Little Dorrit and Dorothea Brooke: Interpreting the Heroines of History

Little Dorrit and Dorothea Brooke: Interpreting the Heroines of HistoryAuthor(s): Alison BoothSource: Nineteenth-Century Literature, Vol. 41, No. 2 (Sep., 1986), pp. 190-216Published by: University of California PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3045138 .

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Little Dorrit and Dorothea Brooke: Interpreting the Heroines of History ALISON BOOTH

CF Thomas Carlyle were called upon to write a history of Victorian fiction,

he would point to the biographies of eminent novelists, notably Charles Dickens, popular romancer, and George Eliot, philosoph- ical realist. Assuming, of course, that Carlyle would agree with our twentieth-century assessment of their importance, he would use their biographies to personify contrasting trends in the period. I have no wish to make a Carlylean melodrama of literary history; rather, I recall his method in order to point out what Dickens and Eliot have in common: the role of "hero-as-man-of-letters" that Carlyle defined for his age. These authors interpreted the heroic part independently, insisting, for one thing, that such historical "heroes" might be women. Both Dickens and Eliot acknowledged their debt to the Sage of Chelsea. Yet as novelists they could not subscribe to the doctrine from Hero-Worship that "Universal His- tory" is made up of the "united biographies" of great men; nor could they accept Carlyle's Calvinistic distrust of fiction. Rather, they seem to have responded to his demand, expressed in the 1830 essay, "On History," that historians turn from political events to study the detail of experience: "History is the essence of innumerable Biographies." In the narration of exemplary lives, the

C 1986 by The Regents of the University of California

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LITTLE DORRIT AND DOROTHEA BROOKE 191

novelist, writing a form of biographical history, would be offering something useful in Carlyle's terms.' Instead of eulogizing historic supermen, however, Dickens and Eliot invoked quite the opposite: figures neither preeminent nor manly who yet redeem the common experience of a burdensome past.

Different as their allegiances and practices were, Dickens and Eliot owe much to the nineteenth-century recognition that history need not present a dry public chronicle and fiction need not render fabulous doings in high circles. Whether the narrative was offered as history or fiction, writer and reader could collaborate in a compromise between "fact" and "value," tempering interest with plausibility.2 Dickens and Eliot follow Carlyle in adapting the form of spiritual biography to illustrate this middle ground, what might be called everyday heroism; in their hands the form be-

"'Summary" to "The Hero as Divinity," On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History, Vol. 5 of The Works of Thomas Carlyle, ed. Henry Duff Traill, Centenary ed., 30 vols. (London: Chapman and Hall, 1896-99), p. 245; "On History," in Vol. 2 of Critical and Miscellaneous Essays, in Works, XXVII, 86. Carlyle's Professor Sauer- teig identifies fiction with lying in "Biography" (1832) in Vol. 3 of Critical and Miscellaneous Essays, in Works, XXVIII, 49. Although Dickens presented himself as Carlyle's disciple (see Vol. 3 of The Letters of Charles Dickens, in The Nonesuch Dickens, ed. Walter Dexter, 23 vols. [Bloomsbury, London: Nonesuch Press, 1938], XII, 348), Carlyle insisted, according to D. A. Wilson, that "some practical work done is worth innumerable 'Oliver Twists'. . . and any amount of other ingenious danc- ing on the slack rope" (quoted by George H. Ford, Dickens and His Readers [1955; rpt. New York: Gordian Press, 1974], p. 89). See Michael Goldberg, Carlyle and Dickens (Athens, Ga.: Univ. of Georgia Press, 1972); and William Oddie, Dickens and Carlyle (London: Centenary Press, 1972). In 1852 Marian Evans praised Car- lyle's biography of John Sterling for tracing the path of "a restless aspiring soul" in an unremarkable life (Essays of George Eliot, ed. Thomas Pinney [London: Rout- ledge, 1963], p. 47), as she was later to do in her novels. According to the Life and Memoirs of John Churton Collins, Carlyle read Middlemarch as "neither amusing nor instructive, but just dull" (quoted in Ford, Dickens and His Readers, p. 89). On Carlyle's influence on nineteenth-century fiction, particularly on George Eliot, see U. C. Knoepflmacher's review of several works on Carlyle in Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 32 (1977), 73-80.

2Truth bridges "fact" and "value," as Edward Hallett Carr notes in What Is History? (New York: Random House, 1961), p. 175. Frank Kermode, The Genesis of Secrecy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1979), pp. 117-18, discusses the relation between historical and fictional narratives, citing Gallie's concept of "followability" as "a narrative structure imposed upon events" (W. B. Gallie, Phi- losophy and the Historical Understanding [New York: Schocken Books, 1964], p. 64).

30n spiritual biography, see Barry V. Qualls, The Secular Pilgrims of Victorian Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1982), pp. 10-13. Jane P. Tompkins



192 NINETEENTH-CENTURY LITERATURE

comes even more pronouncedly secular. The conversion which lends an intelligible structure to their latter-day domestic histories is social rather than religious: "a turning from self-regard to love and social responsibility," as Barbara Hardy puts it.4 The heroines of Little Dorrit (1857) and Middlemarch (1871-72), though not the only characters who trace such a conversion or turn, are the ones most reminiscent of a lost age of heroism or sanctity. Yet, as each author stresses, Little Dorrit and Dorothea are sorely constrained by their milieu. The historian of common life faces the possibility that human experience resists interpretation: that in modern narrative there may be little change or progress in spite of moments of saving grace.

Different as Dickens and Eliot often are in style and approach, Little Dorrit and Middlemarch invite comparison in terms of their heroines.5 Both are weighty and time-consuming serial novels that deal with self-sacrificing women.6 Extremely popular, each novel generally met with the praise expected for a work by the leading novelist of the day; yet some reviewers added a re- proach for the gloominess and difficulty of these massive studies of English society.7 Both novels are set in the authors' childhood,

("Sentimental Power: Uncle Tom's Cabin and the Politics of Literary History," in The New Feminist Criticism, ed. Elaine Showalter [New York: Pantheon Books, 1985], p. 91) discusses the "typological narrative" of sentimental novels that portray history as "a continual reenactment of the sacred drama of redemption." Tompkins op- poses this form to "works like Middlemarch," but the story of Dorothea sustains a reading as Evangelical myth.

4The Moral Art of Dickens (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1970), p. 27. 5With their difference in education, temperament, and sex, Dickens and Eliot

might be characters from separate walks of life in one of their late novels, revealing an unexpected interdependence. Recent studies stress what they have in common as architects of many-storied novels: Robert L. Caserio, Plot, Story, and the Novel (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1979); Peter K. Garrett, The Victorian Multiplot Novel (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1980).

6Little Dorrit was published from December 1855 to June 1857 in eighteen monthly numbers (Harvey Peter Sucksmith, introd., Little Dorrit, ed. Sucksmith [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979], pp. 1-li; further page references to this edition appear parenthetically in the text). Middlemarch appeared from December 1871 to December 1872 in eight parts (Gordon S. Haight, Bibliographical Note, Middle- march, ed. Haight, Riverside ed. [Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1956], p. xxi; subsequent references to this edition are incorporated into the text).

