SOURCE: Showalter, Elaine. “Guilt, Authority, and the Shadows of Little Dorrit.” Nineteenth-Century Fiction 34, no. 1 (June 1979): 20-40.

[In the following essay, Showalter characterizes the shadow motif in Little Dorrit as emblematic of the spiritual darkness of Victorian society.]

As J. Hillis Miller has observed, “shadow” is the “most frequently recurring” of certain key words in Little Dorrit, a term which links “physical imprisonment and imprisoning states of soul”:

It is used most obviously to express the literal shadow of the Marshalsea, but it appears, often metaphorically, in connection with almost all the characters and eventually we understand that the real shadow here is “a deeper shadow than the shadow of the Marshalsea Wall” (II, 19), and that to be “shadowed” by some sadness or blindness or delusion or deliberate choice of the worse rather than the better course is the universal condition of all the dwellers in this prison of a lower world.¹

The unity of Little Dorrit has generally been argued in terms of universal moral symbolism, but I think that a thorough exploration of the novel's shadows can help us understand its coherence in the more specific terms of psychological realism and sociological observation. The shadows of Little Dorrit are more than words or metaphors of spiritual darkness; they represent the world of psychic turbulence which lies beneath the brilliant “surface” of Society cultivated by the financial authority of Merdle, the political authority of the Barnacles, and the social authority of Mrs. General. Not only institutions but also people have their shadows—doubles who enact their repressed roles and desires. For Dickens, the subtle techniques of shadow provide a way to create a three-dimensional fictional world, with depth as well as surface, without asserting the intrusive direct authority of omniscience. In this essay I would like to examine Dickens's use of shadow as figure, theme, and imaginative principle in order to get at some of Little Dorrit's classic puzzles: the prison's centrality, the hero's guilt, and the sense of an ending.

The figure of the shadow as omniscient narrator, as secret self, and as protective imagination occurs first for Dickens in conjunction with the problem of authority. It was civil authority that closed in upon Dickens's father when he was arrested for debt and taken to the Marshalsea, where, he told his broken-hearted little son, the sun had set upon him forever.² John Dickens's descent into the twilight world of the debtor, sinking below the equatorial line of the Thames and out of the cycle of Victorian social mobility, provides the biographical source for one of Little Dorrit's dominant motifs. In this darkest of Dickens's novels, with its pensive imagery of labyrinths and prisons, we see the underside of Victorian authority, the shadows behind the sunny promise of bourgeois self-help, parliamentary democracy, and private charity. It was for this reason that Shaw called Little Dorrit “a more seditious book than Das Kapital” and a book which challenged the inertia, elitism, hypocrisy, and morbidity of the Victorian state.³

Dickens entitled his first chapter “Sun and Shadow”; the title page of the first edition shows Little Dorrit in a broad ray of sun coming through the shadowy Marshalsea gate. The Marshalsea, where dusk falls “sooner than elsewhere,”⁴ is a kind of permanent shadow world, whose inhabitants have endured the eclipse of ambition and ego which John Dickens so lamented to his son. Psychologically, too, it functions as a kind of spectral world of the Victorian unconscious, the shadowy other side of the frenzied pursuit of money, status, and power which characterizes the world of Merdle and the government. In the Marshalsea prisoners lose their social selves, roles with all their attendant paraphernalia of gesture, accent, posture, and costume, but new roles and new hierarchies must replace them. In this sense, the shadow world of the prison comes to mirror and parody the bright authoritative surface. Here, too, self-esteem requires a tireless maintenance of the façade, an endless series of staging problems. Dickens both distrusts the authoritarian structure which constantly threatens and exposes this fragile and pathetic enterprise, and yet, through his own authority as narrative observer, perpetually exposes it himself. He is fascinated with the behavior of prisoners, with the marginal ways people find to sustain their individuality in institutions.

The surrender to the institution—to the Marshalsea, or to the workhouse—was an acknowledgment of social failure, and modern sociology can help us understand its mechanisms. Asylums, Erving Goffman's account of the total institution, provides a vocabulary and a theoretical framework for the study of the social situation of inmates. Goffman is interested in the assaults upon the self within institutions and the manner in which inmate culture, with its privileges, territories, networks, patronage, and hierarchies, functions to maintain personality. Such a culture is essential, because entrance into the institution is a process of stigmatization, involving a series of mortifications designed to strip the inmate of external status. The total institution is above all “a milieu of personal failure in which one's fall from grace is continuously pressed home.” In some cases, Goffman explains, the ego is already so weak or strained that the surrender to failure comes as a tremendous relief. In order to preserve minimal self-esteem, inmates construct protective fictions, “sad tales,” and false histories, which allow self-pity to dominate their relations with others.⁵

The real Marshalsea was a mild prison, much more tolerant in its regime than Newgate or the Bastille, better administered than the other debtors' prisons, the King's Bench and the Fleet. Discipline was so casual that smugglers, who were supposed to be in a higher security section of the building, regularly consorted with the debtors, an arrangement obviously to the advantage of both groups. Marshalsea prisoners were allowed a great deal of leeway in maintaining their personal fictions of gentility and innocence; they wore no uniforms and suffered none of the penitentiary disciplines of silence and isolation.⁶ The turnkey in Little Dorrit keeps tactful silence when Mr. Dorrit, like all inmates, maintains that he is “going out again directly.” It is only by gradual stages that Dorrit divests himself of the remnants of his preprison identity and takes on the gratifying alternative role of “Father of the Marshalsea.” The mode of prison exchange is barter of goods and services, and Little Dorrit herself becomes skilled in using the system to get training for herself, Fanny, and Tip. Despite the relatively benign and “normal” quality of Marshalsea life, its inhabitants sustain a precarious identity by systematically denying the reality of their situations. They call themselves “collegians” rather than prisoners, avoid the gate at locking time, praise the good air and the company. Mr. Dorrit must pretend not to know that his daughters are employed, must deny that the “testimonials,” “subscriptions,” and “tributes” he solicits from departing inmates are crowns and shillings.

