[In the following essay, Winter examines the issue of deference in the character of Amy Dorrit and its relationship to Dickens's criticism of British society.]

In his essay on Dickens' Little Dorrit (1855-57), Lionel Trilling argues that in this novel “the desire for money is subordinated to the desire for deference.”¹ In Victorian society rituals of deference—a wife's deferring to her husband's wishes, a child's deferring to adult discipline and expectations, or a servant's deferring to a master's or mistress's orders—played an important role in the maintenance of gender and class hierarchies. The crucible of hierarchical relationships and of the deferential strategies for acting out and coping with them is the Victorian “Home”—domestic hierarchies, materially and spiritually supported by feminine domestic labor, perpetuate the bonds which construct patriarchal society as one big “Family” where everyone has his or her appointed place. The desire for deference Trilling describes is most dramatically fulfilled by Little Dorrit herself, the novel's exemplary performer of social deference and domestic labor. Yet Little Dorrit's deference and domestic labor serve far more numerous and ambivalent purposes in the novel than simply to support her imprisoned father and “fallen family”.² In fact, I will be arguing that while Little Dorrit embodies and carries out Dickens' novelistic project of reform, her deference also defers this project, so that Dickens's social criticism becomes another “circumlocution.” Although Dickens wants his readers to follow Little Dorrit's example of serving others, he also demonstrates how desirable and comforting it is to be served, even how serving others ultimately serves one's own best interests.

Dickens claims that Little Dorrit is “inspired to be something … different and laborious, for the sake of the rest” (111). What is different about Little Dorrit and her work? Her difference for Arthur lies both in her special treatment by his mother, and also in her double life, the secret of which he learns when he visits her at home in the Marshalsea prison. Little Dorrit is both the breadwinner and the housewife in the Dorrits' nineteenth-century single-parent household: she both works outside the prison—keeping the location of her home secret from her employers—and she also works at home, where she must conceal both her outside work and the necessity for it from her father: “over and above her other daily cares, the Child of the Marshalsea had always upon her the care of preserving the genteel fiction that they were all idle beggars together” (114). Thus she takes upon herself not only the physical labor of housework and let[ting] herself out” (93), but also the “emotions work” of maintaining her family's illusions of “gentility” within the prison. Little Dorrit's most important “difference,” then, is her refusal to make any difference: her unobtrusive domestic labor purposely obscures the contrasts between “genteel” life inside and outside the prison.

I take the term “emotions work” from Arlie Russel Hochschild's The Managed Heart, an impressive study of the exploitation by modern capital of the worker's emotions in service-sector jobs.³ Hochschild defines “emotions work” or “emotion management” as labor which “requires one to induce or suppress feeling in order to sustain the outward countenance that produces the proper state of mind in others” (7). Hochschild also explains that even acts of emotion management which seem only to serve an individual's personal interests are actually formulated within a context of socially defined “feeling rules”:

Acts of emotion management are not simply private acts; they are used in exchanges under the guidance of feeling rules. Feeling rules are standards used in emotional conversation to determine what is rightly owed and owing in the currency of feeling. Through them, we tell what is “due” in each relation, each role.

(18)

Following this economic concept of emotion payment and emotional indebtedness, we could extend Trilling's observation about Little Dorrit to say that deference becomes the most desired source of “wealth” and status in the novel. The deference of the “Collegians” can make the indebted Mr. Dorrit (at least in his own mind) into a beneficent patriarch—he may not be rich, but he can still afford to be “magnanimous” (274). Later in the novel, Mr. Dorrit needs to receive deference from innkeepers and servants in order to confirm the social value of his long-deferred wealth. Most instrumental to the maintenance of his “genteel” patriarchal fiction, however, is Little Dorrit's emotion work. In Dickens' novel, feminine domestic labor and emotion management provide the deferential capital needed to “liberate” the emotional debtor from the “prisons” of diminished patriarchal power and fallen families.

Hochschild believes that women have traditionally made more use of emotion management than men, principally because:

women in general have far less independent access to money, power, authority or status in society, [and therefore,] lacking other resources, women make a resource out of feeling and offer it to men as a gift in return for the more material resources they lack.

