Читать книгу Charles Dickens and the Image of Women - David K. Holbrook - Страница 11

In previous studies I have dealt with the image of woman as she haunts the work of creative writers—Sir James Barrie, Shakespeare, C. S. Lewis, George MacDonald, and D. H. Lawrence. With these I found, as I supposed, that insights from psychoanalysis help us to understand the most baffling meanings. In applying these insights I was not trying to reduce the symbolism of art to some economic theory of the psyche, based (like Freud’s theory) on instincts, the death instinct or the sexual instinct or whatever, but to apply phenomenological disciplines in the search for understanding.

Since Freud, psychotherapy has passed through several new phases—“object relations” theory, Kleinian investigation of infant fantasies, John Bowlby’s work on attachment and loss, D. W. Winnicott’s insights into child nurturing, the existentialist therapy of Viktor Frankl, Rollo May, and R. D. Laing—while psychotherapy has been affected by the European phenomenologists and figures like Martin Heidegger. Happily, I have now dealt with all these movements elsewhere, and may offer, I hope, a kind of literary criticism based on them without having to explain myself yet again.

Freud’s best insights, as in The Interpretation of Dreams, were phenom¬enological. That is, they had to do with the phenomena of consciousness—and, of course, unconsciousness. He saw that dreams, symptoms, sexual perversions, and sexual hang-ups had a meaning. It is this element in the Freudian tradition that has been deepened and extended by the figures mentioned above. They have shown that our capacity to find the world and to deal with it are formed within the context of the mother’s care, in infancy. We all grow within a mother’s body and in a sense within her psyche. We retain in our “psychic tissue” (to use Bowlby’s term) the particular marks of her makeup, and the experience she had of us and we of her.

We looked into her face, and saw ourselves emerging in her eyes. D. W. Winnicott calls this “creative reflection,” and he believed he found in woman a special state that he called “primary maternal preoccupation”—a special state of psychic parturition in woman in the context of which we find ourselves and find the world. At first the mother allows us to believe we are her; but by degrees she “disillusions” us, so that we have to encounter reality.

This is a complex process, involving the way she handles us, which can be false or true (disaster can occur if a baby girl is handled as if she were a boy, or a boy baby looks into his mother’s mind to find what kind of “image” she has of him and finds nothing). A mother who fails to provide an adequate “facilitating environment” for the “maturational processes” may leave within the infant’s psyche a dark and even hostile figure that may haunt him all his life. Catastrophes in these processes of early nurture can leave a legacy of lifelong torment in which, often, the central problem is that of exorcizing a dark shadow in the psychic world, of a figure of woman who will not let the soul rest until she is dealt with.

Indeed, all of us suffer from this dark figure of woman in the unconscious since we were all once totally dependent on a woman and she was only weak and human. She gave us life, but might she not also have the power to take it away? Could she not be a witch? She belongs in any case to the father, and in the air are many reverberations from the parents’ sexuality, which, as infants, we believed to be a powerful kind of eating. The parents could eat one another up, and perhaps eat us. The breast, which means all the presence of the mother that we yearned for, enjoyed, or were denied, is a focus of both our hope and our delight, but also perhaps of our darkest fears as to the consequences of our voracious appetite, in love or hate.

So, woman is our mother, but then also our mate and, as the Jungians believe, in their analysis of symbolism, our grave, in Mother Earth. All that I am saying, of course, I am saying phenomenologically—in terms of the meanings of the psyche; and, obviously, these symbols have to do with our urgent need to pursue the question of the meaning of life. For, again, we learn to play, and learn symbolism, at the mother’s breast; and once we have the capacity to symbolise, we use it (as Winnicott said) to explore the questions, what is it to be human? and what is the point of life? In a great artist like Dickens, then, around the figure of woman circle these pursuits, together with the various facets of her being—angel, guide, whore, witch, mother, libidinal sexual partner, and threat of death.

What puzzled me most when I first began to explore the symbolism of woman in Dickens was the association of woman with murder and death. I shall discuss below the strange image of the hanging woman in Great Expectations. It is the shadow of Estella’s mother, the murderess with the strong wrists, who is Jagger’s housekeeper; but it cannot be her ghost, for she is not dead. Miss Havisham’s life is stopped at the hour of her aborted marriage, so she is a dead woman of a kind, while Estella herself has no heart and is emotionally dead. In Oliver Twist the appalling murder of Nancy is committed by her common-law husband; she is the prostitute type and a gangster’s moll, but she is murdered because her maternal heart goes out in sympathy to Oliver, and over this she betrays her lover. Dickens, as we shall see, was obsessed by the murder and read it in public readings against his doctor’s advice until it contributed to his death.

Such a compulsive fascination with such a horrific fantasy suggests that the moment had a particular phenomenological meaning for Dickens, and we may, I believe, invoke the primal scene and the fantasy of the combined parents so that the scene takes on aspects of the dangers of the culmination of sensual lust; the threat in it, at the unconscious level, is one of the dangers of sexual intercourse, as the infant finds them, in voracious fantasy.*

Lady Dedlock is a woman whose emotional life is dead, whose natural feelings are locked up by her denial of her earlier passionate encounter with Hawdon. These situations, it should be noted, are linked to the predicament of a deprived child.

Pip in Great Expectations is surrounded by hints of murder: we never know what Compeyson or Magwitch has done, but murder is in the air; Orlick makes a murderous assault on Joe Gargery’s sister and, later, on pip.

In David Copperfield it is David’s mother who, although not exactly murdered, falls in with the (sexual) wiles of Mr. Murdstone, who blights David’s sensitive emotional life and so oppresses the young widow he marries that she dies. In Little Dorrit the plot circles around the extraor’ dinary figure Rigaud, who when the book opens is in prison for murder. In Edwin Drood there is a murder, apparently caused by jealousy over a woman, and in Our Mutual Friend, also, there is an attempted murder of Lizzie Hexam’s lover by a fanatical rival, Bradley Headstone. Lizzie herself is brought up under the shadow of murder, as her father retrieves corpses from the river and is suspected of collusion in the murder of James Harmon that is central to the novel.

What does this preoccupation with murder, often associated with woman, mean?

It will surely be accepted that many of these imaginative fantasies have a powerful undercurrent that can only be explained in terms of deep unconscious meanings; they are grotesque, far beyond normal reality, and so disturbing that they have a nightmarish quality. At times, as with some of Dostoevsky’s most fantastic moments, they have a desperate quality, as though a character is trying to come up against a reality that he or she urgently seeks—or that perhaps (we may say) the author seeks. Such incidents are Orlick’s attack on Joe Gargery’s sister and on Pip, or Nancy’s murder, or Bradley Headstone’s assault on Eugene Wrayburn. These re¬semble, in phenomenological terms, Raskolnikov’s attack on the old woman in Crime and Punishment, an act that is the epitome of abnormal criminal acts and the inverted logic that prompts them. It is often significant that such acts have to do with woman—and with hate; they belong to the kind of ferocious hate experienced in infant fantasy, toward the breast and mother.

