ABSTRACT
In a play on the Gothic mode of secrecy, the characters of Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend mostly know nothing. Instead, they are constantly engaged in deceiving and being deceived, misinterpreting what is right in front of them and pretending to be other than they are. The novel’s uncanny degree of silence and its dysfunctional social community is characterised by suspicion and obsessive observation. However, another queer reading of the novel shall reveal that the male community also takes comfort in their subjection to each other’s gaze.
Men in Our Mutual Friend obsessively stare at each other in the attempt to sniff out each other’s secrets - literally and metaphorically. The Gothic mode is most prominent in aspects of spectatorship, as almost all of the male characters subject each other to their desirous gaze, which becomes their prime mode of communication in view of the unspeakable. The male spectator is both friend and foe, a potential sexual partner and spy. This chapter posits that penetrating glances structure the novel, which portrays a male community watching. In Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend, observation functions as a substitute for sexual interaction and enables nonphysical transgressions between men in the shadows of the main plot.
