106 KNOWING DICKENS
and the Screen,” Steven Connor offers a brief history of changes in the
meaning of the term. Through the nineteenth century, he argues, fascination
had “presented itself as a transitive phenomenon... exercised by one subject
upon another... The idea of fascination is inseparable from the conception
of the evil eye” (9). For a time, theories about physical fluids unleashed by the
powers of the eye were revived to explain the phenomenon of mesmerism,
through which Dickens tested the powers of his own eye to elicit internal
distress hidden within others. The notion of fascination as power wielded by
one agent over another gradually changed, Connor writes, “from a transitive
to an intransitive condition.” In the twentieth century, the ability to become
fascinated has emerged as the more compelling aspect of the phenomenon.
Consolidating a good deal of modern theoretical speculation, Connor calls
it “a heightened rather than distorted form of relation between inner and
outer. Fascination thus becomes associated with a particular kind of narcis-
sism, characterized by the fluid interchange between self and not-self, in
which the subject and object of fascination become harder to distinguish”
(12). Dickens’s representations of fascination play in the space between the
“evil eye” theory and the more modern sense of subject-object interchange.
Fascination is also a response to enigma or mystery. Ackbar Abbas calls
it “a willingness to be drawn to phenomena that attract our attention yet
do not submit entirely to our understanding” (qtd. Harris 10). If one figure
gazes fascinated at another, it is because the other seems to conceal some
knowledge about the self that is not quite available to consciousness or lan-
guage. Such “excessive identifications,” as Oliver Harris calls them, show us
that “at the heart of fascination there is no thing, no single and static mate-
rial object, but a complex and mobile relation” (Harris 11). As he explores
the term in connection with his study of William Burroughs, Harris also
foregrounds an important point: that fascination is often “perverse, a call to
internally divided reactions,” in particular the “contrary forces simultaneously
at work in fascination: seduction and shame, attraction and repulsion” (17,
15). For Dickens, who often used variants of the phrase “the attraction of
repulsion,” the scenario of fascination involves a compelling visual bond with
an external figure who seems to conceal some secret knowledge that might
illuminate the internal conflicts of the gazer.
In letters, Dickens uses the word “fascination” in various moods: it can
refer to the lure of nostalgia as well as to more sinister forms of attraction.
A carefully worded argument against capital punishment that he sent to the
editor of the Edinburgh Review in 1845 shows that Dickens thought deeply
about the dangerous fascination allied with the mystery of death. “The Pun-
ishment of Death,” he writes, has “a horrible fascination for many of those