Charles Dickens and the Image of Women. David K. Holbrook
Twist, 255; Marcus, 372.)
As Marcus says, Dickens, in these passages, addresses the reader in a “personal, essayist, and almost musing voice,” and each episode contains “illogical” or “false” details, in the sense that something mysterious happens that Dickens fails to clear up. The implication is that, in “sticking so close to Oliver” (for which Dickens, at the time of writing, suffered a recurrence of a childhood malady), Dickens is here approaching, willy nilly, those childhood fantasies of the primal scene, as murder, which he associated with the father: he had, says Marcus, “a feeling of identity with his father, even with that father who appeared to him as destroyer and betrayer,” which is why Fagin is so human.
With the fantasy of the primal scene we must link, I believe, those intense fantasies of the infant that are directed at the mother’s breast: and here, of course, where Dickens is concerned, we can have no evidence of how he was treated by his mother. We know that Polly Toodles is the picture of a totally maternal woman, as she is chosen to be a wet-nurse for little Paul Dombey, and she is presented as a benign and satisfying female presence, as is Peggoty—the Good Provider.
But the general absence of breasts in the forms of Dickens’s women, and his obsession with women’s faces as those of angels, often giving the promise of another world, suggest that his abhorrence of female sexuality, such as might have been prompted by primal scene experiences, has a deeper cause in some complication of the processes by which a mother introduces her infant to the reality of the world and other people. We need here to go back to the Kleinian theory of the infant being involved, over his feeding, in his fantasy, in a “cannibalistic attack.” There is the question of what D. W. Winnicott calls the way mother and child “live as experience together”:
The mother has a breast and the power to produce milk, and the idea that she would like to be attacked by a hungry baby ... it is she who produces a situation that may with luck result in the first tie that the infant makes with an external object, an object that is external to the self from the infant’s point of view. (Winnicott 1958, 153)
Winnicott urges us to think of the process as if two lines come from opposite directions:
If they overlap there is a moment of illusion—a bit of experience which the infant can take as either his hallucination or a thing belonging to external reality.
There is a great advantage in finding external reality: it affords relief.
Fantasy things work by magic: there are no brakes on fantasy and love and hate cause alarming effects. External reality has brakes on, and can be studied or known, and, in fact, fantasy is only tolerable at full blast when objective reality is appreciated well. The subjective has tremendous value but is so alarming and magical that it cannot be engaged except as a parallel to the objective. (Winnicott 1958, 153)
In the most primitive state, says Winnicott, the object behaves according to magical laws: “it exists when desired, it approaches when approached, it hurts when hurt. Lastly, it vanishes when not wanted”: “to not want, as a result of satisfaction, is to annihilate the object.” Winnicott here deals with the problem of trying to understand why, with some infants, they are not satisfied with satisfaction. This seems to me possibly to lend insight to Dickens’s fear and dread of female sexuality: like a patient to whom Winnicott refers, “his chief fear was of satisfaction”—because satisfaction brought an annihilation of the object, a kind of murder. To such a person, woman might be the source of one’s being, but also (as to the Jungians) that grave into which one ultimately plunges—because, in her body, toward which one directs the fantasies of aspiration and idealism, lies the power, in providing sexual satisfaction, that would annihilate one’s world altogether. A terrifying infant experience of the primal scene would, of course, exacerbate this feeling, not least in a child who had an extraordinary capacity, as Dickens had, for vivid fantasy, and a hunger to find the very source of his being.
So, while Dickens had a deep respect for woman, he also found her associated with dread. In Dombey and Son, writing about Polly Toodles, he says that she was a typical example of the ordinary woman, of “a nature that is ever, in the mass, better, truer, higher, nobler, quicker to feel, and much more constant to retain, all tenderness and pity, self-denial and devotion, more than the nature of men.” At times this develops into the Euphrasia theme, which we have examined in Little Dorrit. “Nature often enshrines gallant and noble hearts in weak bosoms—often, God bless her, in female breasts” Dickens writes of Nell, when she is thinking how destitute her grandfather would be without her, in The Old Curiosity Shop. But these creatures, often angels, can also be frightening, if stirred up.
There is something about a roused woman: especially if she adds to all her other strong passions, the fierce impulses of recklessness and despair: which few men like to provoke. (Oliver Twist, 115)
Dickens’s engagement with the problem of woman cannot be understood without taking into account the deeper insights of psychoanalysis, as several critics have found. Lawrence Frank, for example, in Charles Dickens and the Romantic Self, makes some useful comments on the images of themselves that Dickens’s women have, especially Esther Summerson, who, of course, loses her image before finding it again: and he invokes some enlightening ideas from Maurice Merleau-Ponty (“the image of oneself makes possible the knowledge of oneself, [and] makes possible a sort of alienation” Frank, 1984, 247). Another explanation of Esther’s reality is that made by Alex Zwerdling in an article, “Esther Summerson Rehabilitated.” He finds the treatment of her internal conflicts psychologically plausible, but criticizes the end as depriving her of existential choice.
There is tremendous poetic resonance around some of Dickens’s imagery, as in his depiction of Eugene Wrayburn’s reflections on the river, just before his attempted murder:
The rippling of the river seemed to cause a correspondent stir in his uneasy reflections. He would have laid them asleep if he could, but they were in movement, like the stream, and all tending one way with a strong current. As the ripple under the moon broke unexpectedly now and then, and palely flashed in a new shape and with a new sound, so parts of his thoughts started, unbidden from the rest, and revealed their wickedness. (Our Mutual Friend, 698)
That is, they are lustful thoughts, and reveal themselves like corpses in the river. The thoughts of seduction directed toward Lizzie seem here to have an apocalyptic quality, associated with sexual love, that brings him near to death, and this association of woman and sexual love with death is an enigma in Dickens’s work we need to go on pondering, for it reveals a fundamental duplicity in his view of them.
CHAPTER ONE Bleak House: The Dead Baby and the Psychic Inheritance
Bleak House is in one perspective a thriller, a detective story; but its special power to grip us and move us derives from its deeper content, which has to do with a central theme in Dickens—that of inheritance—the inheritance of each being.
It is highly significant, in the symbolism of the novel, that Esther, who is a kind of orphan, gives her handkerchief to Jenny, the poor woman who lives in the brick kilns, to cover her dead baby, and that later, when Esther is thought to be dying, Lady Dedlock brings the handkerchief from the woman. Later, this handkerchief appears as Lady Dedlock reveals herself to Esther as her long-lost mother. Lady Dedlock dies in the costume of the poor woman who lost her baby. She is in the end discovered through leads given by Guster (who is an orphan) and, of course, by Jo, who knows “nothink” about his parents and is also an orphan, yet plays a considerable part in the action.
Lady Dedlock, then, is one who has allowed her emotional life to die in her by renouncing her passionate attachment to Captain Hawdon, by whom she has had a child she has always been told is dead. Esther, her child, brought up by a punitive woman who often told her that her mother was her shame, is deprived of her emotional inheritance, while Lady Ded´ lock has been denied her motherly role. Parting from Esther for the last time, she says of herself that “the reality is her suffering, in her useless remorse, in her murdering within her breast the only love and truth of which it is capable” (512).