Rhetoric and the Flight of Lizzie Hexam

   
     In Plato’s Phaedrus Socrates says, “…love is a certain madness.” This is demonstrated in Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens, where the beautiful, but poor, Lizzie Hexam is pursued by two men who are in this state of madness about her. One is her brother’s schoolmaster, the passionate and plodding Mr. Headstone, whom she fears and dislikes. The second, is the verbally smooth, gentleman barrister, Mr. Wrayburn, whom she likes vey much, though she keeps this knowledge from him because of their social inequality. Both men, at various times, apply their rhetorical skills in hopes of persuading Lizzie to accept their offers of love. When the refused Mr. Headstone threatens to do physical harm to his rival, Lizzie secretively flees for her safety as well as Mr. Wrayburn’s.

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During this proposal of marriage, the teacher of Greek, Latin and the classics, is mortified by his inept rhetorical skills. “But that thing,” says Socrates, “is indeed shameful: to speak and write not beautifully, but shamefully and badly.” (258d) Not only is the school “master” unable to persuade her of the value of his love and his economic and social worthiness, he is unable to appear even likeable.  To be refused by an uneducated girl from a lower social sphere increases the shame of failure for him and confirms his intellectual insecurity.

Mr. Headstone and Mr. Wrayburn both display love madness in various degrees. Headstone has “not power to master…” (231d) himself so, therefore, channels the violent passion of his failed love into insane jealousy and the dogged pursuit of Wrayburn with the plan to punish him for ruining his chances with Lizzy.  Unaware of the seriousness of his rival’s pursuit, the unrelenting Wrayburn, through unethical stratagems, finds Lizzie in the village where she escaped to and attempts to persuade her that she loves him.  Unlike Headstone, his rhetorical style is gentle, naturally gifted and effective. Despite the superiority of his social standing, he treats Lizzie with respect and is interested in revealing the” truth” of her opinions about him. He wants to alter his "belief" in her love of him to "knowledge" of it. Therefore, he questions her in Platonic philosophical style to help her come to know and voice her  feelings towards him. Wrayburn understands that to only convince her of his love, and not her own, will fail to win her. "I so looked up to you," Lizzie says to Wrayburn, "and wondered at you...and at first thought you so good as to be at all mindful of me." "At first, so good," counters Rayburn, "and now so bad?" "There is nothing in this life for us but separation." concludes Lizzie. She is obviously in love but remains unpersuaded as to the possibility of their future together.

Unlike the men pursuing her, Lizzie alone remains master, or mistress, of herself.  She remembers and understands the “nature/conventions” of the world, that irregardless of his feelings of love, a gentleman of society does not marry an uneducated women from her class.  In Reconsidering Gorgias, Phaedrus, and Platonic Rhetoric “…we have been told,” implies Michael Bernard Donels, “how a rhetoric works to imbricate the natural and social worlds.”  Unconvinced, Donals concludes, “It is clear that Plato attempts to distinguish rhetoric from its use by the sophists as a way of producing belief without analyzing belief’s constraints, but it is also clear that this distinction casts a light on it’s own complexities…rhetoric is inevitably bound up with other ways of knowing…but can never finally be separated from them…as much as Plato wishes…”.