Dickens reminds us that similar pretenses exist outside the prison walls. The players in Fanny's theater call themselves “professionals”; Mrs. General will accept no vulgar remuneration but allows Mr. Dorrit to pay a quarterly sum to her credit at her bankers. The cramped Hampton Court apartments where Mrs. Gowan lives require an intense conspiracy on the part of visitors and inhabitants if the fictions of genteel privacy are to be maintained. “Callers looking steadily into the eyes of their receivers, pretended not to smell cooking three feet off; people, confronting closets accidentally left open, pretended not to see bottles; visitors, with their heads against a partition of thin canvas and a page and a young female at high words on the other side, made believe to be sitting in a primeval silence” (I, 26).

As a novelist, Dickens is in a position akin to that of the observer in the tower of a panoptical prison, who can see each prisoner in his cell, who takes in the entire cellular structure simultaneously, and is thus aware of all the human actors as actors in a systematic drama. Drawing on Michel Foucault's Surveiller et punir: naissance de la prison, Jonathan Arac has discussed the emergence of principles of social organization and inspection in the nineteenth century which connected the authority of the capitalist, the prison warden, and the novelist; for the latter omniscient narration becomes “a principle of novelistic social control … in which an unseen knower achieves panoptical authority over a mass of individuals.” This authority, Arac points out, “was needed to integrate an imaginative view of the city” but “in its panoramic privilege … omniscient narration was one more facet of Victorian inspectorial surveillance, the process of centralization carried on by capitalists in the factories and Utilitarians in the state.”⁷

Dickens's sense of the narrator's position as ethically compromised is expressed in a number of famous passages about the shadowy secrets of the city. As the inquirer, the novelist, he felt frustrated by the “profound secret and mystery” of the human personality.⁸ To be aware, as one walks through the city, that every house contains a myriad of secrets—a persistent theme in Dickens's later novels—is to be constantly teased by what Hillis Miller calls “the opacity of other people.”⁹ Yet Dickens also feels a horror of the surveillant, of the intimate intruder who violates individual privacy. In the novels, the characters who invade the secrets of others are sinister presences such as Mr. Tulkinghorn in Bleak House or Jaggers in Great Expectations: representatives of an authority which uncomfortably exposes and controls others. Even Physician in Little Dorrit, whose profession took him to the “darkest places” and at whose table “guests came out so surprisingly … that they were almost natural” (II, 25), is a figure of ambiguous power. Miss Wade, who cannot be at peace with closed doors and who restlessly and compulsively interprets the world as a conspiracy against her, is a paranoid version of the inquisitive novelist: “From a very early age,” she announces, “I have detected what those about me thought they hid from me” (II, 21).

Dickens's need to understand the omniscient novelist as a benevolent figure, rather than an agent of relentless surveillance, was expressed in his 1848 proposal of “The Shadow” as the unifying theme of a new magazine:

Now to bind all this together, and to get a character established as it were which any of the writers may maintain without difficulty, I want to suppose a certain Shadow, which may go into any place, by sunlight, moonlight, starlight, firelight, candlelight, and be in all homes, and all nooks and corners, and be supposed to be cognisant of everything, and go everywhere, without the least difficulty, which may be in the Theatre, the Palace, the House of Commons, the Prisons, the Unions, the Churches, on the Railroad, on the Sea, abroad and at home: a kind of semiomniscient, omnipresent, intangible creature. I don't think it would do to call the paper The Shadow: but I want something tacked to that title, to express the notion of its being a cheerful, useful, and always welcome Shadow. I want to open the first number with this Shadow's account of himself and his family. I want to have all the correspondence addressed to him. … I want him to loom as a fanciful thing all over London; and to get up a general notion of “What will the Shadow say about this, I wonder?”¹⁰

The figure of the shadow had occurred frequently to Dickens in the 1840's, but always in a negative form, and not as this popular and amiable reporter. In The Cricket on the Hearth (1845), the “great shadow of the stranger” which falls on Dot Peerybingle brings suspicion, jealousy, and violence into her husband's heart; or as a more modern interpretation might have it, embodies the negative feelings which he has repressed. In the 1848 Christmas book, The Haunted Man, the shadow takes the form of a phantom double of the hero Redlaw. It appears to him out of the gloom—“an awful likeness of himself”—and offers to remove his memories of pain, trouble, and sorrow. Like Mr. Hyde or the portrait of Dorian Gray, the shadow incorporates this negative experience and separates it from its human context. Without memories, Redlaw becomes an automaton. Everywhere he goes, he destroys the memories of others, and they too become harsh and insensitive to each other. Without memory, the characters visited by Redlaw break out of their emotional secrecy, and begin to say what they really think and feel. When little Johnny loudly rebels against nursing his infant sister, when Mr. Tetterby notices that his wife is fat and ugly and grumbles that poor people ought not to have children at all, when the invalid student tells his self-sacrificing nurse to stop fussing and preaching, they cease to be Christmasy figures of sentiment, and begin to sound astonishingly convincing and alive. The “haunted man” who tours the city is thus a kind of realistic or naturalistic novelist; and the glaring pitiless world he exposes and documents is Dickens's nightmare.