I believe it is therefore valid not only to see in these themes elements of infantile fantasy but also to speak of a need in Dickens to reexperience the intensity of infantile fantasy for psychic purposes of his own. It is these needs that drive his art, since the problem of the meaning of being is linked with the problems of love and hate, as is only too clear from his work; for in his engagement with the extremes of love and hate, he is investigating the ultimate meaning of being, as Shakespeare was in King Lear.

Dickens’s dealings with hate are startling: Quilp’s treatment of his wife, for instance, and his general villainy; Fagin’s impulse to corrupt youth, and his way of having doubtful members of his gang hanged; Monks’s impulse to lure Oliver into criminality so he will lose his inheritance; Uriah Heep’s manipulations; Littimer’s operations in the service of his decadent master; and Sir Mulberry Hawk’s menace to Kate Nickelby and his violence to Nicholas and Lord Verisopht. We might have taken Bill Sikes as merely a member of the criminal classes, like MacHeath; but his murder of Nancy is an attack on human sympathy itself; performed in a terrible spirit of inverted morality—“Good be thou my Evil“—it is a glimpse of ruthless-ness. Other characters are carried away by hate—Mrs. Clennam, Bradley Headstone, Whackham Squeers, Monks again (“to vent upon it the hatred that I deeply felt, and to spit upon the empty vaunt of that insulting will, by dragging it, if I could, to the very gallows’ foot” [Oliver Twist, 397*]), Steerforth’s mother and Rosa Dartle; the reader of Dickens’s novels is often startled by the intensity of such moments, and there is often in them a quality of aroused blood and fury that we do not find (say) in Samuel Richardson, Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte or George Eliot, though we do find this desperate quality in Wuthering Heights.

The tendency toward an inverted morality, when hate is acted out with a sense of justification, leading to intense cruelty in some of these episodes such as the murder of Nancy, suggests a schizoid element in Dickens’s fantasy. An explanation may be suggested from Kleinian psychology. If we accept the two “positions” of Melanie Klein’s scheme of psychic growth, the paranoid-schizoid is the earliest and deepest stage of development and belongs to a primitive experience of the fear of love. Th£ voracious hunger of the infant, if it is starved of love, is so tremendous, in terms of psychic fantasy, that it comes to fear love; its need is so great that the infant may fear that its hunger will eat up all the world. An individual who grows up with this fear may be tormented by violent fantasies of attacking and emptying the “other” because of his or her hunger for the love of which he or she has been starved. Fairbairn has made an analysis of the strange logic of the schizoid condition, which often culminates in the conclusions, “evil be thou my good” and “good be thou my evil.” To such schizoid individuals, who have been deprived of love, love seems the most dangerous thing in the world, so (by infant logic) it is better to hate. It may be better to give up love and the need for love altogether, and operate according to the rules of hate. These tragic moral reversals often appear in Dickens, as they do in Dostoevsky, and it is these that are perhaps most startling. Oliver finds himself within a world operating on the basis of hate, and the inverted morality of hate impels Monks, while in other novels it drives Bradley Headstone, Steerforth, Dombey, Orlick, Quilp, Uriah Heep, and Squeers, in their various ways. But Dickens’s primary preoccupation is not with the schizoid problem.

The next stage in infant development is the depressive stage, which belongs to the fear of hate. To enter this stage represents progress because it manifests the finding of the other person, and Winnicott calls it “the stage of concern.” The essence of this stage of growth is a recognition of the consequences of one’s own hate on others, and so there is a development of the capacity for guilt. Dicken’s novels are full of guilt—epitomized eminently by Cruikshank’s illustration of Fagin in the condemned cell. Guilt runs through the novels in many forms. Mrs. Clennam is guilty about cheating little Dorrit of her inheritance. Lady Dedlock is guilty about having a premarital affair and a child by her former lover, Captain Hawdon: she is so guilty that in the end she flies away to die: not even heaven can forgive her. Magwitch is a figure of guilt, as is his wife. Guilt haunts the action of Our Mutual Friend, not least because of the mystery of the death of John Harmon, and it haunts the mystery of Edwin Drood. All the characters in David Copperfield are haunted by little Emily’s guilt, as well as that of Steerforth, her seducer. Guilt is clearly an obsession with Dickens.

In Kleinian psychology, guilt is the motive for reparation, and Melanie Klein finds the basis of all our moral capacities in the depressive position, the stage at which, concerned about the effects of our own hate on others, we seek to make reparation, and in symbolic terms to make good the mother and her breast, which in fantasy we may have emptied or destroyed. Reparation, of a symbolic kind, impels many human actions and under¬takings, especially of a cultural kind—a theme Andrew Brink has taken up in literary criticism.* Guilt is the dynamic behind depression, and the response to depression is either a manic response—a false attempt to remedy the sense of harm caused by others—or true reparation, which is a genuine engagement with the suffering caused by concern. There is plenty of both in Dickens, and the difference between manic and true reparation can assist criticism here.

In Dickens we find many episodes that evidently represent reparative activity: there is so much suffering. One of the most obvious themes of manic or false reparation is Magwitch’s attempt to make Pip into a gentle¬man; it is false because it threatens Pip’s own authenticity, since it bears no relation to his own discovery of himself. Pip’s attempt to save Miss Havisham is a symbolic act of reparation, as are his attempts to protect Magwitch against re-arrest. Little Dorrit seeks to restore her father to a state of “good father” (the father whom no one has ever known); her capacity to endure humiliations, even from him, is a long process of re¬parative endurance. Dickens’s dramas of the restoration of affluence are symbolic of reparation, too. There are many developments in which people’s fortunes are restored to them—to Betsy Trotwood, to Little Dorrit, to Clennam, to Oliver, to Esther. As we shall see, one central theme in Dickens is the restoration of the inheritance—as with Esther, Pip, David Copperfield, and Oliver Twist. And we may say that much of Dicken’s work has to do with the restoration to central characters of the psychic inheritance that they should have received, by rights, from the mother, from woman, had she lived or been available.

