that several critics have developed theories about who Jasper’s mysterious mother may have been. For example, Felix Aylmer reminds us that Cuming Walters in Clues to Edwin Drood argues that the opium woman, Princess Puffer, is Jasper’s mother (44). Aylmer, however, disagrees with Walters for a very good reason: the opium woman despises Jasper and shakes her fist at him in outrage in the closing chapter (Drood 279). Aylmer argues that if the opium woman were, in fact, Jasper’s mother, she would certainly not want to harm him, because such an intention would be out of character for the kinds of women Dickens typically presents as mother figures (46). Henry Jackson also reacts with skepticism to Walters’s suggestion that the opium woman could be Jasper’s mother. According to Jackson, Walters’s proposal that the opium woman had been abandoned by Jasper’s father and now pursues Jasper in order to make the “child suffer for the sins of the father” is “fantastic” (60). Furthermore, Jackson rejects Walters’s hypothesis, because, as Jackson explains, it “presumes that the opium woman knows who Jasper is, whereas [. . .] she knows neither his name nor where he lives” (60). Jackson theorizes that the opium woman may pursue Jasper at the end of the novel because she believes he cruelly abandoned a woman who had befriended her (60). Other than this brief speculation regarding the opium woman’s pursuit of Jasper, however, Jackson offers no hypothesis regarding the identity of Jasper’s mother.

Aylmer, on the other hand, while rejecting Walters’s theory that the opium woman may be Jasper’s mother, substitutes his own Byzantine, albeit fascinating theory, proposing that Jasper’s mother was a Moslem woman. Aylmer postulates that Jasper’s Christian father, Drood, may have been working in Egypt where he met and fell in love with a Moslem woman, whom he may or may not have married. In either case, the Moslem woman’s liaison with a Christian would have placed her in a dangerous situation because the tenets of the Moslem religion do not condone inter- faith relationships. Aylmer contends that when the orthodox Moslem family eventually discovered her indiscretion, she would have been subject to the harsh laws and punishment of her culture, which dictated that she either renounce her marriage (or liaison) or be executed. Aylmer suggests that Jasper’s Moslem mother was in fact executed, an event which precipitated an equally violent response from Jasper’s father. According to Aylmer’s theory, Jasper’s father, with Rosa’s father as his second, would have demanded a duel with his deceased wife’s father or brother, because it would have been one of them who had carried out the execution of Jasper’s mother.

Furthermore, Aylmer theorizes that Drood (Jasper’s father) would have killed his wife’s relative and perhaps, would have even attempted to kill another, when Bud interposed. Now, in a complex turn of events, Bud has actually saved the life of a Moslem and the entire Moslem family will forever be in his debt (The Drood Case 51-61).

As Aylmer’s theory would have it, Drood’s actions would have set off a chain of events that would lead to an irrevocable blood feud. Forced to flee Egypt for the safety of his then five-year-old-son Jasper, Drood would have returned to England and married again. This second marriage would produce Edwin. In Aylmer’s scheme, then, Edwin is really Jasper’s half-brother. In the meantime, Bud would have also married, and he and his wife would have a daughter, Rosa. Aylmer suggests that Bud and Drood would have drawn up a pact stipulating that their children would marry upon reaching the age of majority. Aylmer proposes that the betrothal would be a form of protection for Edwin, who might otherwise become a victim of the blood feud. In other words, because Rosa is the daughter of Bud, a friend of the Moslems, Edwin’s betrothal to Rosa should afford adequate protection from would-be assassins (The Drood Case 56-58).

If, in fact, Aylmer’s elaborate scheme is true, then it is possible to understand why Jasper would suffer from neuroses and complexes that lead him to opium and murderous fantasies. First of all, according to Aylmer’s hypothesis, Jasper would have lost his mother at a very early age, a loss that would have led, no doubt, to feelings of rejection and abandonment. Then, shortly after the death of his mother, Jasper’s father would have uprooted him from his homeland and introduced him to an alien culture where he would thenceforth lead an isolated life as one of England’s dispossessed. Permanently separated from his mother and his native culture, Jasper may have found consolation in vague recollections of his early years that emanate from his unconscious and resurface in his tortured hallucinations of exotic pageantry and ritual executions. In regard to this notion, Aylmer proposes that “Jasper’s memory seems to retain a distinct, though muddled, impression of some festival procession in Cairo” (55). The violent nature of the fantasies suggests that the young Jasper may have even witnessed the ghastly execution of his mother. According to Aylmer, the execution imposed in cases of “apostacy” (51) is particularly cold-blooded, the offending female either drowned or, even more gruesomely, cut to pieces (52). If she had been cut to pieces, her execution could be viewed as a grim foreshadowing of the kind of psychological dismemberment that Jasper would suffer.

Aylmer’s hypothesis that Jasper’s mother is Moslem also provides support for the theory that Jasper suffers from psychological instability, because his very genetic makeup would suggest a dual personality — one oriental, the other occidental. From his conception, then, the seeds of discord were planted — the dark desire for opium, as well as his distaste for the methodical life of the staid, middle-class Englishman.

Along with Jasper’s psychological instability and his feelings of rejection and loss, he is probably also feeling justifiably angry because as Drood’s first-born son, it should have been he who was betrothed to Rosa. It may be possible, at least in part, that the wound Jasper suffers that should initiate the process of individuation (but instead leads to his opium abuse), is a symbolic, but nevertheless deeply painful rejection by the father, who denied Jasper the honor, the privilege, and the protective shield that a betrothal to Rosa would have provided. Is the betrothal never extended to Jasper because the father believes that Jasper is protected from would-be assassins by virtue of his Moslem blood? We can only speculate about this point.

While we speculate, however, we may also notice that Jasper exhibits some of the very characteristics that are associated with men who have experienced negative relationships with their mothers or who have negative memories of their mothers. Significantly, these same characteristics reveal the presence of the negative anima.

Von Franz explains that “if [a man’s] mother had a negative influence on him, his anima will often express itself in irritable, depressed moods, uncertainty, insecurity, and touchiness” (178). In the case of Jasper, his moodiness is reflected in the somber surroundings of his home, a murky quality that imbues Jasper’s very personality. Moreover, several characters in the novel notice Jasper’s melancholia. For instance, the Reverend Septimus Crisparkle refers to Jasper’s “black humors” (132) and “occasional indisposition” (180). Jasper’s inclination toward moodiness is also revealed in his diary, an occasional entry of which he shows Crisparkle. In one such entry, Jasper admits that he feels “dark intangible presentiments of evil” regarding Neville Landless (Drood 132). Neville is an orphan from Ceylon, whom Crisparkle has taken in as a student . Jasper’s dismal premonitions are yet another symptom of the negative anima and her penchant to reveal herself in what von Franz calls “prophetic hunches” (177). Another illustration of Jasper’s inclination to moodiness is revealed in Drood’s comments to Rosa about Jasper’s “womanish” behavior, a reference, no doubt, to Jasper’s officious displays of affection toward Drood (168). Jasper’s “presentiments of evil” coupled with his “black humors” and “womanish” manner reveal the presence of an unusually strong and negative anima figure at work in his unconscious. Other characteristics of the negative anima that are evident in Jasper’s life include his inclination to exaggerate emotional relationships, to engage in unhealthy fantasies, to express discontent with his life, and to spread that discontent all around him. A passage from Jung’s Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious mentions several of these characteristics of the negative anima that plague Jasper’s life:

The anima is a factor of the utmost importance in the psychology of a man wherever emotions and affects are at work. She intensifies, exaggerates, falsifies, and mythologizes all emotional relations with his work and with other people of both sexes. The resultant fantasies and entanglements are all her doing. When the anima is strongly constellated, she softens the man’s character and makes him touchy, irritable, moody, jealous, vain, and unadjusted. He is then in a state of ‘discontent’ and spreads discontent all around him. (70-71)

The first part of this passage refers to the way in which the negative anima “exaggerates, falsifies and mythologizes all emotional relations with [a man’s] work and with other people of both sexes.” Clearly, Jasper demonstrates in his relationship with both Drood and Rosa how strongly he exaggerates his affection for both of them.

