Class, Gender and Sexuality: the Representations of Women and Domestic Myth in Charles Dickens's Little Dorrit
Date Issued
2004
Date
2004
Author(s)
Yang, Ruei-ying
DOI
en-US
Abstract
This thesis examines the representations of women in Dickens's Little Dorrit (1855-7) in relation to the domestic myth envisioned by him and the larger social controversies over the Woman Question at his time. Engaging these issues from three interrelated aspects—class, gender, and sexuality—I set out to demonstrate how Dickens as a novelist actively participates in the debates and controversies of his time, transcribing not only his domestic reform project for social ills but also personal anxieties and socio-specific complexes onto the fictional page.
Growing up in a lower-class milieu, familiar with the ways and cant of the streets, Dickens truly sympathizes with the plight of the lower class. However, as a self-made man, a public figure and a proclaimed spokesman of household bliss, Dickens represents the bourgeois myth of self-help success and constantly enacts in his fictional world middle-class imaginations of little women (daughter and/or wives) as ministering angels and milking mothers to hard-working men. By situating Little Dorrit's woman figures in Victorian cultural contexts, drawing upon nineteenth-century discourse and modern criticism, I would argue that Dickens endorses a kind of gendered domestic ideology that for him would diminish Victorian society’s emerging maladies, a domestic “fiction” that predicates on Victorian age's idealization of women and the politics of separate spheres. However, although Dickens's ideal women largely typify Victorian stereotypes and his text often underscores certain Victorian class and gender ideologies, a number of marginal/ized women in Little Dorrit break out of his authorial interpellations and problematize his domestic agenda. More scandalizing, still, are the occasional betrayals of the good daughters’subterranean desires deflected through the dubious surrogate parenting relations and the transference, if not exorcism, of ideal women’s sexual desire onto “innocent” filial piety. Through a brief survey of ideal Victorian household, ideal Victorian womanhood, and ideal Victorian appetite, I hope to illustrate Victorian fascinations with women's body size, its gynephobia complex and a nascent pedophiliac fixation on “little childlike women” many Victorian writers shared. Through Dickens the colossal Victorian, these cultural fears and fascinations found their way into Little Dorrit, surfacing mainly through subtexts or paratexts of the novel. Three abruptly interpolated stories within the story undermine most insinuatingly Dickens's domestic fiction and insistence on the redeeming grace of the childlike, innocent, virginal woman. I would argue that these stories and the very act of storytelling are as automatic, autonomous, as autoerotic to their respective storytellers, masking secret fascination with female sexuality while implicating such cultural taboos as incest and intra-female homoeroticism.
Subjects
維多利亞時期之孩童形象
亂倫
權力與論述
家庭迷思
狄更斯
小杜麗
狄更斯之戀童僻
維多利亞時期家庭觀
女性典型
性相與食慾
Victorian gender and sexuality
ideal bourgeois household
autoerotic storytelling
the Victorian child
ideal womanhood
Charles Dickens
the domestic cult
class ideology
virgins and fallen women
incest
Little Dorrit
Victorian age
pedophilia in Dickens
power and discourse
Victorian sexuality and appetite
surrogate parenthood
Dickens and Darwin
Type
thesis
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