There are also many episodes in which tremendous reparation is made through the ordeal of suffering, as with Eugene Wrayburn’s being brought back to life, after suffering brain damage, under the loving ministrations of women—in this case Jenny Wren and Lizzie Hexam herself. Esther is nursed through smallpox, while she in turn nurses Charley, and their mutual love is a dynamic of the healing process. Pip goes through a horrible ordeal in the lime kilns and is rescued by Herbert. But he has another, longer ordeal in which, suffering a severe illness, he is nursed by Joe; in the course of this he undergoes a radical moral transformation, by both realizing his love for Joe and experiencing profound guilt over how he has neglected him. Dick Swiveller is nursed through a dreadful illness by the Marchioness. David Copperfield runs away as a child and undergoes appalling privation, to be rescued by Betsy Trotwood, who is herself redeemed in the process, by experiencing love. David Copperfield has to undergo the decline and death of his child-wife Dora, and the gradual discovery of his love for Agnes, who also suffers from her secret love for David.

These vast ordeals of reparation bring changes in the hearts of characters, and they often move us deeply because we watch with bated breath to see whether the reparative effort will be successful. Only if it is successful, we feel, can the protagonist as being survive in any true sense. And often the focus of our concern is the love of a good woman.

Dickens is less convincing when he employs magical means to yield a good outcome because in such episodes we have only manic reparation—as when seemingly infinite riches are available from a John Jarndyce or the Cheeryble Brothers or the Mr. Brownlow who takes up Oliver Twist, or even when the Dorrit fortunes are restored. We certainly find it difficult in the extreme to follow the magical switches around John Rokesmith and Bella Wilfer, all of which seem disastrously to belong to the manic. We do not feel it is real or possible—and, of course, the essence of the manic is that it is a denial of death and harm, and a denial of the exigencies of reality. This magic introduction of good fortune often seems false reparation, though sometimes Dickens can use it to demonstrate that mere riches are no solution to the existential problem—as with Bella Wilfer, who experiences such doubts about herself, or as with little Dorrit in her secret yearning for Arthur Clennam.

But where there is moral suffering (as with Pip’s anguish over Mag-witch) or suffering in sickness or in the presence of death (as so often in Our Mutual Friend), then we do feel satisfaction, for the consequence of the anguish is a deepened awareness of our humanness—and of what is authentic, what is right for us, at the deepest level of being. It is the development of the protagonist through such torment that makes Great Expectations, Our Mutual Friend, Little Dorrit, and David Copperfield such great novels—because they convey the progress of an inward sense of authenticity.

Since the impulse toward reparation has to do not only with the mother and the mother’s breast, phenomenologically speaking, but also with the origins of love and hate, it tends to center around the problem of woman. Dickens pursues themes of reparation around his women in many diverse ways. Betsy Trotwood is rescued from her harsh bigotry and her denial of love on grounds of partiality and prejudice by David’s predicament and his claim on her; she comes to love him, and her own ruin and her dreadful marital legacy involve the reader in a further deepening of his or her sympathy. Her love for Mr. Dick and her care for him despite his being simple is yet another manifestation of the power of love in a woman: “the mother knows” as Winnicott puts it. This useful phrase, despite its oddness, seems a completely convincing one to convey the tacit power woman has to do the right thing intuitively. Mrs. Jellyby, whose charity is so “telescopic,” represents a misconception of love, directed at export only, while her own home is sadly neglected, with much consequent suffering. (She, by the way, inspired a later, more complex and subtle dealing with campaigning women in Henry James’s The Bostonians—Miss Birdseye owing a lot to Mrs. Jellyby.) By comparison, Mrs. Pardiggle’s form of charity seems to be based on hate. Dickens’s comic women are often wicked and cruel but, like Falstaff, they are often found sympathetic because their weaknesses are those we recognize in ourselves, as is the case with Sarah Gamp, who despite her gruesome pragmatism has such life and vitality, from her brightly patched umbrella to her fantasy authority, Mrs. Harris.

At the other extreme are the women whom Dickens portrays as angels: Rose Maylie, Agnes Wickham; he even says of Rose Maylie that “earth seemed not her element, nor its rough creatures her fit companions.” These women are less interesting because of the absence in their lives of the reparative need: they do not have to strive with the usual temptations and torments as Esther, Ada, Lizzie, Betsy Trotwood, Biddy, and the more real women do. Agnes suffers a good deal over her father, but is impossibly unselfish. Perhaps in portraying the child-wife Dora, Dickens managed to gain a more critical perspective on his own capacity to idealize woman. Certainly at times he tends to allow himself to depict women as “angels” who have no problems of ambiguity, of emotional need and conflict. With Little Nell this unreal purity becomes morbid: in the end she can only die, resembling a stone angel on a tomb. Her submissive devotion to duty—the duty of a totally committed daughter—is idealized. Even when her father steals from her, she suffers dumbly and fails to challenge him. This “Euphrasia” motif in Dickens will be examined further below, in relation to Dickens’s preferences for a certain kind of man-woman relationship, based on the idealization of the father-daughter complex. Lizzie Hexam, Little Dorrit, and the Little Doll’s Dressmaker also have cruel and wicked fathers; and while Dickens seems fascinated by this kind of relationship, he shows himself painfully short of insights into the limitations it imposes on the women themselves: he seems not sufficiently appalled by the exploitation of “duty.” As will appear, I feel little Dorrit fails seriously to deal adequately with her father, but loves him too absolutely and submissively, while Dickens approves. The Little Doll’s Dressmaker perhaps deals most realistically with her “child” (her father), while Lizzie has Eugene to draw her out of her compromise with her father’s cruelty: he offers radical criticism of her submission to her father’s domination. There are two aspects of the father-daughter relationship in Dickens we need to examine carefully. One is the Euphrasia theme: the archetypal fantasy of the daughter feeding her father with her breasts through the bars of his prison. The other is the reduction of the woman to a child-wife, as manifest in the father-daughter relationship (Clennam and Little Dorrit, John Jarn-dyce and Esther, David and Dora). Both may be seen as revealing the limitations of Dickens’s view of woman’s role, in a way characteristic of his time. There is a tendency in Dickens to escape the exigencies and realities of mature relationship by portraying woman as a submissive household servant, carrying her “little” bunches of keys with her “busy little hands” albeit, of course, in the end, allowing the “ship” to bring her a little baby. But the strange fantasies of murder and death seem to reveal that when it came to a full libidinal sexual relationship with woman, Dickens felt himself to be in a state of danger. One means by which he avoided the fear of sex was to present a man-woman relationship from which the libidinal elements are excluded, as with Tom Pinch’s relationship with his sister, or by father-daughter relationships, a tendency in his art that echoes his strange relationship with Georgina.

Dickens seems to have idolized the father-daughter relationship: with Esther Summerson and John Jarndyce this inclination is very strong, and though he transfers Esther’s affections to Alan Woodcourt in the end, the transfer is made, one feels, with some reluctance; it is done, it would seem, to satisfy the readers, while Dickens’s own sensibility is more inclined to celebrate the benign guardian-ward relationship. He likes to fantasize an all-powerful, generous, patronizing father-daughter relationship, in which recognition of the undercurrents of libidinal, normal sexual inclination is repressed. The father figure enjoys all the delights of wifeliness, but without the disturbances of sexuality:

I held his hand for a little while in mine.

