Our Mutual Female Friends

A Tale of Two Cities was the first book by Charles Dickens that I read. I was about twelve years old, and it changed the way I looked at literature. The second Dickens book I read wasn’t Oliver Twist or Great Expectations or David Copperfield, the ones you might imagine (because you could find cheap editions of those at the B. Dalton bookstore in the mall, or because you considered the catalog of Classics Illustrated comic books to represent the sum total of the literary canon!). It was, for some reason now lost to even the outermost reaches of historiographical power, Our Mutual Friend. My dad and my fiancé (now wife) all got copies and read it during the same period and talked about it when we got together. Life has perhaps never been better than during those weeks of discussing Dickens with two people I loved.

I’m now enjoying my third reading of Our Mutual Friend. Many years have come between my second reading and now; it is for instance, one of the few Dickens books I haven’t blogged about before because I haven’t read it since I started this public project. I’m a little amazed at how much I remember from the book, and especially that everything I remember brings up memories of conversations with Nancy and Dad; I don’t remember anything about reading it the second time.

But, of course, I don’t remember everything in the eight-hundred page tome. The biggest surprise has been Bella Wilfer. I remembered her story well enough, but I had some details of her character wrong. I think that in my memory I had confused Bella with Caddy Jellyby from Bleak House. And I know the reason: both girls have trouble with their mothers and find solace in private dinners (i.e. lunches) with their fathers, a story line that seizes my heart and mind because it is one in which I can sympathize with both father and daughter. (Notice that my mom did not join in our Little Women-like Dickensian book club.)

But there must be other reasons that caused me to misremember details about one of the main characters of this book I cherish. Perhaps because Bella’s character isn’t as strong or deep, literarily speaking, as the characters of Mr. Bumble, Wackford Squeers, Captain Cuttle, Ebenezer Scrooge, Aunt Betsey Trotwood, Wilkins Micawber, Sydney Carton, or Miss Haversham? Yes, of course, that’s the reason. Critics have said (don’t ask me their names; I refuse to remember them!) that Dickens was never good at the characters of heroines. Let me clarify right here that by “heroine,” I think they mean “main love interest”: the person the supposedly typical young woman among readers was expected to have identified with. Betsey Trotwood is heroic in the greatest sense and stands as one of Dickens’s greatest creations, but she is not, I believe, who these critics have in mind when they deprecate Dickens’s depiction of heroines. And if I’m right about who they’re thinking about, I have to agree to a point. If the girl isn’t married at the beginning of a novel and Dickens destines her to marry before the end, he makes her pretty and earnest and good. What do I think of when I think of Kate Nickleby? That she’s pretty and earnest and good. What do I think about when I think of Lucie Manette? That she’s pretty and earnest and good. There’s more to Bella than that, but the end of her story arc finds her pretty and earnest and good.

So I partially and reluctantly agree if these nameless critics mean that Dickens wasn’t especially good at providing his eligible young women with deep characters. But if they mean that Dickens wasn’t good at drawing women, I disagree and have to defend my hero. I have two main lines of argument, and I’ll get the politically parlous one (parlous: a good Dickens word) out of the way first. I believe it’s possible that some women are indeed pretty and earnest and good, and I believe that many young women in the Victorian era, no matter how admittedly unfair or cruel or thoughtless the men of the age were at restraining women within their “sphere,” actually aimed at domestic bliss as the goal of their lives. Please tell me I’m not a monster to think it’s OK to believe that some Victorian women would have found it a great compliment to be called pretty and earnest and good. There may even be a few women today who would take joy in a slightly differently worded encomium. The problem is not, says this dude with the limited perspective of testosterone and a Y chromosome, that some women are satisfied with being pretty and good and seeing family duty as the pinnacle of fulfillment; the problem is in assuming that all women want it or ought to want it or ought to be it without wanting it. In any case, Kate Nickleby is admittedly nowhere near as interesting a literary character as, say, Anna Karenina or Scarlett O’Hara. But might she not be nevertheless true to life?