Dickens's ambivalence about the shadow world, the darkness which protectively harbors the chaos of identity, is manifested in Little Dorrit in a series of strongly contrasted landscapes and cityscapes. The novel begins with a description of Marseilles in the blaze of high noon, a passage which critics have found perplexingly resonant, or even strident and pretentious. A. E. Dyson finds in it a resemblance to a “symbolist poem”; John Lucas concludes that “not even Dickens himself entirely knows what the language of this passage is trying for.”¹¹ For Dickens, Marseilles is a haunted, unshadowed landscape, which mercilessly exposes all nuance and reduces the merely human to insignificance; only the lizard and the cicala flourish in its heat and dust. Timeless, polyglot, and harsh, this city of sun has a peculiar stillness and stagnancy. Dickens emphasizes its abrupt and precise divisions, the visible line of demarcation between the black “abominable pool” of the inner harbor, and the blue of the “pure sea … with which it never mixed.” The key word of the passage is “stare”: “Strangers were stared out of countenance by staring white houses, staring white walls, staring white streets, staring tracts of arid road, staring hills from which verdure was burnt away” (I, 1). As Randolph Splitter has noted, “the fear of exposure inherent in this obsession with staring seems like agoraphobia, fear of open spaces, of being exposed to people's stares, fear of the light instead of the child's fear of the dark.”¹²

Vividly, assertively, even stunningly described, the landscape of Marseilles is unparticularized. This is perhaps because it exists primarily in the mind as an alien space. For Dickens, a landscape without shadow seems to be the most threatening imaginable, a place in which the self is disclosed and imperiled. There is something primitive and deadly about Dickens's vision of Marseilles which connects it to other agoraphobic nightmare landscapes of the English imagination: E. M. Forster's Marabar Hills, Graham Greene's Mexico, T. E. Lawrence entering Jeddah Harbor when the heat of Arabia came out and smote him like a sword; even the red sun that hangs low in the sky of H. G. Wells's dying planet. The city of sun offers no refuge, no concealment, no fantasy, no transforming generosity. Thus, to cite another twentieth-century text, it seems imaginatively right that Evelyn Waugh's Tony Last, in A Handful of Dust, faces an appalling lifetime captivity of reading Little Dorrit to Mr. Todd in the jungle of Amazonas.

The structural and symbolic parallel to Marseilles in Little Dorrit is the monastery of the Great St. Bernard in Book II. Here a cold Alpine clarity and the abrupt division between day and night strip the environment of shadow. The travelers make their ascent through a terrain as blasted and desolate as that of Marseilles: “No trees were to be seen, nor any vegetable growth, save a poor brown scrubby moss, freezing in the chinks of rock.” At the top of the mountain, frozen into tableaux, are the corpses of travelers lost in bygone storms: “The mother, storm-belated many winters ago, still standing in the corner with her baby at her breast; the man who had frozen with his arm raised to his mouth in fear or hunger, still pressing it with his dry lips after years and years” (II, I). With its arched galleries, huge staircase, and dark corridors, the monastery too is a kind of romantic prison, a Piranesian arena of suspended animation.

In contrast to these two still and exposed places is London, the city of turbulent shadow. Here there is constant motion: the river flows ceaselessly; the people are in transit, “restless travellers through the pilgrimage of life” (I, 2). Every dark corner conceals a dense and humming life: “miserable children in rags … like young rats, slunk and hid, fed on offal, huddled together for warmth, and were hunted about” (I, 14); homeless people lay “coiled up in nooks” (I, 14); “the dim streets … [seem] all depositories of oppressive secrets” (II, 10).

For Dickens, this ceaseless activity and motion, for all that he paints it dark, is the source of life and human values. Tranquility reminds him of death. To be still is to sink into despair, to surrender to the moral rot of apathy. Dickens approves of an active anxiety: “It is much better to go on and fret, than to stop and fret.”¹³ Thus London is a dark city, but it has a swarming vitality. In this novel of travelers, of trips to Paris, Venice, Switzerland, and Rome, only London has the power of renewing life. The revitalizing energy of London lies in its acceptance, even celebration, of endless change, struggle, and flux. For Dickens, the resistance to transformation is futile, self-deceptive, and finally deadening; it is the source of the pretense he describes in Rome, “where everything seemed to be trying to stand still for ever on the ruins of something else—except the water, which, following eternal laws, tumbled and rolled from its glorious multitude of fountains” (II, 7). The Marshalsea itself was to disappear, for as Dickens tells us in his preface to the 1857 edition, he finds the outer front courtyard of the old prison “metamorphosed into a butter shop” and the rooms turned into lodgings. Such precariousness made memory all the more precious, individuality the more poignant and unstable.

To be shut away from the sun in a London house of shadows is to inhabit an intensely active world of memories and secrets. Mrs. Clennam's house is modeled more on Plato's Cave than any London terrace; its reality is only the exaggerated projection of her own darkness:

The varying light of fire and candle in Mrs. Clennam's room made the greatest change that ever broke the dead monotony of the spot. In her two long narrow windows, the fire shone sullenly all day, and sullenly all night. On rare occasions, it flashed up passionately, as she did; but for the most part it was suppressed, like her, and preyed upon itself evenly and slowly. During many hours of the short winter days, however, when it was dusk there early in the afternoon, changing distortions of herself in her wheeled chair, of Mr. Flintwinch with his wry neck, of Mistress Affery coming and going, would be thrown upon the house wall that was over the gateway, and would hover there like shadows from a great magic lantern. As the room-ridden invalid settled for the night, these would gradually disappear: Mistress Affery's magnified shadow always flitting about, last, until it finally glided away into the air, as though she were off upon a witch excursion.

(I, 15)

The effectiveness of this scene depends as much on Dickens's brilliant verbalization of the visual effects of chiaroscuro as on its psychological and metaphysical echoes. In 1842 he had written enthusiastically of Daniel Maclise's Hamlet: “What an extraordinary fellow he must be who so manages the lights in this picture, that on the scene behind, is an enormous shadow of this group—as if the real murder were being done again by phantoms.”¹⁴ In Little Dorrit Dickens frequently adapts such painterly conventions, as in his introduction of Miss Wade, sitting in a shadow which fell “like a gloomy veil across her forehead” (I, 2), and his picture of Rigaud in the Alps, drinking his wine “with a monstrous shadow imitating him on the wall and ceiling” (II, 1). As we see also in the story of the Princess and the shadow, which Little Dorrit tells Maggy, people's shadows incorporate their secret inner lives. Little Dorrit too inhabits the shadow world of secrecy, repression, and fantasy. Her love for Clennam is a “treasured shadow,” which she keeps hidden in “a very secret place,” and which she intends to take with her to the final secrecy of the grave (I, 24).