7[E. B. Hamley], "Remonstrance with Dickens," Blackwood's Magazine, April 1857, pp. 490-503, rpt. in Dickens: The Critical Heritage, ed. Philip Collins (London:




around the time of the first Reform Bill.8 Though not strictly speaking historical novels-for one thing, neither portrays actual historical figures-the detailed reconstruction of time and place, with complex critical reference from past to present, has led them to be read as historical.9 The elaboration of a locale-Middle- march or London-that changes at its own pace while the characters come and go is enhanced by the interaction of numerous social circles.

Where does the heroine belong in the simulacrum of a historical world? The titles, Little Dorrit and Middlemarch, promising the ordinary, middling, or diminutive, obscure as much as they specify. Dickens entitled his monument in honor of the heroine, who stepped in when he was at a standstill with a social satire called "Nobody's Fault." The published title, nevertheless, is anonymous enough to refer to a place or a quality. Without the original title page showing a girl emerging from a doorway, readers might not have anticipated that "Little Dorrit" was female, and the ques-

Routledge, 1971), p. 359; "The Melancholy of 'Middlemarch,'" Spectator, 1 June 1872, rpt. in George Eliot and Her Readers, ed. John Holmstrom and Laurence Lerner (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1966), pp. 78-83. Both Little Dorrit and Middlemarch were considered by some to be too convoluted and polemical: [James Fitzjames Stephen], "The Licence of Modern Novelists," Edinburgh Review, July 1857, pp. 124-56, rpt. in Dickens: The Critical Heritage, p. 366; and "The Melan- choly of 'Middlemarch,'" pp. 78-79. Eliot and Dickens were both praised for painterly precision and lifelike characters.

8Little Dorrit opens with the words, "Thirty years ago," as though conscious of Scott's "'Tis sixty years since," yet the narrative is less peppered with perspective- setting irony than Middlemarch. Eliot's narrator observes: "The world in general was more ignorant of good and evil by forty years than it is at present" (Middle- march, ed. Haight, p. 139). On the historical setting of Little Dorrit, see Sucksmith, introd., Little Dorrit, p. xxix.

9Both novels refer to historical figures without fully characterizing them; Dick- ens, like a political cartoonist, invents names, whereas Eliot refers to Wellington or Bichat in the manner of an essayist. See Avrom Fleishman, The English Historical Novel (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1971); Thomas F. Deegan, "George Eliot's Historical Thought and Her Novels of the Historical Imagination," Diss. North- western University 1970; Michael York Mason, "Middlemarch and History," Nine- teenth-Century Fiction, 25 (1971), 417-31; Frank Kermode, "Novel, History and Type," Novel, 1 (1968), 231-38; J. Hillis Miller, "Narrative and History," ELH, 41 (1974), 455-73; Sucksmith, introd., Little Dorrit, pp. xv-xvi, xxix, xxxi; Malcolm Andrews, Dickens on England and the English (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1979), p. 131.




tion of whether she is a child or a woman is kept before us throughout the book. The name is a diminutive either of a woman's name or a patronymic, suggesting endurance, doors, gifts (as in "Dorothea"). Like Dickens, Eliot was bogged down in a study of social interdependence when she added the heroine, in this case the subject of an originally separate story, "Miss Brooke," which was then spliced onto Lydgate's biography to amplify "A Study of Provincial Life."'0 "Middlemarch" is a plausible name for a town in the Midlands, but of course it suggests a way for the middle class, a period midway in history, a purgatory reached from Dante's halfway point. In both cases, the heroine was introduced to a work in progress, lending her vitality to a biographical history of England in the 1830s.

Why is Little Dorrit not received as primarily "about" its epon- ymous heroine? Unlike Little Nell, Little Dorrit "never became a cult-figure," according to Philip Collins." Critics have been more enthusiastic about the structures of which she forms a part; themes of imprisonment, red tape, shadows, disease, or genteel fictions seem to explain more than does the tender little cipher going about her chores.'2 According to the tradition deriving from George Eliot and Henry James, a feminine ideal is an artistic fail- ure. Yet some readers have detected a sinister aspect in Little Dor- rit.'3 Others read her as a daring creation of "untinctured good-

'0Dickens' notebook for the novel, as pointed out by John Forster in his Life of Charles Dickens, indicates Dickens' initial interest in "people who lay all their sins negligences and ignorances, on Providence," hence the projected title, "Nobody's Fault" (see Sucksmith, introd., Little Dorrit, p. xiii). Nearly two years after George Eliot began Middlemarch in 1869, she wrote "Miss Brooke" on a long-projected theme; the story was added to the beginning of the novel in 1871 (Haight, introd., Middlemarch, pp. xiv-xv).

""Little Dorrit," Dickens: The Critical Heritage, p. 357. '2Elaine Showalter, "Guilt, Authority, and the Shadows of Little Dorrit," Nine-

teenth-Century Fiction, 34 (1979), 20-40; Edwin B. Barrett, "Little Dorrzt and the Disease of Modern Life," Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 25 (1970), 199-215; Janice Carlisle, "Little Dorrit: Necessary Fictions," in her The Sense of an Audience (Athens, Ga.: Univ. of Georgia Press, 1981); Roger D. Lund, "Genteel Fictions: Caricature and Satirical Design in Little Dorrit," in Dickens Studies Annual, Vol. 10, ed. Michael Timko, Fred Kaplan, Edward Guiliano (New York: AMS Press, 1982), pp. 45-66.

'3James, in the Eliot manner, would have begun with his Isabel Archer "en disponibilitg" and fleshed her out (Preface to The Portrait of a Lady in The Art of the Novel, introd. Richard P. Blackmur [New York: Scribner's, 1950], p. 44). He would have perceived Little Dorrit as "a little monster" like Jenny Wren, who "belongs




ness," the "Paraclete in female form," as Lionel Trilling puts it.'4 Dorothea Brooke has undergone a similar range of interpreta- tions, though Middlemarch, in spite of the strong alternate plots, "reads" as Dorothea's story. The objections to the saccharine treatment of the former heroine and the aggrandizement of the latter are akin; though Little Dorrit seems improbably sage, Dorothea seems oddly unknowing. F. R. Leavis's criticism of Eliot's "un- qualified self-identification" with her heroine overlooks the narrator's ironic distance from Dorothea's idealism.'5 True, the heroine does make disturbing choices of men to idealize.'6 Perhaps her folly, like Little Dorrit's purity, is designed to raise the rhe- torical question: if idealism will not do, what better do we have?'7

The difference in the portrayal of Little Dorrit and Dorothea lies not in their power to command our belief but in the knowledge a reader needs in order to follow them as agents of good in their respective worlds. Little Dorrit is a constant, a mystery only to be guessed at; Dorothea is an awareness we must intermittently

to the troop of hunchbacks, imbeciles, and precocious children who have carried on the sentimental business of all Mr. Dickens's novels" (James, "The Limitations of Dickens," Nation, 1 [1865], 786-87, rpt. in The Dickens Critics, ed. George H. Ford and Lauriat Lane, Jr. [Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press, 1961], p. 50). Alex- ander Welsh considers Little Dorrit Clennam's angel of death (The City of Dickens [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971], p. 209). Janice Carlisle perceptively attributes this shadiness to the price Little Dorrit must pay to keep up appearances (The Sense of an Audience, p. 108).