(163)

Hochschild goes on to explain that women have been obliged to make the best of the limited leverage these emotional resources have offered, both in personal relationships and in society at large; they do not passively allow their emotions to run their lives, nor secretly manipulate those around them, but rather “adapt feeling to a need or purpose at hand, and they do it so that it seems to express a passive state of agreement” (167). Thus women perform an almost invisible labor of emotional accommodation, which may improve their situation without, however, radically redistributing power:

The emotion work of enhancing the status and well-being of others is a form of what Ivan Illich has called “shadow labor,” an unseen effort, which, like housework, does not quite count as labor but is nevertheless crucial to getting other things done. … In fact, of course, when we redefine “adaptability” and “cooperativeness” as a form of shadow labor, we are pointing to a hidden cost for which some recompense is due. …⁴

(167, 70; my emphasis added)

Dickens does not ignore the emotional debts which Little Dorrit's shadow labor creates, but rather spends a great deal of narrative time and anxiety attempting to repay her.

Little Dorrit's emotion management is directed both inward and outward; she simultaneously manages both her own feelings and desires and attempts to satisfy the desires of others. She represents her management of her own desires in the story of the “tiny woman” and the “Princess” (341-43). Her fictional account of the tiny woman's love for a man whom she cannot have (presumably Arthur) is embedded in a larger fantasy of a perfect father-daughter family, that of the powerful and rich King and his daughter the Princess. If Little Dorrit's father had been a “King,” (a real Patriarch, instead of the father of the Marshalsea), then she might have been the Princess, and her management of her desires would have been as unproblematic as their fulfillment. Little Dorrit imagines that if she were the Princess, she would already know everything that the “masters” of the world had to “teach,” and thus she would never need to perform the deferential shadow labor of the “tiny” domestic worker. Instead, she would be able to ride out in her carriage and openly practice an omniscient charity. Little Dorrit's fantasy of feminine wisdom and altruistic power, however, depends on the model of the aristocratic, patriarchal family: in order for her to be a Princess her father must first be a King. Moreover, Little Dorrit's Princess-role neither frees her to desire, nor to fulfill her desires, but rather takes her beyond desire to a removed and beneficent curiosity. The Princess is Little Dorrit's ideal precisely because she does not need to control her desires. The tiny woman's predicament demonstrates that performing emotion management creates desire, even if only for a “shadow.” Members of the ideal, aristocratic family are charitable and wise, but the “head” of a “fallen” family must defer and control the hidden and painful desires constantly generated by her shadow labor.

Little Dorrit's perfect application of Victorian feeling rules seems to have more in common with the Princess's wisdom than with the tiny woman's self-denial, yet her story-telling reveals that even she cannot live up to the Victorian code of feminine emotional self-control and lack of self-interested desire. Little Dorrit's deference, therefore, as well as her fictions about herself, also allow her to manage and diminish her desires so that they make no demands upon their already lost objects: “nobody missed it, … nobody was the worse for it” (342). Seen through the tiny woman's eyes, Little Dorrit's emotion work has a double purpose: by devoting herself to other people's desires she can both try to forget her own, and also spare others the pain of having to “treasure” a shadow. Although the tiny woman is “proud” of her beloved shadow, Little Dorrit can only cry and attempt to resign herself to prospects from which even her imagination cannot remove the “inescapable brand” of her domestic prison (337-38). Fortunately, however, her deference and selfless service will not be in vain, even though she seems unaware that her very stance of laboring on while suppressing her love will ultimately earn her its object.

Little Dorrit's outward-directed emotion management functions to keep secrets and preserve illusions. Little Dorrit is the object of desires for a deference which, because of her “difference”—her ideal character—she can guarantee as genuine. When her father, and later Arthur, look into “her earnest face” and “clear true eyes” (433), they need not suffer the slightest doubt or fear that there is anything but authentic loyalty and love behind her deference. In her mediation of other characters' desires, Little Dorrit becomes the standard against which all emotional or domestic behavior is measured, so that any character who desires love, or deference, or even power, in some sense “borrows” from Little Dorrit's emotional capital, and thus ends up indebted to her. Because she is the novel's ideal and source of its emotional-economic legitimacy and solvency, (she guarantees that Dickens's novel, and his moral message, will pay off in the end), Little Dorrit becomes the implied third term in every relationship. As Arthur finally realizes, she is the “vanishing point” of his own story: “Every thing in its perspective led to her innocent figure” (801).

