Ambivalent Father Figures and the Enigma of Male Identity in Dickens’s Fiction by Max Véga-Ritter

“…Towards the end of Charles Dickens’s life, in Our Mutual Friend or in The Mystery of Edwin Drood, his fiction seems to present the reader with an image of the two Scrooges threatening to merge into one, hence the confusion about who the son is: a murderer or a murdered man. In some ways the Headstone-Wrayburn couple with its repressed homosexual undertones seems to function as an echo of that duplicity and uncertainty about the identity of the son. …”
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