'4"Little Dorrit," in Dickens: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Martin Price (En- glewood Cliffs, NJ.: Prentice-Hall, 1967), p. 157. See J. Hillis Miller, Charles Dick- ens: The World of His Novels (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1958), p. 240.

'5The Great Tradition (New York: G. W. Stewart, 1948), p. 74. Gordon S. Haight objects to Leavis's partial account (introd., Middlemarch, pp. xii-xiii).

16Eliot's editor John Blackwood doubted that so intelligent a girl as Dorothea would fail to see through Casaubon's proposal letter (Blackwood to George Henry Lewes, 9 Oct. 1871, The George Eliot Letters, ed. Gordon S. Haight, 9 vols. [New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1954-78], V, 199). James called Ladislaw "a woman's man" (Galaxy, March 1873, rpt. in George Eliot and Her Readers, ed. Holmstrom and Lerner, p. 111). The Examiner, 7 Dec. 1872, had this comment: "It is not easy to like young Ladislaw... in marrying him, Dorothea makes nearly as great a blunder as she did in marrying Mr Casaubon. How much pleasanter it would have been for Lydgate to be her husband?" (rpt. in George Eliot and Her Readers, p. 87).

'7See Laurence Lerner, "Dorothea and the Theresa-Complex," in George Eliot: Middlemarch; a Casebook, ed. Patrick Swinden (London: Macmillan, 1972), p. 225.




share as it grows. Whereas the first heroine gradually assumes the dimensions of a woman we might meet, the latter appears more extraordinary, even legendary, toward the close. Though prejudice and misjudgment are universal in these created societies, the heroine in each undergoes a distinct process of misrepresentation before she is free to define herself.

In both novels, the emphasis falls on the true interpretation of the secular "progress" of the heroine, involved as she is in a complex of interdependent fates. Both novelists exempt their heroines from the defeating determinism of their worlds, albeit with a different bias. Eliot invokes Herodotus, who "thought it well to take a woman's lot for his starting point," taking care to portray Dorothea's imperfections as the result of the "conditions of an imperfect social state" (pp. 71, 612). Dickens takes that social state and the hero Clennam and his double, Rigaud-Blandois, as his starting point and several chapters later introduces a heroine at once ideal, comic, and sinister, a kind of projection of man's am- bivalence.18 In either case, the heroine-who belongs to the sex traditionally excluded from history'9-suffers the misjudgments and gains the sympathy of her society. Little Dorrit and Dorothea are imprisoned in the stories told about them, only to be freed through a kind of hermeneutical faith: that the meaning of the past is redeemable in the present, and that there is a spiritual reading of obscure lives. Such faith was becoming increasingly difficult to maintain in a historically conscious age. As E. D. Hirsch, Jr., notes, historicism, founded on the faith that the same cultural patterns, like Lydgate's primitive tissue, recurred in all societies, developed the means to undermine that faith. As the century unfolded, interpretation was shown to be culture-bound.20

'8Showalter, "Guilt, Authority, and the Shadows of Little Dorrit," pp. 33-35. '9Gerda Lerner, "The Challenge of Women's History," The Majority Finds Its

Past: Placing Women in History (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1979), as quoted by Elaine Showalter, "Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness," in The New Feminist Criticism, ed. Showalter, pp. 260-61.

20Validity in Interpretation (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1967), pp. 39-41. In 1851 the historian J. A. Froude ("Homer," in Froude's Short Studies on Great Subjects [London: Longmans, Green, 1886], I, 506, 537) could write confidently of Homer's timeless record of human nature and manners, much as Matthew Arnold in 1857 spoke of the fifth century B.C. as "a modern ... epoch" ("On the Modern Element in Literature," in On the Classical Tradition, Vol. 1 of Complete Prose Works of Matthew




Little Dorrit and its successor, Middlemarch (published fifteen years later, two years after Dickens' death), offer resistance to such creeping relativism: cosmopolitan men are assimilated into the old-fashioned or timeless world of a woman whose idealism is still intact.

The world that turns around the Marshalsea or Middlemarch is a less heartless place because of the female quixote with a heart like the Virgin Mary's. For us in the twentieth century, such figures raise a difficulty: can there be a believable angel in the house or a modern St. Theresa? Both Dickens and Eliot confronted the difficulty of creating what we aptly call believable characters. Each chose a different approach to the middle ground between fact and value in biographical history. Both defended against the misreading, whether too literal or too literary, that would destroy belief in their characters. Both set boundaries for interpretation of everyday heroism that need some examina- tion.

It might seem that the development of Victorian fiction, in our Carlylean literary history, marked a transition from the Dick- ensian to the Eliotic; readers were taught to expect realistic char- acterization, and villains and saints were banished from the pages of novels. Dickens himself complained of the literal-mindedness of the age:

The merit or art in the narrator, is the manner of stating the truth.... And in these times, when the tendency is to be frightfully literal and catalogue-like ... I have an idea ... that the very holding of popular literature through a kind of popular dark age, may depend on such fanciful treatment."

Arnold, ed. R. H. Super, 11 vols. [Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 1960-77], p. 28). Walter Pater in 1873 emphasized the discontinuities between disparate cul- tures and epochs, while sharing Arnold's idea of recurring spirits (Pater, The Re- naissance: Studies in Art and Poetry, ed. Donald L. Hill [Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1980]).

2IDickens, quoted by John Forster, The Life of Charles Dickens, ed. J.W.T. Ley (London: Cecil Palmer, 1928), pp. 727-28.




While insisting on a certain leeway, Dickens defended his char- acterization as true to life, in upper case. "It is useless," he wrote in the preface to Oliver Twist, "to discuss whether the conduct and character of the girl seems natural or unnatural, probable or im- probable, right or wrong. IT IS TRUE."292 Naturalistic criteria were "useless" for Dickens; he adhered to a sort of realistic idealism. Throughout his career, Dickens defended both his deliberately fanciful "merit or art" and the ideal truth of his representations, repudiating the grey outlook that cannot imagine white or black extremes of character.

It is remarkable that what we call the world, which is so very cred- ulous in what professes to be true, is most incredulous in what professes to be imaginary; and that, while, every day in real life, it will allow in one man no blemishes, and in another no virtues, it will seldom admit a very strongly-marked character, either good or bad, in a fictitious narrative, to be within the limits of probability.21

George Eliot, entering the arena when Dickens was at the height of his powers, presented herself as a contender for the sober rather than the extreme truth. Whereas the preface to Martin Chuzzlewit chides "the reader whose eye for colour is a little dull," the clerical narrator of "The Sad Fortunes of the Reverend Amos Barton" warns off "Mrs. Farthingale, for example, who prefers the ideal in fiction," for whom the "commonplace," unheroic Bar- ton will seem too lifelike for a novel. Clearly, Eliot's strategy re- verses Dickens', albeit with a similar aim. She strives to school readers to that grey outlook he resists, only to reveal "the tragedy and comedy" of everyday life, the truly "glorious possibilities .. of human nature."24

22"Author's Preface to the Third Edition," Oliver Twist, ed. Kathleen Tillotson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966), p. lxv.

