122 KNOWING DICKENS
because he is a man who occupies a ground identical to Headstone’s; both
men are drawn toward the corpse-robber’s daughter as if she were a life-
line thrown out to succor failing souls. For Headstone, who suffers deeply
from class resentment, the loving of Lizzie Hexam and the hating of Eugene
Wrayburn are inextricable. But, although he cannot conceal that resentment,
he is quite capable of condemning Wrayburn’s clever moves and insisting on
the seriousness of his threats. One has the class assurance, the other the emo-
tional drive, that the other lacks, and they recognize each other; each conveys
to the other, “I see who you are and what you’re doing.”
The wordless nocturnal cat-and-mouse chases around London dramatize
this same dynamic in dumb show. Eugene, the goader, leads Bradley hither
and yon, only to turn suddenly and pass him. As Eugene narrates to the
horrified Mortimer Lightwood, “Then we face one another, and I pass him
as though unaware of his existence, and he undergoes grinding torments”
(OMF 3.10). Both men seem equally compelled to rehearse and defer the
moment when they might turn and meet each other “face to face.” Eugene
knows that tormenting Bradley is a way of projecting onto him the emo-
tional situation that they share. He tells Lightwood, “I own to the weakness
of objecting to occupy a ludicrous position, and therefore I transfer the posi-
tion to the scouts [Headstone and Charley Hexam].” When he takes Light-
wood on the chase with him one night, Lightwood feels “astonishment that
so careless a man could be so wary, and that so idle a man could take so much
trouble.” Eugene has come alive in his courtship of the danger suppressed
within his lethargic idleness. It is Lightwood who cannot sleep that night; he
“cannot lose sight of that fellow’s face” (OMF 3.10).
Wrayburn’s crisis comes in his face-to-face encounter with his would-be
murderer. As the narrator tells it, the murder attempt is an intimate encounter
in which the bodies of the two men are fused in an embrace of assault and
dependence. When they fall on the riverbank together, it is not entirely clear
who has gone into the river: “After dragging at the assailant, he fell on the
bank with him, and then there was another great crash, and then a splash, and
all was done” (OMF 4.6). Through this near-fatal identity exchange, Eugene
gets what he needs: enough of Bradley’s primal energy to survive, and a blur-
ring of class status that allows him to do what Bradley would have done: to
marry Lizzie. As in The Frozen Deep, the power flowing from one man to
another is eroticized but not specifically homosexual. The sheer energy of
released desire—whether it’s a renewed desire to live or an active embrace of
death—is the product in Dickens’s fantasies of male fusion.
Bradley Headstone continues the chain of self-projection down the so-
cial scale when he doubles with the pure aggression of Rogue Riderhood,