Charles Dickens and the Image of Women. David K. Holbrook
Polly Toodles can provide it better than a Miss Murdstone or an Edith (though Edith’s powers are brought out by Florence—only to lead to intense envy and hatred in Dombey himself). What Polly provides, as a strong working-class wet-nurse, is the breast, while often, one senses, the sickly or oppressed mothers have failed to give the experience of the breast to their infants. So, crucial to an understanding of Dickens’s genius as a writer is an examination of his attitudes to woman. To penetrate beyond normal considerations of what this means, we have to try to bring up insights from psychoanalytical theories about the origins of many of our adult problems in the infant experiences of hunger, fear, hate, and the reparative impulse—directed at all we mean by “the breast,” the focus of the mother’s care and her capacity to reflect us and bring out from us our sense of our own being, and our grasp of reality.
It is obvious from recent scholarship that many critics share my puzzlement about Dickens and woman. Michael Slater, in Dickens and Women, writes in a fascinating way of how Dickens used the women in his life as the basis of his characters—his mother, for instance, for Mrs. Nickleby and Mrs. Micawber; his sister Fanny for Fanny Dorrit; Lucy Stroughill in some of his visions of child-sexless-love; Maria Beadnell as Dora and Flora Finch-ing; Mary as Rose Maylie and Agnes, and so on. And this in turn leads him to make some very pertinent comments on the general problem of Dickens’s treatment of women.
He reaches the conclusion that Dickens’s “nervousness about any manifestation of aggressive female passion (as opposed to passive female devotion) may be linked to his nervousness about his own strong sexual responsiveness” (356). He “could not include the turbulence and sensuous delights of sexuality” in the domestic setting, along with childhood and angels. His women tend to be the Fairy or Angel, the Good Sister, or the kitten: the fully adult woman is missing.
Slater shows by his quotations that the most sympathetically portrayed couples tend to be brother and sister—Nicolas Nickleby and Kate, and especially Tom Pinch and Ruth—while his married couples seem more like fathers and daughters rather than husbands and wives. The attraction of the brother and sister union seems to be that it represents a “sexless marriage” (34), while there are aspects of boy and girl relationships that seem to Dickens especially enchanting, as when David Copperfield speaks of loving little Emily “with greater purity and more disinterestedness, than can enter into the best love of a later time of life.”
On the one hand, his experience of his real wife, Catherine, seems to have had little influence on his art. Slater says,
the woman he married and lived with for twenty-two years, fathering a large family by her, appears to have had less impact on his deepest imagination and on his art than any of the other women who hold an important place in his emotional history. (102)
Among these other women were Lucy Stroughill, who was the object of an innocent romance of his happy childhood; Fanny, his sister, whose career at the Royal College of Music was encouraged while he was kept on at the blacking factory; Maria Beadnell, who treated him with cold-hearted contempt and was at the same time flirtatious and flippant. Then there were more significant figures who lived in his household: Mary Hogarth, for whom he grieved as a sister and with whom he fantasized a heavenly reunion, yearning that she might turn out to be of his own blood—a household saint in Dickens’s mind, whose relationship to the saintly Agnes Wickfield is clear; and Georgina, another sister of his wife, who embodied that capacity that Dickens regarded as so important for woman—the capacity for a good sisterly relationship. And then there was his mistress, Ellen Ternan, his fascination for whom made Dickens hate his wife and accuse her of many failings, including being a bad mother and housekeeper.
