Charles Dickens and the Image of Women. David K. Holbrook
often culminates in the conclusions, “evil be thou my good” and “good be thou my evil.” To such schizoid individuals, who have been deprived of love, love seems the most dangerous thing in the world, so (by infant logic) it is better to hate. It may be better to give up love and the need for love altogether, and operate according to the rules of hate. These tragic moral reversals often appear in Dickens, as they do in Dostoevsky, and it is these that are perhaps most startling. Oliver finds himself within a world operating on the basis of hate, and the inverted morality of hate impels Monks, while in other novels it drives Bradley Headstone, Steerforth, Dombey, Orlick, Quilp, Uriah Heep, and Squeers, in their various ways. But Dickens’s primary preoccupation is not with the schizoid problem.
The next stage in infant development is the depressive stage, which belongs to the fear of hate. To enter this stage represents progress because it manifests the finding of the other person, and Winnicott calls it “the stage of concern.” The essence of this stage of growth is a recognition of the consequences of one’s own hate on others, and so there is a development of the capacity for guilt. Dicken’s novels are full of guilt—epitomized eminently by Cruikshank’s illustration of Fagin in the condemned cell. Guilt runs through the novels in many forms. Mrs. Clennam is guilty about cheating little Dorrit of her inheritance. Lady Dedlock is guilty about having a premarital affair and a child by her former lover, Captain Hawdon: she is so guilty that in the end she flies away to die: not even heaven can forgive her. Magwitch is a figure of guilt, as is his wife. Guilt haunts the action of Our Mutual Friend, not least because of the mystery of the death of John Harmon, and it haunts the mystery of Edwin Drood. All the characters in David Copperfield are haunted by little Emily’s guilt, as well as that of Steerforth, her seducer. Guilt is clearly an obsession with Dickens.
In Kleinian psychology, guilt is the motive for reparation, and Melanie Klein finds the basis of all our moral capacities in the depressive position, the stage at which, concerned about the effects of our own hate on others, we seek to make reparation, and in symbolic terms to make good the mother and her breast, which in fantasy we may have emptied or destroyed. Reparation, of a symbolic kind, impels many human actions and under¬takings, especially of a cultural kind—a theme Andrew Brink has taken up in literary criticism.* Guilt is the dynamic behind depression, and the response to depression is either a manic response—a false attempt to remedy the sense of harm caused by others—or true reparation, which is a genuine engagement with the suffering caused by concern. There is plenty of both in Dickens, and the difference between manic and true reparation can assist criticism here.
In Dickens we find many episodes that evidently represent reparative activity: there is so much suffering. One of the most obvious themes of manic or false reparation is Magwitch’s attempt to make Pip into a gentle¬man; it is false because it threatens Pip’s own authenticity, since it bears no relation to his own discovery of himself. Pip’s attempt to save Miss Havisham is a symbolic act of reparation, as are his attempts to protect Magwitch against re-arrest. Little Dorrit seeks to restore her father to a state of “good father” (the father whom no one has ever known); her capacity to endure humiliations, even from him, is a long process of re¬parative endurance. Dickens’s dramas of the restoration of affluence are symbolic of reparation, too. There are many developments in which people’s fortunes are restored to them—to Betsy Trotwood, to Little Dorrit, to Clennam, to Oliver, to Esther. As we shall see, one central theme in Dickens is the restoration of the inheritance—as with Esther, Pip, David Copperfield, and Oliver Twist. And we may say that much of Dicken’s work has to do with the restoration to central characters of the psychic inheritance that they should have received, by rights, from the mother, from woman, had she lived or been available.
