Anthropocentrism and Inheritance in Our Mutual Friend: Return, Recognition, Reanimation

Abstract In decentering “Man,” a category long rhetorically constructed as the privileged species of a divine creator, Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection necessitated a reexamination of how human subjectivity should be represented in fiction. This article uses the example of Charles Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend (1864) to track and scientifically contextualize how anthropocentrism is constructed and interrogated in fiction after publication of On the Origin of Species (1859). Competing nineteenth-century theories of species transmutation recognized physiological fluidity and variation within species and type, yet unlike Darwin, they sought to define uniquely human qualities of mind. Literary narratives, such as Dickens’s final completed novel, engaged this intellectual project—attempting to stabilize a dominant form of human subjectivity while recognizing shifting varieties of being. Protagonist John Harmon is oddly vacant as an imagined human consciousness; his actions create or resolve conflict within the story, but he fails to demonstrate any stable motivation. Depicting the initial misrecognition, and eventual recognition, of an English heir newly returned from abroad, Our Mutual Friend articulates cultural anxieties about the potential mutability of identity and type and the origins and durability of English dominance. Its post-Darwinian model of consciousness challenges traditional realist valorization of the individualistic, agential subject.