Charles Dickens and the Image of Women. David K. Holbrook
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