Play With Fire, You'll Get (Wray)Burned

Play With Fire, You’ll Get (Wray)Burned: How the Characterization of Eugene Wrayburn and Bradley Headstone Comments on Class Division

Awwww yeah! (Credit: http://wesleying.org)

Our Mutual Friend’s Eugene Wrayburn is your typical golden boy. He is young, handsome, has friends in high standing, and money to burn. As a lawyer, he is well-educated and, one might suppose, satisfied with life. On the contrary, Eugene is bored with his leisurely life and finds pleasure in educating the beautiful Lizzie Hexam. He also enjoys playing with fire in the form of torturing his polar opposite, Bradley Headstone.  

Just looking at this smug jerk gets me riled up! (Credit: www.google.com)

Bradley is a young schoolmaster who comes from a poor family, radically different than Eugene who comes from money and has a good living. He is educated, but not naturally bright or witty like Eugene. He is always working, and he works very hard at everything he does, but earns far less than a lawyer. He is also taken with Lizzie, and unlike Eugene he proposes to her, only to be shot down. The passionate Bradley does not respond well to being rejected, especially because he believes his hated nemesis Eugene is to blame. 

Just look how sad and pathetic he looks! (Credit: http://www.tierneyalison.com)

When Eugene and Bradley are together in a room, sparks fly. The class division is painfully obvious when they are compared side-by-side, and the way each man develops the other’s character seems to say a lot about their respective classes. Eugene, more of an aristocrat, openly disrespects Bradley, dehumanizing him by refusing to use his name when it is given to him, instead calling him “Schoolmaster” as if to remind him how lowly and pathetic he is. He frequently interrupts Bradley’s passionate rant during their first meeting, blatantly antagonizing him just for the fun of seeing him get riled up. The relationship between the upper and lower class is seen clearly through this one meeting, painting Eugene as an irreverent, arrogant, condescending bully to his lower class counterpart.

Bradley, lacking the wit of his rival, relies on passion to get his feelings across. Where Eugene’s quick mind allows him to retort faster than Bradley can register what he’s said, Bradley’s speech is slower and often sounds rehearsed, “as if he were repeating them from a book” (Dickens, 381). When he gets worked up, his body shows it, his face reddening and lips quivering. Eugene, perfectly composed, never seems to lose his temper and has complete control over his body, but Bradley does not, unable to calm down once he is enraged and apt to losing control of his body completely. This seems to characterize the lower class as being slower and more “mechanical” (Dickens, 218), suggesting they are inherently inferior to the upper class. There is an aspect of control that is lacking in lower class, as Bradley’s characterization might suggest: he has no control over his circumstances because he hasn’t any money, he has no control over his body or his relentless rage, and he certainly has no control over Lizzie. 

Pictured: Bradley (left) and Wrayburn (right) (Credit: http://cdn.c.photoshelter.com)

Eugene is an intelligent man. That is a point that cannot be contested. What interests me is that he knows what makes people tick, he knows just what buttons to push with Bradley and he happily does so, but why? Does he truly not see that his actions will have consequences, that playing with fire is deadly? This ignorance seems to characterize the upper class in the same way, and in truth many of the upper class characters are blind to what is around them (to give a few examples, Podsnap being blind to the hardships of the poor and Mrs. Veneering being blind to the fact that the Lammles had no money to begin with). Mortimer Lightwood, one of the few upper class characters who does not exhibit some of the unsympathetic traits discussed so far (arrogance, condescension), is the only one who seems aware that Eugene is in danger. He’s uneasy about a man stalking his best friend, and even though he is not the target, he views Bradley as a true threat, so frightened that he cannot sleep after running all around town with Eugene from Bradley. Eugene thinks it’s a game, but Mortimer knows better. He understands that Bradley is not to be toyed with, and he sees that it is a serious problem.

We as readers know Bradley is prone to violence. When he is rejected by Lizzie, he punches a headstone (haha, get it? Headstone? Very clever, Dickens) so hard that he makes his knuckles bleed. He also openly threatens Eugene’s life, exclaiming: “then I hope that I may never kill him!” (Dickens, 390). Bradley is capable of violence and hell-bent on revenge, making him a very real threat to Eugene. Bradley’s murderous intent further characterizes the lower class as almost primal and savage, very in-tune with what physical means can accomplish (in this case, revenge through murder). Wegg, another member of the lower class, expresses the same sentiment, wanting his vengeance against Mr. Boffin by coercing him out of half his fortune through physical means: a piece of paper. Mr. Boffin, like Eugene, is completely unaware of the danger he is in until he is informed by Mr. Venus. The class dynamic remains the same: the lower class, suppressed by the upper class, plans to take its vengeance in the only way it knows how (physically), and the upper class underestimates the threat posed to them in their ignorance. 

This guy's so intense, I actually spent a half-hour rendering a picture worthy of expressing his rage. (Credit: Google and my amazing MS Paint skills)

It all comes down to this: who will reign supreme, the upper or lower class? At this point in the novel, it is hard to say. If you read into the characters as representing their respective classes, whatever the end may hold for us will be quite the social commentary indeed. If Eugene should perish at the hands of Bradley, it would confirm that the lower class is primal and effective and that the upper class is ignorant and unfoundedly pompous. If Eugene should live, however, it would suggest that the lower class is somehow inferior, as the upper class presumes. Whatever may happen, I know one thing to be true: if Eugene Wrayburn insists on playing with fire, he will get burned.   

Burn, baby, burn! (Credit: www.google.com)

~Justine Camacho