There are also many episodes in which tremendous reparation is made through the ordeal of suffering, as with Eugene Wrayburn’s being brought back to life, after suffering brain damage, under the loving ministrations of women—in this case Jenny Wren and Lizzie Hexam herself. Esther is nursed through smallpox, while she in turn nurses Charley, and their mutual love is a dynamic of the healing process. Pip goes through a horrible ordeal in the lime kilns and is rescued by Herbert. But he has another, longer ordeal in which, suffering a severe illness, he is nursed by Joe; in the course of this he undergoes a radical moral transformation, by both realizing his love for Joe and experiencing profound guilt over how he has neglected him. Dick Swiveller is nursed through a dreadful illness by the Marchioness. David Copperfield runs away as a child and undergoes appalling privation, to be rescued by Betsy Trotwood, who is herself redeemed in the process, by experiencing love. David Copperfield has to undergo the decline and death of his child-wife Dora, and the gradual discovery of his love for Agnes, who also suffers from her secret love for David.
These vast ordeals of reparation bring changes in the hearts of characters, and they often move us deeply because we watch with bated breath to see whether the reparative effort will be successful. Only if it is successful, we feel, can the protagonist as being survive in any true sense. And often the focus of our concern is the love of a good woman.
Dickens is less convincing when he employs magical means to yield a good outcome because in such episodes we have only manic reparation—as when seemingly infinite riches are available from a John Jarndyce or the Cheeryble Brothers or the Mr. Brownlow who takes up Oliver Twist, or even when the Dorrit fortunes are restored. We certainly find it difficult in the extreme to follow the magical switches around John Rokesmith and Bella Wilfer, all of which seem disastrously to belong to the manic. We do not feel it is real or possible—and, of course, the essence of the manic is that it is a denial of death and harm, and a denial of the exigencies of reality. This magic introduction of good fortune often seems false reparation, though sometimes Dickens can use it to demonstrate that mere riches are no solution to the existential problem—as with Bella Wilfer, who experiences such doubts about herself, or as with little Dorrit in her secret yearning for Arthur Clennam.
But where there is moral suffering (as with Pip’s anguish over Mag-witch) or suffering in sickness or in the presence of death (as so often in Our Mutual Friend), then we do feel satisfaction, for the consequence of the anguish is a deepened awareness of our humanness—and of what is authentic, what is right for us, at the deepest level of being. It is the development of the protagonist through such torment that makes Great Expectations, Our Mutual Friend, Little Dorrit, and David Copperfield such great novels—because they convey the progress of an inward sense of authenticity.
Since the impulse toward reparation has to do not only with the mother and the mother’s breast, phenomenologically speaking, but also with the origins of love and hate, it tends to center around the problem of woman. Dickens pursues themes of reparation around his women in many diverse ways. Betsy Trotwood is rescued from her harsh bigotry and her denial of love on grounds of partiality and prejudice by David’s predicament and his claim on her; she comes to love him, and her own ruin and her dreadful marital legacy involve the reader in a further deepening of his or her sympathy. Her love for Mr. Dick and her care for him despite his being simple is yet another manifestation of the power of love in a woman: “the mother knows” as Winnicott puts it. This useful phrase, despite its oddness, seems a completely convincing one to convey the tacit power woman has to do the right thing intuitively. Mrs. Jellyby, whose charity is so “telescopic,” represents a misconception of love, directed at export only, while her own home is sadly neglected, with much consequent suffering. (She, by the way, inspired a later, more complex and subtle dealing with campaigning women in Henry James’s The Bostonians—Miss Birdseye owing a lot to Mrs. Jellyby.) By comparison, Mrs. Pardiggle’s form of charity seems to be based on hate. Dickens’s comic women are often wicked and cruel but, like Falstaff, they are often found sympathetic because their weaknesses are those we recognize in ourselves, as is the case with Sarah Gamp, who despite her gruesome pragmatism has such life and vitality, from her brightly patched umbrella to her fantasy authority, Mrs. Harris.
At the other extreme are the women whom Dickens portrays as angels: Rose Maylie, Agnes Wickham; he even says of Rose Maylie that “earth seemed not her element, nor its rough creatures her fit companions.” These women are less interesting because of the absence in their lives of the reparative need: they do not have to strive with the usual temptations and torments as Esther,