Dickens, Sexuality and Gender

Lillian Nayder

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351944380
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Critica letteraria di letteratura comparata

This volume of essays examines Dickens's complex representations of sexuality and gender as well as his use of gender ideologies and sexual and gender differences over the course of his literary career, from his first sketches and early novels to his late works of fiction. The essays approach gender issues in Dickens's writing by focusing on a number of topics: his treatment of gender ideals and transgressions; the intersections and displacements among gender, class and race; the ties between gender and the body, and among gender, voice and language; his depiction of the homosocial and the homoerotic; and the relation between gender and the law. The essays provide an introduction to the most recent approaches to Dickens's fiction in addition to those now considered classic, draw on queer theory and also feature a variety of methodologies, ranging across feminist, historicist and psychoanalytic methods of interpretation. The collection represents the best of previously published research by Dickens's scholars and illuminates for students and scholars alike the meaning of gender in such novels as The Pickwick Papers, Dombey and Son, and Our Mutual Friend.

Part I

Ideals and Transgressions

1

A Sisterhood of Rage and Beauty: Dickens’ Rosa Dartle, Miss Wade, and Madame Defarge

Barbara Black

But [Polly] was a good plain sample 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, than the nature of men.

—Dombey and Son (27)

Any discussion of Dickens and his female characters must confront the great faith he places upon women in his novels. His interest in the domestic sublime—that elevation of the Horne fundamental to the separate spheres of Victorian gender configuration—leads consequently to an apotheosis of women. As the genii of the hearth, women are ready moral agents able to resurrect and repair the many men of their lives—father, brother, employer—who journey out into the world and are tainted by it. Dickens’ belief in women’s potential for good is evident in the characteristic statement above from Dombey and Son. Here Dickens describes women as “better, truer, higher, nobler, quicker to feel” than men. Dickensian women are virtuous in their capacity for service to others, in their “self-denial and devotion.” It seems that Dickens’ conceptions of femininity are hardly complex and offer little challenge to the critical commonplace of the Victorian angel in the house. For like his favorite child and favorite self, David, Dickens would wish for every man an Agnes as the reward for life’s arduous peregrinations.

And yet alongside this feminine ideal lies an uneasy and unsettling connection between women and violence in Dickens’ novels. Dickens depicts men violating women, women who do violence to others, and women who violate and mutilate themselves. Explicit violence exists often in the novel’s periphery, in fleeting suggestions concerning tertiary characters such as the woman in the police station in Our Mutual Friend “who was banging herself with increased violence, and shrieking most terrifically for some other woman’s liver” (67). An examination of female violence in the Dickens corpus, moreover, uncovers the rage that seethes beneath the surface of many of Dickens’ most famous, mild heroines. Nascently violent, Florence Dombey represses the death-wishes she feels for her father; finally violated, she shuns her own breast branded by “the darkening mark of an angry hand” (680). In reading Little Dorrit’s life, we come to understand the harsher implications of the equation above from Dombey and Son: For women, “devotion” and “self-denial” are synonymous. Amy’s commitment to the ideal of service involves the affliction of unshod feet and the punishment of a malnutrition that verges on anorexia. Even Esther, whom many readers embrace as the genuine voice of a sincere discourse and who is saved from explicit violence by Hortense’s function in the novel, speaks a language churning with rage:

[H]ow often had I considered within myself that the deep traces of my illness, and the circumstances of my birth, were only new reasons why I should bebusy, busy, busy…. So I went about the house, humming all the tunes I knew;and I sat working and working in a desperate manner, and I talked and talked, morning, noon, and night.

(612, 686)

The rhythms of this passage suggest that Esther’s function as a “pattern” is for her far less congenial than it is compulsive, debilitating, and “desperate.” Although Edmund Wilson contrasts Esther, whom he calls the “sweet and submissive illegitimate daughter” with Miss Wade, the “embittered and perverse illegitimate daughter” (53), Esther shares with Miss Wade a peculiarly female rage. Her dutiful housewifery, symptomatic of the pain she feels in her own mutilated face, maps out a radically different pattern: Out of victimization emerges the potential for rage.

From the extensive ranks of Dickens’ violent women, then, I have chosen to discuss three particularly resonant female characters in the Dickens ouevre: Rosa Dartle, Miss Wade, and Madame Defarge. They are intriguing, in part, because relatively little has been written about them.¹ In The Triumph of the Novel, for example, Albert Guerard discounts the significance of Miss Wade for “she occupies relatively few pages” (41). And Nina Auerbach’s treatment of David Copperfield in Woman and the Demon, despite its promising title, focuses on the angelic Agnes, locating the demonic as the exclusive property of the utterly masculine Steerforth. But these characters further intrigue because they defy standard categorizing of Dickens’ women into groups such as “heroines,” “old maids,” “shrews,” “adventuresses,” and “new women.”² I have joined Rosa, Miss Wade, and Madame Defarge in a sisterhood because they share two qualities: rage and beauty. As enraged yet beautiful women, Rosa, Miss Wade, and Madame Defarge are doubly passionate and thus doubly threatening to Dickens, his narrators, and his novels. Their rage cannot be dismissed as geriatric like that of Mr. F’s aunt in Little Dorrit and Mrs. Sparsit in Hard Times nor defused through caricature like that of Mrs. Joe in Great Expectations or Miss Nipper in Dombey and Son nor contained as lower-class like that of Hortense or Molly in Great Expectations. Instead, time and again, their characters are centers of attraction—and distraction—for Dickens’ imagination;³ and, thus, they risk becoming the unruly presence in the text, the fissure in the narrative that escapes narratorial control.