“I saw my ward oftener than she saw me,” he added, cheerily making light of it, “and I always knew that she was beloved, useful and happy. She repays me twenty-thousand fold, and twenty more to that, every hour in every day!”

“And oftener still,” said I, “she blesses the Guardian who is a Father to her!”

At the word Father, I saw his former trouble come into his face. He subdued it as before, and it was gone in an instant; but, it had been there, and it had come so swiftly upon my words that I felt as if they had given him a shock. . . .

“Take a fatherly good-night, my dear,” said he, kissing me on the forehead, “and so to rest. These are late hours for working and thinking. You do that for all of us, all day long, little housekeeper.” (Bleak House, 237-38)

Dickens likes to use the word “little” for women: “the little creature.” And by this he shows his inclination to portray the ideal woman as a dutiful daughter, busying herself with her “little” baskets of keys and her household tasks: Esther reports that, “A maid ... brought a basket into my room, with two bunches of keys in it, all labelled” (Bleak House, 68).

John Jarndyce is a foster father to Esther; by comparison Dr. Strong is a father/husband figure to Annie Strong. We may note how with the latter the libidinal leaps out, as she is tempted by a lover—whose passionate interest is symbolized by the red ribbon he steals from her. Dickens is actually somewhat ambiguous about this temptation, and we cannot help feeling that the marriage of this young girl to an elderly man, despite all the honor he deserves, was a mistake, since it means she can never fulfill herself as a young creature capable of passion.

There are several bad fathers in Dickens: little Nell’s grandfather gambles and even steals from her; Madelaine Bray’s father is a sick and petulant man who oppresses her and keeps her something of a prisoner; Dombey is a bad father to Florence Dombey, and Mr. Murdstone is a cruel stepfather to David Copperfield. Dorrit behaves monstrously to little Dorrit, exploiting her dutiful nature and criticizing her most generous acts as offensive to him and his social status.

But on the whole Dickens seems to idolize the father status, and we cannot help feeling that there was a pressing need in him to be thought a good father himself, although all the indications are that he was a difficult and sometimes bad one. Attitudes to husbands and fathers, of course, tell us a good deal about a writer’s attitudes to women and marriage.

Where marriage is concerned, perhaps Dickens’s best insights are developed in his comic themes. His caricature of life after marriage is embodied with gruesome realism in his portrayal of the fate of Bumble the Beadle. In chapter 27 of Oliver Twist Bumble is shown examining Mrs. Corney’s silver: “Mr. Bumble had re-counted the teaspoons, re-weighed the sugar-tongs, made a close inspection of the milk-pot ...” (Oliver Twist, 196). Returning with a stately walk to the fireplace, he declares, with a grave and determined air, “I“ll do it!”

He followed up this remarkable declaration, by shaking his head in a waggish manner for ten minutes, as though he were remonstrating with himself for being such a pleasant dog; and then, he took a view of his legs in profile with much seeming pleasure and interest. (197)

By such touches of bodily presence Dickens manages to convey to us the undercurrents of sexuality that often, in marriage, are turned into hate—as happens so terribly with the Quilps, Jonas Chuzzlewit, the Mantalinis, and the Lammles, for instance.

Mrs. Corney plays up to the Beadle in a hilarious scene of sly and awkward courtship: on her breathless return, Bumble asks what has upset Mrs. Corney.

“Nothing,” replied Mrs. Corney. “I am a foolish, excitable weak creatur.”

“Not weak, ma’ am,” retorted Mr. Bumble, drawing his chair a little closer. “Are you a weak creatur, Mrs. Corney?”

“We are all weak creaturs,” said Mrs. Corney, laying down a general principle.

“So we are,” said the Beadle.

Nothing was said, on either side, for a minute or two afterwards. By the expiration of that time, Mr. Bumble had illustrated the position by removing his left arm from the back of Mrs. Corney’s chair, where it had previously rested, to Mrs. Corney’s apron-string, round which it gradually became entwined. (198)

Mrs. Corney has perquisites as mistress of the workhouse:

“Coals, candles and house—rent free,” said Mr. Bumble. “Oh, Mrs. Corney, what a Angel you are!”

The lady was not proof against this burst of feeling. She sunk into Mr. Bumble’s arms; and that gentleman in his agitation, imprinted a passionate kiss upon her chaste nose. (199)

Declaring him “a irresistable duck,” Mrs. Corney agrees to marry Bumble, and they exchange endearments such as “dear,” “dove,” and “love,” and he speaks of her “lovely countenance”:

The dove then turned up his coat-collar, and put on his cocked-hat; and, having exchanged a long and affectionate embrace with his future partner, once again braved the cold wind of the night. (200)

The next time we meet the pair, however, things are changed.

A paper fly-cage dangled from the ceiling, to which he occasionally raised his eyes in gloomy thought ... it might be that the insects brought to mind, some painful passage in his own life. (267)

Mr. Bumble is no longer a beadle, but is now master of the workhouse, and reflects woefully that he has been married only two months. He admits later,

“I sold myself ... for six teaspoons, a pair of sugar-tongs, and a milk pot” (268).

Mrs. Bumble fails to respond to Mr. Bumble’s stern look, and asks him whether he is going to sit snoring all day. To decide how he shall behave, declares Mr. Bumble, is his “prerogative.” Mrs. Bumble sneers at the word with “ineffable contempt.” The prerogative of woman, it seems, is to obey.

Mrs. Bumble, seeing that the decisive moment had now arrived and “that a blow struck for the mastership on one side or other, must necessarily be final and conclusive,” drops into a chair with a loud scream and falls into a paroxysm of tears.

The drama develops and the comedy has beneath it the irony drawn into it from the previous exchange. We are all weak creatures—and the impulse that draws the couple together is dependence. But now, after sexual union, the mutual dependence is resented, and the struggle for “mastery” begins. Although Bumble is, like Dogberry, a caricature, the presentation has much psychological truth.