While I believe that Jasper’s protestations of love for Drood are all lies, he is so adept at creating an illusion of devotion, that even Drood believes his uncle loves him intensely. And Drood is not alone. The entire community of Cloisterham, as well, seems to be hoodwinked by Jasper’s show of affection for Drood and believes him to be the very epitome of avuncular devotion. Harry Levin underscores Jasper’s duplicity, however, pointing out in his article “The Uncles of Dickens” that Jasper is “the most complex of [Dickens’s] uncles, professing warm regards and harboring jealous reservations” (29-30). Levin also notes that Jasper is an uncle in the Ricardian tradition, meaning he is following in the footsteps of King Richard III, who in Levin’s view, was “the very archetype of wicked uncles” (7), because he disdains his role of guardian and behaves in a manner “unnatural, hostile and malicious, a proponent of those negative forces which he should be tempering” (6).

Despite Jasper’s ability to deceive most of the citizens of Cloisterham, at least one character expresses a slight disapproval of Jasper’s overzealous concern for Drood. Crisparkle is troubled by what he calls Jasper’s “exaggerative” diary entry, in which Jasper expresses his “morbid dread” that some “horrible consequences” will befall his “dear boy” (132). What prompts that fear, Jasper maintains, is the “demoniacal passion” he has seen Neville display toward Drood (132). Jasper witnesses Neville’s “fury” toward Drood in the evening following a dinner at Crisparkle’s (132). At the dinner Neville meets and feels attracted to Rosa. Based on flippant remarks Drood makes about Rosa, Neville concludes that Drood does not appreciate Rosa the way she deserves to be appreciated. The two men nearly come to blows on the street after depositing Rosa, Helena Landless, and Miss Twinkleton at the Nuns’ House — Miss Twinkleton’s school for young ladies — and are only interrupted by Jasper, who encourages them to be friends and come into the Gate House for a glass of wine. Apparently, Jasper mixes some drugs with the wine, for as the narrator hints, the preparation of the “mulled wine” “seems to require much mixing and compounding” (100). The narrator also notes that the faces of both Drood and Neville “become quickly and remarkably flushed by the wine,” emphasizing this point, perhaps, so that the reader will not miss the clue (101). Having drunk the tainted mixture, the inhibitions of the two men are decidedly lower than before.

Jasper takes advantage of their condition to incite yet another confrontation between them, pointing out to Neville that Drood has everything that he and Neville do not have. “The world is all before him where to choose,” declares Jasper: “A life of stirring work and interest, a life of change and excitement, a life of domestic ease and love! Look at him!” (Drood 100-01). Jasper exacerbates the already emotionally- charged situation by asking Neville to “consider the contrast” between their lives and Drood’s (101). “You and I have no prospect of stirring work and interest, or of change and excitement, or of domestic ease and love” Jasper asserts. “You and I have no prospect [. . .] but the tedious, unchanging round of this dull place” (101). Because of Jasper’s constant goading, Neville grows increasingly irritated and angry, and eventually he and Drood again exchange heated words. The final blow is Drood’s “insulting allusion” to Neville’s “dark skin,” a comment that prompts Neville to “fling the dregs of his wine at Edwin” (102).

This scene reveals several ways in which the negative anima is working in Jasper’s life. It shows that it is Jasper, not Neville, who possesses the “demoniacal passion” that is to be feared, because it is Jasper who insidiously goads the two young men to violence (132). Furthermore, the scene illustrates to what degree Jasper is jealous of Drood and discontented with his own lot in life. The scene also clearly presents one way, as Jung points out in the passage above, in which Jasper “spreads discontent all around him.” In his exaggeration of the danger Neville poses to Drood, in his exaggerated show of affection for Drood, and through his jealousy and obvious discontent, Jasper exhibits how profoundly his unconscious is infected by his negative anima.

Another significant aspect of this scene is that it reinforces what Rosa had earlier confided in Neville’s sister Helena; that is, Jasper has the ability to exercise some mysterious control over her. Rosa explains to Helena that Jasper “has made a slave of [her] with his looks [and] pursues her as a lover” (95). Rosa emphasizes that it is Jasper’s eyes that frighten her the most and explains to Helena: “I avoid his eyes, but he forces me to see them without looking at them” (95). Having heard Rosa’s confession to Helena, the reader may now begin to suspect that Jasper uses his eyes to mesmerize Rosa.

Arthur J. Cox states unequivocally in “The Morals of Edwin Drood” that “Jasper is a mesmerist,” a “discovery” that was first introduced by Aubrey Boyd in his 1922 A New Angle on the Drood Mystery (32). Cox asserts that although the word “mesmerism” is never used in the novel, Dickens provides hints that mesmerism does play a role, especially in his mention of “animal magnetism” associated with “two states of consciousness” (32). Cox claims it is Jasper’s attempt to mesmerize Rosa during her musical performance that leads her to burst into tears and to scream in sheer terror (32). If Rosa can be a victim of his hypnotic powers, why not others? Cox says yes, that Jasper does use mesmerism to manipulate other characters and explains that he uses hypnotism to foment the previously-discussed argument between Drood and Neville (32).

With Cox’s assertion in mind, it does seem possible that Jasper’s ability to mesmerize could have something to do with the conflict between Drood and Neville. Curiously, Jasper suddenly appears beside the two men on the street as sparks began to fly between them. The narrator notes that Jasper “has come up behind them on the shadowy side of the road” like Count Dracula who always lurks in the darkness, biding his time, and waiting for an opportune moment to waylay an unsuspecting victim (98). Another way Jasper resembles Dracula is suggested by Rosa as she discusses with Helena Jasper’s bizarre pursuit of her. Rosa explains that she never feels “safe from him. [She] feels as if he could pass in through the wall” (95). As Rosa describes the eerie feeling that Jasper gives her, Jasper takes on the unmistakable image of a vampire, who possesses evil preternatural powers like those traditionally attributed to Dracula. As with Dracula, so it is with Jasper that the eyes are used to hypnotize and control his victims.

In the violent scene that takes place between Neville and Drood in Jasper’s Gate House, it is also Jasper’s eyes that flash between the two and, in a sense, work to mesmerize and manipulate the two men. And later in the same scene the narrator emphasizes that immediately before the argument between Drood and Neville reaches a climax, “Mr. Jasper’s play of eyes between the two holds good throughout the dialogue, to the end” (102). Fred Kaplan notes in Dickens and Mesmerism: The Hidden Springs of Fiction that Jasper’s “’optic vision’ is extraordinary” (131). Moreover, Kaplan points out that Jasper “has been given a full armament of mesmeric weapons: the power of his music, eyes, hands, touch, voice, presence” (131). No wonder he has the power to incite men to violence or drive women to the brink of emotional collapse.

Jasper’s attempts to mesmerize Rosa may symbolize his need to manipulate, subdue, and ultimately integrate the negative anima that she embodies. If this is the case, Jasper is projecting onto Rosa characteristics of his negative anima. Von Franz explains that sometimes a man may project qualities of his anima so that they appear to belong to a “particular woman” (180). Jung elaborates on this idea in The Integration of the Personality in which he argues that “as long as a man is unconscious of his anima she is frequently projected upon a real woman, and the man’s fantasy equips her with all the fascinating qualities peculiar to the anima” (23). Von Franz also points out that the danger of projecting onto an “official personification” is that the person who serves as the object of the projection “tends to fall apart into a double aspect, such as Mary and witch” (188). Based on this Jungian insight, it is possible to see Rosa as a double anima, one who embodies aspects of both the negative and the positive anima.

Everett F. Bleiler provides some insights about Rosa that support the idea that she is, in fact, a double anima. First of all, Bleiler shows that Rosa’s very name suggests she is a virgin figure. As further validation that the name suggests a virginity, Bleiler reminds the reader that Drood often blends the name Rosa Bud into Rosebud, “a common term for an attractive young woman, particularly a nubile virgin” (91). Traditionally, a virgin figure would be associated with the positive anima, the feminine force that von Franz says puts men in tune with their “right inner values” (180). But Bleiler makes some observations that would lead one to believe that Rosa is in fact a negative anima figure. Bleiler argues that “Rosa Bud is one of the most curious sex symbols in literature [. . .] something less and something more than a human being” (91). He also asserts that “she is ultimately a destructive element,” because those who associate with her come to tragic ends. “Drood dies,” Bleiler explains, “Jasper will die; Neville Landless will die” (91). Although Bleiler makes interpretive leaps about the fate of the characters that the text cannot support, he does make two significant comments about Rosa that help support the contention that she is a negative anima figure. For example, the phrase “something less and something more than a human being” implies that while Rosa has not yet achieved her full humanity, she is endowed with symbolic significance that situates her on a mystical, mythological plane, on a different level from that of human beings. Lawrence Frank sees the unfinished portrait of Rosa, drawn by Drood and now propped on Jasper’s mantle, as a symbol of her “unfinished” personality (The Romantic Self 208). This unfinished portrait, Frank says, “presides over Jasper’s chambers like the image of an impish, secular madonna” (208). Because of her developing personality, she “remains,” in Frank’s view, “a creature of [Drood’s and Jasper’s] imaginings, forever eluding their understanding” (208). Her symbolic identity is that of the negative anima, a femme fatale, who like the mythological nixie (“a female, half-human fish” that fishermen on rare occasions caught in their nets) has the power to drag men down to their deaths (Archetypes 24).

