160 KNOWING DICKENS
signed—apparently from them both—“Bully and Meek” (3.291). Perhaps
they were joking about the absoluteness of his will in those days, but in 1857
it was no longer a joke. Catherine had succumbed, and Dickens could no
longer bear the sight of what he had done; he wanted her to disappear.
In the story, the wish to achieve a guilt-free liberation is punished through-
out the narrator’s lifetime and even beyond his death. (In this respect the
fantasy is predictive if not self-fulfilling: Dickens did not experience relief
or a new lightness of being even after he declared that Catherine had been
wiped out of his memory.) The agent of punishment in the story is a “slen-
der youth of about her age, with long light brown hair,” who loves the Bride,
and has watched the older man imprison her emotions and destroy her will.
He displays “a tress of [her] flaxen hair, tied with a mourning ribbon,” and
speaks passionately of his feeling: “Murderer, I loved her!” Surely this figure
of mourning is the young Dickens who had loved Catherine, arriving in
the fantasy to insist on the purity of his original feelings and to damn the
older man who has made such bad work of the marriage. When the older
man suddenly kills him and buries him in the garden of the secluded house
in which he had kept the young Bride, the young man’s corpse becomes an
agent of delayed revenge. The murderer’s plan to escape with his ill-gotten
wealth is now paralyzed; he is “chained to the house of gloom and horror,
which he could not endure. Being afraid to sell it or quit it, lest discovery
should be made, he was forced to live in it” (Dent 3.457–48).
Inevitably, discovery is made and he comes to be hanged—for the “real”
murder of the young romantic self, though the fantastic wife-murder comes
to light as well. As the fantasy begins to reincorporate the scene of confessional
telling at the inn, the Dickens-Collins duo is split into two other Dickenses.
One speaks of the other’s readiness for any adventure, and the other replies,
“Not quite so, Dick; if I am afraid of nothing else, I am afraid of myself ”
(Dent 3.462). The daydream narrative clarifies the rage and the attendant
guilt and shame with which Dickens approached the idea of a marital disso-
lution, leaving no doubt that he had a conscience. The rage is directed toward
the wife figure, who is described as a “weak, credulous, incapable, helpless
nothing” (Dent 3.453) and, briefly, toward the memory of the romantic youth
who had loved her; guilt and shame figure in the older man’s impulsive mur-
der of his more innocent self, in the house-bound self-destructive paralysis of
emotion that follows, and in the exposure to public infamy.
For a few months after the fantasies and events of October, Dickens may
have contemplated living, chained to the corpse of a marriage, in a desolate
house. In late March 1859 he wrote to Forster, “It is not, with me, a mat-
ter of will, or trial, or sufferance, or good humour, or making the best of