Mrs. Corney that was has tried the tears as less troublesome than manual assault. But now she is prepared to try the other method:

The first proof he experienced of the fact, was conveyed by a hollow sound, immediately succeeded by the sudden flying off of his hat to the opposite side of the room. This preliminary proceeding laying bare his head, the expert lady, clasping him tightly round the throat with one hand, inflicted a shower of blows (dealt with singular vigour and dexterity) upon it with the other. This done, she created a little variety by scratching his face, and tearing his hair; and, having by this time, inflicted as much punishment as she deemed necessary for the offence, she pushed him over a chair, which was luckily well situated for the purpose; and defied him to talk about prerogative again, if he dared. (269-70)

As in our own relational difficulties, we find the conflict only binds us together, in its humiliating way, since it is itself a manifestation of need and attachment. So, Mr. and Mrs. Bumble go together to conspire with Monks in the suppression of the relics of Agnes’s existence and his fraud on Oliver—until, exposed in the end, they are prohibited from ever again holding office and join the paupers whom they have previously exploited. Such severe realism about human weakness is perhaps what Dickens is most revered for: yet, as we shall see, in his dealings with woman he is sometimes unable to confront reality, while in some of his vacillations around the theme of what woman can or cannot provide, he penetrates to even deeper areas of truth.

Dickens is far too complex a character to be understood in terms of a single theme throughout his work. But it is perhaps worth dwelling further on the phenomenological significance in his work of the orphan theme—the “orfting,” as it is called in David Copperfield. It seems to represent a hunger for further “reflection.” The orphan often also yearns to find the mother’s face: there are significant moments, for instance, when Esther first sees Lady Dedlock, and later when she reveals herself as her mother, as we shall see. We may even, I believe, go further and see how a writer preoccupied with the orphan sense of needing to find better access to an inheritance may tend to find woman as an angel, as Oliver finds Rose Maylie.

The younger lady was in the lovely bloom and springtime of womanhood; at that age, when, if ever angels be for God’s good purposes enthroned in mortal forms, they may be, without impiety, supposed to abide in such as hers.

She was not past seventeen. Cast in so slight and exquisite a mould; so mild and gentle; so pure and beautiful; that earth seemed not her element, nor its rough creatures her fit companions. The very intelligence that shone in her deep blue eye, and was stamped upon her noble head, seemed scarcely of her age or of the world; and yet the changing expression of sweetness and good humour, the thousand lights that played about the face, and left no shadow there; above all the smile, the cheerful, happy smile were made for Home, and fireside peace and happiness. (212)

Oliver, of course, is an orphan. He is born in the workhouse, delivered by the parish surgeon, and his mother dies on the third page: he is a parish child. In the end he inherits a property, of which Monks has tried to cheat him, amounting to “little more than three thousand pounds,” and is adopted by Mr. Brownlow as his own son. Rose Maylie, also an orphan, is an aunt, the sister of Oliver’s own mother, Agnes, who was “weak and erring.” In chapter 49 there is a long and elaborate unfolding of the plot between Mr. Brownlow and Monks. Throughout it is made clear that Mr. Brownlow’s interest in the case arose because he saw resemblances in Oliver’s face. The coincidences in the book, of course, are incredible, and it is not necessary for our purposes to unravel the fantastically complex plot. We simply note that the essence of Oliver Twist has to do with his being an orphan, while later he is redeemed by a beautiful angelic woman who is his mother’s sister (or, we might say, her substitute or reincarnation). The theme of the rediscovered face is one we shall look at later: in Oliver Twist and Bleak House the recognition of a face through a portrait is significant, for example.

Pip, too, is an orphan; everyone who has read Dickens recalls the sad and slightly comical account he gives of the grave of his mother and the series of defunct siblings.

I give Pirrip as my father’s family name, on the authority of his tombstone As I never saw my father or my mother, ... my first fancies regarding what they were like, were unreasonably derived from their tombstones. The shape of the letters on my father’s gave me an odd idea that he was a square, stout, dark man, with curly black hair. From the character and turn of the inscription, “Also Georgina Wife of the above,” I drew a childish conclusion that my mother was freckled and sickly. To five little stone lozenges, each about a foot and a half long, which were arranged in a neat row beside their grave, and were sacred to the memory of five little brothers of mine—who gave up trying to get a living exceedingly early in that universal struggle—I am indebted for a belief that they had all been born on their backs with their hands in their trouser pockets, and had never taken them out in this state of existence. (Great Expectations, 1)

Both Great Expectations and Oliver Twist consist of a child growing up with a series of substitute parents—as does David Copperfield, of course, who is also an orphan—his mother having remarried to a wicked stepfather, Murdstone, who treats him so cruelly that he runs away to find a substitute mother in the forbidding but sympathetic Betsy Trotwood. Esther is a kind of orphan, and she has a guardian for father; later she finds her real mother in circumstances in which the acknowledgement cannot be openly made. The orphan theme in Bleak House yields the beautiful story of little Charley, which we shall examine.

Little Dorrit is not an orphan, but she is disinherited by the wicked manifestations of Mrs. Clennam, and she is orphaned by Dorrit’s collapse and death later in the book. Nicolas Nickleby and Kate have lost their father and their ordeals are those of trying to survive. Florence Dombey loses her mother and is rejected by her father, and when she flees she becomes an orphan and is taken in as a daughter by Captain Cuttle. Estella is virtually an orphan, as her father has been transported, and her mother is kept as a household servant by Jaggers. George Rouncewell is virtually an orphan, as he has kept himself away from his mother and brother. Lizzie Hexam is orphaned early in Our Mutual Friend, while Caddy Jellaby is virtually an orphan because of the neglect of her household by her campaigning mother; Peepy feels very much like an orphan child. Jo, the crossing sweeper, knows “nothink” of his origins, of course, while the Marchioness in The Old Curiosity Shop is an orphan. Dora is orphaned, while Tattycoram is taken in from a foundling hospital.

Thus throughout Dickens’s works there is a preoccupation with the urgent needs of the deprived infant and child and of the adult who feels, like Esther, that he or she has never experienced a full portion of rich reflecting love. Consequently, when we come to Dickens’s image of woman, the question that hangs over her is whether she can provide that reflection, that capacity to fulfill the needs of being, the role of the (lost) mother.

A Polly Toodles can provide it better than a Miss Murdstone or an Edith (though Edith’s powers are brought out by Florence—only to lead to intense envy and hatred in Dombey himself). What Polly provides, as a strong working-class wet-nurse, is the breast, while often, one senses, the sickly or oppressed mothers have failed to give the experience of the breast to their infants. So, crucial to an understanding of Dickens’s genius as a writer is an examination of his attitudes to woman. To penetrate beyond normal considerations of what this means, we have to try to bring up insights from psychoanalytical theories about the origins of many of our adult problems in the infant experiences of hunger, fear, hate, and the reparative impulse—directed at all we mean by “the breast,” the focus of the mother’s care and her capacity to reflect us and bring out from us our sense of our own being, and our grasp of reality.

It is obvious from recent scholarship that many critics share my puzzlement about Dickens and woman. Michael Slater, in Dickens and Women, writes in a fascinating way of how Dickens used the women in his life as the basis of his characters—his mother, for instance, for Mrs. Nickleby and Mrs. Micawber; his sister Fanny for Fanny Dorrit; Lucy Stroughill in some of his visions of child-sexless-love; Maria Beadnell as Dora and Flora Finch-ing; Mary as Rose Maylie and Agnes, and so on. And this in turn leads him to make some very pertinent comments on the general problem of Dickens’s treatment of women.