It wouldn’t do, I think, to accuse Dickens of being so afraid of women that he hated women, though he does portray some deadly women in his novels (Magwitch’s wife, Mrs. Gamp, Mrs. Nickleby, Mrs. Clennam, Mrs. Steerforth and Rosa Dartle, Mrs. MacStinger, Mrs. Corney [Mrs. Bumble]). But we must surely take note of Kate, his daughter (Mrs. Perrugini), who declared that “my father did not understand women,” “he was not a good man,” and “my father was a wicked man—a very wicked man” (Storey, 219). He was known to swear at his wife, and there are occasional glimpses of his strange behavior at home: for instance, on the eve of Kate’s wedding he was found sobbing into her wedding dress (Slater, 185). His final treatment of his wife seems determinedly governed by hatred and misrepresentation. He enjoyed putting women in bodily fear, as Slater reports, quoting an occasion on which Dickens recklessly held a woman in the rising tide, in a melodramatic posture, until her new silk dress was ruined (Mrs. Christian, The English Woman s Domestic Magazine 10 [1871]: 339, quoted by Slater, 115) and describing how he ruined two of her bonnets by pushing her under waterfalls. His inclination to bully women is hinted at, as when he referred to himself and Catherine as “Bully and Meek,” speaks of exerting “despotic conjugal influence” on her, and writes of how he would keep a strict watch over her housekeeping, “concerning which we hold solemn weekly councils when I consider it my bounden duty to break a chair or two, as a frugal demonstration” (Slater, 111). He spoke of his wife’s “bashful sensuality,” but that the marriage was energetically sexual is plain from the record of ten children and two miscarriages in sixteen years.
But there is also the indicative episode of Dickens’s obsession with Mrs. de la Rue, on whom he exercized mesmerism, in which the fact that (as Slater declares) “the power-relationship was ... sexual” was made plain by a story Dickens wrote at the time, in which a woman “vanishes into infamous oblivion with the man whose face threatening her had appeared in a dream” (Slater, 124).
This, then, was the reality of Dickens’s life with his wife and other women, in which it is clear that he could not bring together the ideal and the libidinal, and in which he continued to yearn for an impossible ideal. There was something he felt he had never had: “something beyond that place and time.” He wrote to Forster, “Why is it, that as with poor David, a sense comes always crushing on me now, when I am in low spirits, as of the one happiness I have missed in life, and one friend and companion I have never made” (679). Like Esther Summerson, Dickens obviously felt “as if something for which there was no name, no distinct idea, were definitely lost to me,” as he goes on. To Esther, he restores this “something” in the strange piece of wish-fulfillment by which she is given to Alan Woodcourt by a kind of magic switch, on Mr. Jarndyce’s part, in a ploy, of course, that deprives Esther of any authentic choice in the matter—and as if Dickens could not endorse a woman’s free choice in sexual love.
To Dickens fully adult sexual love was, at the unconscious level, terribly dangerous. Michael Slater returns again and again to this problem. It was as if Dickens felt that it was sex that made women cold-hearted: Slater points out that, writing about aunts (like Betsy Trotwood), Dickens marveled that “the fire of love should not have been quenched in their lonely hearts,” but celibacy was likely to make that fire “burn brighter,” and even to preserve women from downright cold-heartedness: “women are never naturally vain, heartless, and unloving. They are made so” (176). A woman is often made so by marriage. In the marriages of Charity Pecksniff and Jonas Chuzzlewit, and of Mr. and Mrs. Bumble, he shows the rapid change of courtship into violent brutality and the domination of one partner by the other.
Speaking of the fate of the women in Dickens’s novels who are punished by being “endowed with passion” (Edith Dombey, Lady Dedlock, and Louisa Gradgrind), Michael Slater repeatedly notes Edith Dombey, Lady Dedlock, Louisa Gradgrind, and Miss Havisham as women who are “endowed with passion.” But Edith Dombey’s flight with Carter is only a piece of simulated abandonment to passion—she repudiates the man who casts himself as her seducer, and reveals that she only went away with him to humiliate Dombey. Miss Havisham has gone mad because her intended fails to turn up at the wedding—she is passion frustrated and unawakened, and turned to hate. Lady Dedlock has of course the secret of her passionate affairs in youth, but little remains of her passionate nature: she has locked it up in her heart. Louisa simply does not know how to deal with a lover. Surely these women are, rather, threatened by passion? Slater says, “we can register just how disturbed he was by this quality in the opposite sex: he seems compelled to show it as finally finished or at least neutralized” (265). Slater concludes that he is reflecting a world that “dealt harshly with women who could not conform to socially