Northrop Frye describes “a hidden and private world of dream and death” in Dickens's novels as the source of “renewed life and energy” for those heroes who can survive knowledge of its depths.¹⁵ This world, Frye suggests, surfaces in the half-light of dawn and twilight. Perhaps this is why so many scenes in Little Dorrit are set at sunrise or dusk. While Dickens's sunsets tend to be “poetic” scenes in the Turner-Ruskin tradition, many of the sunrises in the novel are seen from the windows of the prison; the rays of the sun which waken the hopeless to another day are only the “bars of the prison of this lower world” (II, 30). In contrast to the romantic sunsets are the many sunrise passages in which characters have been up all night, troubled and frightened: Little Dorrit locked out of the Marshalsea, Physician and Bar after Merdle's suicide. Cavalletto's escape from Rigaud takes place at dawn from an inn called the Break of Day; Dickens noted it in his number plan as “sunrise picture. Cavalletto making off in the red light down the long road.”¹⁶ Superficially the most cheerful of the sunrise pictures, this turns out to be a Miltonic image of a damned soul escaping from hell: “a black speck moved along the road and splashed among the flaming pools of rainwater” (I, 11). Clennam's vigil in the Marshalsea is a night watch leading to a dawn which brings no renewal but only “a blurred circle of yellow haze” (II, 29). When Maggy and Little Dorrit spend the night sleeping outside in the streets, morning comes with similar anticlimactic indistinctness, in sound rather than dramatic or beautiful light:

No day yet in the sky, but there was day in the resounding stones of the streets; in the waggons, carts, and coaches; in the workers going to various occupations; in the opening of early shops; in the traffic at markets; in the stir of the river-side. There was coming day in the flaring lights, with a feebler colour in them than they would have had at another time; coming day in the increased sharpness of the air, and the ghastly dying of the night.

(I, 14)

The human analogues to these scenes of painful exposure are the nobodies, characters who are permanent inhabitants of the half-light. Dickens reserves his most astonishing poetry for the anonymous dispossessed who have lost even their sustaining fictions, “perhapsers” (like George Moore's Alfred Nobbs), whose identities have totally broken down, who have given up the effort to play even their roles. Such feeble and eroded personalities as Frederick Dorrit (“in private life, where there was no part for the clarionet, he had no part at all” [I, 20]) and Old Nandy, upon whom Mr. Dorrit projects his own humiliation, seem to arouse Dickens's deepest narrative sympathies. Although he calls the shabby crowd of “messengers, go-betweens, and errand-bearers” at the Marshalsea gate the “nondescripts,” he musters on their account all his resources of language and metaphor; they are supremely described, with that Dickensian art of the necessary detail that contradicts Orwell:

Their walk was the walk of a race apart. They had a peculiar way of doggedly slinking round the corner, as if they were eternally going to the pawnbroker's. When they coughed, they coughed like people accustomed to be forgotten on door-steps and in draughty passages, waiting for answers to letters in faded ink, which gave the recipients of those manuscripts great mental disturbance and no satisfaction.

(I, 9)

Poverty and the workhouse are institutions more effective than the Marshalsea in destroying the self, the “Spirit” (as Mr. Dorrit calls it) that sustains ego and individuality. While the entire novel is permeated by an aching awareness of psychic entropy, of personality running down and out, Dickens analyzes it most exactly in the nondescripts, whose utter vulnerability and lack of secrecy perhaps liberates his own authorial omniscience. Like the prisoners, the nobodies have been stripped of their personal history. In their shapeless coats, baggy trousers, and obdurate hats, the little old men of the workhouse, “every one of whom smells of all the others” (I, 31), are reduced to an animal helplessness; measured against their fate, even Dorrit's selfishness has some redeeming energies. It is only with the nondescripts, however, who have no shadows and nothing to lose, that Dickens is so brutally direct. With his central characters he seems to feel more guilt about an omniscient invasion.

Because Dickens is so reluctant to expose the psyches of his main characters, Hillis Miller has concluded that the novel asserts the essential mystery of personality: “Little Dorrit, like A Tale of Two Cities, has at its center a recognition of the inalienable secrecy and otherness of every human being. Here Dickens makes explicit his repudiation of the idea that another person can be a kind of transparent alter ego whom I can know and possess without the intervention of any shadow of mystery or strangeness.”¹⁷ But it is through the technique of doubling—the creation of pairs of characters, one of whom embodies the “mystery and strangeness” of the other—that Dickens attempts to penetrate the secrecy of personality. This strategy allows him to exercise narrative authority without surrendering his own fiction of benevolence towards his heroes and heroines. In Little Dorrit the obvious doubles—identical twins such as the Meagles sisters, or the Flintwinch brothers; and couples such as Miss Wade and Tattycoram, Casby and Pancks—echo the relationships of paired characters whose bond is more obscure, but who seem connected nonetheless: Arthur Clennam and Rigaud; Little Dorrit and Maggy; Flora and Mr. F's Aunt. These pairs might be described as characters and their shadows. In Jungian analysis, the Shadow is an archetypal aspect of the psyche, an instinctual self of the same sex, which represents spontaneity, creativity, and strong emotions, but also lust, criminality, and violence. The shadow characters in Dickens are sometimes amiable companions, like the roving reporter he had imagined in 1848. Sometimes the encounter with the shadow—as in Clennam's meeting with Rigaud in the Marshalsea—is guilt-laden and intense.