Furthermore, Bleiler emphasizes Rosa’s “destructive” power, a characteristic commonly associated with a negative anima (91). She is destructive insofar as she causes friction between Drood and Jasper and later between Drood and Neville. As Jasper’s confession in the “Shadow on the Sun-Dial” chapter clearly shows, Jasper has been in love with Rosa for quite a long time, and he admits that had his love for her been any stronger, he would have “swept” Drood away as so much dross ( 229). So while Jasper denies having actually killed Drood, he comes as close to a confession as possible in admitting to Rosa that the thought had crossed his mind and that it was his obsessive love for her that drove him to such a thought.

Another aspect of Rosa’s personality that makes her such a “curious sex symbol” is her blend of physical attractiveness and her childlike quality. While she embodies what Bleiler calls “the power of female sexuality” (91), Rosa also exhibits some genuinely infantile behaviors and habits, such as her fondness for “Turkish sweetmeat” (58), her shy gesture of hiding her face behind her apron when Edwin comes calling (54), and the once-mentioned silly gesture of placing her fingers in her ears in an attempt to block out further revelations about the argument that takes place between Drood and Neville (107). She is indeed a strange blend of female sexuality and girlishness — an innocent, yet provocative, Lolita. This blend of childlike innocence and budding sexuality suggests that Rosa shares common traits with Dora Spenlow, David Copperfield’s first wife, who in some ways represents the ideal Victorian woman, a vacuous and feckless female, yet curiously attractive in the eyes of Victorian men.

Drood not only refers to Rosa as Rosebud, but as Bleiler points out, he occasionally refers to her as “Pussy, a slang term for the female genitals, which is [. . .] recorded for this period” (91). These two names blended together create a woman who is an embodiment of purity but, simultaneously, a symbol of pure female sexuality. Blending these two names captures her conflicting roles as negative and positive anima. As a positive anima figure, Rosa has within her what von Franz would describe as the power to “raise love (eros) to the heights of spiritual devotion” (185). But, simultaneously, as a negative anima figure, Rosa has the power to seduce and destroy.

Clearly, then, there is a discrepancy between Rosa’s power as a virgin figure to “raise love” to the level of “spiritual devotion” and the reality that Jasper’s devotion to her is based purely on lust. The lustful nature of Jasper’s attraction to Rosa is palpable during their last meeting in the garden of the Nuns’ House. Throughout the scene he calls her by turns, “sweet witch,” “rare charmer” (229), “angel” (231), and “worshipped of my soul” (230), contradictory terms that emphasize her role as both negative and positive anima. According to the confession he makes to her during this scene, he has for some time been tormented by his mad love for her:

even when my dear boy was affianced to you, I loved you madly; [. . .] even when I strove to make him more ardently devoted to you, I loved you madly; [. . .]. In the distasteful work of the day, in the wakeful misery of the night, girded by sordid realities, or wandering through Paradises and hells of visions in which I rushed, crying your image in my arms, I loved you madly. (228)

The word “image” in this passage is telling. Here Jasper implies that it is her physical being alone which attracts him. The portrait over his mantle also reflects his interest in her image, not an interest in her character or personality. He confesses in the garden six months after Edwin’s death, that it is not her love that he requires. He will even settle for her hate, her “pretty rage,” “that enchanting scorn,” just so long as her body comes along with it (Drood 229).

Based on Jasper’s confession, it is apparent that Rosa wields sufficient sexual power (though unconscious, I believe) to bewitch utterly the already psychotic Jasper. Richard M. Baker suggests that it is Rosa who plays the role of the “dancing girl” in Jasper’s fantasy (42). The dance she performs in his erotic fantasy has the same effect on Jasper as a hypnotic trance. The mesmerist becomes the mesmerized. Jasper uses his hands in the garden scene much as a prestidigitator would use his hands to deceive his audience; however, Jasper’s “menacing” face (228) and “frightful vehemence” (231) do not work in harmony with his hands, and the “spell” he attempts to cast over Rosa is broken (231). The spell may never take hold because Jasper cannot hypnotize his anima into submission. His effort to subdue her is yet another futile attempt to reintegrate the anima that he has projected onto Rosa. Lawrence Frank asserts that in the garden scene with Rosa, Jasper becomes “a disembodied self for whom there are no authentic gestures, but only further means of disguising an illusory real self hidden behind impenetrable layers of posturing [. . . ]” (The Romantic Self 231). Because Jasper can assert “no authentic gestures,” he becomes what Robert Barnard refers to as “a personality on the verge of disintegration” (136) and what Jung would call a self suffering utter dissociation of consciousness (Man and his Symbols 24).

Ultimately, Rosa frees herself from his insidious attempts to mesmerize her and flees to London where she finds shelter with her guardian, Hiram Grewgious. In running away from Jasper, Rosa symbolizes the archetypal feminine principle that paradoxically gathers strength when repressed and ultimately overwhelms the very force that vainly seeks to subdue it. It is appropriate that an approaching thunderstorm sounds in the distance as she lies in a faint within the walls of the Nuns’ House. The sound of the imminent storm heralds the Dionysian force that is gathering strength within Rosa’s unconscious, a force that was hitherto held in check both by the constraining walls of the Nuns’ House and, more significantly, by the mind control Jasper sought to impose on her.

Another anima figure in the novel is Helena Landless, the indomitable twin sister of Neville Landless. As a positive anima figure she would most closely resemble what von Franz calls “Sapienta,” a feminine image of “wisdom” (185). Having come from the east, she may represent oriental wisdom that Jasper needs to reassimilate if he is to enter into the process of individuation. If in fact Jasper’s mother was from the east, Helena may even be the source of maternal wisdom that Jasper has been lacking since the death of his mother. The strongest evidence to support the argument that Helena is a wisdom figure can be found in the scene where Jasper frightens Rosa as she is singing to his piano accompaniment after a dinner party at Crisparkle’s home. Edwin attempts to explain Rosa’s terrified reaction to Jasper with the excuse that she is “’not used to an audience [. . .] . She got nervous’” (93). But he adds an even more insightful reason for her apparent fright. Addressing Jasper, Edwin says, “[. . . ] you are such a conscientious master, and require so much, that I believe you make her afraid of you. No wonder” (93). When Helena echoes Edwin’s last two words, Edwin asks her if she would not also be frightened of Jasper “under similar circumstances” (93). But she boldly responds, “Not under any circumstances” (93).

As Helena consoles Rosa, Jasper disappears from the scene, realizing, perhaps, that he is in the presence of a woman whom Richard Baker describes as “a powerful adversary, one who can get the better of him at his own game” (48). John Beer maintains that Helena possesses a “basic vitality, shared with her brother, which is the only force in the novel fully to match Jasper’s [. . .]” (171). Helena is an androgynous figure who, as Neville relates to Crisparkle, has even greater courage and determination than he has. Neville explains that on several occasions he and Helena ran away from their stepfather — each time at her instigation — and that “each time she dressed as a boy, and showed the daring of a man” (Drood 90). Neville makes it clear, however, that the cruel treatment they received at the hands of their stepfather never drove his sister to become violent, mean-spirited, or inhumane. On the contrary, Neville asserts that the deprivations of their youth, while leaving him with “a drop of what is tigerish in [the] blood,” have, in fact, left Helena with a sensibility more elevated than his (90). He explains, “She has come out of the disadvantages of our miserable life, as much better than I am, as that Cathedral tower is higher than those chimneys” (90). By comparing Helena to the Cathedral tower, Neville offers an analogy that also lends support to her role as positive anima, an embodiment of both wisdom and spiritual fortitude and, as von Franz points out, a representative of a stage of “psychic development” “rarely” attained by “modern man” (186).