He reaches the conclusion that Dickens’s “nervousness about any manifestation of aggressive female passion (as opposed to passive female devotion) may be linked to his nervousness about his own strong sexual responsiveness” (356). He “could not include the turbulence and sensuous delights of sexuality” in the domestic setting, along with childhood and angels. His women tend to be the Fairy or Angel, the Good Sister, or the kitten: the fully adult woman is missing.

Slater shows by his quotations that the most sympathetically portrayed couples tend to be brother and sister—Nicolas Nickleby and Kate, and especially Tom Pinch and Ruth—while his married couples seem more like fathers and daughters rather than husbands and wives. The attraction of the brother and sister union seems to be that it represents a “sexless marriage” (34), while there are aspects of boy and girl relationships that seem to Dickens especially enchanting, as when David Copperfield speaks of loving little Emily “with greater purity and more disinterestedness, than can enter into the best love of a later time of life.”

On the one hand, his experience of his real wife, Catherine, seems to have had little influence on his art. Slater says,

the woman he married and lived with for twenty-two years, fathering a large family by her, appears to have had less impact on his deepest imagination and on his art than any of the other women who hold an important place in his emotional history. (102)

Among these other women were Lucy Stroughill, who was the object of an innocent romance of his happy childhood; Fanny, his sister, whose career at the Royal College of Music was encouraged while he was kept on at the blacking factory; Maria Beadnell, who treated him with cold-hearted contempt and was at the same time flirtatious and flippant. Then there were more significant figures who lived in his household: Mary Hogarth, for whom he grieved as a sister and with whom he fantasized a heavenly reunion, yearning that she might turn out to be of his own blood—a household saint in Dickens’s mind, whose relationship to the saintly Agnes Wickfield is clear; and Georgina, another sister of his wife, who embodied that capacity that Dickens regarded as so important for woman—the capacity for a good sisterly relationship. And then there was his mistress, Ellen Ternan, his fascination for whom made Dickens hate his wife and accuse her of many failings, including being a bad mother and housekeeper.

It wouldn’t do, I think, to accuse Dickens of being so afraid of women that he hated women, though he does portray some deadly women in his novels (Magwitch’s wife, Mrs. Gamp, Mrs. Nickleby, Mrs. Clennam, Mrs. Steerforth and Rosa Dartle, Mrs. MacStinger, Mrs. Corney [Mrs. Bumble]). But we must surely take note of Kate, his daughter (Mrs. Perrugini), who declared that “my father did not understand women,” “he was not a good man,” and “my father was a wicked man—a very wicked man” (Storey, 219). He was known to swear at his wife, and there are occasional glimpses of his strange behavior at home: for instance, on the eve of Kate’s wedding he was found sobbing into her wedding dress (Slater, 185). His final treatment of his wife seems determinedly governed by hatred and misrepresentation. He enjoyed putting women in bodily fear, as Slater reports, quoting an occasion on which Dickens recklessly held a woman in the rising tide, in a melodramatic posture, until her new silk dress was ruined (Mrs. Christian, The English Woman s Domestic Magazine 10 [1871]: 339, quoted by Slater, 115) and describing how he ruined two of her bonnets by pushing her under waterfalls. His inclination to bully women is hinted at, as when he referred to himself and Catherine as “Bully and Meek,” speaks of exerting “despotic conjugal influence” on her, and writes of how he would keep a strict watch over her housekeeping, “concerning which we hold solemn weekly councils when I consider it my bounden duty to break a chair or two, as a frugal demonstration” (Slater, 111). He spoke of his wife’s “bashful sensuality,” but that the marriage was energetically sexual is plain from the record of ten children and two miscarriages in sixteen years.

But there is also the indicative episode of Dickens’s obsession with Mrs. de la Rue, on whom he exercized mesmerism, in which the fact that (as Slater declares) “the power-relationship was ... sexual” was made plain by a story Dickens wrote at the time, in which a woman “vanishes into infamous oblivion with the man whose face threatening her had appeared in a dream” (Slater, 124).

This, then, was the reality of Dickens’s life with his wife and other women, in which it is clear that he could not bring together the ideal and the libidinal, and in which he continued to yearn for an impossible ideal. There was something he felt he had never had: “something beyond that place and time.” He wrote to Forster, “Why is it, that as with poor David, a sense comes always crushing on me now, when I am in low spirits, as of the one happiness I have missed in life, and one friend and companion I have never made” (679). Like Esther Summerson, Dickens obviously felt “as if something for which there was no name, no distinct idea, were definitely lost to me,” as he goes on. To Esther, he restores this “something” in the strange piece of wish-fulfillment by which she is given to Alan Woodcourt by a kind of magic switch, on Mr. Jarndyce’s part, in a ploy, of course, that deprives Esther of any authentic choice in the matter—and as if Dickens could not endorse a woman’s free choice in sexual love.

To Dickens fully adult sexual love was, at the unconscious level, terribly dangerous. Michael Slater returns again and again to this problem. It was as if Dickens felt that it was sex that made women cold-hearted: Slater points out that, writing about aunts (like Betsy Trotwood), Dickens marveled that “the fire of love should not have been quenched in their lonely hearts,” but celibacy was likely to make that fire “burn brighter,” and even to preserve women from downright cold-heartedness: “women are never naturally vain, heartless, and unloving. They are made so” (176). A woman is often made so by marriage. In the marriages of Charity Pecksniff and Jonas Chuzzlewit, and of Mr. and Mrs. Bumble, he shows the rapid change of courtship into violent brutality and the domination of one partner by the other.

Speaking of the fate of the women in Dickens’s novels who are punished by being “endowed with passion” (Edith Dombey, Lady Dedlock, and Louisa Gradgrind), Michael Slater repeatedly notes Edith Dombey, Lady Dedlock, Louisa Gradgrind, and Miss Havisham as women who are “endowed with passion.” But Edith Dombey’s flight with Carter is only a piece of simulated abandonment to passion—she repudiates the man who casts himself as her seducer, and reveals that she only went away with him to humiliate Dombey. Miss Havisham has gone mad because her intended fails to turn up at the wedding—she is passion frustrated and unawakened, and turned to hate. Lady Dedlock has of course the secret of her passionate affairs in youth, but little remains of her passionate nature: she has locked it up in her heart. Louisa simply does not know how to deal with a lover. Surely these women are, rather, threatened by passion? Slater says, “we can register just how disturbed he was by this quality in the opposite sex: he seems compelled to show it as finally finished or at least neutralized” (265). Slater concludes that he is reflecting a world that “dealt harshly with women who could not conform to socially approved patterns.” No doubt he had to satisfy his readers: but we may, I believe, explore the subjective factors beneath his repudiation of sexuality in women.

