Charles Dickens and the Image of Women

David K. Holbrook

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 1993
• Print ISBN:
  9780814735282
• eBook ISBN:
  9780814773277
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

How successful is Dickens in his portrayal of women? Dickens has been represented (along with William Blake and D.H. Lawrence) as one who championed the life of the emotions often associated with the "feminine." Yet some of his most important heroines are totally submissive and docile.
Dickens, of course, had to accept the conventions of his time. It is obvious, argues Holbrook, that Dickens idealized the father-daughter relationship, and indeed, any such relationship that was unsexual, like that of Tom Pinch and his sister—but why? Why, for example, is the image of woman so often associated with death, as in Great Expectations? Dickens's own struggles over relationships with women have been documented, but much less has been said about the unconscious elements behind these problems.
Using recent developements in psychoanalytic object-relations theory, David Holbrook offers new insight into the way in which the novels of Dickens—particularly Bleak House, Little Dorrit, and Great Expectations—both uphold emotional needs and at the same time represent the limits of his view of women and that of his time.

CHAPTER ONE
Bleak House: The Dead Baby and the Psychic Inheritance

Bleak House is in one perspective a thriller, a detective story; but its special power to grip us and move us derives from its deeper content, which has to do with a central theme in Dickens—that of inheritance—the inheritance of each being.

It is highly significant, in the symbolism of the novel, that Esther, who is a kind of orphan, gives her handkerchief to Jenny, the poor woman who lives in the brick kilns, to cover her dead baby, and that later, when Esther is thought to be dying, Lady Dedlock brings the handkerchief from the woman. Later, this handkerchief appears as Lady Dedlock reveals herself to Esther as her long-lost mother. Lady Dedlock dies in the costume of the poor woman who lost her baby. She is in the end discovered through leads given by Guster (who is an orphan) and, of course, by Jo, who knows “nothink” about his parents and is also an orphan, yet plays a considerable part in the action.

Lady Dedlock, then, is one who has allowed her emotional life to die in her by renouncing her passionate attachment to Captain Hawdon, by whom she has had a child she has always been told is dead. Esther, her child, brought up by a punitive woman who often told her that her mother was her shame, is deprived of her emotional inheritance, while Lady Ded´ lock has been denied her motherly role. Parting from Esther for the last time, she says of herself that “the reality is her suffering, in her useless remorse, in her murdering within her breast the only love and truth of which it is capable” (512). The dead baby symbolizes the loss of the (psychic) inheritance that a child should be entitled to, and the death of the mother’s true potentialities.

Faces are important in this kind of drama, and if we read the work of Winnicott we discover why. In Oliver Twist, Mr. Brownlow’s interest in the case arose because he saw resemblances in Oliver’s face, while in Bleak House the resemblance between Lady Dedlock, Lady Dedlock’s portrait, and Esther is something that strikes the blundering Guppy. Esther loses her “old face” through smallpox, and has to come to live with a new face, after much suffering.

The mother is not only the face that reflects the emerging self: she is also the inspiring Stella Maris, who lifts us up toward a higher state of being. The orphan, therefore, feels a special loss: not only has he or she not experienced sufficient “creative reflection” to develop his or her sense of an authentic self; he or she also suffers from a deficiency of spiritual inspiration, and so is prone to idealize the image of woman, when a beautiful face presents itself.

Oliver Twist finds this kind of angelic figure in Rose Maylie; Pip, in Estella; and David Copperfield, in Agnes. But of course the price to be paid by this impulse to idealize is to fail to find woman as she really is, as the creature in whom the libidinal and the ideal are combined. As I shall suggest, this coming-to-terms with the reality of woman is perhaps best achieved by Dickens in his portrayal of Lizzie Hexam.