Crisparkle soon notices for himself that Helena possesses certain noble qualities that Neville would do well to imitate. Walking with the twins along the restless sea coast, Crisparkle entreats Neville to forget about his confrontation with Drood and seek reconciliation instead. At first both Neville and Helena are outraged by such a suggestion, seeing that it was Drood’s lack of civility and hospitality that led to the argument in the first place. But eventually Crisparkle is able to persuade Neville to meet with Drood. As their discussion comes to an end, Crisparkle addresses Helena, asking her if she cannot “overcome” in her brother what she has managed to “overcome in [herself],” namely anger and pride (130). The modest Helena believes her influence to be very slight compared to that of Crisparkle. But he astutely asserts that her wisdom is “the wisdom of Love, [. . .] and it was the highest wisdom ever known upon this earth” (130). If Jasper could recognize the type of wisdom Helena embodies, he might be able to assimilate this noble feature of the positive anima that she represents, but after the scene at the piano with Rosa, he avoids her as though afraid of what a confrontation with her might bring.

Crisparkle and Neville are not the only characters in the novel who notice Helena’s positive attributes. After Rosa’s frightening experience with Jasper at the piano and after she and Helena have returned to the safety of the Nuns’ House, Rosa describes Helena’s demeanor and apparent strength of character, as “womanly,” “handsome,” and “noble” (Drood 94-95). Lawrence Frank believes that “in Helena Landless, Rosa finds her antithesis” (“Intelligibility” 175). Crisparkle has noticed their polar differences as well, but he has learned from local “gossip” (Drood 122) how they complement each other in their “picturesque alliance” at the Nuns’ House (123).

Rosa also refers to Helena’s qualities of “resolution” and “power,” qualities that provide her (Rosa) with a sense of security in Helena’s presence (94). In addition to the fortitude Helena displays, there is also an indication that she possesses both self-knowledge and an awareness of her limitations, important characteristics of true wisdom. Despite Rosa’s praise for her, Helena humbly confesses that she has “everything to learn” and is “deeply ashamed to own [her] ignorance” (94). But this confession does not alter Rosa’s high opinion of Helena, to whom she attributes the ability to “acknowledge everything” (94). By this statement, Rosa means that Helena has an uncanny ability to make clear that which may otherwise appear cloudy.

Helena’s knack for seeing into the heart of things and exposing their truth to others may anticipate her ultimately seeing into Jasper’s dark soul and exposing its sordid secrets to the citizens of Cloisterham. Philip Collins notes that “it has often and plausibly been suggested that Helena Landless was to have hypnotized [Jasper], thus ‘elaborately eliciting’ his guilt from him” (303). Collins suggests that it would have been an interesting turn of events if she had been able to hypnotize Jasper, who, over the course of the novel, frequently attempts to mesmerize others (301). Furthermore, if Helena has disguised herself as the mysterious Datchery, who may be an undercover detective (G. K. Chesterton refers to Cuming Walters’s argument that the strange Mr. Datchery is Helena in disguise 225-26), then she overtly demonstrates her power as a positive anima figure. In her capacity as sleuth, she may not only unmask Jasper, but lead him to see who he truly is. If he acknowledges and integrates that part of his psyche that she represents, he would be on the way to attaining a more integrated persona, and Helena would have functioned as what von Franz calls the archetypal positive anima figure, that is, “guide and mediator to the inner world” (186). Paradoxically, Helena in this role of unmasker could also be seen as a negative anima figure, for she will destroy the façade of middle-class respectability behind which Jasper has so long lived and, symbolically, destroy the self that he has presented to the world. Once the false self is exposed, Jasper may have an opportunity to renounce his wicked past and, as the scripture passage from Ezekiel 18:27 at the end of chapter one says, “save his soul alive.”

While Helena functions as primarily a positive anima figure, Princess Puffer embodies the traditional negative anima figure, a witch who seeks to lure Jasper to his doom. Datchery describes her “as ugly and withered as one of the fantastic carvings on the under brackets of the stall seats, as malignant as the Evil One” (Drood 279). In the novel’s opening scene in the opium den, Jasper is repulsed by her repugnant appearance and leaning close to her “watches the spasmodic shoots and darts that break out of her face and limbs, like fitful lightning out of a dark sky” (39). A truly demonic figure, she is the personification of Jasper’s dark, secret addiction to opium, an addiction that she finds it profitable to promote. She reminds him that it is not good for him to attempt to mix his own opium and encourages him to rely solely on her as his source of drugs. “’Never take it your own way,’” she says, “’It ain’t good for trade and it ain’t good for you” (Drood 267). Insidiously, she wheedles her way into his life, and at least on two occasions she visits Cloisterham to hang about him like the opium smoke that hangs about his head.

Princess Puffer also represents the archetype of the Terrible Mother who, according to Guerin, is associated with “the negative aspects of the Earth Mother” (163). In other words she is associated with “darkness,” emasculation,” and “death,” every quality that is in opposition to the beneficent “life principle” of the Earth Mother (163). In her relationship with her clients, Princess Puffer claims to function as “a mother” (Drood 266). As she explains to Jasper, “there’s land customers, and there’s water customers. I’m a mother to both” (266). In her terms of endearment for Jasper, she connotes a mother-son relationship, calling him “deary” (267), “poppet” (267), and “chuckey” (268). Like a mother quietly lulling her child to sleep, she “gently lays him back again” when he grows disturbed, and like the devil himself, “revives the fire in [his pipe] with her own breath” (270). In her opium kingdom, she rules over the wretched souls who visit her realm, just like a dark queen over the spirits of the dead.

In A Jungian Approach to Literature, Bettina L. Knapp discusses a Finnish myth that deals with a hero who visits the “Abode of the Dead,” much as Jasper visits Princess Puffer’s opium den (301). Unlike Väinämöinen, the hero of this Finnish myth who refuses to drink the brew offered by the queen of the dead, Jasper smokes the opium that Princess Puffer offers him. The Finnish myth makes it clear that by taking the drug and losing “lucidity,” a visitor to the “Abode of the Dead” will “remain bound, imprisoned in this darkened domain, [and] forgo ego-consciousness” (301). In a similar way, once Jasper loses consciousness in Princess Puffer’s opium den, he is relegated to the dark realm of his own unconscious, unaware of his need to pursue individuation.

Wendy Jacobson notes in her introduction to the Drood companion that there is a “doppelgänger” “motif” at work in this novel (5). Based on this comment, it may be possible to see Princess Puffer as Jasper’s dark double, a terrifying image of his own misshapen humanity. Even Edwin notices the similarity between the old woman and Jasper when he by chance encounters her in Cloisterham on Christmas Eve. As Edwin observes her physical shaking, he is shocked to remark the likeness between her and his uncle. He thinks to himself, “’Good Heaven! [. . .]. Like Jack that night!’” (178). In an allusion to the Jungian concept of integration, Jacobson notes that “the doubling seems to move towards integration when the Princess Puffer hobbles into the Cathedral, the antithesis of her opium den. [. . .] she brings together the disparate parts of Jasper’s life” (5). Jacobson then poses the question, “Can this be a parody of a possible integration of Jasper’s personality?” (5). The answer would seem to be “yes,” because the narrator in Drood reports that as Princess Puffer watches Jasper, “All unconscious of her presence, he chants and sings” (279, emphasis added). As long as Jasper remains unconscious of the presence of the negative anima, he will be unable to come to terms with this ugly aspect of his persona.

Faced with three anima figures, Jasper is surrounded by opportunities for psychological growth. However, each time he has an opportunity to acknowledge and integrate the anima figure, he suffers further psychic fragmentation. By projecting his anima onto Rosa, he develops what von Franz calls a compulsive dependency on her (188). Although his attempts to mesmerize Rosa end in failure and frustration, Jasper may believe that hypnosis is the only method he can use as he attempts to harness the power that the anima represents. By avoiding Helena, Jasper misses an opportunity to integrate the valuable wisdom she embodies. In Princess Puffer, Jasper meets the Terrible Mother, who encourages his drug addiction and leads him into even darker despair and insanity. Until Jasper acknowledges and learns to tap into the power of the anima, he will remain her victim.