One interesting observation emerges from Michael Slater’s book: Dickens’s women tend to be described in terms of their faces (and hair) and sometimes their (“neat”) feet: but their figures and bosoms are neglected. There is a tendency for the more admired women to be somewhat ethereal—bodiless, angelic figures. Agnes is like a figure in a church window; Esther Summerson has a mysterious period in which she goes temporarily blind, and is preoccupied with having her face disfigured (though it later becomes as mysteriously beautiful again). She seems to feel at times as if her own beauty, indeed her own feminine and lovable self, has been “given” to Ada, and (as Alex Zwerdling points out) there is a revealing slip at one point when, speaking to Charley about not letting Ada into her sick chamber when she has the smallpox, she says, “Charley, if you let her in but once ... I shall die.” Note she does not say “she will die” but “I will die”—so closely does she identify with Ada, and so closely does Dickens identify with her. The “double” theme is a common one in Dickens (cf. the Harmon story, the Cheeryble brothers), while Dickens himself seemed to need to search for a firm identity. So we may, I believe, see the woman deprived of her birthright as an alter ego of Dickens, who searches continually for a sense of self-being capable of loving and being loved, and in this way remaining in touch with childhood, as a deprived child. His obsession with his mother’s “warmth” to return him to the blacking factory to contribute to the family’s earnings when he yearned for learning and the opportunity to realize his potential must surely hide an earlier and deeper experience of deprivation at his mothers breast.

It is such a deprivation, I believe, that explains Dickens’s urgent need to fantasize, on the one hand, and his dread of sensual woman, on the other: a dread that makes him find full adult female sexuality associated with death. For Nancy (he wrote somewhere, “the woman is a prostitute”) is both his most fully realized sensual woman and also one who has to be killed in a most brutal way, for daring to show pity for Oliver and loyalty to her man. Her death is a fantasy of the brutal primal scene, and Dickens’s continual yearning for childish purity in his women is a way of avoiding the murderous dangers of aroused female sexuality.

Here I was delighted to find confirmation of my suspicions in an appendix to Steven Marcus’s book, Dickens: From Pickwick to Dombey, titled “Who Is Fagin?” Marcus pieces together various aspects of Dickens’s childhood experience and picks out, in relation to this, a number of very betraying phrases and paragraphs.

One of the phrases is in a recollection of Dickens, in which he sees himself sitting on his bed, “reading as if for life.” This points to the intense need in Dickens for literary fantasy, and to devise his own fantasies, and this may be linked with the whole question of the humiliation and neglect Dickens felt as a child, when the father was arrested for debt, the mother followed him into the Marshalsea, and Dickens—who remained outside (a “small Cain,” he called himself)—had no home to go to. He seemed to feel most his father’s indifference at the time to his yearning for education: his father “had utterly lost at this time the idea of educating me at all.”

One day Dickens, who was wrapping blacking bottles at the window, where the workers were watched from time to time, saw his father watching him, and “wondered how he could bear it.” We have seen the degree to which Dickens resented his mother’s “warmth” for keeping him at the humiliating work. Now he felt his father’s freedom was a fraud and an outrage. But Steven Marcus believes that this intense memory of being seen in an exposed situation, and of seeing something menacing, is a screen memory of earlier traumatic experiences. And, as he points out, there are many scenes of the kind throughout Dickens’s novels.

These are primal scene fantasies, in which, he believes,

the child [is] asleep, or just waking, or forging sleep while observing sexual intercourse between his parents, and, frightened by what he sees or imagines, is either then noticed by the parents or has a fantasy of what could occur if he were noticed. (Marcus, 373)

In the mind of a very small child, says Marcus, “when parents seem like gods, giants and demons,” “sexual intercourse is first apprehended as a form of violence, specifically of murder, inflicted by the male upon the female” (375). In this we have a clue to Dickens’s fascination with murder (and, one might add, his preoccupation with public hangings for murder, which he felt ought to be private: he was obsessed with the corruption he felt to be inherent in thousands of eyes' being turned on this dreadful activity, and he was especially vivid in his description of a murderous couple being hanged). But here, too, we may find clues to Dickens’s fear of the fully adult sexual woman, and his fear of sexuality altogether, the converse of which is a yearning for “pure” infancy, and for an innocence, in woman, in love, and in his protagonists, that is prelapsarian: that is, one might say, for a state before the dreadful experience of witnessing the primal scene. This also helps us understand why (for example) the relationship between Eugene Wrayburn and Lizzie Hexam has to go through the threat and experience of murder before it can be accepted: it has to be shown (to the self) that one may survive murder in order to endure adult sexuality.

To return to Steven Marcus: he points out the intensity of the writing about eyes, in the way Nancy’s dead eyes haunt Bill Sikes, and in the way Fagin is exposed to the eyes of the multitude:

Those widely staring eyes, so lustreless and so glassy, that he had better borne to see them than think upon them, appeared in the midst of darkness; light in themselves, but giving light to nothing. There were but two, but they were everywhere. If he shut out the sight, there came the room with every well-known object ... each in its accustomed place. The body was in its place, and its eyes were as he saw them when he stole away. (Oliver Twist, 368; Marcus, 375)

At the end, Sikes is surrounded by “tiers and tiers of faces in every window,” by people fighting each other “only for an instant to see the wretch.” At last he calls out “the eyes again,” loses his balance, and is hanged by the rope he is carrying.

At the end, with Fagin, the court is “paved, from floor to roof, with human faces: he seemed to stand surrounded by a firmament, all bright with gleaming eyes.” As Marcus points out, in the end, “Sikes and Fagin, both of them figures who threaten to ruin, castrate and destroy Oliver, are now in Oliver’s place,” and the reader is enlisted in their terror. Yet it was the most horrifying scene, Sikes’s murder of Nancy, that Dickens read in public until it killed him. Yet the essence of the murder is that Nancy dies because she stays loyal to Sikes and is seeking to save Oliver: that is, because of her maternal instincts.