I confess, that first argument only goes so far. Elizabeth Bennet is pretty and earnest and good and also a deeply interesting character, so it was clearly possible for Dickens to do better. Perhaps we can pity the man here. In Catherine Hogarth, he found a wife who was pretty enough but who didn’t turn out to have the other two-thirds of the winning recipe. So maybe he only wanted to give his male leads happier love lives than he himself had had.

But before we leave argument no. 1, let’s acknowledge that Dickens, while not reaching Austenesque heights, does sometimes do better with his eligible females. Bella is more than the stereotype, with her mercenary edge. Esther Summerson is more, with her serious doubts about whether she can in fact live up to the stereotype expected of Victorian women, especially after smallpox erases her beauty, and with her understanding that struggle and defect and loss can actually elevate the worth of everything else in life. Susan Nipper is more, with her acid tongue. And Caddy Jellyby is more, with her melancholia and her resentment of her mother.

With Susan and Caddy, we have strayed from the group of lead love interests, and this departure leads us to argument no. 2: Dickens does just fine with women whom we don’t expect to see getting married. After all, this is Charles Dickens, wildly popular and influential author, subject of scores of scholarly books and two scholarly journals of long standing, and probably still in our tragically unbookish and functionally illiterate society the most familiar English author of the nineteenth century (although he may be second to Austen). He doesn’t enjoy this glorious reputation and eminent standing because he had serious flaws in his skills with character development. He produced a grand parade of unforgettable female characters, interesting and complex, ranging from wholesome to silly to morally ambiguous to infuriating and all the way to downright villainous.

Let’s begin with Betsey Trotwood, who hates men (and donkeys) and will not let David Copperfield forget her disappointment that he wasn’t born a girl. But she has a sad history that explains some things at least, she protects a man with mental illness, and boy! does she come through in the end! Then how about Miss Havisham, who sits in a darkened house in her wedding dress decades after she was jilted at the altar? She auditions boys to find one who will come play with her beautiful young ward just so she can watch Estella break the boy’s heart. Miserable Estella, herself, is an amazing character, a girl who cannot have the life Dickens’s ideal readers and typical female protagonists enjoyed because she has been raised as a tool by a mad recluse. (I suppose she is the lead love interest since Pip is in love with her all the way to the end of the book, but do we really want her to marry Pip? I don’t!) Then there’s Biddy, the girl Pip doesn’t notice, who has to negotiate the conflict between her feelings for Pip and, on the one hand, Victorian standards of expression (or repression) of those feelings and, on the other hand, Pip’s very consistent treatment of her in a way that makes him wholly unworthy of her affection. Biddy thinks she has to be realistic and settle for someone else, but she ends up much happier for her choice.

Give a Dickensian woman a few married years, and she can be loving like Mrs. Boffin or narcisistically shrewish like Mrs. Wilfer. Give her a job, and she might blossom into a Sarah Gamp, the drunken nurse with the conveniently fictitious friend. Give her money, and she may become a delicious villain like Lady Dedlock, who, like the Sphinx, has a secret, speaks in riddles, and never shows animation or expression on her stony face. Then there’s Mrs. Defarge, who coldly encodes the deadly fate of her enemies into her knitting while talking with them. And there’s Nancy, the prostitute with the heart of gold – and not my wife! (A side note. If you were, by the slimmest of chances, to ask me for examples of men who treated prostitutes with utmost dignity, four names would come to mind: Jesus, Cervantes, Dostoevsky, and Dickens.)

I have to stop without doing any more than mentioning Sally Brass, Mrs. Clennam, Rosa Dartle, Jenny Wren, and Miss Mowcher, all well developed and none stereotypical. And there’s Mrs. Gummidge, with one unforgettable line, and Mrs. Plornish, with one unforgettable goofy habit, and Mrs. Bagnet, who is the subject of one unforgettable joke (definitely not at her expense). None of these three women can be said to be developed as deep literary characters, yet they all live in my memory as three-dimensional human beings.

How are you supposed to take this post, dear reader of the twenty-first century? The odds are that you have lived a tragically deprived life and haven’t read these books, that you don’t know these names. In that case, my flipping through a picture book can’t possibly demonstrate to you that Dickens actually could create good female characters. But if nothing else, the fairly long litany of names in this post may at least suggest to you that the girls who are pretty and earnest and good are in the minority.