In a psychoanalytic interpretation of A Tale of Two Cities, Albert D. Hutter sees Dickens's characteristic “splitting,” of which the double or shadow is one expression, as a “fundamental mode of psychological defense. … part of a normal adaptive strategy for coping with any intense relationship.”¹⁸ His analysis is immensely useful for an understanding of Little Dorrit, especially since the two novels were written consecutively and contain many similar themes and images. It seems more productive to view these shadowed characters in Little Dorrit, however, in literary as well as psychoanalytic terms, as the result of Dickens's solutions to narrative problems and to the ethical problems of authority. The shadows function as dramatizations of the repressed self, yet allow Dickens a kind of narrative charity towards his characters.

Alexander Welsh has suggested that “if Rigaud is Clennam's double, the plot of Little Dorrit makes a little more sense,” since “the substantially motiveless Rigaud, who is likened to Cain, behaves as if he obeyed motives that logically belong to the hero.”¹⁹ In the encounter of Clennam and Rigaud in the Marshalsea, Welsh sees a parallel to the famous meeting between Pip and Orlick in Great Expectations; somehow Clennam is morally accountable for the other's crimes. Taylor Stoehr, too, has noticed that once Clennam is in the Marshalsea, Rigaud seems free to carry out aggressive action: “As happens frequently in Dickens (Darnay's imprisonment is an exact parallel), the confinement of the hero produces an eruption of violence elsewhere in the novel.”²⁰

We have been educated to look for patterns of guilt and expiation in Dickens when a “hero” and a “criminal” are thus doubled. Pip, in Julian Moynahan's well-known reading of Great Expectations, is “a very dangerous young man” whose violent fantasies are enacted in the text.²¹ Charles Darnay, in Hutter's reading of A Tale of Two Cities, is also engaged in a guilty rebellion. In both of these novels, the hero's guilt has to do with father-son conflict, with his relationship to “the British world of business,” and with sexual dread.²² The same configuration can be seen in Little Dorrit. Clennam too is a dangerous young man, who is responsible for Mr. Dorrit's release from the Marshalsea into a world he can no longer inhabit, for Doyce's financial ruin, for Little Dorrit's love and Flora's disappointment, and for Mrs. Clennam's paralysis. In Dickens's original plan the novel was to be called “Nobody's Fault,” and the central figure was to be a man “who should bring about all the mischief in it, lay it all on Providence, and say at every fresh calamity, ‘Well, it's a mercy, however, nobody was to blame you know!’”²³ Clennam, who is repeatedly identified in the novel as “nobody” (e.g., in Bk. I, chs. 16, 17, 26, 28: “Nobody's Weakness,” “Nobody's Rival,” “Nobody's State of Mind,” “Nobody's Disappearance”) is still this mischievous individual; but the addition of Rigaud, a truly murderous figure, gives the novel a violent dimension that allies it to Dickens's other novels of the period. Like Orlick, Rigaud is the instrument of vengeance against the women the hero fears.

Although Clennam rarely betrays his own potential rage, sexuality, and violence, his real emotion is never very far from the surface. In his very first speeches (to Mr. Meagles during the quarantine), Clennam's anger towards his parents' business values erupts in an impulsive confession: “I am the son … of a hard father and mother. I am the only child of parents who weighed, measured, and priced everything.” But the resentment towards the father who kept him “always grinding in a mill I always hated” (I, 2) is also a kind of displaced resentment of the mother who ruled them both.²⁴ As we learn late in the novel, Mrs. Clennam has destroyed the romances of both her husband and of his son; yet to confront her immense sexual power directly terrifies Arthur. His dread of her is the secret he keeps from himself.

In Clennam, Dickens dramatizes a disembodied self—one in whom the sexual impulses, the ambitious desires, and the rebellious energies that would identify him as an adult male in conflict with Mrs. Clennam's power are all repressed and denied. Interestingly, Clennam cherishes an image of himself as aged and impotent, identifying strongly with the weakness of his own father and with the Father of the Marshalsea. Immediately attracted to Little Dorrit, he names his feelings to himself as paternal and protective and encourages her to think of him as a “good father” (I, 14). When he feels attracted to Pet Meagles, he quickly persuades himself that he is unqualified to win her for a host of curious reasons, including having “no kind sisters to present to her” (I, 16). In fact, Clennam will not compete sexually for any woman until Mrs. Clennam's defeat and the collapse of her house of shadows. He will not compete strenuously in the world of business, either. Frightened as he is by his night in the prison, Clennam seems strangely attracted by its spurious “peace” (I, 8). For the noncompetitor, the milieu of failure offers a kind of refuge. But his passivity conceals massive anger. At one point in his desperate struggle to become Nobody, the throbbing insistent self is so painful that he thinks of suicide (I, 16). When he walks through London's deserted streets, past the lonely church vaults, the empty countinghouses and banking houses, Clennam imagines his mother at the very center of the oppressive system, “inflexible of face, indomitable of will, firmly holding all the secrets of her own and his father's life, and austerely opposing herself … to the great final secret of all life” (II, 10). She is the darkest shadow of all, and the deadliest. Described as both Sphinx and Medusa, Mrs. Clennam is presented as a stony and omnipotent figure; her power is quite simply emasculating, and in this she is connected to other mother surrogates in Dickens's fiction: Mrs. Gargery, Miss Murdstone, and (as we shall see) Mr. F's aunt. When Clennam thinks about her, “his sense of helplessness” is intensified; “his advice, energy, activity, money, credit, all his resources whatsoever, were all made useless. If she had been possessed of the old fabled influence, and had turned those who looked upon her into stone, she could not have rendered him more completely powerless” (II, 23).