As so often, in applying concepts from psychoanalytical investigation of the earliest processes of psychic life, we have no evidence in the life of the author. We know little or nothing of Dickens’s infancy. He was not an orphan, and all we do know about his childhood relationship with his mother is that, when improved circumstances made it possible for him to leave the humiliating work he endured pasting labels on blacking bottles, his mother insulted his soul by determining to keep him at the toil he loathed. This perhaps indicates some deficiency in her capacity to cherish her son, but for the incident to be remembered as significant we may surmise that there were earlier weaknesses in the relationship that made it difficult for Dickens to sustain an image of the good mother without deep misgivings. But there were other problems, of course, that belong to the whole tenor of his time: his readership pressed upon him an idea of woman that he felt bound to give them back in return, despite its falsity. As an acquaintance of Wilkie Collins, who lived with two women to whom he was not married, Dickens knew well enough how people behaved sexually in real life. The awful opprobrium offered in his novels toward illicit relationships and illegitimate births—sins that put his characters beyond even heaven’s mercy—was not the predominant criterion in the social milieu in which he lived, though it may have been in bourgeois circles at large. (Mrs. Gaskell’s difficulties show that the Chadband-Pardiggle element was powerful enough in society.) Rather, what we are dealing with are ghosts or phantoms of the imagination—and there we encounter tremendous feelings of guilt, dread, murderousness, and outrage that are associated with the figure of woman, and this suggests some unsatisfactory relationship between Dickens and his mother in infancy.

For some reason Dickens associates woman with the dreadful possibility of being deprived of one’s emotional inheritance, and so of being blighted or falsified. In the face of this deprivation one has to struggle and suffer intensely and make prodigious efforts at reparation, to find fulfillment in oneself, and to discover meaning in the world. So when it comes to sexual fulfillment with woman, there is a powerful feeling of inhibition, such love seeming to be full of menace, shadowed by death, and unlikely to lead to harmony and richness. So with him there seem to be, at the unconscious level, terrible dangers in the woman as a focus of sexual desire, and surely this is only explicable according to the kind of insights afforded by psychotherapy.

As I have already suggested, the dead baby in Bkeak House has a powerful symbolism. The baby is a symbol of the sexuality that produced it; but for the Victorians it was also a symbol of innocence, a creature closer to the angels. The morbid attitude of the Victorians to babies in this mode led to some extraordinary excesses. There is a short story by George Mac-Donald, for instance, called “The Gift of the Christ Child,” which surely deserves F. R. Leavis’s deadliest critical judgment—“embarrassing.” In this a little girl called Phosy, whose father does not love her, picks up a very recently dead baby brother, supposing that he is the Christ child; finding her thus, her father is changed by the image of her devotion, and his love then flows for her in the proper way. Could a Victorian really believe that a child could mistake a baby’s corpse in that way? That she could believe it was Baby Jesus? That a hardened heart could be susceptible of change by such an experience? Mrs. Frances Hodgson Burnett’s Little Lord Faun-tleroy, of course, depends for its effect on the reader believing that hard hearts are capable of redemption by the influence of simple childhood grace, and in the novel the account is not to be despised: presumably here the text is that “a little child shall lead them”? The same kind of process, of course, is demonstrated in A Christmas Carol.

More realistically, we can see the dead baby in Bleak House as the product of sexual sensuality and so, phenomenologically, as a focus of the fantasies of “inner” and “outer” that go with sexual experience. It is a product of the potentialities indicated by menstruation, always a focus of dread (witness the various ways in which, during their periods, women are supposed to be unclean, likely to spoil rites, pollute society, or turn the cheese); it is a product of those mysterious powers in the psyche by which woman creates us (and can be supposed to decreate us). We must try to see the difficulties Dickens had with the libidinal element in woman in connection with his particular attitude to babies and angels.

In applying my modern phenomenological interpretation I am not trying to explain away Dickens’s concern with the baby and infant. I am just trying to show how, as in the fantasies of George MacDonald, the Christian mythology allows for the world of the unconscious to be explored. Dickens’s moral concern is perhaps more devotedly Christian than we tend to recognize, more conscious of the ethical precepts of Jesus and the New Testament: there are many places in Bleak House where the New Testament is implicitly invoked. Dickens’s attitude to children, for instance, obviously bears in mind the sayings of Jesus, about “offences to these little ones.” Dickens’s warm-hearted comparison is also driven by his recognition of Christ’s concern for the poor and the outcast. These Christian preoccupations culminate in Bleak House in the death of Jo: to him, as he dies, “light is coming,” the cart of life is shaken all to pieces, and he is “a-gropin'.” He repeats the Lord’s prayer:

“Art in Heaven—is the light a-comin, sir?”

“It is close at hand. HALLOWED BE THY NAME!”