This study has been inspired by something I have long known: Rosa has an unforgettable face. When I last taught David Copperfield, Rosa monopolized the class’s final discussions, for students felt duly haunted by a suspicion that Dickens, although the master of wrap-up endings, had far from mastered her. In similar fashion, Michael Slater writes of Miss Wade: she is a “vital creation, who stays in the reader’s mind long after the minor role she plays in the novel’s intricate plot has been forgotten” (269). Time and again, readers seem to sense what too many scholars have often neglected: the narrative gaze’s relentless pursuit of these enraged beauties and the questions that pursuit raises—questions of gender, body, and voice or narrative. Striking as both physical and textual presences in their novels, Rosa, Miss Wade, and Madame Defarge represent what Peter Brooks in Body Work calls the “semi-oticization of body” and “somatization of story” central to nineteenth-century realism (xii). In these characters the body, the word, as well as the psyche intersect; here Dickens anticipates Freud’s attempts to read the psychic as it is inscribed upon the body. Somatic voices, marked and signifying bodies—such inscriptions expose not only the buried lives of imagined women but also the psychic traces of a male authorial imagination. As we read, we realize that we do not forget these characters because Dickens cannot. The undocile sisters of Freud’s Dora, Rosa, Miss Wade, and Madame Defarge challenge the mid-Victorian ideal of female passionlessness and look forward instead to fin de siecle representations of women, to the late-Victorian fascination with female monsters and monstrous femininity, and to Freud’s explorations into hysteria and into the connections between repression and expression. As Peter Gay argues in his recent revisionist portrait of the nineteenth century, The Cultivation of Hatred, rage and aggression for the Victorians wore a familiar and attractive face.⁴

While few readers will deny these characters their rage, some indeed overlook their beauty. For example, Slater contrasts the “beautiful and spirited” Estella and Bella with Madame Defarge whom he groups with Miss Havisham as the “two grim older women” (277); however, Defarge is the same age as Rosa, thirty years old, and only slightly older than Miss Wade, who is twenty-six. To underscore their attractiveness Dickens introduces these characters in voyeuristic moments. In fact, rarely do we encounter Rosa, Miss Wade, and Madame Defarge without a voyeur present: Equipped with the feminine quality Laura Mulvey calls “to-be-looked-at-ness” (19), they function to be watched, and their scenes are intensely visual. For David, Rosa’s mesmeric charm conjures up a sexual fantasy—’The air of wicked grace: of triumph, in which, strange to say, there was yet something feminine and alluring… worthy of a cruel Princess in a Legend” (563). And in presenting Madame Defarge, Dickens repeatedly foregrounds her body, detailing her clothes and what lies underneath: the knife in her girdle, the heart under her “rough robe,” the loaded pistol “lying hidden in her bosom,” and the sharpened dagger “lying hidden at her waist.” Lingering over her robe, the narrator observes, “Carelessly worn, it was a becoming robe enough, in a certain weird way, and her dark hair looked rich under her coarse red cap” (391). Dickens’ striking choice of the word “weird” here is much like Freud’s unheimlich as indicative of something alluring yet frightening, familiar yet strange and indefinable.⁵ Here the eroticism of the strange upholds Barthes’s sense of narrative as striptease, especially in the succeeding lines when the narrator imaginatively unwraps Madame Defarge’s clothes and lays bare her Amazonian, primal fleshliness, “bare-foot and bare-legged, on the brown sea-sand” (391). Such description gives the lie to Slater’s insistence on the “virtual absence in Dickens’ fiction of any descriptions of female beauty below neck-level” (359).

Rosa and Miss Wade enter their respective texts in the act of mesmerizing Dickens’ narrators. Here the sheer abundance of detail indicates the narrators’ fascination; the dilatory description suggests the narrators’ erotic surge:

There was a second lady in the dining-room, of a slight short figure, dark, and not agreeable to look at, but with some appearance of good looks too, who attracted my attention: perhaps because I had not expected to see her; perhaps because I found myself sitting opposite to her; perhaps because of something really remarkable in her She was a little dilapidated—like a house—with having been so long to let; yet had, as I have said, an appearance of good looks.