Little Dorrit's mediations in the novel bring her both between men and between women.⁵ Her deference and emotion management “erase” the incestuous content of her relationships with her father and Arthur, so that no matter how maternally, conjugally or filially she behaves toward them, she can maintain her status as innocent child, rather than woman.⁶ Little Dorrit comes between her father and the standards of the outside world, helping him to believe that the Father of the Marshalsea receives from his fellow prisoners the deference due to a true patriarch. At the end of the novel, Little Dorrit's devotion also inspires Arthur to accept the position she has engineered for him with the help of Mr. Meagles and Daniel Doyce. Thus Little Dorrit uses her prodigious (and painfully won) skill at emotion management to serve the men she loves: she succeeds in reinstating them in positions of conventional (if diminished) masculine authority, despite their failures.

If Little Dorrit is Dickens' exemplary “managed heart,” then Miss Wade is her negative double or shadow, “an unsubduable nature” (62): “I am self-contained and self-reliant; your opinion is nothing to me; I have no interest in you, care nothing for you, and see and hear you with indifference” (62). Miss Wade is a former domestic worker (a governess) who, unlike Little Dorrit, refuses to perform shadow labor or put up with what she sees as the “fool's” role of maintaining domestic fictions by giving or accepting deference: “If I could have been habitually imposed upon, instead of habitually discerning the truth, I might have lived as smoothly as most fools do” (725). Although Dickens calls Mr. Dorrit's patriarchal delusions “self-imposition” (276), he also implies that Little Dorrit is actually responsible for her father's state: “[her] love alone had saved him to be even what he was” (276). Thus Miss Wade seems to voice Dickens' ambivalence about Little Dorrit's emotion management: according to Miss Wade's discernment, deference supports a system of “swollen patronage and selfishness calling themselves kindness, protection, benevolence, and other fine names” (734). Miss Wade's much resented category of “[l]ittle images of grown people” (726) clearly includes Little Dorrit.

Even though Dickens presents Miss Wade as a woman whose grievances are in some sense justified by her illegitimate birth and resulting lack of social status, he finally judges her and decides her fate in the novel according to the standards set by Little Dorrit. Miss Wade's “unhappy temper” (727) is her own fault after all—Dickens entitles her autobiographical letter to Arthur, “The History of a Self-Tormenter” (725). Thus Miss Wade's discernment of the truth and her indictment of social hypocrisy, despite Dickens' own similar criticisms, finally are shown to result merely from her bad attitude. Miss Wade's fate demonstrates what seems to be the novel's message of domestic accommodation: in order to achieve and maintain a reasonably “happy” temper, one must learn to accept the imposition of domestic fictions. Miss Wade also threatens the patriarchal family by her attempt to reproduce herself and her desires through Tattycoram. However, as Mr. Meagles warns her, in Dickens' world such a feminine desire for self-reproduction, along with its erotic component, is a perversion: “If it should happen that you are a woman, who, from whatever cause, has a perverted delight in making a sister-woman as wretched as she is (I am old enough to have heard of such), I warn her against you, and I warn you against yourself” (379). Mr. Meagles is also quick to dispel the last attractions of such a sisterhood by pointing to Little Dorrit as a positive example for Tattycoram:

“You see that young lady who was here just now—that little, quiet, fragile figure passing along there, Tatty? Look. The people stand out of the way to let her go by. The men—see the poor, shabby fellows—pull off their hats to her quite politely. … I have heard tell, Tattycoram, that her young life has been one of active resignation, goodness, and noble service. Shall I tell you what I consider those eyes of hers … to have always looked at, to get that expression?”

“Yes, if you please, sir.”

“Duty, Tattycoram.”

(881)

Here Tattycoram learns part of the secret about how Little Dorrit is repaid for her deferential emotion work: it is a simple exchange—when you give deference you get deference back. Thus Dickens represents a kind of utopia of perfectly managed hearts, within the prison. Yet this ideal of reciprocal deference obscures the very nature of the deferential relationship—an exchange between two people of unequal status. Tattycoram receives this egalitarian domestic fiction as a fringe benefit of her domestic labor, in addition to her “wages” of duty (another word for shadow labor), which she promises to count perpetually, even up to “five and twenty thousand” (880).

