Content area
Full Text
Hilary M. Schor. Dickens and the Daughter of the House. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999. Pp. xii+232. $60.00.
This is a significant and thought-provoking book. Literary criticism has frequently taken an unsympathetic view of many of the women in Dickens's novels, especially angelic young women of the type that Edwin Pugh dismissed long ago as “femininanities” in The Charles Dickens Originals (1912). Later, near the start of the current feminist revolution, feminist critic Kate Millett was almost equally dismissive, writing that it “is one of the more disheartening flaws in the master's work that nearly all the ‘serious’ women in Dickens' fiction, with the exception of Nancy and a handful of her criminal sisters, are insipid goodies” (Sexual Politics, 1970). Although Michael Slater's Dickens and Women (1983) is an important exception, much criticism dealing with Dickens's female characters in the last twenty years has been feminist inspired, and much of this feminist criticism has followed Millett's lead, directing attention to female rebels in Dickens's novels and often saying little about the affinities between such rebels and the dutiful young women who occupy a prominent place in Dickens's fictional oeuvre. Now Hilary Schor has turned her attention to these dutiful daughters. In Dickens and the Daughter of the House, Schor provides an insightful feminist analysis of the good daughters' deviations from the patriarchal values that such daughters struggle to accept, and she elucidates what the experiences of these daughters imply about women's property and worth.
Much of Schor's book consists of new readings of individual Dickens novels from Dombey and Son to Our Mutual Friend. These sparkling and often brilliant readings are perhaps the strongest feature of the book. After an initial discussion of David Copperfield and several of Dickens's early novels, Schor turns in chapter 2 to Dombey and Son and the heart of her argument. According to Schor, in “the meeting of Florence Dombey and her stepmother Edith, and in the toll it exacts for the daughter to separate herself from the dark heroine (whom she refers to as ‘my beautiful mama’), Dickens posed the problem of the daughter within the patriarchal house, both Dombey's house and the novel, which he was to work out in the rest of...