(251)

The shadow in which she sat, falling like a gloomy veil over her forehead, accorded very well with the character of her beauty. One can hardly see the face, so still and scornful, set off by the arched dark eyebrows, and the folds of dark hair, without wondering what its expression would be if a change came over it. That it could soften or relent, appeared next to impossible. That it could deepen into anger or any extreme of defiance, and that it must change in that direction when it changed at all, would have been its peculiar impression upon most observers…. Although not an open face, there was no pretence in it. I am self-contained and self-reliant… this it said plainly. It said so in the proud eyes, in the lifted nostril, in the handsome, but compressed and even cruel mouth.

(23)

Both introductions present the image of sexualized femininity, its seizure by the “phallic gaze,”⁶ and the heightened pleasure afforded the gazer when beauty is linked with pain. Throughout Little Dorrit, the narrative focus seems unable to relinquish the erotics of pain as it gazes upon Miss Wade, who, as the self-tormentor, is a body in pain explicitly and, later, doubly so through Tattycoram’s mirroring of her: “It was wonderful to see the fury of the contest in the girl, and the bodily struggle she made as if she were rent by the Demons of old” (25). In David Copperfield, Rosa Dartle’s scar keeps the observer ever aware of the presence of pain; from it, David “could not dissociate the idea of pain” (367). In short, David cannot stop talking about Rosa’s disfigurement:

[A]nd [she] had a scar upon her lip. It was an old scar—I should rather call it, seam, for it was not discolored, and had healed years ago—which had once cut through her mouth, downward towards the chin, but was now barely visible across the table, except above and on her upper lip, the shape of which it had altered.

(251)

In her passion, a passion “killing her by inches” (673), in what David calls “an eagerness that seemed enough to consume her like a fire” (367), a rage that “might tear her within” (606), Rosa’s scar becomes enlarged and swollen: “I saw her face grow sharper and paler, and the marks of the old wound lengthen out until it cut through the disfigured lip, and deep into the nether lip, and slanted down the face” (366). Rosa’s scar is a grotesque erogenous zone that is simultaneously the site of her pain. And, although David finds the wound horrifying—’ ‘There was something positively awful to me in this”-(367)—the scar fascinates him—“I could not help glancing at the scar with a painful interest when we went in to tea” (253). As an image for the female genitalia, for a wounded sexuality or for a sexuality that is little else than pain, Rosa’s scar attracts and repels male fascination. For David, Rosa seems “to pervade the whole house”; he is expectant of her approaching, crushing anatomy—“I heard her dress rustle … I saw her face pass…. she closed her thin hand on my arm like a spring, to keep me back” (366).

Such spectacular, specular bodies in pain lead to the gazer’s eventual stupefaction.⁷ This surprising turn is apparent from the start when, in introducing Rosa, David betrays his own nervousness about the indefinability yet certainty of her appeal. Now the dilatory expression of Rosa’s introduction seems more like stammering when David confesses that the sight of her is both agreeable and disagreeable; she is “perhaps” this, “perhaps” that, “perhaps,” most truthfully, “remarkable.” So too is Mr. Meagles captivated yet confused by Miss Wade. We are told “Mr. Meagles stared at her under a sort of fascination” (319), surveying this “handsome young Englishwoman” with a “puzzled look” and confessing “that you were a mystery to all of us…. I don’t know what you are” (323)—a sentiment Clennam later echoes with “I know nothing of her” (523). The inscrutable and erotic most clearly merge in the details of Miss Wade’s introduction: the shadow, the dark tresses, and especially Dickens’ synecdochic use of the veil. When Dickens uses this motif again to describe Miss Wade’s “composure itself (as a veil will suggest the form it covers) [intimating] the unquenchable passion of her own nature” (319), the narrative again turns striptease, energized by the erotics of concealment. Yet we have also confronted the incomprehensible femininity that threatens to disable the male gaze.

Rosa, Miss Wade, and Madame Defarge present an instability in the text because they are objects of the gaze that aspire to be themselves gazing subjects. Such a battle over the gaze ensues when, for example, David spends the night at Highgate only to find Rosa’s likeness “looking eagerly at [him] from above the chimney-piece” in his room (255). Here her presence forces him to continue to look and submit to being looked at himself. Indeed, he is compelled to correct the painter’s omission and to see the face as he must see it in life, with scar intact. Even in the darkness afforded by night and sleep, he knows that her gaze remains vigilant, chasing him in his dreams. As the novel progresses, David’s chronic watching comes to resemble something more like hypnosis, and we wonder who, after all, is watching whom:

But what I particularly observed, before I had been half-an-hour in the house, was the close and attentive watch Miss Dartle kept upon me…. So surely as I looked towards her, did I see that eager visage, with its gaunt black eyes and searching brow, intent on mine…. In this lynx-like scrutiny she was so far from faltering when she saw I observed it, that… I shrunk before her strange...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Series Preface
• Introduction
• PART I IDEALS AND TRANSGRESSIONS
• PART II INTERSECTIONALITIES
• PAR III MIND, BODY, LANGUAGE, VOICE
• PART IV QUEER DICKENS
• PART V GENDER AND THE LAW
• Name Index