Charles Dickens and the Image of Women. David K. Holbrook
true potentialities.
Faces are important in this kind of drama, and if we read the work of Winnicott we discover why. In Oliver Twist, Mr. Brownlow’s interest in the case arose because he saw resemblances in Oliver’s face, while in Bleak House the resemblance between Lady Dedlock, Lady Dedlock’s portrait, and Esther is something that strikes the blundering Guppy. Esther loses her “old face” through smallpox, and has to come to live with a new face, after much suffering.
The mother is not only the face that reflects the emerging self: she is also the inspiring Stella Maris, who lifts us up toward a higher state of being. The orphan, therefore, feels a special loss: not only has he or she not experienced sufficient “creative reflection” to develop his or her sense of an authentic self; he or she also suffers from a deficiency of spiritual inspiration, and so is prone to idealize the image of woman, when a beautiful face presents itself.
Oliver Twist finds this kind of angelic figure in Rose Maylie; Pip, in Estella; and David Copperfield, in Agnes. But of course the price to be paid by this impulse to idealize is to fail to find woman as she really is, as the creature in whom the libidinal and the ideal are combined. As I shall suggest, this coming-to-terms with the reality of woman is perhaps best achieved by Dickens in his portrayal of Lizzie Hexam.
As so often, in applying concepts from psychoanalytical investigation of the earliest processes of psychic life, we have no evidence in the life of the author. We know little or nothing of Dickens’s infancy. He was not an orphan, and all we do know about his childhood relationship with his mother is that, when improved circumstances made it possible for him to leave the humiliating work he endured pasting labels on blacking bottles, his mother insulted his soul by determining to keep him at the toil he loathed. This perhaps indicates some deficiency in her capacity to cherish her son, but for the incident to be remembered as significant we may surmise that there were earlier weaknesses in the relationship that made it difficult for Dickens to sustain an image of the good mother without deep misgivings. But there were other problems, of course, that belong to the whole tenor of his time: his readership pressed upon him an idea of woman that he felt bound to give them back in return, despite its falsity. As an acquaintance of Wilkie Collins, who lived with two women to whom he was not married, Dickens knew well enough how people behaved sexually in real life. The awful opprobrium offered in his novels toward illicit relationships and illegitimate births—sins that put his characters beyond even heaven’s mercy—was not the predominant criterion in the social milieu in which he lived, though it may have been in bourgeois circles at large. (Mrs. Gaskell’s difficulties show that the Chadband-Pardiggle element was powerful enough in society.) Rather, what we are dealing with are ghosts or phantoms of the imagination—and there we encounter tremendous feelings of guilt, dread, murderousness, and outrage that are associated with the figure of woman, and this suggests some unsatisfactory relationship between Dickens and his mother in infancy.
For some reason Dickens associates woman with the dreadful possibility of being deprived of one’s emotional inheritance, and so of being blighted or falsified. In the face of this deprivation one has to struggle and suffer intensely and make prodigious efforts at reparation, to find fulfillment in oneself, and to discover meaning in the world. So when it comes to sexual fulfillment with woman, there is a powerful feeling of inhibition, such love seeming to be full of menace, shadowed by death, and unlikely to lead to harmony and richness. So with him there seem to be, at the unconscious level, terrible dangers in the woman as a focus of sexual desire, and surely this is only explicable according to the kind of insights afforded by psychotherapy.
As I have already suggested, the dead baby in Bkeak House has a powerful symbolism. The baby is a symbol of the sexuality that produced it; but for the Victorians it was also a symbol of innocence, a creature closer to the angels. The morbid attitude of the Victorians to babies in this mode led to some extraordinary excesses. There is a short story by George Mac-Donald, for instance, called “The Gift of the Christ Child,” which surely deserves F. R. Leavis’s deadliest critical judgment—“embarrassing.” In this a little girl called Phosy, whose father does not love her, picks up a very recently dead baby brother, supposing that he is the Christ child; finding her thus, her father is changed by the image of her devotion, and his love then flows for her in the proper way. Could a Victorian really believe that a child could mistake a baby’s corpse in that way? That she could believe it was Baby Jesus? That a hardened heart could be susceptible of change by such an experience? Mrs. Frances Hodgson Burnett’s Little Lord Faun-tleroy, of course, depends for its effect on the reader believing that hard hearts are capable of redemption by the influence of simple childhood grace, and in the novel the account is not to be despised: presumably here the text is that “a little child shall lead them”? The same kind of process, of course, is demonstrated in A Christmas Carol.
More realistically, we can see the dead baby in Bleak House as the product of sexual sensuality and so, phenomenologically, as a focus of the fantasies of “inner” and “outer” that go with sexual experience. It is a product of the potentialities indicated by menstruation, always a focus of dread (witness the various ways in which, during their periods, women are supposed to be unclean, likely to spoil rites, pollute society, or turn the cheese); it is a product of those mysterious powers in the psyche by which woman creates us (and can be supposed to decreate us). We must try to see the difficulties Dickens had with the libidinal element in woman in connection with his particular attitude to babies and angels.
In applying my modern phenomenological interpretation I am not trying to explain away Dickens’s concern with the baby and infant. I am just trying to show how, as in the fantasies of George MacDonald, the Christian mythology allows for the world of the unconscious to be explored. Dickens’s moral concern is perhaps more devotedly Christian than we tend to recognize, more conscious of the ethical precepts of Jesus and the New Testament: there are many places in Bleak House where the New Testament is implicitly invoked. Dickens’s attitude to children, for instance, obviously bears in mind the sayings of Jesus, about “offences to these little ones.” Dickens’s warm-hearted comparison is also driven by his recognition of Christ’s concern for the poor and the outcast. These Christian preoccupations culminate in Bleak House in the death of Jo: to him, as he dies, “light is coming,” the cart of life is shaken all to pieces, and he is “a-gropin'.” He repeats the Lord’s prayer:
“Art in Heaven—is the light a-comin, sir?”
“It is close at hand. HALLOWED BE THY NAME!”
“Hallowed be—thy—”
The light is come upon the dark benighted way. Dead! Dead, your Majesty. Dead, my lords and gentlemen. Dead, Right Reverends and Wrong Reverends of every order. Dead, men and women, born with Heavenly compassion in your hearts. And dying thus around us every day. (Bleak House, 649)
The scene is very moving, despite the elements of Victorian sentimentality in it, because Jo is a comic if wretched orphan who “don’t know nothink,” but who all the same is a survivor; he bites Lady Dedlock’s golden sovereign to make sure it is a good one, and is only too glad to eat Mrs. Snagsby’s broken meats. But for our taste such episodes are too emotionally loaded, as are the episodes of the brick worker’s baby’s death and Agnes’s quasi-heavenly status, as when she is the bearer of the news of the death of Dora and looks like an angel. These moments have a heavy religiose quality that is very much of its time. Yet, of course, we recognize the difference between Mrs. Pardiggle’s approach and Dickens's. All the same, the question must inevitably arise—how much did Dickens endorse this kind of fervor? Did he aspire to be a “good man” himself, or just to be thought one? Or was he merely trying to satisfy his public?
Often in his work there is a kind of reference to the bearing of Christianity that may be deeply sincere, but to these insistences he cannot avoid giving a morbid Victorian quality. In the course of invoking religion we seem to be asked to endorse beliefs that are not really true or possible; certainly, they seem impossible for us to believe, and one wonders whether the Victorians could really have believed them. Did they really believe that Lady Dedlock was beyond even God’s forgiveness? Or that Little Dorrit was being Christlike in her perpetual self-abnegation?