CHAPTER 4

The Approach of the Shadow

At the end of chapter one of The Mystery of Edwin Drood, the narrator cites in bold, capital letters the opening words of Ezekiel 18:27: “WHEN THE WICKED MAN — ” (40). In a footnote, Arthur J. Cox presents the entire Biblical verse and reminds the reader that this particular scriptural passage is read at the beginning of both “the Morning Prayer and the Evening Prayer in the Anglican Church Liturgy” (302). The entire passage as presented in the footnote reads: “Again, when the wicked man turneth away from his wickedness that he hath committed and doeth that which is lawful and right, he shall save his soul alive” (302). Cox further explains in his footnote that “the importance [Dickens] attached to these ‘intoned words’ is attested by a notation in the plan of the first monthly number [. . .]: Touch the keynote ‘When the Wicked Man’” (302). From Dickens’s own notes for the novel, then, it is possible to infer that he employed the verse as a way of introducing a central theme for the novel. That key theme has to do with the wicked nature of its central character, John Jasper.

The passage from Ezekiel serves to remind the reader that Jasper is a wicked man who has fallen from grace and therefore in need of redemption. The idea of a fall from grace reminds us, too, that Jasper is a wounded creature, who has suffered so deeply that he turns to opium and murderous fantasies in a futile attempt to assuage his psychic pain. The psychic pain from which he suffers could have been provoked by any number of events, including the loss of his mother when he was young, the loss of Rosa through her betrothal to Drood, or even by the very nature of his monotonous life in Cloisterham. As von Franz argues in Man and his Symbols, the wound to his psyche should prompt psychic growth and initiate the process of individuation (166). But Jasper’s life is an unrelenting cycle of unfulfilling, tedious work, and opium-induced fantasy. Rather than embrace and explore the dark wound from which he suffers, confront the cause, and learn the lessons that the unconscious attempts to teach him by means of the wound, Jasper avoids dealing with the bleak reality that resides there and continues to escape into the smoky world of opium-induced stupor. In the deadly, daily round of his life, Jasper thus avoids any opportunity for psychic growth or spiritual transformation.

Before Jasper could embrace the reality of his dark self, he would have to face and ultimately integrate his shadow self. Von Franz explains that according to Jung’s model of the psyche, the shadow self is an “unconscious part of the personality [. . . ] [that] often appears in dreams in a personified form” (168). Von Franz further elaborates that the shadow “represents unknown or little-known attributes and qualities of the ego — aspects that mostly belong to the personal sphere and that could just as well be conscious” (168). Von Franz adds that in the shadow a man may see those “qualities and impulses he denies in himself but can plainly see in other people” (168). Bettina L. Knapp clarifies this point, explaining that the shadow includes “[. . .] those characteristics that the ego considers to be negative and wishes to hide or rejects by projecting them on others” (101). Conversely, the shadow may also contain qualities that the ego needs to recognize and incorporate. As von Franz explains, the shadow in this regard may hold “values that are needed by consciousness, but that exist in a form that makes it difficult to integrate them into one’s life” (170-71).

Jung explains in The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious that there are similarities between the shadow and the anima figure. “Like the anima,” Jung writes, “[the shadow] appears either in projection on suitable persons, or personified as such in dreams” (284). As Jasper projects his anima onto Rosa, so he projects his shadow onto several characters in the novel. As in the case of the anima, who sometimes embodies positive or negative qualities, so it is with Jasper’s shadow figures. In Neville, Durdles, and in the Sultan figure, who appears in Jasper’s dream, we see personified Jasper’s negative, dark qualities. On the other hand, in Crisparkle we see positive values that Jasper needs to assimilate into his psyche. According to Jung, shadow figures commonly “irrupt autonomously into consciousness as soon as it gets into a pathological state” (Archetypes 285). Jasper, with his murderous fantasies (exacerbated by opium use), his exaggerated and disingenuous displays of affection for Drood, and his obsessional lust for Rosa, is certainly a victim of just such a “pathological” state.

From the opening scene of the novel, Jasper is portrayed as a victim of opium- induced delusions. The reader first sees him in a wretched opium den, sprawled across a broken bedstead and locked in the unconscious throes of one of his perverse hallucinations. One of the central characters in Jasper’s fantasy is a Turkish Sultan. Bored with his own mundane life, Jasper fantasizes about the majestic and colorful life of an oriental potentate. In the fantasy, he escapes the constraints of his ignoble identity and takes on the seemingly robust life of the powerful Sultan. Richard M. Baker points out this association, explaining that each character in the fantasy actually embodies a person in Jasper’s real life: “Jasper is the Sultan; Edwin Drood [. . .] is the robber; Rosa Bud — the object of his passion — is the dancing girl whom Edwin has stolen from him” (42). Von Franz provides more insight into Baker’s assertion by pointing out in Man and his Symbols that a “dream image” is a “symbol for an inner aspect of the dreamer himself” (220). Von Franz’s explanation helps us to see that the Sultan functions as Jasper’s shadow self. The Sultan represents Jasper’s inner desire for power and excitement, which on the surface may be harmless aspirations. However, the Sultan also manifests Jasper’s hidden desire to commit murder. The Sultan, then, at least in part, is a manifestation of those qualities of the shadow that Jasper tries to repress and conceal.

By entering his opium-induced imaginary world, Jasper momentarily shuts out the reality of his life as choirmaster and participates in an exhilarating world where he rules as omnipotent sovereign. As he tells the Opium Woman, he came to the opium den many times when he could “bear” his life no longer, when he had to engage in the fantasy in order to extract from his sterile existence some semblance of pleasure, albeit a perverse pleasure (270). The exotic fantasy that Jasper enters with each visit to the opium den is replete with vivid images, completely antithetical to the gray, sterile landscape of Cloisterham. The dream imagery includes “thrice ten thousand dancing- girls strew[ing] flowers,” “white elephants caparisoned in countless gorgeous colors [. . .] infinite in number and attendants,” and “ten thousand scimitars flash[ing] in the sunlight” (37). In Jasper’s fantasy, the powerful Turkish Sultan appears to be the very embodiment of decadent power. As omnipotent ruler of his territory, the Sultan exercises sovereign powers over all the inhabitants of his country.

The Sultan exhibits many of the attributes that Jasper so desperately longs to possess but is powerless to realize. For instance, the Sultan lives in a “palace” in a colorful, exotic land, unlike the unfortunate Jasper who inhabits a Gate House in the gray cathedral town of Cloisterham (37). At the Sultan’s command, beautiful women dance, his military forces parade before him, ostentatiously brandishing their flashing “scimitars,” and “a horde of Turkish robbers” are “impal[ed]” on a threatening “spike of rusty iron” (37). It is both significant and telling that a central image in the fantasy is the menacing and surprisingly Freudian spike. This disturbing image emphasizes the key role that violence and eroticism play in Jasper’s unconscious life. This image of incipient violence also sets up a dichotomy between east and west, because within the context and eastern setting of the fantasy the Sultan can freely and openly practice public executions without fear of reprisal. On the other hand, Jasper cannot, in a civilized and respectable English community, openly express his clandestine desire to execute some robber — namely Drood — on a rusty spike. However, he can give free rein to that nefarious idea in his opium-infested imagination. The eastern drug evokes an eastern yearning to employ violence in a public arena, where the culture celebrates the autocratic practice of carrying out public executions. Dickens may have been subtly injecting here an indictment against his own society which allowed public executions until the middle of the nineteenth century.

Jasper yearns to have an opportunity to live an exciting life, to escape the paralyzing impotence of his bleak, Cloisterham existence, and to hold within his grasp the power of life and death. But he feels trapped. His only plausible way to escape the “oppressive respectability” of Cloisterham and satisfy, at least momentarily, his “hankerings after the noisy world” is to journey to the opium den, engage in delusions of grandeur, and project onto his shadow self his dark impulse toward murder (51).