23Preface, Nicholas Nickleby, New Oxford Illustrated Dickens (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1950), p. xviii. Many modern critics have objected to Dickens' im- probable "black characters" and "purely virtuous figures" (Ford, Dickens and Hzs Readers, p. 140). Also see Angus Wilson, "The Heroes and Heroines of Dickens," in Dickens: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Price, pp. 16-17.

24Preface, Martin Chuzzlewit, New Oxford Illustrated Dickens (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1951), p. xv. Eliot, Scenes of Clerical Life, Cabinet ed. (Edinburgh: W. Blackwood, 1878), pp. 66-67. According to Alice R. Kaminsky, George Henry Lewes as Literary Critic (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse Univ. Press, 1968), p. 45, George Eliot shared George Henry Lewes's view, expressed in the Westminster Review in 1858, that idealism is "a special kind of realism."




Both novelists had a need to fend off insensitive readings that reduce the range of human possibility. From the first, however, Eliot sought to record psychological shadings with photographic rather than fanciful precision. In "The Natural History of Ger- man Life," published in 1856 as she was beginning to write fiction, she criticized Dickens' work in the context of Riehl's pioneering social history. She examines the popular novelist's achievements and lapses as though he were an imperfect realist, a "natural historian" who fudges his facts. On the surface he "can copy Mrs. Plornish's colloquial style with the delicate accuracy of a sun-pic- ture." On the psychological level, however, Dickens becomes "tran- scendent in his unreality," pretending that "high morality and re- fined sentiment" can develop among "harsh social relations, ignorance, and want."25 Dickens in short, is a wishful and irre- sponsible historian of the common life. It is interesting to realize that Eliot is here referring to Little Dorrit, which was appearing at that time in monthly numbers. Thus we may have her objection to the portrayal of Little Dorrit before she began to offer her own version of the redemptive heroine.

Ostensibly, Eliot is disengaging herself from the school of the popular romancer to join a trend toward realism, requiring that character and milieu appear interdependent. Dickens invites us to fancy a rare being who is somehow stronger than the "harsh" conditions around her; Eliot, at least in theory, refuses to posit such aberrations. Yet on a more fundamental level, she allies herself with the master, whose imaginative biographical histories awaken sympathy for ordinary experience. The example of Dick- ens informs Eliot's work from beginning to end. If Middlemarch is a perhaps unconscious revision of Little Dorrit, it is certainly an artful exploitation of Dickensian elements: the idealistic and ideal- ized heroine (whose historical role Eliot developed in Romola) sub- mitted to a complex of modern conditions worthy of a late novel by Dickens. The societies dominated by Merdle and by Bulstrode function in much the same way, just as Little Dorrit and Dorothea

25"The Natural History of German Life," Essays of George Eliot, ed. Pinney, pp. 271, 272. Eliot's allegiance to realism was complex, but she was always more bound to plausible social conditions than Dickens. See George Levine, "George Eliot's Hypothesis of Reality," Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 35 (1980), 2; according to Levine, the "ideal is the working hypothesis ... of the late narratives" (p. 16).




differ in degree rather than in kind. Dorothea, with her "middling" faults in Middlemarch,26 ought to resemble a living woman in the 1830s more than she resembles Little Dorrit, the angelic child raised in a debtors' prison. Yet Eliot's heroines, in Middle- march and elsewhere, share a vocation with Dickens'. Whereas the power of the womanly redeemer has become more doubtful in the years between late Dickens and late Eliot, we need only con- sider Mirah in Daniel Deronda to realize that the novelist continued to exempt some female characters from life as we know it.

Fanciful or precise, both authors strive for a visionary truth as historians of everyday heroism, lapsing neither into chronicle nor hagiography. Within narratives of inexorable cause and effect, their heroines suggest other modes, other human possibilities: myth, romance, spiritual biography, a more vital history. Dickens' good figures represent a lapse in the determining mechanism of society rather than a denial that such a mechanism is at work. Little Dorrit is almost a cry, reiterated throughout the novel, of protest against all the muddled prejudices which deaden the "social sympathies" Eliot calls for in "The Natural History of German Life." Eliot, too, defies "the conquests of modern generalization," the social "theories" that preclude "a real knowledge of the Peo- ple."27 An exceptional spirit is called on to interrupt the cycles of the probable. At the same time, the heroines of Little Dorrit and Middlemarch must belong to this world in order to redeem it. If we perceive Little Dorrit as dull white in spite of the Shadow of the Marshalsea, we shall miss the ambiguities of her responsibility in the novel. Dorothea, though more like a living young woman in her inconsistencies and consciousness, also has moments of white glory. The ideal and the real clash in these heroines as they try to instill life in a present deadened by the past-by forbidding

261n a letter to John Blackwood, 18 Feb. 1857, Letters, ed. Haight, II, 299, George Eliot writes: "My artistic bent is directed ... to the presentation of mixed human beings in such a way as to call forth tolerant judgment, pity, and sympathy. And I cannot stir a step aside from what I feel to be true in character.... inconsistencies and weaknesses are not untrue."

27"The Natural History of German Life," Essays of George Eliot, ed. Pinney, p. 272. Eliot, in "Historic Imagination," calls for a new kind of historical writing, not "the abstract treatment" of "grave history" or "the schemed picturesqueness of ordinary historical fiction," but a "real, minute vision of how changes came about in the past" ("Leaves from a Notebook," Essays of George Eliot, p. 447).




wills, by imprisoning family history, by the rigid structure of society.

How shall the meek inherit the earth? Both Dickens and Eliot seem acutely aware of the difficulty; innocence is too often paired with weakness. In Eliot's novels, as J. Hillis Miller explains, "the ability to do good . . . depends on ignorance, while the novels themselves show over and over the terrible dangers of ignorance."28 Neither Dickens nor Eliot displays confidence that goodness will escape imprisoning misconceptions as long as we live in society. But they have little hope for public means of reform without the only true progress, the change of heart, just as, following Carlyle, they have lost faith in history as political plot. History, these novelists imply, calls for "organized" innocence as Blake conceived it: the innocence that "can withstand the test of experience," in Harold Bloom's words.29 Such perdurable virtue, weigh- ing rather heavily on the heroines expected to uphold it, is ultimately no mere amenity of the parlor. Its diffusive influence could redeem the world from a deadly round of experience.30 Without challenging Dickens' and Eliot's similar assumptions about the self-sacrificing and nurturing qualities of womanhood, we need to examine more closely how their heroines come to es- tablish this efficacy.