But Marcus also points to the strange moments in Oliver Twist in which Dickens records what Marcus calls a “hypnagogic phenomenon.” They do not emerge out of the logic of the story, and contain elements that are never cleared up, as if Dickens felt compelled to write about a mysterious experience he had had. The first is when Oliver is dozing in Fagin’s den:

There is a drowsy state, between sleeping and waking, when you dream more in five minutes with your eyes half open ... (Oliver Twist, 58; Marcus, 371)

Fagin calls the boy by name, and he does not answer. He takes jewels out of a small box, including a trinket that seems to have “some very minute inscription on it” that he pores over “long and earnestly.” Suddenly, a flash of recognition passes between them:

for the briefest space of time that can possibly be conceived—it was enough to show the old man that he had been observed. He closed the lid of the box with a loud crash; and laying his hand on a bread knife which was on the table, started furiously up. (Oliver Twist, 59; Marcus, 371)

The scene ends inconsequentially, but Marcus links it with his diagnosis of the “primal scene” fantasy, Fagin’s attention to the trinket being presumably related to a fantasy of the father being engaged in attention to a sexual goal whose meaning remains incomprehensible to an infant, though when observed turns to furious rage against him.

The second hypnagogic episode is of course the mysterious appearance of Fagin and Monks to the sleeping Oliver in the May lies' house. Oliver is reading.

There is a kind of sleep that steals upon us sometimes, which, while it holds the body prisoner, does not free the mind from a sense of things about it. (Oliver Twist, 255; Marcus, 372.)

As Marcus says, Dickens, in these passages, addresses the reader in a “personal, essayist, and almost musing voice,” and each episode contains “illogical” or “false” details, in the sense that something mysterious happens that Dickens fails to clear up. The implication is that, in “sticking so close to Oliver” (for which Dickens, at the time of writing, suffered a recurrence of a childhood malady), Dickens is here approaching, willy nilly, those childhood fantasies of the primal scene, as murder, which he associated with the father: he had, says Marcus, “a feeling of identity with his father, even with that father who appeared to him as destroyer and betrayer,” which is why Fagin is so human.

With the fantasy of the primal scene we must link, I believe, those intense fantasies of the infant that are directed at the mother’s breast: and here, of course, where Dickens is concerned, we can have no evidence of how he was treated by his mother. We know that Polly Toodles is the picture of a totally maternal woman, as she is chosen to be a wet-nurse for little Paul Dombey, and she is presented as a benign and satisfying female presence, as is Peggoty—the Good Provider.

But the general absence of breasts in the forms of Dickens’s women, and his obsession with women’s faces as those of angels, often giving the promise of another world, suggest that his abhorrence of female sexuality, such as might have been prompted by primal scene experiences, has a deeper cause in some complication of the processes by which a mother introduces her infant to the reality of the world and other people. We need here to go back to the Kleinian theory of the infant being involved, over his feeding, in his fantasy, in a “cannibalistic attack.” There is the question of what D. W. Winnicott calls the way mother and child “live as experience together”:

The mother has a breast and the power to produce milk, and the idea that she would like to be attacked by a hungry baby ... it is she who produces a situation that may with luck result in the first tie that the infant makes with an external object, an object that is external to the self from the infant’s point of view. (Winnicott 1958, 153)

Winnicott urges us to think of the process as if two lines come from opposite directions:

If they overlap there is a moment of illusion—a bit of experience which the infant can take as either his hallucination or a thing belonging to external reality.

There is a great advantage in finding external reality: it affords relief.

Fantasy things work by magic: there are no brakes on fantasy and love and hate cause alarming effects. External reality has brakes on, and can be studied or known, and, in fact, fantasy is only tolerable at full blast when objective reality is appreciated well. The subjective has tremendous value but is so alarming and magical that it cannot be engaged except as a parallel to the objective. (Winnicott 1958, 153)

In the most primitive state, says Winnicott, the object behaves according to magical laws: “it exists when desired, it approaches when approached, it hurts when hurt. Lastly, it vanishes when not wanted”: “to not want, as a result of satisfaction, is to annihilate the object.” Winnicott here deals with the problem of trying to understand why, with some infants, they are not satisfied with satisfaction. This seems to me possibly to lend insight to Dickens’s fear and dread of female sexuality: like a patient to whom Winnicott refers, “his chief fear was of satisfaction”—because satisfaction brought an annihilation of the object, a kind of murder. To such a person, woman might be the source of one’s being, but also (as to the Jungians) that grave into which one ultimately plunges—because, in her body, toward which one directs the fantasies of aspiration and idealism, lies the power, in providing sexual satisfaction, that would annihilate one’s world altogether. A terrifying infant experience of the primal scene would, of course, exacerbate this feeling, not least in a child who had an extraordinary capacity, as Dickens had, for vivid fantasy, and a hunger to find the very source of his being.

So, while Dickens had a deep respect for woman, he also found her associated with dread. In Dombey and Son, writing about Polly Toodles, he says that she was a typical example of the ordinary woman, of “a nature that is ever, in the mass, better, truer, higher, nobler, quicker to feel, and much more constant to retain, all tenderness and pity, self-denial and devotion, more than the nature of men.” At times this develops into the Euphrasia theme, which we have examined in Little Dorrit. “Nature often enshrines gallant and noble hearts in weak bosoms—often, God bless her, in female breasts” Dickens writes of Nell, when she is thinking how destitute her grandfather would be without her, in The Old Curiosity Shop. But these creatures, often angels, can also be frightening, if stirred up.

There is something about a roused woman: especially if she adds to all her other strong passions, the fierce impulses of recklessness and despair: which few men like to provoke. (Oliver Twist, 115)

Dickens’s engagement with the problem of woman cannot be understood without taking into account the deeper insights of psychoanalysis, as several critics have found. Lawrence Frank, for example, in Charles Dickens and the Romantic Self, makes some useful comments on the images of themselves that Dickens’s women have, especially Esther Summerson, who, of course, loses her image before finding it again: and he invokes some enlightening ideas from Maurice Merleau-Ponty (“the image of oneself makes possible the knowledge of oneself, [and] makes possible a sort of alienation” Frank, 1984, 247). Another explanation of Esther’s reality is that made by Alex Zwerdling in an article, “Esther Summerson Rehabilitated.” He finds the treatment of her internal conflicts psychologically plausible, but criticizes the end as depriving her of existential choice.

There is tremendous poetic resonance around some of Dickens’s imagery, as in his depiction of Eugene Wrayburn’s reflections on the river, just before his attempted murder:

The rippling of the river seemed to cause a correspondent stir in his uneasy reflections. He would have laid them asleep if he could, but they were in movement, like the stream, and all tending one way with a strong current. As the ripple under the moon broke unexpectedly now and then, and palely flashed in a new shape and with a new sound, so parts of his thoughts started, unbidden from the rest, and revealed their wickedness. (Our Mutual Friend, 698)

That is, they are lustful thoughts, and reveal themselves like corpses in the river. The thoughts of seduction directed toward Lizzie seem here to have an apocalyptic quality, associated with sexual love, that brings him near to death, and this association of woman and sexual love with death is an enigma in Dickens’s work we need to go on pondering, for it reveals a fundamental duplicity in his view of them.