Another character in the novel who functions as both shadow and doppelgänger to Jasper is the local stonemason, Stony Durdles. According to Everett F. Bleiler, Durdles’s name “is obviously derived from dirt” (137), an explanation that is borne out by the narrator’s description of the man. He is described as “covered from head to foot with old mortar, lime, and stone grit,” the very image of hoary death (Drood 74). Harry Stone validates this view of Durdles in his cogent article “What’s in a Name: Fantasy and Calculation in Dickens,” referring to Durdles as “an incarnation of the dusty tomb” (200). What further characterizes Durdles as an image of death is his tomb-like home, “a little antiquated hole of a house that was never finished [. . .] built, so far, of stones stolen from the city wall” (Drood 68). The death imagery is further enhanced by the portrait of two workers, who cut stone in Durdles’s chip and stone-strewn yard. They are described as “two journeymen, who [. . .] incessantly saw stone; dipping as regularly in and out of their sheltering sentry-boxes, as if they were mechanical figures emblematical of Time and Death” (68-69). Finally, in terms of an association with death, there is Durdles’s affliction, which he calls “Tombatism” (69). Mr. Sapsea, the Mayor of Cloisterham, believes that Durdles has committed a malapropism and really means to say rheumatism, but Durdles asserts otherwise, claiming that not only he, but “Mr. Jasper knows what Durdles means” (69). Durdles then explains the meaning of “Tombatism” so the Mayor will also understand: “You get among them Tombs afore it’s well light on a winter morning, and keep on, as the Catechism says, a walking in the same all the days of your life, and you ‘ll know what Durdles means” (69). Durdles’s explanation of the meaning of this word makes yet another strong connection between him and Jasper. Clearly, “Tombatism” has nothing to do with rheumatism but is instead an affliction similar to ennui, the sense of boredom and inertia from which Jasper also suffers. This syndrome they share also emphasizes another facet of their death-in-life existence. In short, they are both nearly bored to death.

Jasper is intrigued by Durdles’s line of work, or at least pretends to be in order to talk Durdles into a tour of the crypt. On a symbolic level, it is possible to see a relationship between Durdles’s work as a sculptor and Jasper’s emotional response to the intense feelings of malaise and impotence that permeate his life. Durdles’s occupation requires that he carve images in stone. But for Jasper, the sculpting occurs in a much more figurative way. He swears that the “daily drudging round” of his life will compel him to begin “carving [demons] out of [his] heart” (48).

It is possible to draw further parallels between the characters based on comments they make about each other. For instance, Durdles notes a connection between the type of work they do, pointing out that as Jasper “pitch[es] his note” in the choir loft, Durdles pitches his note by mysteriously “tapping” with his hammer on the walls and floor of the crypt to determine whether a space is hollow or solid, and thus whether it contains a desiccated corpse or only empty space (75). Jasper also makes certain comments that reveal his awareness that he and Durdles share a similar “lot” in life, as if to say that he recognizes that Durdles is a shadowy part of himself (74). First of all, Jasper remarks that they seem destined to spend their lives “in the same old earthy, chilly, never-changing place” (74). It is noteworthy that Jasper should refer to their place of habitation as “earthy, chilly, [and] never-changing.” His assessment of their place of residence tends to emphasize their association with the cold and subterranean earth, an association that evokes images of death. In this regard, both Durdles and Jasper are chthonic characters who dwell both physically and psychologically in darkness. Their affinity for darkness is also mirrored in their search for dark places in which to escape from the monotony of their lives. Durdles, it is said, “habitually resort[s] to that secret place [the crypt],” where he can “sleep off the fumes of liquor” (67-68). In much the same way, Jasper seeks out his secret opium den where he can indulge in opium and then sleep off its effects without fear of detection.

In addition to these similarities, both Jasper and Durdles have difficulty discovering their true identities. Although Durdles asserts his identity as stonemason, he is more widely known as a “wonderful sot” and “chartered libertine” (67). As the narrator points out, Durdles seems to be “a little misty as to his own identity when he narrates,” frequently referring to himself in “the third person” (68). Similarly, Jasper suffers from a “scattered consciousness” that is exacerbated by opium consumption (37). The drugs and alcohol that the two men ingest also produce in them some kind of occasional paroxysm. Mr. Tope, the cathedral verger, first makes the reader aware that Jasper suffers some kind of “fit” (41). Shortly after Tope reports to Mr. Crisparkle and to the Dean that Jasper was “having a kind of fit on him,” we see Jasper exhibit similar symptoms in the presence of Drood (47). Durdles suffers a “mild fit of calenture,” as he and Jasper reach the top of the cathedral tower stairs during their mysterious midnight investigation of the cathedral crypt (157). According to a gloss provided by editor Arthur J. Cox, calenture is “a fever [. . .] giving rise to delirious fancies [. . .] sometimes applied to a desire to leap from a height” (309). From the context of the scene in which his fit occurs, it is apparent that it is Jasper’s drugged wine that Durdles has freely imbibed throughout the evening, which has induced the stonemason’s momentary delirium. Henry Jackson argues that their “unaccountable expedition” (Drood 160) is Jasper’s method of rehearsing the murder of Drood (Jackson 23-26). Moreover, Jackson contends that Jasper gives Durdles the drugged wine in order to observe whether it will be “potent” enough to incapacitate Drood when the night of the planned murder arrives (24).

Jasper’s clandestine trek with Durdles through the cathedral crypt and up the tower stairs also suggests that Jasper is symbolically trying to become better acquainted with his shadowy alter-ego. Their joint exploration of the dusty crypt may be a sign that Jasper is growing in consciousness and developing a more acute awareness of the dark side of his self that needs to be integrated. However, just as Jasper attempts to mesmerize his anima in order to subdue and manipulate her, here he engages in a similar activity when he tries to intoxicate the shadow self that he has projected onto Durdles. Jasper’s need to control the shadow by means of intoxication is a symbolic effort to repress further his own wicked nature, a nature that he is unable to acknowledge and assimilate.

Von Franz asserts that the shadow, as represented by both Durdles and the dream image of the Sultan, may be “base or evil, an instinctive drive that one ought to overcome” (216). She adds, however, that the shadow “may [. . .] [also] be an impulse toward growth that one should cultivate and follow” (216). This “impulse toward growth” is the message Jasper receives from another projection of his shadow self, Septimus Crisparkle. He is described as “fair and rosy, and perpetually pitching himself head- foremost into all the deep running water in the surrounding country; [. . .] early riser, musical, classical, cheerful, kind, good-natured, social, contented” (42). In short, Crisparkle is the very antithesis of the dark and brooding Jasper. Bleiler observes that this passage imparts the idea that “Crisparkle’s mode of life certainly fits the athletic Christianity of the day” (137).

The passage is also striking in its reference to the role that water plays in the Minor Canon’s life. It is appropriate that Crisparkle should be associated with water, an element that plays such a central role in the life of the Christian. Guerin notes that as an archetypal image, water resonates with meaning. According to Guerin, among its many symbolic meanings, water may represent “the mystery of creation; birth-death- resurrection; purification and redemption” (161). Guerin also notes that it is important to keep in mind that “these meanings may vary significantly from one context to another” (161). The variation that Guerin notes is certainly observable in the context of Crisparkle’s experience with water as compared to that of Jasper. One of Crisparkle’s early encounters with water nearly ended in tragedy, when, as a schoolboy, he was rescued from drowning by a devoted underclassman named Tartar (Drood 243). Symbolically, Crisparkle’s near-death experience mimics the Christian baptism in which the sinner enters the waters so that the old self may die and the new self emerge. Apparently, the Minor Canon’s near-death experience does not instill in him a phobia of water, for thereafter, according to Tartar, he “took to swimming” (243). In the tradition of the Muscular Christian, Crisparkle typically begins his mornings by breaking through “the thin morning ice near Cloisterham Weir with his amiable head, much to the invigoration of his frame” (78). So it is that for Crisparkle, water is a source of life and purification.

But for Jasper, the activities in his life that revolve around water are not so pleasant. It is the river near Cloisterham, in fact, that becomes the site of the most intensive search for Edwin’s body. As Jasper searches for Edwin’s corpse in the river, this body of water becomes not a symbol of life and rebirth, but a symbol of death. As Jasper and other “rough-coated figures” persistently search the river for traces of Edwin, the river is described as a hellish place “lurid with fires” (189). When Jasper returns to the Gate House, exhausted from days of relentless searching, he is described as “unkempt and disordered [and] bedaubed with mud,” the polar opposite of the Minor Canon who returns home refreshed and purified after a morning’s swim (190). It is manifestly clear that water alone cannot wash the villainy from Jasper’s guilty being.

In addition to his association with water, Crisparkle’s connection to the Christian faith is further explained by Bleiler, who points out that “it is also possible that the name Crisparkle (the character being one of the few sympathetic religious figures in Dickens) conveys a hint of Christ” (137). The Minor Canon’s first name, Septimus, also suggests a parallel with Christ. Septimus is a latinate form of the numeral seven. As Guerin notes in his list of examples of archetypal images, seven is “the most potent of all symbolic numbers — signifying the union of three and four, the completion of a cycle, perfect order” (163). Christ is traditionally viewed as a veritable personification of wholeness, the most highly-individuated man who ever lived. Through his association with Christ, Crisparkle also functions as a symbol of the complete man. Charles Mitchell corroborates this interpretation of Crisparkle’s character, pointing out that the Minor Canon is a type of ideal man, who achieves a sense of order and balance in his personal and public life. Furthermore, Mitchell observes that “Crisparkle is apparently the whole man in whom there exists a perfect musical harmony of the self reverberating in the social world outside. [. . .] a synthesis of the inner and outer man” (240). But in contrast to Crisparkle’s healthy psychological state, Mitchell notes that “Jasper represents the inner man in a state of disease,” an insight that again supports the view that Jasper suffers from dissociation of consciousness or psychological instability (241).

