Charles Dickens and the Image of Women. David K. Holbrook
the place of a “good mother,” however punitive.
This problem is not unconnected with that of the punitive attitude to sexual passion. Esther, we remember, has been told,
“Your mother, Esther, is your disgrace, and you were hers Unfortunate girl, orphaned and degraded from the first of these evil anniversaries, pray daily that the sins of others be not visited upon your head, according to what is written. Forget your mother, and leave all other people to forget her who will do her unhappy child that greatest kindness
Submission, self-denial, diligent work, are the preparations for a life begun with such a shadow on it. You are different from other children, Esther, because you were not born, like them, in common sinfulness and wrath. You are set apart.” (17)
There are some important points to note here. Dickens intended implicitly to criticize this punitive view; yet odd emphases creep into his way of putting it. The last sentence is revealing: marriage, ordinary wedlock, is, it seems, “common sinfulness and wrath,” since that is how other legal children are conceived! Esther’s dreadful fault would then seem to be that she was born of joyful sexual passion! And, by implication, all of us are born from sinful passion, which is like wrath. “Wrath” presumably refers to the doom cast on Eve when she was cast out from Eden, but its menacing implication also distantly evokes the primal scene—that is, parental sex conceived of as voracious and dangerous, which is how the child conceives of it, from an infantile logic that supposes sex is a kind of eating and, in fantasy, suspects that it is threatening.
Now to return to the symbolism of mother and baby. At the end of Bleak House Lady Dedlock changes clothes with Jenny, who is the mother of the dead child. Lady Dedlock has taken possession of Esther’s handkerchief, which she used to cover the face of this dead baby. When Captain Woodcourt, Mr. Bucket, and Esther eventually find the fugitive Lady Dedlock, she looks like Jenny, because she is dressed in Jenny’s clothes (but Jenny, of course, has gone up north in Lady Dedlock’s clothes, to put everyone off the scent).
I saw before me, lying on the step, the mother of the dead child ... she lay there, who had so lately spoken of my mother. She lay there, a distressed, unsheltered, senseless creature. (811)
This is a very moving moment. But what it brings home to us is the fact that, at the level of unconscious themes, a dead baby is at the heart of the novel Bleak House: that is, the baby Esther, who should have had her birthright but who was presumed dead by Lady Dedlock and who, without a mother’s care, would be psychically dead. Lady Dedlock’s life is dead, because of the love that is locked in her secret heart. Esther is not psychically dead, because she has been brought up (albeit punitively) by her aunt: that care at least has been a form of love. Yet of course, right to the end, there is a powerful need for love in Esther; and (we may say) she is a projection of Dickens’s own need for love. But there is also a sense in which she needs (and experiences) massive fathering love from her guardian, in order to bring her fully to life, in the realm of being.
So this novel, like so many of Dickens’s novels, is about the need to be loved, about being orphaned or deprived of love: David Copperfield, Pip, Oliver Twist, Esther, Clennam, Paul Dombey, Louisa Gradgrind—all these are brought up in some condition of deprivation, seeking to be fulfilled in the context of love (and often learning through love how to find and how to realize the good and integrity within themselves). This is, we may say, Dickens’s “problem,” which he turns to good artistic purpose.
There are those who can give love and those who cannot. The worst thing is to deny the capacity for love in oneself: this is Mr. Dombey’s sin, Miss Havisham’s error, Estella’s predicament, Mr. Murdstone’s offense, and the social and philosophical failure of Bounderby and Gradgrind. Little Dorrit pours out love to her father, ruined by the system that incarcerates him in the Marshalsea as a victim of the system. Dickens saw his society as one that generated, encouraged, and falsified those who could not give love as it should be given or who denied love or offended against it, and in this he saw a failure to follow Christ’s example and principles. He found here, as Leavis has made plain, a fundamental moral failure, for our moral capacities, as he tries to show in the fable Hard Times, depend upon love and upon the experience of those powers that are exercised for love and for nothing else, like play, imagination, and the provision for the “childhood of the mind.” In these themes of Dickens there is a powerful and fine moral message: an injunction to the reader to pay attention to the needs of being—to love and imagination and sympathy—rather than to power or possessions.
Lady Dedlock has suffered from the blight of the emotions consequent upon the denial of love:
In truth she is not a hard lady naturally; and the time has been when the sight of the venerable figure suing to her with such strong earnestness would have moved her to great compassion. But so long accustomed to suppress emotion, and keep down reality; so long schooled for her own purposes, in that destructive school which shuts up the natural feelings of the heart, like flies in amber, and spreads one uniform and dreary gloss over the good and the bad, the feeling and the unfeeling, the sensible and the senseless; she had subdued even her wonder until now. (755)
It is an important theme of Dickens's, then, that one should not allow one’s feelings to become petrified, since this sphere of the richness of being is the source of one’s moral capacities; by inference a society that drew on this richness would be a better one. So, he becomes a true champion of being and makes a radical criticism of bourgeois society.
The themes of deprivation of being because of the failure of inheritance is at the heart of many of Dickens’s criticisms of society. This question is dealt with more realistically in another novel about illegitimacy: Ruth, by Mrs. Gaskell. It is no wonder, by the way, that Dickens found Mrs. Gaskell sympathetic: her mother died when she was one year old and her novels are about inheritance, too—not least about the heroine who has to draw upon and develop her deepest resources of being in order to cope with a difficult and often menacing world and to realize her integrity. Mrs. Gaskell is more realistic than Dickens about sickness and death, and more painful; in her work bereavement is a truly terrible if positive experience, and she is not afraid to tackle it often, and openly.
But Dickens is realistic enough about society’s evils. Our inheritance is often blighted by the chance circumstances of life (what Americans call “happenstance”). But sometimes it is blighted by wilfulness or by being corrupted by ambition, pride, lust, cupidity, avarice, hate; in this we find the Jonsonian quality in the Dickens who gave us Mr. Dombey, William Dorrit, Uriah Heep, Fagin, Mr. Merdle, Mr. Murdstone, Mr. Vholes, Mrs. Clennam In Bleak House the great corrupting external influence is the law and its “wiglomeration”: a system that is the servant of property becomes its own justification, and comes to make more and more business for itself until it eats up the great cause in its own costs, thus destroying those who took recourse to it in the first place. The instrument of the individual’s quest for his rights may even rob him of his birthright—his freedom, his hope, and eventually his life, as with Richard. This process is also symbolized by the names of Miss Flyte’s birds, which are imprisoned all through the progress of the Jarndyce suit, and are only freed when it disintegrates into nothing. The “wiglomeration” represents a great falsification of what is important in life: doing and getting, rather than being. The law seduces people into false egoism rather than selfless love.
All this is fine—and it is written, we may note, in the Christian New Testament: “lay up not for yourself treasure upon earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt.” Just as the dead baby’s angel was aware of the service done to it by Ada, so there is a heavenly record of devotion to selfless love and duty, in another realm; and in such giving, Christianity tells us, there is meaning (or “salvation”).
But yet Dickens cannot do without actual earthly riches. This seems often the manic fly in the pure ointment of his preoccupation with love. “Give up all that thou hast and follow me”—this is often his message for a time, but we know it will not be long before Aunt Trotwood recovers her fortune, or the Cheeryble brothers turn up—or John Jarndyce dips into what appears to be a fathomless pocket. Does this matter? Could there be love, devotion, duty, selflessness—without the money? And the magic?
Later,