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
  • how tenuous this makes masculine heterosexuality - almost a boon for same-sex desire: David and Steerforth, Havisham and Estella