First, we must abstract the story of Amy/Do- rothea from the populous narratives in which each saintly woman ineluctably belongs. Margaret Anne Doody's "ur-model" for the nineteenth-century novel (derived from late eighteenth-century novels by women) will serve as a basis:

It is the story of a woman gifted with some talents and a deep capacity both for affection and responsibility who is ... at odds with

28"Middlemarch, Chapter 85," Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 35 (1980), 447. 29The Visionary Company, rev. and enl. ed. (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press,

1971), pp. 33-34. 30Tompkins acknowledges the radical program behind Harriet Beecher Stowe's

portrayal of Little Eva in Uncle Tom's Cabin: spiritual conversion comes before political change ("Sentimental Power," in The New Feminist Criticism, ed. Showalter, pp. 89-91).




the world.... her abilities are often frustrated by poverty of education and incomplete experience. Her life is manifestly an affair of irritation and anxiety, though the reader is taught to measure society against her good will.... She is frequently an orphan or half-orphan, and parents or parent substitutes are inadequate.... The heroine is often presented with the foil of a female character of her own age who is smaller-minded.... She desires above all the love of a man who is her equal.3

Thus far we have a likeness of the Child of the Marshalsea and the modern St. Theresa. As the inadequate parent, Mr. Dorrit is comparable to Mr. Brooke as well as Casaubon, whom Dorothea marries as "a sort of father" (p. 8);32 the worldly counterpart, in the one case Fanny Dorrit, is disparately portrayed in the other by Celia and Rosamond, while Amy Dorrit's plain, housewifely obscurity is assigned to Mary Garth. Both "Dorrit" (Amy Dorrit's original Christian name) and Dorothea struggle to win a true lover. Clennam slights Amy, imagining himself as "nobody," eligible for Pet's dead twin; only his parodic shadow, John Chivery, dotes on her from the first. Dorothea's case is, as always, more complex. Pursued in the beginning by the eligible suitor who usu- ally gets the heroine in the end, she dedicates herself, like Little Dorrit, to a self-centered master. Lydgate, like Clennam, a man with a drive to look into everything but his own heart, underrates Dorothea at first, yet learns to depend on and value her. Fred Vincy, embodying Clennam's disinherited worldliness, is, like Clennam, converted to Little Dorrit's domestic faith in the person of Mary Garth. Only the fitfully inspired Ladislaw, who has seen his ideal in Dorothea almost from the start, finally wins her. The suitable partnership is formed at the end; after that, we hear little or nothing of the new Mrs. Clennam or Mrs. Ladislaw.

The heroine's happiness is to sacrifice herself to the happiness of those around her, first as the keeper of a distorted fiction (Dor-

31 "George Eliot and the Eighteenth-Century Novel," Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 35 (1980), 268.

32Both U. C. Knoepflmacher, "Middlemarch: An Avuncular View," Nineteenth- Century Fiction, 30 (1975), 53-81, and Lionel Trilling, "Little Dorrit," in Dickens: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Price, p. 154, note the patterns of inadequate parents in these novels. Also see Dianne F. Sadoff, "Storytelling and the Figure of the Father in Little Dorrit," in Charles Dickens: New Perspectives, ed. Wendell Stacy John- son (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1982), pp. 121-41.




rit as Father of the Marshalsea, Casaubon as discoverer of the Key to all Mythologies), then, finally, as the helpmeet of the man she rescues from despair. Her weakness is her strength; as a young woman she is handicapped, yet endowed with the "art" which Eliot grants to women, "the function of love in the largest sense, to mitigate the harshness of all fatalities."33 Through suffering she learns how to escape her narrow sphere, living vicariously in "equivalent centers." Her merciful vision reveals the history of anonymous lives to be neither chronicles of crime nor cycles of commonness.

As well as a blessing, however, the heroine's womanliness raises a conflict. Little Dorrit, "little mother," is emphatically ma- ternal and diminutive, with a comic or uncanny exemption from sexual desire. Eliot is able to create a more mature, self-willed woman, but "Dodo" is also amusing in her puritanical self-repression.34 Amy/Dorothea's gift is to be other-worldly, no product of a Mrs. Lemon or a Mrs. General: to be too great, a tragedy queen, or too pure, a child-mother, for ordinary purposes. Yet in spite of her vocation, she feels an attraction to a sympathetic man, an attraction which calls on her stricter dedication. A radical change in her state-the Dorrits' inheritance, the marriage with Casau- bon-precipitates a trip abroad and a crisis in her faith; she re- alizes her powerlessness to help her father/master or to disguise the flaw in his authority. For significant passages, she is submerged in the narrative: we read letters from Amy in her exile; the narrator abandons Dorothea for Casaubon in chapter 29. It is as

33Letters, ed. Haight, IV, 364-65. Barbara Hardy argues that the "feminist moral" originating in the story, "Miss Brooke," is "controlled and extended by the complex plot" of Middlemarch (The Novels of George Eliot [London: Athlone Press, 1959], p. 52). Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar read The Mill on the Floss and Middlemarch as failed attempts to subsume "portraits of female destiny" in "sociological studies"; they endorse Eliot's "interest in history viewed from the bottom up" and in "the need for men to develop 'feminine' receptivity" (The Madwoman in the Attic [New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1979], pp. 491, 482).

34In Charlotte Brontes Villette, the doll-size Paulina and the Quakerish Lucy offer case studies of repression comparable to Little Dorrit and Dorothea; Paulina and Lucy collaborate in their false images as child and prude: Paulina becomes the grand lady, while Lucy, as central to the narrative as Dorothea, keeps to the world of shadows and plain service.




though the way of the world, the burden of her lot in life, must succeed in stifling her.

Nevertheless, the heroine comes into her own, becoming what Edwin M. Eigner terms the "woman who exalts" in tandem with "the passive hero." "The household Virgin, the hearthside Ma- donna," a much-lamented specialty of Dickens', is also a feature, in less emblematic form, of Eliot's novels.35 The continual references to Dorothea as a madonna (p. 141) with a halo (p. 316), a virgin-sacrifice (p. 264) or a "mater dolorosa" (p. 578), a stage heroine (pp. 316, 391) or a mythical beauty buried alive (Antigone, Persephone, or Eurydice) lend some of Little Dorrit's aura to a creature of apparent flesh and blood. As we have seen, the heroine of such a biographical history must recall a lost age of mir- acles, even as she suffers the ills of society. In these two novels the suggested material causes for the heroines' ordeals, imprisonment for debt (Little Dorrit) or benighted education for women (Middlemarch), are disproportionate, and must be taken as synec- doches for the historical world.36

In each novel the heroine remains almost untouched by the mystery which implicates most of the characters and which is never satisfactorily resolved. The Bulstrode plot, though more contained than the Clennam-Dorrit mystery (in which Little Dorrit is one of the pawns), has been criticized as a bit of Dickensian mechanics misplaced in what we might call a Trollopian Middle- march.37 On the other hand, Dickens seems to leave out some of the nuts and bolts of his "Machinery in Motion" (ch. 23), so that

35The Metaphysical Novel in England and America (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1978), pp. 120, 122.

36The authors seem to recognize that reform would not prevent the repetition of the heroines' spiritual biographies. In his preface Dickens notes that the Mar- shalsea has been closed, although traces of the prison remain (Little Dorit, ed. Sucksmith, p. lix). Eliot removed from the Finale of Middlemarch the specific cri- tique of the mores that influenced Dorothea to be Casaubon's deluded bride (p. 612, n. 1).

37Hawthorne's praise of Trollope's novels, 'just as real as if some giant had hewn a great lump out of the earth" (quoted by Trollope in An Autobiography, ed. Michael Sadleir and Frederick Page, World's Classics [1950; rpt. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1980], p. 144), is echoed in John Blackwood's praise of Eliot for moving "like a great giant... among us.... how true it is to Nature" (Blackwood to Eliot, 20 July 1871, Letters, ed. Haight, V, 167).




it is difficult to read Little Dorrit for the plot.38 Both Middlemarch and Little Dorrit have an open form in spite of concluding with marriages.39 In both, our interest is engaged in the obstacles that keep the lovers apart. The heroes' standing is undermined (Clen- nam ill in prison, Lydgate and Ladislaw ostracized), threatening them with bankruptcy. Both heroines are convinced that their lovers love someone else; unselfishly, they turn from their own pain to nurse the maligned men. This generosity wins them the prize of love they thought was lost. Though Mr. Dorrit and Casaubon are unmasked in death, their failed protectresses redeem the younger men. Weddings take place in defiance of a codicil to a will, and at the expense of the heroines' tainted inheritances. These feminine managers, with their plain taste and earnest af- fections, elude the grasp of the "dead hand" of the past.