Therefore, Little Dorrit's emotion management and her status as feminine ideal in the novel reveal a further function of her domestic labor and deference: coming between, and separating, women. Little Dorrit's mediation does not enable women to work together and create empowering bonds through common experience. Rather, Dickens uses Little Dorrit's “ideal” example to encourage women to work alone at home, and to hope for the same kind of “success” she achieves at the end of the novel through emotional accommodation and shadow labor in service of the patriarchal family. In the world of Dickens' novel, no political movements or class or gender consciousness-raising are possible, because men and women are encouraged to think of their own familial and personal experiences as unique and unrelated to the situations of others, even though the novel's plot should bind together all the individual characters' stories. The much put-upon and “squeezed” Bleeding Hearts also fail to live up to the metaphorical connotations of their nickname: they neither revolt, nor even “torment themselves” over their poverty and unemployment, but rather, symptomatically, they build “Happy Cottages” (630). Even the proletariat is satisfied with the facades of domestic fictions.

In the end, the novel's exemplary “managed heart,” Little Dorrit, does receive her heart's desire: marriage to Arthur. Little Dorrit's desire is fulfilled precisely because she simultaneously denies and nurtures it through shadow labor, like the precious but precarious resource it is. Little Dorrit's service ultimately wins her the love and domestic happiness, if not the disinterested mastery, she desired. Finally, then, Dickens' novel proposes complementary strategies to its female and male readers: Little Dorrit promises women that if they practice self-management and dedicate themselves to the service of the patriarchal family they, like Little Dorrit, will ultimately get what they want, while it counsels its males readers to control their desires, and, more importantly, to accept and make use of feminine domestic labor and emotion management.

Before she proposes marriage to Arthur (828), Little Dorrit comes into possession of a secret whose revelation could explode his already unstable domestic fiction: she knows the true meaning of the mysterious inscription in Arthur's father's watch, “Do Not Forget” (406). Rigaud's theft of the box with the family documents forces the domestic “Nemesis” to reveal her own theft and false position in the Clennam household: Mrs. Clennam is not Arthur's real mother and she has withheld the fortune that should have belonged to Little Dorrit, the niece of Arthur's real mother's patron. Mrs. Clennam has not only assumed the rights and privileges of maternity, but she also attempts the ultimate usurpation of paternal authority—she makes her own will into the will of God. According to Jeremiah Flintwinch, however, she has only succeeded in becoming God's dark shadow: “I call you a female Lucifer in appetite for power!” (851). Despite Jeremiah's harangue, Mrs. Clennam does not seem to fear divine judgment. Yet she rises from her chair “as if a dead woman had risen” (853), when Rigaud threatens to reveal her false maternity to Arthur, and she asks Little Dorrit to keep the truth from him until after she is dead: “Let me never feel, while I am still alive, that I die before his face, and utterly perish away from him, like one consumed by lighting and swallowed by an earthquake” (860). Although Little Dorrit promises not to tell Arthur the truth, Mrs. Clennam's apocalyptic nightmare of domestic punishment still comes true: the Clennam house collapses, and Mrs. Clennam becomes a living “statue” (863). Dickens implies that this latter state was a logical possible development of her “rigid” and “Bumptious” character (851), yet Mrs. Clennam's final silence and paralysis are in fact “enforced upon her” (863). Who is the “enforcer” here?

In her discussion of Mrs. Clennam as an “emasculating” mother, Elaine Showalter connects her to the image of the mother in Freud's “Medusa's Head” essay; she concludes that ‘[i]n Clennam's world, … adult women are potentially entrapping, engulfing, and sexually omnivorous.”⁷ While I agree that for Arthur Mrs. Clennam functions as a maternal “Gorgon,” I also believe that she meets her own Nemesis in Little Dorrit herself. Little Dorrit is also a “Medusa,”: the petrifying power of her role as feminine ideal effectively paralyzes any woman who fails to live up to her standard. Yet Little Dorrit's “enforcement” of Victorian gender roles within the novel does not make her an unambiguously powerful nor oppressive figure—she neither “castrates,” nor tyrannizes, nor manipulates, in fact, as we have seen in the story of the tiny woman, she too must defer her own desires. Rather, Little Dorrit is the “vanishing point” of the novel's enforcement of patriarchy—her shadow labor covers patriarchy's tracks. She is also the ideal “Sphinx” who never asks Oedipus the riddle of origins, and thus spares him the knowledge of his father's and mother's true names.

