Barkilphedro—Josiana

Barkilphedro—Josiana is a relationship of long-nursed hostility that becomes an elaborate act of political and personal retaliation. Barkilphedro has spent years looking for a weakness in Josiana’s elevated life; when a sea-borne document finally offers one, he does not merely reveal the secret it contains. He arranges circumstances so that Gwynplaine’s restored status will confront Josiana as a reversal of rank, expectation, and appearance, while also giving Barkilphedro a chance to attach himself to a new source of power.

The Shape of the Enmity

The narrative presents Barkilphedro as Josiana’s persistent but socially diminished enemy: he regards himself as her most intimate and least consequential adversary, and has come close to believing that her position is invulnerable. His discouragement does not extinguish his wish to harm her. Instead, it makes the absence of an opportunity feel like a further humiliation. The relationship is therefore marked by an imbalance: Josiana occupies the lofty life that Barkilphedro resents, while he waits for circumstances that might let him act against her without meeting her directly as an equal.

His outward composure conceals the scale of that resentment. When Hardquanonne’s flask reaches him, he appears unsurprised, but the narration distinguishes this mask from his inward astonishment and exultation. The discovery matters to Barkilphedro not simply as information. It arrives at the point when he had begun to despair of finding any vulnerable point in Josiana’s life, turning prolonged frustration into a sudden practical opportunity. His reaction makes the relation less a single quarrel than a sustained disposition: the flask gives his hostility an instrument and a target.

The Flask and the Reversal

The parchment found inside Hardquanonne’s flask connects the abandoned child Gwynplaine with the identity and inheritance that had been concealed from him. Barkilphedro joins that document to his memory of the notice advertising Gwynplaine at the Tadcaster Inn, which had described the child’s abandonment on the coast at Portland on 29 January 1690. The recognition converts separate pieces of information into a consequence for Josiana: Gwynplaine is no longer merely the performer she might encounter at a fairground, but the heir whose return will displace Lord David Dirry-Moir in rank and possessions.

Barkilphedro understands the revelation through its effect on the arrangement surrounding Josiana. In the reversal he anticipates, wealth, estates, and social standing pass from Lord David Dirry-Moir to Gwynplaine; Josiana, formerly placed alongside an illustrious and powerful world, faces a radically altered prospect. The contrast between her expected position and the new one is central to Barkilphedro’s delight. His revenge depends on a change in status that reaches beyond an insult: the discovery rearranges the very relations of inheritance and marriage through which Josiana’s future had been framed.

The sea’s delivery of the flask gives the reversal its peculiar form. Barkilphedro has waited at what the narration calls the gate of chance, and now treats the chance arrival as a reward for that waiting. He imagines himself as the fixed obstacle against which Josiana, figured as something cast adrift, will be dashed. The image captures both the imbalance he seeks to exploit and the indirectness of his method: he does not create the secret or the inheritance, but takes possession of their consequences and turns them toward his enemy.

Manipulation and Self-Advancement

Barkilphedro’s response is calculated rather than openly confrontational. He uses suggestion to influence others while keeping himself apparently outside the action. In particular, he arranges for Josiana to visit the Green Box troupe and see Gwynplaine while Gwynplaine remains in his lowly public station. The visit is designed as part of a larger sequence: Barkilphedro expects that the contrast between Gwynplaine’s present condition and the status he will later acquire will make the eventual reversal more potent. He quietly prepares the circumstances and waits until the legal formalities have been completed, with secrecy helping the plan remain intact.

The plan serves Barkilphedro’s ambition as well as his animosity. He expects to become the protector of the newly elevated Gwynplaine, to shape the peer’s first impressions, and to gain influence through his proximity to the royal circle. He imagines that Gwynplaine’s connection to Queen Anne’s family and the public response to his appearance could help him rise from obscurity toward importance, even entertaining the prospect of a church career. Thus his opposition to Josiana is not selfless vengeance: the same discovery that promises to injure her seems to offer Barkilphedro a patron and a path to advancement.

This double purpose makes his conduct especially revealing. He calls the anticipated injury his vengeance, yet he also calculates what the new order can yield for himself. His hatred supplies the energy for the scheme; his hopes of becoming Gwynplaine’s adviser give it a personal reward. Josiana is at once the intended target and the measure of the reversal he wants to stage, while Gwynplaine is the person whose newly disclosed identity makes the scheme possible.

The Grotesque Sign and the Limits of Control

The plan draws its force from the distance between Gwynplaine’s face and his inward life. His appearance provokes laughter in those who see him, although the laughter is not his own; his expression is fixed, and even grief or anger can intensify the impression of mirth. That visible contradiction makes him a useful instrument in Barkilphedro’s design: Josiana is first directed toward the performer in his diminished circumstances, and the later revelation places that same man at the center of an inheritance that can reorder her future. The contrast is not merely between poverty and rank, but between what the world reads on a face and what a person’s identity and experience contain.

Yet Gwynplaine’s later speech before the peers shows that the meaning of his appearance cannot be controlled by the intrigues that deploy it. He describes the forced laugh as an outward sign of suffering and makes it an accusation against those who wield power. His appeal turns the visible mark that had served as spectacle into a political claim on behalf of the people. This later transformation does not erase Barkilphedro’s role in exploiting the discovery, nor does it establish a further outcome for his relation with Josiana. It does, however, expose the limits of treating Gwynplaine as a mere piece in a private scheme: the revelation that Barkilphedro uses to overturn Josiana’s prospects also brings forward a voice that indicts the social order on which their struggle depends.