Without these personified possibilities, the history narrated in these novels would take the form of wave upon wave of dashed ambition. The Clennams and Lydgates of the world would face perpetual defeat, as households, enterprises, and discoveries col- lapse in material and moral exhaustion. The heroines, the poten- tial of mercy and love, must stand clear of the rubble, disregard- ing-in ignorance or courage-the manifest lessons of history, so that all may read a tolerable, intelligible narrative of progress. It would take many pages to do justice to the elaborate phases of the heroines' ordeals, from confinement, to exile, to triumph, within the intricate web of their represented worlds, but some of the details can suggest the markedly similar treatment of these figures as a walking hypothesis to disprove humanity's dishearten- ing experience.

Both Little Dorrit and Dorothea are introduced as prisoners of social fictions. The Child of the Marshalsea is barely perceptible for six chapters: "It was a girl, surely. . . almost hidden in the dark corner?" Clennam asks. More like a tale

38See John Holloway's synoptic appendix, "The Denouement of Little Dorrit," in Little Dorrit, ed. John Holloway (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1967), p. 896.

390n open form see Alan Friedman, The Turn of the Novel (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1966), pp. 22-26.




than a girl, she "was handed down among the generations of col- legians, like the tradition of their common parent," Mr. Dorrit, the Father of the Marshalsea (pp. 39, 67). Miss Brooke, though more striking, is also embodied by the conventions of her culture. In the style of an Italian madonna, she is as impressive as "a fine quotation from the Bible ... in a paragraph of to-day's newspa- per" (p. 5). The narrator in each case holds somewhat aloof from the young woman who will sacrifice herself to conventions which, in her innocence, she holds sacred. In Little Dorrit, we read of the heroine's devotion to her deluded father: "Inspired? Yes. Shall we speak of the inspiration of a poet or a priest, and not of the heart impelled by love and self-devotion to the lowliest work in the lowliest way of life!" (p. 70). In the Prelude to Middlemarch, Dorothea is identified as a "later-born" St. Theresa whose "ardour alternate[s] between a vague ideal and the common yearning of womanhood," "whose loving heart-beats and sobs after an unattained goodness tremble off and are dispersed among hindrances" (pp. 3, 4). In neither case is the effusive tone intentionally parodic; the narrators must persuade readers to believe in a heroism of everyday life, even as they insist that their heroines remain un- tainted by the ordinary matters which, especially in Little Dorrit's case, occupy the day. The effect is to complete the isolation of these aspiring female saviors from the common humanity they yearn to save.

The heroines' confinement in the early passages of both novels is naturally a question of perception. Little Dorrit calls the debtors' prison home and almost makes it one. In spite of her enviable position and gifts, Dorothea feels imprisoned by "a social life which seemed nothing but a labyrinth ... a walled-in maze" (p. 21). Both women encourage and then resist a misinterpretation of themselves. Amy invites Clennam's fatherly view of her, but then "a slight shade of distress fell upon her, at his so often calling her a child" (p. 209). Dorothea is eager to play Casaubon's aman- uensis, and then discovers with wounded pride that her husband will not let her be more: " 'I will write to your dictation, or I will copy and extract what you tell me: I can be of no other use.' Dorothea, in a most unaccountable, darkly-feminine manner, ended with a slight sob and eyes full of tears" (p. 148). The heroines naturally resent being relegated to footnotes and after-




thoughts in masculine versions of history, even as they dutifully erase what it would not flatter men to read.

The two women escape from their first confines into more acute distress, and significantly it is in Italy, a land seeming to embody history, that each faces her disillusionment. Miss Amy Dorrit, abroad with her family, seems condemned to the purgatory of adult society. In the decaying clutter of the European land- scape, "misery and magnificence wrestling with each other," she alone of her party perceives the shadow of prison life, of the past, of poverty, everywhere. As though the family motto were an in- version of the Clennams' "Do Not Forget," Amy tries obediently to forget; but memory, as an accurate as well as heartfelt family history, rises like an unconscious wish. She furtively lingers over her little unremembered acts of servitude, "thoughtfully looking after some diminutive girl leading her grey father" (pp. 452, 453). Tourist society is "a superior sort of Marshalsea"; in Rome, "everything seemed to be trying to stand still for ever on the ruins of something else" (p. 497). Public history seems compelled to repeat its decadent cycles, just as individuals seem driven to con- form. Amy is incapable of "forming a surface," as Mrs. General would have her, though she is perpetually masked by others' in- comprehension. Her family persists in calling her a "child" and "little thing" who willfully keeps up the memory of their associ- ation with Clennam (pp. 440-41). To her father she is an incar- nate reminder of a shameful past. Only the "Wreck," Uncle Fred- erick, seeing through the public progress of the family, dares protest this slanderous fiction:

"Have you no memory? Have you no heart? ... where's your affectionate, invaluable friend? Where's your devoted guardian? Where's your more than mother? How dare you set up superiorities against all these characters combined in your sister?" (p. 470)

Throughout the Merdle order of things, even Clennam forgets Amy's history, misreading her letters as those of any young lady, his "grateful and affectionate Little Dorrit," rather than the personification of memory and heart.

Dorothea is similarly bound by custom and accumulated, empty forms. Whereas the Dorrits are aggrandized by the whims of fortune, the Casaubons are submerged in the annals of history:




When George the Fourth was still reigning over the privacies of Windsor, when the Duke of Wellington was Prime Minister, and Mr Vincy was mayor of ... Middlemarch, Mrs Casaubon, born Dorothea Brooke, had taken her wedding journey to Rome. (p. 139)

Conveyed from sight to sight by maid and courier, Dorothea, like Amy, secretly suffers a loss of purpose in life. Rome, a gloomy "city of visible history," seems to dwarf her private discontent. Like Amy, she is ushered on an autumnal, "dream-like," fragmentary journey through the "oppressive masquerade of ages." Though condemned to see beyond the lot of the newlywed lady at the "brilliant picnic of Anglo-foreign society," she studies the lessons of civilization without insight, lacking any guidance but Casau- bon's borrowed authority, "the opinion of the conoscenti" [sic]. The ruins of the past and the "sordid present" combine to haunt her like "magic-lantern pictures" (pp. 143, 146, 144). Like Little Dorrit escaping to float in her gondola, she drives to the Cam- pagna for relief.