Little Dorrit's role as vanishing point in his own story also causes Arthur a great deal of distress and guilt during his feverish days and nights of self-torment in the Marshalsea prison:

None of us clearly know to whom or to what we are indebted in this wise, until some marked stop in the whirling wheel of life brings the right perception with it. … It came to Clennam in his adversity, strongly and tenderly. … “If I, a man, with a man's advantages and means and energies, had slighted the whisper in my heart, that if my father had erred, it was my first duty to conceal the fault and to repair it, what youthful figure with tender feet going almost bare on the damp ground, with spare hands ever working, … would have stood before me to put me to shame? Little Dorrit's.” … Always, Little Dorrit. Until it seemed to him as if he met the reward of having wandered away from her, and suffered anything to pass between him and his remembrance of her virtues.

(787)

Arthur is in prison not only for bankruptcy, but also for his emotional debt to Little Dorrit. This passage seems to me exemplary of the function and consequences of Little Dorrit's shadow labor and emotion management in the novel. All Dickens' readers should ideally come to this “right perception” of the Little Dorrits in their lives, and should feel to some extent “put to shame.” Arthur makes Little Dorrit his inspiration in his search for his father's fault; her emotion management of Mr. Dorrit teaches Arthur to create domestic fictions in order to “conceal” paternal weaknesses. Moreover, Little Dorrit's suppression of Arthur's real mother's identity and his parents' adultery allows Arthur finally to repay his debt to her by marrying her: if he had known that Mrs. Clennam had deprived Little Dorrit of her fortune, Arthur's guilt would probably have made marriage to her a virtual emotional bankruptcy, distressing to his masculinity. Dickens never tells us what Arthur believes about the fall of his house and his mother's final paralysis; presumably marriage to Little Dorrit also dissolves his obligation to find out the truth about his origins—he has a new domestic fiction to keep him “happy.”

By marrying Little Dorrit, however, Arthur also, unknowingly, makes some reparation for that paternal fault to his real mother, with whom Little Dorrit has been associated since her first appearance in the novel. According to Affery, a “shadowy figure of a girl” has been haunting the Clennam house: “Who else rustles about it, making signals by dropping dust so softly? Who else comes and goes, and marks the walls with long crooked touches when we are all a-bed?’” (854). These nocturnal activities are shadow labor beyond the grave, the haunting of a martyred mother to whom “some recompense” is still due. Although Dickens later discredits Affery's interpretation of these mysterious phenomena (863), he does not deny that the house collapses under the pressure of maternal secrets, almost as if it had been sucked into the vacuum left by Mrs. Clennam's revelations, despite Little Dorrit's prompt cover-up. When the Clennam house falls following the limited identification of Arthur's real mother, (the reader never learns her name, nor the contents of her “mad” letters), it crushes and buries not only the domestic blackmailer and wife-killer, Rigaud, but also the shadow of a repressed, guilt-producing maternity.

Little Dorrit, the novel's universal emotion banker, takes on Arthur's emotional debts to his real mother, and Mrs. Clennam's debts to Arthur and to herself, and then burns the “IOUs” in the fire (893). By burning the lost codicil, Little Dorrit once again chooses to keep family secrets and to preserve domestic fictions. Thus Little Dorrit is also the novel's ideal emotional creditor and Mother—she extends a limitless credit of domestic devotion and of “forgiving and forgetting” (881), and she never asks for repayment. With Little Dorrit in charge of emotional indebtedness, no debtor should have to face his or her domestic prison.

In fact, the only characters in the novel who do end up paying their emotional debts dearly, are two women who only become indebted because they refuse to extend or to accept unlimited emotional credit. Dickens describes Mrs. Clennam as a merciless judge of emotional “defaulters”: “Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors was a prayer too poor in spirit for her” (86). Miss Wade refuses to take credit for not having any improper intentions toward the friend of her fiance, and she interprets her future mother-in-law's advice as the condescension of an employer: “Her other servants would probably be grateful for good characters, but I wanted none” (773). Thus these negative doubles of Dickens' heroine become the “petrified” objects of the resentment—“an inward protest and feeling of antagonism” (134)—which Little Dorrit's infinite emotional credit provokes.

Dickens also repays Little Dorrit by not paying her back. All the negative and violent feelings generated by the “impositions” of her emotion management and shadow labor are redirected at her own shadows, Mrs. Clennam and Miss Wade. Dickens attempts a partial resolution of this ambivalent attitude toward guilt-producing maternal devotion by illuminating (as on the title page of the 1857 edition of the novel) the ideal figure of the “Little Mother.” He reminds his readers not to forget her, but his warning also applies to Little Dorrit's threatening, abused doubles, laboring almost unnoticed in the domestic shadows.