Having internalized the image of the adult and powerful woman as sexually threatening, Arthur, like Dickens's other heroes, can only love a woman who is physically like a child. All his love objects—Flora, Pet, and Little Dorrit—attract him when they are young, delicate, and slight. It is impossible to imagine him caring for a forty-year-old Flora, or for any physically mature woman. Thus Rigaud, the sadist who hates and acts against women, comes into the novel to release some of the suppressed violence of Clennam's psyche. Rigaud has murdered his own wife; he bullies Mrs. Clennam and spies on Pet Meagles after her marriage to Gowan. Clennam is an irresolute dreamer; Rigaud is an activist, a man who “can't submit … [and] must govern” (I, 1). Clennam is a self-tormentor; Rigaud torments and pursues others.

In the figure of Little Dorrit, as in Clennam, Dickens evades all the negative impulses of the female psyche: anger, jealousy, and desire. Janice M. Carlisle has pointed out that her tale of the Princess and the shadow—a simultaneous confession and denial of her love for Clennam—“is the counterpart of Clennam's conception of himself as Nobody.”²⁵ Yet she too can be seen as a dangerous young woman; indeed, Welsh has argued that she is an angel of death whose marriage to Clennam “is the culmination of the hero's life, but also the end of it.”²⁶ Dickens brings out the ambiguity, if not the deadliness, of Amy's character by giving her as Shadow a retarded young woman of approximately her own age but with a mental age of ten. Whereas Amy Dorrit is little, Maggy is large: “large bones, large features, large feet and hands, large eyes” (I, 9). Maggy's constant good humor is the fixed smile of an idiot; and she is blind in one eye.

If Maggy's deficiencies suggest that Little Dorrit too is blind to reality (Fanny calls her sister “Mole” and “Miss Bat”) and that her goodness is a kind of moral stupidity, their doubling also brings out other aspects of the heroine's behavior. Like the other shadows in the novel, Maggy embodies Little Dorrit's physical, aggressive, and uninhibited self. She is present at many meetings between Little Dorrit and Clennam, as a kind of chaperon and catalyst combined. She comes to Clennam's rooms the night that they are locked out of the Marshalsea; she is along, with her big cap and basket, when Little Dorrit visits Clennam in the Marshalsea; she is doing needle-work “in her old place” when they decide to marry. In these situations, Maggy betrays the appetite and the competitiveness which Amy has struggled to extinguish. One of Little Dorrit's characteristics, for example, is her “extraordinary repugnance to dining in company” (I, 5). She is so self-denying that she appears never to eat. Initially, this abstemiousness is a ruse enabling her to smuggle her dinner back to the prison for her father. Witnessing Mr. Dorrit's supper in the Marshalsea, Clennam understands that Little Dorrit's frailty is the result of years of deprivation and “insufficient food” (I, 8). But it is also part of her angelic incorporeality never to be hungry or thirsty, a trait especially attractive to Clennam, who is horrified by Flora's healthy appetite. Maggy, on the other hand, is ravenous. Her fondest memory is of the “chicking” she enjoyed as a hospital patient; when we first meet her she is carrying potatoes and learning to read signs in the grocer's window. When Clennam offers them both refreshment, Little Dorrit of course refuses; Maggy gloats “over the fruit and cakes with chuckles of anticipation,” drinks her wine “in a series of loud smacks,” and loads her basket “with every eatable thing upon the table” (I, 14). Maggy is similarly assertive about emotions, and her innocent communications are always significantly timed. It is Maggy who speaks up when Clennam is obtusely pleading with Little Dorrit to tell him her romantic secrets; unfortunately, Maggy's version of the tale of the princess and the tiny woman is so garbled that Clennam fails to understand it. And when the couple finally manage an engagement, it is Maggy who rushes out joyously to share the good news with rivals: Flora and Mr. F's Aunt.

As Rigaud shadows Clennam, and as Maggy shadows Little Dorrit, so Mr. F's Aunt shadows Flora. Although she is a minor character in the novel, Mr. F's Aunt has attracted a good deal of baffled critical attention. George Bernard Shaw called her “a first-rate clinical study of senile deficiency in a shrewd old woman.”²⁷ But many critics since have seen her as a symbolic rather than a realistic madwoman. To John Lucas she is “an unknowable comic mystery … reminiscent of some of Wordsworth's studies of incommunicability”; to William Myers, she is “formless hatred,” her violence an arbitrary “fact of nature.”²⁸ Alan Wilde sees the relationship between Mr. F's Aunt and Flora as typical of the “fearfully parasitic relationships which pervade the novel,” the relationships between Miss Wade and Tattycoram, Rigaud and Cavalletto, Casby and Pancks. “In each case,” he writes, “the more powerful is the more self-seeking, devious, and corrupt, drawing nourishment, vampire-like, from the good, the silly, and the weak.” Mr. F's Aunt is “all the irrationality of the world, all of its aggression and hostility breaking out under the mark of eccentricity.”²⁹

But in my opinion Mr. F's Aunt is a more readable character than these interpretations suggest, and her relation to Flora is more particularized and comprehensible than it is exemplary of a universal condition. Mr. F's Aunt is best understood as the embodiment of Flora's repressed anger at Arthur's rejection. Like Little Dorrit, Flora behaves with admirable and, indeed, inhuman selflessness. But Clennam has in fact hurt and betrayed Flora in ceasing to love her, in dodging her embraces, and in pretending not to understand her hints about the future. While Dickens atones for his authorial guilt in exposing the silliness of the adult Flora by making her kind, he also gives us her shadowside, externalized as her constant companion.