In both novels, the heroine is subjected to more intense scru- tiny in Italy, where she is displayed in vivid contrast to the splen- dor and corruption of history. Still a simple girl, she has "come out" with a vengeance into a deceitful society, into a culture of wrongful power. Dorothea first reappears to us standing beside a statue of Ariadne; Naumann, the artist, interprets for us: the nun- like or Quakerish young beauty is juxtaposed with "antique beauty... arrested in... its sensuous perfection." She cannot avoid being typecast unawares. Casaubon, like Dorrit blaming his daughter for reminding him of his past, misconstrues Dorothea's efforts at intimacy; instead of resembling an "elegant-minded ca- nary-bird," she seems a "personification of that shallow world" of his critics, from whose point of view his synopsis of mythologies (already superseded by the latest historical criticism) has no place in the history of scholarship (pp. 140, 149). The young Ladislaw, dispossessed like Little Dorrit's uncle, objects to the misconstruc- tions confining the heroine-he is a "lunette" in her prison-but adds an ideal version of his own. His first impression, "that she must be disagreeable in spite of appearances," was a sophisticated self-defense; in her Roman rooms he sees her as "an angel be- guiled," an "Aeolian harp," the authoress of "some original romance for herself" (pp. 265, 155). While the young man idolizes,




the old man elicits her worst; their complementary misunder- standings awaken her to her "moral imprisonment." The only out- let is the imaginative leap of sympathy; thus the famous schism in chapter 29: "-but why always Dorothea?" The path to a selfless dedication may be dreary, leading through "older and more eat- ing griefs" (pp. 202, 205) than those of an underestimated young woman. Rather than playing the romantic role of "Milton's daugh- ters" (p. 47) as she imagined, Dorothea studies the dry old-fashioned chronicle of Casaubon's character, just as we accept a novel as a biographical history of experience, old and dull as well as young and appealing.

The sorrows of Amy Dorrit and Dorothea Brooke are not tragic. Through their suffering, they gain the saving faculty of sympathy. In the end they escape being buried alive without hav- ing to commit an offense against filial piety; their jailers die. While they maintain a tradition of sanctity, they inadvertently benefit from the crimes of the past, as, through a kind of divine retri- bution, the high are brought low. Rushing to the aid of the fallen, the heroine finds her place.

After the crash of the Merdle market, Clennam, at last ex- periencing the Marshalsea from the inside, is forced to revise his own history. An invisible force has been working through "one weak girl": "When I first... set something like purpose before my jaded eyes, whom had I before me, toiling on ... against ig- noble obstacles that would have turned an army of received heroes and heroines?" To all his self-questioning, Little Dorrit is the answer. Arriving at something like the Everlasting No of Sartor Re- sartus, Clennam decides that Little Dorrit's love is an abstract so- lace that he must forego: "Looking back upon his own poor story, she was its vanishing point.... her innocent figure.... was the termination of everything that was good and pleasant in it; beyond there was nothing" (pp. 700, 714). But as the fortunes of those around her fall, Amy ascends. Her history is recounted as a lesson in duty for the resentful Tattycoram:

"You see that... little, quiet, fragile figure . . .? The people stand out of the way to let her go by.... If she had constantly thought of herself, and settled with herself that everybody visited [the Mar- shalsea] upon her... she would have led an irritable and probably an useless existence." (p. 788)




By resigning herself to her lot in life, she transcends it; rather than a message in a prison cell, she is a kind of itinerant blessing. Instead of a receding, she becomes an approaching ideal to Ar- thur. She brings the voice of Nature to the "changeless and bar- ren" prison, echoing "every merciful and loving whisper that had ever stolen to [Clennam] in his life" (p. 790). As always, she is the embodiment of vital history.

Their union requires both an obliteration of the compulsion handed down from the past (the ritual burning of old Mrs. Clen- nam's secret) and an endorsement of a progressive history (the inscription of the new Mrs. Clennam in a fresh volume of the parish register). Unheroic but blessed with the wisdom of experience, given a foreknowledge of the crimes of mankind, Little Dorrit and Arthur are perhaps a likelier pair to make a go of it than our first parents; for the Dickens couple "went down into a modest life of usefulness and happiness" (p. 801). It is as though the man of the world has taken to his side faith, hope, and charity-no longer outgrown weaknesses but the strength of the future.

Like Little Dorrit, Dorothea is misinterpreted as an ideal rather than a living being with an independent will. As the novel unfolds, however, her fellow sufferers begin to recognize her true excellence instead of trying to arrest her as a helpmeet (Casau- bon), a flawless "crystal" (Ladislaw, p. 344), or a young widow fit to be "a queen" or a "marchioness" (Sir James and Mrs. Cadwal- lader, pp. 391, 392). Lydgate is moved enough by her generosity to exempt her from his general censure of women:

"This young creature has a heart large enough for the Virgin Mary.... She seems to have what I never saw in any woman before-a fountain of friendship towards men.... her love might help a man more than her money." (p. 563)

It is too late for Lydgate to benefit from more than her friendship and a little of her money; Ladislaw gets her love as well, as though rewarded for being her ideal reader. As in Little Dorrit, the heroine's filial piety withstands false versions of biographical history. Dorothea refuses to become the Keeper of the Key to all My- thologies, disregards Lydgate's damaged reputation and Ladislaw's




blighted family history, and contradicts the villainous versions of her husband, herself, and Ladislaw portrayed in Casaubon's will.

Dorothea fades into memory in the Finale as an ideal whom Lydgate is "always praising and placing above" Rosamond, who likewise holds her sacred. With Ladislaw, Dorothea has entered a life blended of idealism and practice, giving "wifely help" toward reforms "with a young hopefulness of immediate good" to be en- vied and pitied by a later and wiser generation. But as the uproar of the streets qualifies the ending of Little Dorrit, so the happiness of the ending of Middlemarch is qualified by the judgment of society: "Many who knew her, thought it a pity that so substantive and rare a creature should have been absorbed into the life of another" (pp. 610, 611). Part of the tragedy of many Dorotheas lies in the conventional interpretation of their worth, as a passage in the Finale, deleted after the first edition, makes plain (p. 612, n. 1). Dorothea is survived by a Middlemarch tradition that re- cords only her two marriages-a mere plot sketch-as evidence that she was not "a nice woman." But this society has never shown itself a judge of character, or of any slow developments through "incalculably diffusive" effects-such as its own history. Whatever the pity of Dorothea's story, it is all to the good in the long run, which runs long after the finales of novels. The narrator, playing up the generalizing effects of historical perspective, abstracts the heroine into a type: "a new Theresa," one of "many Dorotheas," an agent of the "growing good" through "unhistorical acts," one of "the number" of unknown dead whose lives persist through our imaginative memory-who endure, that is, in the visited tomb of a novel (pp. 611, 612).

The selective overviews of these novels nec- essarily distort them, like caricatures of complex, unfolding per- sonalities. Both Little Dorrit and Middlemarch were received as portraits of actual society on vast detailed canvases. They filled a momentous function in the lives of their readers. In 1857 it was declared:

The completion of one of Mr. Dickens's monthly number books is to the critic what the termination of great events is to the politician,




or the close of an epoch to the historian.... There is... so vast a range of character and observation of the world-so broad a canvas crowded with so many shapes and incidents-that the effect on the mind is ... that of looking at an epitome of life itself."'

Again in 1872 the analogy with world events was made:

When, month by month... Charles Dickens "put forth his green leaves" . . . his current story was really a topic of the day; it seemed something almost akin to politics and news-as if it belonged not so much to literature but to events. Of "Middlemarch"... the same may be said.'

