Charles Dickens and the Image of Women. David K. Holbrook
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Charles Dickens and the Image of Woman
Also by David Holbrook
POETRY
Imaginings Against the Cruel Frost Object Relations Old World, New World Chance of a Lifetime Selected Poems
ON EDUCATION
English for Maturity English for the Rejected The Secret Places The Exploring Word Children’s Writing English in Australia Now Education, Hihilism, and Survival English for Meaning Education and Philosophical Anthropology
NOVELS
Flesh Wounds A Play of Passion Nothing Larger Than Life Worlds Apart A Little Athens Jennifer The Gold in Father’s Heart Even If They Fail
LITERARY CRITICISM AND PHILOSOPHY
The Quest for Love Human Hope and the Death Instinct Sex and Dehumanisation The Masks of Hate Dylan Thomas: The Code of Hight Gustav Mahler and the Courage to Be Sylvia Plath: Poetry and Existence Lost Bearings in English Poetry Evolution and the Humanities The Hovel and Authenticity Further Studies in Philosophical Anthropology Images of Woman in Literature The Skeleton in the Wardrobe Where D. H. Lawrence Was Wrong about Woman
Charles Dickens and the Image of Woman
David Holbrook
NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS
New York and London
Copyright © 1993 by New York University
All rights reserved
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Holbrook, David.
Charles Dickens and the image of woman / David Holbrook.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references (p.) and index.
ISBN 0-8147-3483-9 (acid-free paper)
1. Dickens, Charles, 18124870—Characters—Women. 2. Women and
literature—Great Britain—History—19th century. I. Title.
PR4592.W6H63 1993 92-33074
823'.8-dc20 CIP
New York University Press Books are printed on acid-free paper,
and their binding materials are chosen for strength and durability.
Manufactured in the United States of America
c 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 2 3 1
To the memory of my mother, who loved Dickens’s novels and named me after David Copperfield, whose story she was reading during her pregnancy.
Gratitude is due to Downing College, the Arts Council of Great Britain, and the Leverhulme Trust for help with the writing of this book.
“ ... But Wooman, lovely Wooman,” said Mr. Turveydrop, with very disagreeable gallantry, “what a sex you are!”
—Bleak House
Contents
1. Bleak House: The Dead Baby and the Psychic Inheritance
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
Charles Dickens and the Image of Woman
Introduction
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