Charles Dickens and the Image of Women. David K. Holbrook
underlined, symbolically, at the unconscious level. Behind this is the question of the survival of being.
Of course, there are wide implications about the moral issues here that cannot be separated from religious belief. If such a child has an “Angel,” and the angel can be aware of how adults behave, aware of the moral significance of their acts, then we live in a totally different world from our present (secular) world of general disbelief or unbelief, in which it is impossible to believe in angels. For in a world in which a baby’s angel can be aware of pity and compassion, there are eternal verities and universal considerations in our every act; it is still a world in which “Thou God seest me.” An irresponsible sexual relationship would then be seen as one that was likely to create babies (with angels) who have a birthright that may be blighted for life (like Esther’s). Sexual passion becomes then a matter of the deepest spiritual concern, for what it may create may go on existing even in heaven and may be able to judge earthly creatures. However, as we know, this kind of religious morality applied to the middle classes: there was less concern for the babies farmed out by prostitutes and the demimondaines.
Later, we shall have to go in more detail into the attitudes in this novel toward illegitimacy. There seems to have been a considerable change in attitudes to illegitimacy during the first half of the nineteenth century. In Jane Austen there is often some discussion of “natural” children; but there is no horrified and prudish dismay about the matter: take, for instance, her presentation of Harriet Smith in Emma. It is interesting to ponder the implications of her remark when Harriet’s (merchant) parentage is revealed: “The stain of illegitimacy, unbleached by nobility or wealth, would have been a stain indeed.” But there is no sense of sin and horror about the illegitimacy itself. No one would talk to Harriet Smith as her godmother talks (in chapter 3) to Esther. Dickens seems to need to accede to his audience’s opprobrium, for not only do the stepmothers inflict guilt on the illegitimate infants they raise (like Miss Barbary and Miss Clennam); but the women themselves feel they are beyond forgiveness.
One recurring theme is that of the baby that is born of some illicit passion and is then handed over to a near relation, who raises the children in the severest possible manner, as if to punish the infant for the sin of its parents. This has been the fate of Arthur Clennam in Little Dorrit, as well as of Esther. It is obvious that Dickens does not approve of such vengeful infliction of punishment of the sins of the mothers on the children (Agnes, Oliver Twist’s mother, is pardoned as “weak and erring”), but it seems that his audience enjoyed the frisson of guilt all the same, and he never attempts assertively to exonerate those who fall into the wickedness of illicit passion—or, at least, they can never expect to be received in the company of decent people. The men, like Edward Leeford, do come in for some blame, or are degenerating, like Captain Hawdon.
Let us for a moment, however, turn away from the questions of social moeurs and morals over illegitimacy in order to look further at the unconscious themes of birthright associated with it. The handkerchief that Esther uses to cover the dead baby’s face reappears in the hands of Lady Dedlock in the scene in which she declares herself Esther’s mother (book 2, chapter 5), and so for the first time they look at one another.
The mother’s face is a powerful archetypal symbol, and the reasons for this are illuminated by Winnicott’s notion of “creative reflection”: the baby finds itself in the mother’s regard. The link between the dead baby and Esther is not only that Esther was once put aside as dead when she was a baby but also that her deprivation of the mother threatens her with psychic death. This is a common Dickensian theme: Estella in Great Expectations is a woman who suffers from deadness of the emotions, as does Louisa Gradgrind to some extent, while Florence Dombey is threatened with a similar blight by her father’s rejection, as she feels her good image of him in her heart die. Dickens is aware of the need for creative reflection and for that imaginative sympathy and play that enable the child to come into its psychic birthright. The handkerchief is a symbolic veil between self and world, akin to the curtain of the bassinette in Berthe Morisot’s lovely painting La Berceuse.
So the handkerchief that has covered the dead baby’s face links the dead baby with the dread of deadness in a psyche that has never sufficiently experienced creative reflection from the mother. When Lady Dedlock comes face to face with the Esther she now knows to be her own child, Esther not only perceives her as completely unbending from her usual “haughty self-restraint” but is also “rendered motionless”
by a something in her face that I had pined for and dreamed of when I was a little child; something I had never seen in any face; something I had never seen in hers before. (508)
Later she says,
I looked at her; but I could not see her, I could not hear her, I could not draw my breath (509)
—an experience of the kind a child sometimes has when the mother returns after an absence during which the child has tried to hold her image together in its memory, and failed (see Winnicott, 1958, 309 and elsewhere).
We may remember that earlier Dickens has given Esther an uncanny power to respond to Lady Dedlock’s glances:
Shall I ever forget the rapid beating of my heart, occasioned by the look I met, as I stood up! Shall I ever forget the manner in which those handsome proud eyes seemed to spring out of languor, and to hold mine! ...
And, very strangely, there was something quickened within me, associated with the lonely days at my godmother’s; yes, away even to the days when I had stood on tiptoe to dress myself at my little glass, after dressing my doll. And this, although I had never seen this Lady’s face before in all my life—I was quite sure of it—absolutely certain. (249-50)
Dickens presumably felt this was the operation of “natural love.” The reference to the mirror here is significant, for what Esther is shown to be yearning for is what Winnicott called “the mother in her mirror role”—that is, as the responding face in which one finds oneself reflected.
Esther also at this moment hears the mother’s voice:
Then, very strangely, I seemed to hear them, not in the reader’s voice, but in the well-remembered voice of my godmother.2 This made me think, did Lady Dedlock’s face accidentally resemble my godmother’s? It might be that it did, a little; but, the expression was so different, and the stern decision which had worn into my godmother’s face, like weather into rocks, was so completely wanting in the face before me, that it could not be that resemblance which had struck me. (250)
She recalls her child self:
And yet I—I, little Esther Summerson, the child who lived a life apart, and on whose birthday there was no rejoicing—seemed to arise before my own eyes, evoked out of the past by some power in this fashionable lady, whom ... I perfectly well knew I had never seen until that hour. (250)
What Esther is yearning for is that unique recognition of the existential being that only the mother can give, as she reflects and draws out the potentialities of the self. The need is beautifully expressed by George MacDonald in his fantasy At the Back of the Worth Wind: Diamond tells the North Wind (a kind of fantasy mother) that he does not like the nursery rhyme Little Bopeep:
Because it seems to say one’s as good as another, or two new ones are better than one that’s lost. I've been thinking about it a good deal, and it seems to me that although any one sixpence is as good as any other sixpence, not twenty lambs would do instead of one sheep whose face you knew. Somehow, when once you've looked into anybody’s eyes, right deep down into them, I mean, nobody will do for that one any more. Nobody, ever so beautiful or so good, will make up for that one going out of sight. (263-64, Nonesuch Edition)3
If we take Dicken’s novel at the phenomenological level, then we may see that it is, of course, a terrible thing to deny this reflecting “natural love” to any child. However, Esther seems to have a substantial sense of identity and a rich emotional life and sympathy (compared, say, with Estella