Ironically, the very day of Edwin’s murder, Jasper appears to be adopting some of Crisparkle’s optimism and good cheer. The narrator reports that while generally Jasper’s “nervous temperament is occasionally prone to take difficult music a little too quickly,” “he quite astonishes his fellows by his melodious power. [. . .] has never sung difficult music with such skill and harmony, as in this day’s Anthem” (180). This report of Jasper’s unusually strong performance suggests that for some reason he has been able to overcome, at least temporarily, his irritation at listening to what he once described to Drood as a “devilish” service (48). His more positive attitude may indicate that he has reduced his opium dosage and cleared his head of its effects, perhaps in order to be in better control of his faculties before he sets into motion his plan to murder Edwin. Moreover, his cheerful attitude may signify that he has entered a state of exhilaration and euphoria, because the homicide he has so frequently rehearsed in his opium fantasy will soon become a reality.

As Jasper emerges from the cathedral on his way home to meet Neville and his nephew and preside over their formal reconciliation, Crisparkle also remarks that Jasper’s performance was “beautiful [and] delightful!” (180). Crisparkle’s complimentary words lead the choirmaster and the Minor Canon into a conversation about Jasper’s “black humors,” and Jasper admits that he has been “out of sorts, gloomy, bilious, brain-oppressed” but is currently in a “healthier state” (181). Referring to these dark aspects of his personality, Jasper points out one of the major differences between himself and Crisparkle: “You are always training yourself to be, mind and body, as clear as crystal, and you always are, and never change; whereas I am a muddy, solitary, moping weed” (181). It is significant that Jasper should use the word “crystal” to describe Crisparkle’s personality, since, as von Franz explains, the crystal has long been considered a symbol of the self:

In many dreams the nuclear center, the Self [. . .] appears as a crystal. The mathematically precise arrangement of a crystal evokes in us the intuitive feeling that even in so-called “dead” matter there is a spiritual ordering principle at work. Thus the crystal often symbolically stands for the union of extreme opposites — of matter and spirit. (209)

Equally noteworthy is the fact that the name Jasper can refer to the jasper stone, whose characteristics mirror those of Jasper. According to Jacobson, the jasper stone is “’always opaque,’ which is appropriate to Jasper’s impenetrable personality; and its being ‘not invariably of one colour’ also accords with the double personality” (35).

The self-integrated, physically fit, and emotionally balanced Crisparkle functions as Jasper’s positive shadow self, one who “contains” what von Franz describes as “valuable, vital forces, [that] ought to be assimilated into actual experience and not repressed” (175). Crisparkle represents an inchoate tendency in Jasper, who by his association with the cathedral, demonstrates some inherent need to develop spiritually. If Jasper could assimilate into his conscious self the “impulse toward growth” that Crisparkle represents, he could enter the process of individuation and begin to heal his dangerous psychological fragmentation (von Franz 216).

Neville Landless is another character who, in struggling with his own demons, functions as Jasper’s shadow self. Neville is neither a totally positive nor a completely evil shadow figure. He serves as yet another projection of Jasper’s shadow self, mirroring certain of Jasper’s characteristics that Jasper despises in others, yet fails to see in himself. As von Franz introduces this particular dimension of the shadow self, she explains that in some cases, “when an individual makes an attempt to see his shadow, he becomes aware of (and often ashamed of) those qualities and impulses he denies in himself, but can plainly see in other people” (168). Her explanation serves to deepen our understanding of the volatile relationship that develops between Neville and Jasper. Neville is a key, shadow figure because his presence suggests the possibility that Jasper may still have an opportunity to acknowledge and integrate the dark part of himself that he has frequently projected onto others.

The most obvious similarity between Neville and Jasper is their physical appearance. They are both dark; a fact which may help support Aylmer’s theory that Jasper has a Moslem mother. Neville grew up in Ceylon, and his dark complexion may suggest that he, too, has an oriental mother. But the likeness goes much deeper. As Lawrence Frank points out, they are both “dark, alien young men, with no prospects, and are taunted by Drood’s easy self-assurance” (The Romantic Self 220). Frank’s comment suggests another way in which Neville is the shadow of Jasper, for he insinuates that Neville shares Jasper’s envy of Drood’s prospects, especially his forthcoming marriage to Rosa. The narrator’s disclosure that “Neville Landless is already enough impressed by Little Rosabud, to feel indignant that Edwin Drood (far below her) should hold his prize so lightly” lends credence to Frank’s assertion that Neville is covetous of Drood (97).

In addition to the envy that Neville and Jasper both feel toward Drood, we also notice they both possess violent natures. Neville realizes he has violent tendencies and, as he tells Crisparkle, he intends to make a sincere effort to hold them in check. Part of the problem, he explains to Crisparkle, is his upbringing. Because he was brought up in Ceylon, he explains, his “ideas of civility were formed among Heathens” (98). As a result of his environment and his “tyrannical” stepfather, Neville claims that he has a temperament tainted with “a drop of what is tigerish in [his] blood” (90).

After Drood’s disappearance and Neville’s arrest as a suspect, the damaging statements Neville has confessed to Crisparkle are hawked about town (probably by the vindictive Jasper). In addition to what Neville has already willingly disclosed to Crisparkle, other preposterous allegations begin to circulate about Cloisterham. One rumor has it that “before coming to England [Neville] had caused to be whipped to death sundry ‘Natives’” (198). Although this is a gross exaggeration, Neville does admit to Crisparkle that he had considered committing murder — not the murder of natives, but that of his own brutal stepfather, had the man not died when he did.

Neville’s violent tendencies, however, pale in comparison to those that Jasper exhibits. Jasper’s inclination toward violence is evidenced by his assault on two of Princess Puffer’s clients in the opium den (39) and by his vicious attack on Deputy in the cathedral graveyard (159). Jasper is so enraged when he attacks Deputy, that his public persona seems suddenly usurped by his usually repressed, demonic self, and a startled Durdles has to urge Jasper to “recollect” himself (159). Furthermore, in his barbarous hallucinations, Jasper reveals the secret depths of his violent nature.

Philip Collins notes that in addition to their penchant for violence, Jasper and Neville both possess some sort of “para-normal” or hypnotic powers (301). While it appears that Jasper has the ability to hypnotize several characters in the novel, Neville relies on his telepathic powers to communicate only with his twin sister, Helena. In the same way, she is also able to communicate with Neville (91). Neville explains to Crisparkle that their ability to communicate without direct discourse derives from a “complete understanding [that] exist[s] between them” (91).

Jacobson notes in her companion to the novel that “some critics, notably G.K. Chesterton, argue” that Jasper actually uses hypnosis on Neville to compel him to serve as an accomplice in Drood’s murder (133-34). If Jasper did employ a kind of mind control in order to force Neville to function as an unwitting accomplice in Drood’s murder, this act is further evidence of Jasper’s attempt to manipulate the shadow self, much the same way he sought to intoxicate Durdles and mesmerize Rosa. His manipulatory actions further attest to his inability to recognize and integrate the shadow.

A greater irony would exist if, as Fred Kaplan postulates, Jasper is in fact “self-mesmerized” (154). Kaplan’s provocative idea lends support to the argument that Jasper lacks psychological integrity and is unable to enter into the process of individuation. As Kaplan explains:

[Jasper’s] own mesmeric trances as well as his use of mesmerism on others are not instruments of self-discovery but murderous weapons to destroy himself. Undoubtedly the novel would have ended with death and the loss of consciousness. For the most mysterious state of consciousness and potential of mind is no consciousness at all. (155-56)

Conclusion

The journey motif winds its way throughout The Mystery of Edwin Drood, carrying with it the implication that Jasper is on a quest. Although during the course of the novel Jasper does travel on at least two occasions to London, most of his journey is psychological — a dark voyage into the depths of his disintegrating self. Lawrence Frank corroborates this view, observing that “[. . .] the novel encompasses [. . .] the full complexity of the individual’s situation in nineteenth-century England: the quest for the unified self is the core of the novel” (The Romantic Self 167).