Mr. F's Aunt's interjections and imprecations are not random or irrational but carefully timed to coincide with Clennam's displays of “heartlessness” to Flora. Her first performance comes at the Casbys' dinner party. Arthur has been frantically evading Flora's advances, her “grotesque revival,” as it seems to him, of their past romance. At the dinner table he avoids her eyes. Meanwhile Mr. F's Aunt “sat silently defying him with an aspect of the greatest bitterness.” When she speaks, she announces “I hate a fool!” a remark pointedly addressed to Arthur. “What he come there for, then?” she asks Flora on the way out (I, 13). If he has not come to court Flora, why has he come indeed? Clennam then stays away, and so Flora and Mr. F's Aunt come to find out why. “I am far from blaming you or any one,” Flora tells him generously; but Mr. F's Aunt observes “with the deadliest animosity” that “you can't make a head and brains out of a brass knob with nothing in it” (I, 23). It is typical of Clennam's inability to acknowledge his own motives and actions that he should be bewildered at his effect on Mr. F's Aunt and ask Pancks to explain it. Mr. F's Aunt makes her final and most furious appearance after Arthur's engagement to Little Dorrit. At this point, even “Flora's eyes were a little red, and she seemed rather out of spirits,” but she manages to wish Little Dorrit well, “and find no fault with either.” In fact, she is disappointed and hurt, and Mr. F's Aunt is correspondingly enraged, “so stiffened that she had the appearance of being past bending, by any means short of powerful mechanical pressure.” She wishes to be avenged on Arthur for his desertion of Flora, and is ready to sit in the “pie-shop parlour” forever, awaiting his appearance so she can “chuck him out o' winder!” (II, 34).

Like other Dickensian shadows, Mr. F's Aunt is not only the suppressed and violent alter ego of a main character but also Dickens's critique of that character's power. Rigaud makes us aware that Clennam rationalizes his passivity; Maggy leads us to question Little Dorrit's infantilization. Mr. F's Aunt dramatizes Flora's omnivorous and man-eating capacities. What chiefly terrifies and repels Clennam about the adult Flora is her appetite. Like her father, she is “a mighty eater”; Clennam notes at their reunion meal “that she was very fond of porter, that she combined a great deal of sherry with sentiment, and that if she were a little overgrown, it was upon substantial grounds” (I, 13). Flora's characteristic speech, with its “unslackened volubility” and fecundity, is verbally engulfing; she leaves Clennam no space.

The encounter with the adult Flora revives Clennam's childhood fears of being consumed and confined, fears which he has associated with his mother; at their reunion, too, he has watched her consume a meal. Dickens connects Flora with Mrs. Clennam through the stony images he heaps on Mr. F's Aunt. She is wooden and rigid, with “a stiff yellow wig perched unevenly on the top of her head” (I, 13), and she carried a “stony reticule (an appendage of great size, and of a fossil appearance)” (I, 23). This fossilized reticule is mentioned again in the text; after Mr. F's Aunt learns of Clennam's engagement to Little Dorrit, “her stony reticule was as rigid as if it had been petrified by the Gorgon's head, and had got it at that moment inside” (II, 34).

The reticule or purse functions as a female sexual symbol in Victorian art, and its innuendos are clearly understood in Victorian pornography.³⁰ In David Copperfield, Miss Murdstone (whose name means what we would now call a “ballcutter”) carries a “hard steel purse … which … shut up like a bite.” The reticule of Mr. F's Aunt is also a kind of vagina dentata, as indicated by its associations with the Gorgon. In his note on “Medusa's Head,” Freud explained “the terror of Medusa” as “a terror of castration that is linked to sight … of the female genitals … and essentially those of his mother.”³¹ As we have seen, Mrs. Clennam too is a Gorgon, whose “hard granite face” (I, 5) and “stony head-dress” (I, 3) emphasize her unnatural power. In Clennam's world, it seems, adult women are potentially entrapping, engulfing, and sexually omnivorous.

It can thus be seen that the prisons of Little Dorrit, and especially the Marshalsea, have strongly sexual connotations. Like the Gorgon, they paralyze, engulf, and emasculate. In the debtor's prison, cut off from the money-making activity which defines their masculinity in Victorian terms, Dorrit and Clennam are impotent, dependent (whether they admit it or not) on the energy and the nurture of women. The prison imposes on its male inhabitants a form of infantile pre-Oedipal regression; when Dickens compares Little Dorrit's tenderness for her father to the “classical daughter” who nurtured her imprisoned father with the milk of her breasts (I, 19), and when he dramatizes Amy's prison relationship to Clennam as maternal (II, 29), there is a jarring note of surrender and engulfment. Sinking totally into this helplessness and experiencing it fully (as Dorrit never does), Clennam reaches the depths of his own shadow fantasies.

Yet it is Clennam's willingness to experience the confining illness of the Marshalsea—he chooses it over less claustrophobic prisons (II, 26)—to become, in fact, “the pupil of the Marshalsea” (II, 27)—that releases him from his paralysis. In the prison he studies himself, and meditates upon his suppressed feelings for Little Dorrit. Unlike Mr. Dorrit, he refuses to let himself be drawn into the inmate culture. His time is spent in the cultivation of his own memory, the “right kind of remembering”³² which is a precondition of growth. “Do Not Forget”—the message which he carries to England from his father's deathbed—becomes the theme of a moral meditation on self-knowledge.

In the Marshalsea, Clennam finally undergoes a regressive illness, like Pip's brain fever; and in his breakdown the long-repressed emotions of entrapment erupt: “His dread and hatred of the place became so intense that he felt it a labour to draw his breath in it. The sensation of being stifled sometimes so overpowered him, that he would stand at the window holding his throat and gasping. At the same time a longing for other air, and a yearning to be beyond the blind blank wall, made him feel as if he must go mad with the ardour of the desire” (II, 29). The scene looks back to Clennam's memories of having been locked in a dark closet by his parents as a punishment (I, 3) and to his stifled childhood rage as the silent, helpless witness of their loveless marriage. It is this claustrophobic confrontation with the ardent self that seems to precipitate the novel's final upheavals: total calcification and paralysis of the Gorgon-like Mrs. Clennam; the crushing of Rigaud under the collapsed house; the shearing of the “sacred locks” of Casby, the symbolic patriarch. Having destroyed the sexually emasculating “mother” and the professionally emasculating “father,” and having purged the murderous inner shadow, Clennam is free to leave the prison and to go with Little Dorrit into the “roaring streets” (II, 34). It is significant that before their marriage, Little Dorrit must nonetheless give up her “purse”—the fortune that endows her with the excessive and emasculating power of the mother.

