Charles Dickens and the Image of Women. David K. Holbrook
in women.
One interesting observation emerges from Michael Slater’s book: Dickens’s women tend to be described in terms of their faces (and hair) and sometimes their (“neat”) feet: but their figures and bosoms are neglected. There is a tendency for the more admired women to be somewhat ethereal—bodiless, angelic figures. Agnes is like a figure in a church window; Esther Summerson has a mysterious period in which she goes temporarily blind, and is preoccupied with having her face disfigured (though it later becomes as mysteriously beautiful again). She seems to feel at times as if her own beauty, indeed her own feminine and lovable self, has been “given” to Ada, and (as Alex Zwerdling points out) there is a revealing slip at one point when, speaking to Charley about not letting Ada into her sick chamber when she has the smallpox, she says, “Charley, if you let her in but once ... I shall die.” Note she does not say “she will die” but “I will die”—so closely does she identify with Ada, and so closely does Dickens identify with her. The “double” theme is a common one in Dickens (cf. the Harmon story, the Cheeryble brothers), while Dickens himself seemed to need to search for a firm identity. So we may, I believe, see the woman deprived of her birthright as an alter ego of Dickens, who searches continually for a sense of self-being capable of loving and being loved, and in this way remaining in touch with childhood, as a deprived child. His obsession with his mother’s “warmth” to return him to the blacking factory to contribute to the family’s earnings when he yearned for learning and the opportunity to realize his potential must surely hide an earlier and deeper experience of deprivation at his mothers breast.
It is such a deprivation, I believe, that explains Dickens’s urgent need to fantasize, on the one hand, and his dread of sensual woman, on the other: a dread that makes him find full adult female sexuality associated with death. For Nancy (he wrote somewhere, “the woman is a prostitute”) is both his most fully realized sensual woman and also one who has to be killed in a most brutal way, for daring to show pity for Oliver and loyalty to her man. Her death is a fantasy of the brutal primal scene, and Dickens’s continual yearning for childish purity in his women is a way of avoiding the murderous dangers of aroused female sexuality.
Here I was delighted to find confirmation of my suspicions in an appendix to Steven Marcus’s book, Dickens: From Pickwick to Dombey, titled “Who Is Fagin?” Marcus pieces together various aspects of Dickens’s childhood experience and picks out, in relation to this, a number of very betraying phrases and paragraphs.
One of the phrases is in a recollection of Dickens, in which he sees himself sitting on his bed, “reading as if for life.” This points to the intense need in Dickens for literary fantasy, and to devise his own fantasies, and this may be linked with the whole question of the humiliation and neglect Dickens felt as a child, when the father was arrested for debt, the mother followed him into the Marshalsea, and Dickens—who remained outside (a “small Cain,” he called himself)—had no home to go to. He seemed to feel most his father’s indifference at the time to his yearning for education: his father “had utterly lost at this time the idea of educating me at all.”
One day Dickens, who was wrapping blacking bottles at the window, where the workers were watched from time to time, saw his father watching him, and “wondered how he could bear it.” We have seen the degree to which Dickens resented his mother’s “warmth” for keeping him at the humiliating work. Now he felt his father’s freedom was a fraud and an outrage. But Steven Marcus believes that this intense memory of being seen in an exposed situation, and of seeing something menacing, is a screen memory of earlier traumatic experiences. And, as he points out, there are many scenes of the kind throughout Dickens’s novels.
These are primal scene fantasies, in which, he believes,
the child [is] asleep, or just waking, or forging sleep while observing sexual intercourse between his parents, and, frightened by what he sees or imagines, is either then noticed by the parents or has a fantasy of what could occur if he were noticed. (Marcus, 373)
In the mind of a very small child, says Marcus, “when parents seem like gods, giants and demons,” “sexual intercourse is first apprehended as a form of violence, specifically of murder, inflicted by the male upon the female” (375). In this we have a clue to Dickens’s fascination with murder (and, one might add, his preoccupation with public hangings for murder, which he felt ought to be private: he was obsessed with the corruption he felt to be inherent in thousands of eyes' being turned on this dreadful activity, and he was especially vivid in his description of a murderous couple being hanged). But here, too, we may find clues to Dickens’s fear of the fully adult sexual woman, and his fear of sexuality altogether, the converse of which is a yearning for “pure” infancy, and for an innocence, in woman, in love, and in his protagonists, that is prelapsarian: that is, one might say, for a state before the dreadful experience of witnessing the primal scene. This also helps us understand why (for example) the relationship between Eugene Wrayburn and Lizzie Hexam has to go through the threat and experience of murder before it can be accepted: it has to be shown (to the self) that one may survive murder in order to endure adult sexuality.
To return to Steven Marcus: he points out the intensity of the writing about eyes, in the way Nancy’s dead eyes haunt Bill Sikes, and in the way Fagin is exposed to the eyes of the multitude:
Those widely staring eyes, so lustreless and so glassy, that he had better borne to see them than think upon them, appeared in the midst of darkness; light in themselves, but giving light to nothing. There were but two, but they were everywhere. If he shut out the sight, there came the room with every well-known object ... each in its accustomed place. The body was in its place, and its eyes were as he saw them when he stole away. (Oliver Twist, 368; Marcus, 375)
At the end, Sikes is surrounded by “tiers and tiers of faces in every window,” by people fighting each other “only for an instant to see the wretch.” At last he calls out “the eyes again,” loses his balance, and is hanged by the rope he is carrying.
At the end, with Fagin, the court is “paved, from floor to roof, with human faces: he seemed to stand surrounded by a firmament, all bright with gleaming eyes.” As Marcus points out, in the end, “Sikes and Fagin, both of them figures who threaten to ruin, castrate and destroy Oliver, are now in Oliver’s place,” and the reader is enlisted in their terror. Yet it was the most horrifying scene, Sikes’s murder of Nancy, that Dickens read in public until it killed him. Yet the essence of the murder is that Nancy dies because she stays loyal to Sikes and is seeking to save Oliver: that is, because of her maternal instincts.
But Marcus also points to the strange moments in Oliver Twist in which Dickens records what Marcus calls a “hypnagogic phenomenon.” They do not emerge out of the logic of the story, and contain elements that are never cleared up, as if Dickens felt compelled to write about a mysterious experience he had had. The first is when Oliver is dozing in Fagin’s den:
There is a drowsy state, between sleeping and waking, when you dream more in five minutes with your eyes half open ... (Oliver Twist, 58; Marcus, 371)
Fagin calls the boy by name, and he does not answer. He takes jewels out of a small box, including a trinket that seems to have “some very minute inscription on it” that he pores over “long and earnestly.” Suddenly, a flash of recognition passes between them:
for the briefest space of time that can possibly be conceived—it was enough to show the old man that he had been observed. He closed the lid of the box with a loud crash; and laying his hand on a bread knife which was on the table, started furiously up. (Oliver Twist, 59; Marcus, 371)
The scene ends inconsequentially, but Marcus links it with his diagnosis of the “primal scene” fantasy, Fagin’s attention to the trinket being presumably related to a fantasy of the father being engaged in attention to a sexual goal whose meaning remains incomprehensible to an infant, though when observed turns to furious rage against him.
The second hypnagogic episode is of course the mysterious appearance of Fagin and Monks to the sleeping Oliver in the May lies' house. Oliver is reading.
There is a kind of sleep that steals upon us sometimes,