“Hallowed be—thy—”

The light is come upon the dark benighted way. Dead! Dead, your Majesty. Dead, my lords and gentlemen. Dead, Right Reverends and Wrong Reverends of every order. Dead, men and women, born with Heavenly compassion in your hearts. And dying thus around us every day. (Bleak House, 649)

The scene is very moving, despite the elements of Victorian sentimentality in it, because Jo is a comic if wretched orphan who “don’t know nothink,” but who all the same is a survivor; he bites Lady Dedlock’s golden sovereign to make sure it is a good one, and is only too glad to eat Mrs. Snagsby’s broken meats. But for our taste such episodes are too emotionally loaded, as are the episodes of the brick worker’s baby’s death and Agnes’s quasi-heavenly status, as when she is the bearer of the news of the death of Dora and looks like an angel. These moments have a heavy religiose quality that is very much of its time. Yet, of course, we recognize the difference between Mrs. Pardiggle’s approach and Dickens's. All the same, the question must inevitably arise—how much did Dickens endorse this kind of fervor? Did he aspire to be a “good man” himself, or just to be thought one? Or was he merely trying to satisfy his public?

Often in his work there is a kind of reference to the bearing of Christianity that may be deeply sincere, but to these insistences he cannot avoid giving a morbid Victorian quality. In the course of invoking religion we seem to be asked to endorse beliefs that are not really true or possible; certainly, they seem impossible for us to believe, and one wonders whether the Victorians could really have believed them. Did they really believe that Lady Dedlock was beyond even God’s forgiveness? Or that Little Dorrit was being Christlike in her perpetual self-abnegation?¹ How could they believe such things about babies, about women and children and human beings in general? How could they believe in such innocence, such lack of recognition of the realities, as in MacDonald’s terrible story? But besides the obvious moral didacticism there is also here a more complex symbolism around that dead baby. In one sense, it seems to have to do with angels, with care, the soul, God’s mercy and pity. In another sense, the dead baby is a symbol of a psyche so deprived that it cannot live and fulfill itself. The deprived baby evokes the problem of the mother who could not keep it alive, and so we come to the figure of woman, in relation to feelings about her, and the extent to which she is to be blamed for our failures to fulfill ourselves. Even as Dickens embarked on public readings in which he strove to appear to uphold the domestic virtues, he was suffering the worst anguish of not being able to establish order and harmony in his own life, was separating from his wife, whom he considered impossible, and was (apparently) keeping a mistress. So the image of woman, in this dimension, is the focus of a deep existential perplexity; and if we attend carefully to his work, we find it leads us to a strong current of guilt around these themes and a sense of something dreadful and murderous in the background.

The Victorians, of course, had developed a heavy taboo on sexuality and on the whole reality of woman. This demonstrated an impossible and harmful desire, which we find in Dickens, that woman should be “innocent.” The sentimentalized baby in their art, live or dead, is a symbol of that innocence—and this means sexual innocence, before the Fall. If only the production of babies could be split off from sexuality and the passion that creates them! We may link this unrealistic sentimentality with the fear of libidinal woman.

In the scenes under discussion in Bleak House, the greatest play is made with the contrast between the innocent babe, victim of its parents’ gross-ness, and the violence between the parents:

She only looked at it as it lay on her lap. We had observed before, that when she looked at it she covered her discoloured eye with her hand, as though she wished to separate any association with noise and violence and ill-treatment, from the poor little child. (108)

The innocent child is thus separated from the sexual energy that generated it, to which the violence belongs.

We may recall the way, discussed above, in which Mrs. Bumble falls into violence only two months after marriage. In Martin Chuzzlewit a similar change overtakes Merry Pecksniff when she marries Jonas and becomes subject to his violent domination. This is clearly related to her sexual knowledge of him, and the point is underlined by Sarah Gamp’s professional interest in her possible pregnancy, at the time of her wedding. It is as if sexual union inevitably produces antipathy and discord, and marriage hatred. The horrified submissiveness of Mrs. Quilp, in the face of his cruel tyranny, is another of Dickens’s portrayals of a dreadful marriage, and Quilp’s deformity is calculated to make the sexual union of this pair repulsive.