In the archetypal journey, the hero sets out with optimism and a clear sense of purpose. Usually, the hero on a quest realizes that the road he must travel is fraught with danger, and he anticipates that he will face puzzling riddles and encounter terrifying creatures as he makes his way toward his goal. Unlike the traditional hero, Jasper is from the outset of the novel what the narrator calls a “jaded traveller” (39). Little more than a decade before Dickens began creating Jasper, Robert Browning had depicted in 1855 a similar sort of “jaded traveller” in his poem “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came.” Like the disillusioned Jasper, Roland is weary of the quest and decides to leave the conventional path and set out on a journey through what quickly reveals itself to be a wasteland that leads to death.

It is appropriate that the word “jaded” should be used to describe Jasper, because this word relates to his name and recalls his murky and inscrutable nature. The word “jaded” also reminds the reader that Jasper is weary of the quest from the very beginning of the novel, tired of his dull life as a “poor monotonous chorister and grinder of music” (49). In yet another sense, the word “jaded” reminds us that Jasper is cynical and callous, lacking in sentiment, and, therefore, exhibiting what Dickens calls in his 1856 Household Words article “The Demeanour of Murderers.”

In addition to his inward journey, Jasper makes two significant outward journeys in the novel — his “unaccountable expedition” with Durdles that takes him down to the cathedral crypt and up to the cathedral tower — and his final trip to London to visit the wretched opium den (160). In his nocturnal expedition with Durdles, Jasper is embarking on what is usually a traditional part of the hero’s quest — a terrifying odyssey into the region of the dead. We see it in Homer’s The Odyssey, when Odysseus visits the shades in Hades, so that he may ask for advice from the soothsayer Teiresias (Book 11). Dickens himself had also employed the device in The Pickwick Papers, when Samuel Pickwick chooses to enter debtor’s prison, a subterranean dungeon that takes on the unmistakable characteristics of hell (chapters 41-42, 44-47). Whereas Odysseus descends to Hades in hopes of obtaining advice that will benefit both himself and his seafaring companions, and Pickwick chooses to enter the prison in protest against the injustices of a corrupt English legal system, Jasper descends to the crypt in order to rehearse his homicidal scheme. Odysseus and Pickwick descend for unselfish reasons; Jasper, on the other hand, descends only to further his nefarious plan of parricide. Thus Jasper’s journey into a symbolic hell is both a reflection of his psychopathic frame of mind and his ever-increasing psychic fragmentation and loss of self.

After descending into the crypt, Jasper climbs with Durdles to the top of the cathedral tower, an ascent that could symbolize spiritual growth. But this journey, too, becomes an inverted odyssey that fails to elicit positive results. The Gothic atmosphere of the cathedral crypt and the midnight hour of their journey emphasize the macabre nature of this bizarre expedition. As the narrator says, “their way lies through strange places,” and “dim angels’ heads upon the corbels of the roof [. . .] watch their progress” (156). Rather than feel the comforting presence of a guardian angel during his midnight excursion, Jasper is surrounded by “dim angels,” reminiscent of Lucifer’s fallen legions. Their presence is yet another sign that Jasper has entered into an unholy quest.

Jasper’s journey beyond the stony gates and walls of Cloisterham takes him to London. His excursions to London always involve the same goal — to enter the opium reverie and repeat in his imagination the murder of his nephew. In leaving Cloisterham, Jasper seeks to escape the oppressive Anglican rectitude embodied in the desiccated cathedral town. The first part of the town’s name — Cloister — implies that the village provides a retreat from life, that it is a place where one may escape the crass materialism of the age in order to nurture the life of the spirit. But for Jasper, the word “cloister” carries negative connotations. In that placid, boring, staid English community he is immured and nearly suffocates behind his facade of “oppressive respectability” (51). In order to find relief from his routine life, at least for a brief time, and emerge from behind the hypocritical mask of middle-class respectability, Jasper must occasionally seek refuge in the dingy back streets and squalid opium dens of London. John Thacker notes in Edwin Drood: Antichrist in the Cathedral that Jasper is a “prisoner” of the cathedral (81). Thacker elaborates this point, asserting that at some stage in rebellion against the restrictive discipline of the Cathedral [Jasper] wanders about the East End of London and makes the discovery that opium enables him to pass through the walls of his prison into a different and completely uninhibited environment. (81)

Curiously, Jasper’s inauthentic journey toward the opium den is described as one that takes him ever “eastward and still eastward through the stale streets [. . .] until he reaches his destination: a miserable court, specially miserable among many such” (Drood 266). An eastward journey implies a journey toward a new dawn, a rebirth, with its concomitant promise of spiritual enlightenment and possible epiphany. Symbolically, this eastward journey could also represent Jasper’s search for self-integration, especially if we regard him (as Aylmer suggests) as a genetic blend of Moslem and Christian, who seeks to reassimilate the maternal aspect of himself that was lost in Cairo. But this journey does not lead to self-integration, and despite the chapter’s title — “The Dawn Again” — it does not lead to rebirth. On the contrary, Jasper’s journey to the dark, tomb-like den is anything but a new dawn, for it inspires neither a sense of self- renewal nor optimism. Rather, it is an odyssey into a spiritual wasteland, where Jasper may once again enter his perverse opium fantasy, replay in his imagination the insidious journey of death with his “fellow-traveller,” and finally luxuriate in the vivid, erotic images of the Sultan and his colorful cortege (271). Thus the eastward movement to the opium den suggests that Jasper is engaged in an ironic, inverted journey — not a journey to self-awareness and self-realization, but a journey into psychological disintegration and ultimate unconsciousness.

Once inside the den, Jasper again encounters Princess Puffer. To her he describes his journey, the journey he takes in his imagination each time he smokes his opium pipe: “It was a difficult and dangerous journey,” he explains to her. “A hazardous and perilous journey over abysses where a slip would be destruction. Look down! Look down! You see what lies at the bottom there?” (269). Jasper may be describing what he sees when he looks into the black hole of himself, a shattered image of the “jaded traveller” forever lost in the labyrinth of his disintegrating self.

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NOTES

Chapter 1

1) Nicoll and other commentators have pointed to the testimony of Drood illustrator Luke Fildes to support the theory that Jasper did in fact kill Drood. In 1905, Fildes wrote a letter to The Times Literary Supplement assuring the public that Dickens had asked him to depict Jasper wearing around his neck a long, black scarf. Fildes added that Dickens explained that the scarf was to be used to strangle Drood. Fildes urged readers to accept his testimony on the grounds that a sincere Dickens would never have misled him (54-55).

Chapter 2

1) According to Edmund Wilson, who outlines Duffield’s Thug theory in The Wound and the Bow, Jasper is a member of a Hindu cult whose members worshipped “Kali, the Hindu goddess of destruction” (87). Summarizing Duffield, Wilson notes that the Thug killers used a “fold of cloth” to strangle their victims, much like the “great black scarf” that Jasper is wearing the day of Drood’s disappearance (Drood 182). Among other parallels between Jasper’s alleged murder of Drood and the Thug method of homicide, Wilson observes that both must select a “secret burial place,” both “prey,” only on “travelers,” both use “exaggerated terms of endearment,” both entice their victims out of their safe home “after midnight,” and both use some sort of drug “to stupefy” the unsuspecting victim (88). The Thug murderer is also to make certain that his victim is wearing no gold. As “proof” that Duffield’s theory is valid, Wilson cleverly offers evidence from the novel that logically corresponds with each of these “ritualistic requirements for a sanctified and successful Thug murder” (87). One illustration of this proof is Wilson’s suggestion that Jasper has in fact found a secret burial place for Drood in the tomb of Mrs. Sapsea (87). Another piece of support for the Thug theory, Wilson says, is the fact that Drood is a traveler, since he is planning to depart for Egypt. Further support, as far as Wilson is concerned, can be found in the parallel between the Thug’s use of “terms of endearment” and Jasper’s exaggerated affection for Drood (88). Finally, Wilson suggests that the drugged wine Jasper gives to Drood, Neville, and later Durdles, could easily correspond to the drug the Thugs used to incapacitate their victims before the murderous attack occurred.

2) In Charles Dickens and the Romantic Self, Lawrence Frank frequently employs this metaphor in his discussion of various characters, including John Jasper.