Even with this qualification, I read the ending of Little Dorrit as one of resigned and mature optimism. Arthur and Amy leave the prison to enter a society which can never be a haven for the passive and the innocent. The world of shadows has been encountered but not dispelled; the lovers pass along “in sunshine and shade,” and around them the noisy and the eager, the arrogant and the vain, continue to fret. It is, however, the “usual uproar” (II, 34) of human conflict, rather than the poisoning unhealthy silence of the Marshalsea, which represents vitality, imagination, actuality. It is the clamor in which Dickens finds his own peace, in which he hears (to reverse George Eliot's famous line) the silence on the other side of roaring.

Notes

1. [J. Hillis Miller,] Charles Dickens: The World of His Novels (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1958), pp. 230, 229.

2. John Forster, The Life of Charles Dickens, ed. A. J. Hoppé (London: Dent, 1966), I, 16.

3. Bernard Shaw, Preface to Great Expectations (Edinburgh: R. and R. Clark, 1937), p. xi. See also William Myers, “The Radicalism of Little Dorrit,” in Literature and Politics in the Nineteenth Century, ed. John Lucas (London: Methuen, 1971), pp. 77-104.

4. Little Dorrit, New Oxford Illustrated Dickens (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1953), Bk. I, ch. 20. References to Little Dorrit are to this edition and are given parenthetically in my text by book and chapter.

5. [Erving Goffman,] Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates (Chicago: Aldine, 1961), p. 67.

6. See “Report from the Committee of the House of Commons on the Kings Bench, Fleet, and Marshalsea Prisons,” The Pamphleteer, 6 (1814), 474-519.

7. [Jonathan Arac,] Commissioned Spirits: The Shaping of Social Motion in Dickens, Carlyle, Melville, and Hawthorne (New Brunswick: Rutgers Univ. Press, forthcoming 1979), ch. 1. I am indebted to Professor Arac for allowing me to see this section in manuscript.

8. A Tale of Two Cities, New Oxford Illustrated Dickens (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1949), Bk. I, ch. 3.

9. Miller, p. 243.

10. Quoted in Forster, Life, II, 63-64.

11. Dyson, The Inimitable Dickens: A Reading of the Novels (London: Macmillan, 1970), p. 203; Lucas, The Melancholy Man: A Study of Dickens' Novels (London: Methuen, 1970), p. 248.

12. [Randolph Splitter,] “Guilt and the Trappings of Melodrama in Little Dorrit,” Dickens Studies Annual, ed. Robert B. Partlow, Jr., VI (Carbondale: Southern Illinois Univ. Press, 1977), 128.

13. Quoted in Forster, Life, II, 198.

14. Quoted in Angus Wilson, The World of Charles Dickens (New York: Viking Press, 1970), p. 194.

15. [Northrop Frye,] “Dickens and the Comedy of Humours,” The Stubborn Structure: Essays on Criticism and Society (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1970), pp. 236, 238.

16. Paul D. Herring, “Dickens' Monthly Number Plans for Little Dorrit,” Modern Philology, 64 (1966), 28.

17. Miller, p. 243.

18. [Albert D. Hutter,] “Nation and Generation in A Tale of Two Cities,” PMLA [Publications of the Modern Language Association], 93 (1978), 455.

19. [Alexander Welsh,] The City of Dickens (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), p. 135.

20. [Taylor Stoehr,] Dickens: The Dreamer's Stance (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1965), p. 178.

21. [Julian Moynahan,] “The Hero's Guilt in Great Expectations,” in Victorian Literature: Selected Essays, ed. Robert O. Preyer (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1967), p. 137.

22. See Hutter, pp. 452-55. George Holoch attributes Clennam's sense of “indefinable guilt” to “childhood repression” in “Consciousness and Society in Little Dorrit,” Victorian Studies, 21 (1978), 337.

23. Forster, Life, II, 179.

24. Splitter, p. 124, comments: “Beneath the pale shadow of father-son rivalry lies an even more primitive and more serious conflict between mother and child.”

25. “Little Dorrit: Necessary Fictions,” Studies in the Novel, 7 (1975), 202.

26. Welsh, p. 209.

27. Shaw, Preface to Great Expectations, p. vi.

28. Lucas, The Melancholy Man, p. 268; Myers, pp. 95-96. See also Holoch, p. 339; and Richard Stang, “Little Dorrit: A World in Reverse,” in Dickens the Craftsman, ed. Robert B. Partlow, Jr. (Carbondale: Southern Illinois Univ. Press, 1970), p. 158.

29. [Alan Wilde,] “Mr. F's Aunt and the Analogical Structure of Little Dorrit,” NCF, [Nineteenth-Century Fiction] 19 (1964), 37-39.

30. See G. Legman, Rationale of the Dirty Joke (New York: Grove Press, 1968), pp. 378-79; and “Walter,” My Secret Life (New York: Grove Press, 1966), pp. 525-26.

31. [Sigmund Freud,] “Medusa's Head,” Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. and ed. James Strachey et al., XVIII (London: Hogarth Press, 1953-74), 273-74. See also Hutter's comments on the Gorgon's head, pp. 449-50.

32. Barry Westburg, The Confessional Fictions of Charles Dickens (DeKalb, Ill.: Northern Illinois Univ. Press, 1977), p. 172.