Behind such dealings with sexuality one often detects in Dickens a deep dread, which displays an unconscious fear of sex as a death-threatening activity; and the concomitant is that creative woman has some of that death-threatening power. Later we shall explore this further in examining Dickens’s attitudes, and those of his public, to illegitimacy and illicit passion, and so to the dark side of woman—including man’s darker attitudes to woman, and Dickens’s own somber side.

In Bleak House the baby dies, even as Ada bends over it:

Ada, whose gentle heart was moved by its appearance, bent down to touch its little face. As she did so, I saw what happened and drew her back. The child died. (108)

Besides the sexual themes behind babies, of course, there is the inheritance or birthright theme. Esther Summerson is a focus of our feelings about babies coming into the world, their birth, raising, and inheritance: birthright (as in the Jarndyce and Jarndyce case) is, one may say, the theme in this novel and in many other novels by Dickens. Dickens’s Christian feelings about dead babies seem here to be made plain:

Presently I took the light burden from her lap; did what I could to make the baby’s rest prettier and gentler; laid it on a shelf, and covered it with my own handkerchief. We tried to comfort the mother, and we whispered to her what Our Saviour said of children. (109)

The Victorians must have been more acquainted than we are with dead children; but it seems to belong to a certain Christian fairy-story attitude to death, as in George MacDonald’s story, for Esther to say “to make the baby’s rest prettier and gentler.” People who deal with actual dead babies must surely feel a deep distress, and even dread; no doubt they arrange the corpse as decently as they can: but never, surely, would the word “prettier” seem appropriate? However, the dead baby is by now virtually an angel, and is used as a contrast to our earthly state, with Christ being evoked in a powerful way, for His attitude to children.

Dickens has another moral purpose here, of course, having to do with the nature of charity: the scene is intended to contrast with the invasion of the brick maker’s privacy by Mrs. Jellyby’s associate, Mrs. Pardiggle. She represents the wrong kind of evangelism, the kind that patronizes and offends: she cannot cross the gap to the poor. Among the poor there is brutality, ignorance, and suffering. It would be better for them to have the consolations of a true knowledge of Christ’s teaching, but this can only be brought home to them by those who are prepared to share their suffering, who are capable of showing love in action. Such people can invoke the words of Jesus at the critical moment—as here, or as when Jo is dying and Alan Woodcourt makes him repeat the Lord’s prayer at the end. Clearly, Dickens believed in the urgent necessity of applying the principles of Christian compassion, and conveying the Gospel to those who were lost without it.

When Mrs. Pardiggle leaves, the difference between her charity and that of Esther and Ada is made plain:

I hope it is not unkind in me to say that she certainly did make, in this, as in everything else, a show that was not conciliatory, of doing charity by wholesale, and of dealing in it to a large extent. (108)

The influence of the (true) Christianity of Ada and Esther, by contrast, has the effect of bringing out the best in the poor.

I thought it very touching to see these two women, coarse and shabby and beaten, so united; to see what they could be to one another; to see how they felt for one another; how the heart of each to each was softened by the hard trials of their lives. I think the best side of such people is almost hidden from us. What the poor are to the poor is little known, excepting to themselves and GOD. (109)

All this is powerfully didactic, but we recognize it as that excellent impulse in Dickens, under the influence of the words of Jesus Christ, to show that the poor will always be with us, that they too were created in the image of God, and that we should try to understand all conditions of people and seek the “good side” in them. His renderings of characters like Mrs. Gamp or Jo, the Artful Dodger or Mr. Weller Senior are in consequence always humanly sympathetic and positive, as is his touching treatment of little orphaned Charley and her siblings.

But in Bleak House the theme belongs to that fairy-tale mode of belief in the supernatural world that can make Esther say,

How little I thought, when I raised my handkerchief to look upon the tiny sleeper underneath, and seemed to see a halo shine around the child through Ada’s drooping hair as her pity bent her head—how little I thought in whose unquiet bosom that handkerchief would...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1. Bleak House: The Dead Baby and the Psychic Inheritance
• 2. Religion, Sin, and Shame
• 3. Little Dorrit; Little Doormat
• 4. At the Heart of the Marshalsea
• 5. Great Expectations: A Radical Ambiguity about What One May Expect
• 6. Finding One Another's Reality: Lizzie Hexam and Her Love Story in Our Mutual Friend
• 7. Dickens's Own Relationships with Women
• Bibliography
• Index
• Footnotes