Little Dorrit, the novel, also carries out Dickens' project of emotion management through its own domestic fiction. Despite Dickens' criticism of hypocritical “Patriarchs” and aristocratic, family-run bureaucracies like the Circumlocution Office, he finally falls back on the patriarchal model of marriage, supported by feminine domestic labor and deferential emotion work. If something does go wrong with the Family, individuals like Mrs. Clennam and Miss Wade, and even Mr. Dorrit, will be the guilty parties, and not the patriarchal family structure itself. Thus Little Dorrit proposes a “practical”⁸ alternative to the “self-torment” of rebellion or of constant dwelling-upon the faults of those with whom one is forced to live: Dickens' readers should create and take comfort in domestic fictions like Arthur's and Little Dorrit's marriage, “a modest life of usefulness and happiness” (895).⁹ Little Dorrit even promises readers concerned with the duration of her emotional credit that she will “lovingly close [their] eyes on the Marshalsea and all its blighted fruits” (895). Little Dorrit's offer of maternal devotion and forgiveness may not change “Society,” but hopefully it will reform a few emotional debtors.

As for the prison, in all its connotations, Dickens seems finally to reject Miss Wade's revolutionary impulses once again: “If I had been shut up in any place to pine and suffer, I should always hate that place and want to burn it down, or raze it to the ground” (61). Instead, the novel concludes in favor of Mr. Meagles's “practical” and charitable speculation: “I dare say a prisoner begins to relent towards his prison after he is let out” (60). If anyone is ever “let out” of prison in Dickens' world, then she or he might no longer need to call it home.

Notes

1. Lionel Trilling, “Little Dorrit,” in The Opposing Self (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1950), p. 51.

2. Charles Dickens, Little Dorrit (New York: Penguin Books, 1967) 112. Subsequent references to the novel are to this edition and are cited parenthetically in the text by page number.

3. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983) 7. Subsequent references are cited parenthetically in the text by page number.

4. My use of Illich's term “shadow labor” follows Hochschild's limited use; I intend “shadow labor” to represent metaphorically (following the novel's own representations) the capital yet repressed status of feminine and maternal domestic labor, and the economy of “diminished” desire, (a desire whose expression or fulfillment in the real world seems impossible, but which is nevertheless—or correspondingly—powerful and “treasured,” like the tiny woman's desire for the “shadow”), which underlies Little Dorrit's emotion management. For critiques of the sexism in Illich's constructions of gender see Gloria Bowles, et al. “Beyond the Backlash: A Feminist Critique of Ivan Illich's Theory of Gender” Feminist Issues 3 (Spring 1983): 3-43.

5. I am indebted to Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985) for her analysis of male homosocial bonding, which challenged me to question more closely the position of a female mediator like Little Dorrit.

6. Only the prostitute, who at first confuses the identities of Maggy and her Little Mother, reminds Little Dorrit that there are some domestic and social “falls” that her deferential shadow labor cannot redeem or clean up (218). This “woman” (as Dickens euphemistically [?] calls her) sees something in Little Dorrit's eyes that Arthur and Mr. Dorrit cannot see, perhaps a glimmer of the tiny woman's desires. Little Dorrit's sexuality cannot be entirely idealized away, although it seems that only a “woman” can see Little Dorrit's own vulnerability to a fall.

7. Elaine Showalter, “Guilt, Authority and the Shadows of Little Dorrit,” Nineteenth-Century Fiction 34 (June 1979): 39.

8. The Meagles's seemingly idiosyncratic use of the word “practical”—which in their vocabulary seems to mean “charitable,” or “kind” or “sentimental”—also demonstrates the usefulness of service in Dickens's novel: it is “practical” for the Meagles to be kind to Tattycoram because in return she will be loyal to them. Their practicality also extends to employing attractive female domestics: “why not have something pretty to look at, if you have anything at all?” (241).

9. Dickens also identifies Little Dorrit's marriage as a passage out of the “death” of her sexually ambiguous earlier life:

   this young lady is one of our curiosities, and has now come to the third volume of our Registers. Her birth is in what I call the first volume; she lay asleep, on this very floor, with her pretty head on what I call the second volume; and she's now a-writing her little name as a bride in what I call the third volume.

   (894)

   The second volume is the burial register (219); Little Dorrit's rite of passage takes her from birth, to death, to marriage, as if her shadow labor finds its eternal life in the roles of wife and mother.