Carey 1973

Carey, John. The Violent Effigy: A Study of Dickens' Imagination. London: Faber & Faber, 1973. Repr. 1991. Print.

• 162: Louisa [in Hard Times] is something of a breakthrough for Dickens, escaping the two categories of pure maid and frump. Generally his female figures fit comfortably into one or other of these two categories. The Victorian effort to restrict the role of women to such stereotypes, both in fiction and in real life, suggests a lurking awareness of woman's threat to male surpremacy. The woman must be constrained to certain kinds of servitude - domestic pet, angel, mother, clown - to meet the male's need for entertainment or spiritual uplift. But behind the man-made categories women were waiting to get out - women with talents and intellects which the nineteenth century stifled. The phenomenon of women expecting to be treated, in political or intellectual matters, as if she were a normal human being, provoked Dickens, in real life, to sportive derision: 'she has found out that she ought to go and vote at elections; ought to be competent to sit in Parliament; ought to be able to enter the learned professions - the army and the navy, I believe.' For a woman to 'go out speechifying', besides being preposterous in itself, was to forfeit the 'hold' upon her husband which shrinking femininity could naturally reckon on.... Among those rightly upset by the portrayal of the public-spirited women in Bleak House was John Stuart Mill, who pronounced it 'vulgar impudence', and 'done too in the vulgarest way, just as the style in which vulgar men used to ridicule "learned ladies" as neglecting their children and household.' Independent, professional women are represented in Dickens' fiction. But it's difficult to disguise from ourselves the fact that he normally regarded them patronizingly or with contempt. [...] [163] The threat presented by women does not get into the novels through these woebegotten strugglers-for-a-living [Mrs. Gamp, Miss Mowcher in Copperfield]. It gets in through scenes where women with ordinary domestic instruments - scissors, needles - are suddenly thrown into relief, malignant, uncomfortable. [...][164] These women, with their insidious miniature weapons, adumbrate a threat to masculine superiority.
  • how tenuous this makes masculine heterosexuality - almost a boon for same-sex desire: David and Steerforth, Havisham and Estella
  • last point about material objects of feminine craft as threat of female freedom: he mentions Madame Defarge in Two Cities, Mrs. Sparsit in Hard Times, Jenny Wren in Our Mutual Friend (Dickens, 1865) - would be interesting to cross-reference with Talia Shaffer's Novel Craft, which apparently discussed OMF
• 173 David and Esther, then, both combat tendencies in Dickens himself. The tendency to categorize women, which is David's failing. And the tendency to admire plucky, sexless heroines - Little Nell, Little Dorrit - with their unnatural attachment to older men. In Esther he shows us that the type is a perversion: the result of cruel pressures exerted in childhood.