Both novels bear a weight of social criticism on a frame of ideal- ized plot. The specific problems facing society at the period of the novel seem to have been resolved, though the larger tensions persist.42 The Little Dorrit/Dorothea Brooke plots offer more optimistic counterparts to the darker social satire. According to Harvey Peter Sucksmith, work on Little Dorrit was halting until Dickens conceived of collective rather than personal responsibility; subsequent changes of the title from Dorrit to Little Dorrit indicate a "development in the heroine's character and significance, a shift... towards a more positive, hopeful balance through the countertheme of enlightenment, freedom, duty, and love."43 But the heroine is not simply identical with the "white" countertheme; she is depicted in chiaroscuro, though she lightens the world. Sig- nificantly, she prompts her author to creativity, much as she re- stores Clennam's hope. Her straight ways elude the devious forces of Circumlocution and speculation, as a line of reasoning helping the reader decipher a history of madness. Dorothea, as we have seen, performs a similar function, extenuating the masculine powers, insisting on shared responsibility. Although Eliot would no doubt have placed her complex study of the misguided young lady in a different order of creation from Dickens' "type" of the ob-

40Unsigned review, Leader, 27 June 1857, pp. 616-17, rpt. in Dickens: The Crit- ical Heritage, ed. Collins, p. 362.

41 Unsigned review, Daily Telegraph, 18 June 1872, rpt. in George Eliot and Her Readers, ed. Holmstrom and Lerner, p. 83.

42See Mason, "Mzddlemarch and History," p. 418; Holloway, introd., Little Dorrit, pp. 17-19; Sucksmith, introd., Little Dorrit, p. xvi, n. 2.

43Sucksmith, introd., Little Dorrit, p. xxi; see also p. xx.




scure female saint, his "type" influenced her. In designing a figure to transform the misinterpretations of history, Eliot, not coinci- dentally, chose a similar name, role, and story. She reworked Dick- ens' version of the nineteenth-century heroine who was over- whelmed by family in England, by history in Italy, and by romantic and financial vicissitudes on her return. The difference in the later reenactment is that Eliot, with her ambivalent femi- nism and meliorism, is not content with a Little Dorrit's homely, inarticulate passivity. In Dorothea's counterpart, Mary Garth, Eliot portrays a Little Dorrit grown up and fleshed out, prepared for everyday life with an imperfect husband. It seems that Do- rothea, in the end, must follow suit. Beautiful and high-spirited, whereas Mary is plain and sensible, Dorothea nearly transcends the ministering, influential role. She approaches the manly activ- ities of cottage building, scholarship, estate management (like Mary Garth's and Mary Ann Evans' fathers). Yet, after all her spectacular metamorphoses, she is absorbed in giving "wifely help" in Little Dorrit's wake. The female idealist's story apparently could not be completed beyond the contingencies of the historical world; "Miss Brooke" must be caught in the web of Middlemarch. The Victorian novel seems to proscribe other finales for an ad- mirable lady, even that of productive spinsterhood.44 Still, Doro- thea, not Mary, is the heroine; her capacity for drama and fresh insight, not her eventual resignation, propels the novel. Like Little Dorrit in her quieter way, Dorothea embodies a possibility for progress, a precedent for future heroines.

Prejudice, like the literal reading, traps the heroines in petty lives. They learn to take responsibility, to change the determining patterns around them, to persuade others to read the spirit of the letter. This saint-woman is the type of the self-sacrificing soul ca- pable of envisioning social growth, with the past bound to the future through the meaning of history. Her story, though exemplary, is no simple comic progress. The only complete escape from society and self is death; to live virtuously requires self-ab-

44Charlotte Bronte seems to anticipate her readers' dissatisfaction with an un- married Lucy Snowe by shrouding the fiance's death in mystery at the end of Villette. See Nina Auerbach, "Old Maids and the Wish for Wings," Woman and the Demon (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1982), pp. 109-49.




negation. Still later Dorrit-theas, enduring, adoring, and god- desslike, may escape repeating the narrative of the heroine of nineteenth-century history.45

It may be that Little Dorrit and Dorothea Brooke carry an impossible burden of belief if we read their stories as alternative histories. Their authors are careful to give them their angelic moments before the close, which is the ellipsis, ambiguous and on- going, into the reader's present. The pure woman's influence is plausible only in a narrow sphere. There is too little evidence of her grace in things as they are. As creatures of their miniature societies, they are diminished, imprisoned, defined; they have a problematic character. But according to law, both sociological and natural, they change over time; their lives have shape. And to some extent that shape-from confinement, to exile, to triumph- is a fresh creation, a miraculous transformation of necessity into promise. Thus Dickens and Eliot seem to derive comfort from the very austerity of their social vision. The heroines of Little Dorrit and Middlemarch must bear a shining message from the crypt; without their confinement we would perceive nothing but common daylight. The very definition of hope is its difference from certainty. Little Dorrit is an answer to the story of a self-deter- mined man who blames Providence for all the mischief he himself causes. Dorothea, likewise, is the gift Eliot offers to mitigate an otherwise fatalistic insight: each "man's life impinges on many others."46 Dickens seems to say, If it is everybody's fault, there must be some connection not only between every guilty fact but between one act of atonement and everyone's expiation. Similarly, for Eliot, "undeviating law .., alone can give value to experience and render education in the true sense possible."47 In spite of the frag-

45Virginia Woolf, who complained of Eliot's refusal to allow her heroines to escape domestic fates as the novelist herself had done, rewrites the role of the father-nursing, cottage-building guardian of family history in The Years; Eleanor achieves independent spinsterhood, her idealism still fresh. See Woolf, "George Eliot," in Women and Wrzting, ed. Michde Barrett (New York: Harcourt Brace Jov- anovich, 1979), pp. 157-60.

46On Little Dorrit as an optimistic counterplot, see Lund, "Genteel Fictions," p. 47; also see George Levine, "Determinism and Responsibility in the Works of George Eliot," PMLA, 77 (1962), 271-78.

47"Mackay's Progress of the Intellect," in Essays and Uncollected Papers, Vol. 22




mentation of modern life, there is a causal continuity with the past, and hence a hypothesis may be formed about the future. Such is the very basis of character as "a process and an unfolding," and of the historical idea. In a sense, these heroines "mean" history; their biographies record obscure heroism, fidelity to the past, faith for the future.

The idealizations and misinterpretations of the heroines must be both true and false, just as the present must be both like and unlike the historical past. Every interpretation is a comparison and contrast, a discernment of sameness in difference. We need both the "spiritual" and the "carnal" reading.48 Little Dorrit is both practical young woman and ministering angel. Middlemarch is what is left over when Saint Theresa is reduced to Dorothea: "an imperfect social state" (p. 612); the novel Middlemarch both embodies and transcends that imperfection. J. Hillis Miller gives a partial account of Eliot's "writing of history" when he stresses the "act of repetition in which the present takes possession of the past and liberates it for a present purpose, thereby exploding the continuum of history." It might better be said that such expropriation of the past precisely constitutes the continuum of history, which after all consists of what we have considered worthy of narrative rendition. Thus, it may be true, as Miller claims, that novels such as Middlemarch "'deconstruct' naive notions about history,"49 but in spite of their open form and hermeneutical skepticism, both novels adhere to the authors' belief in society as an organic continuum, no matter how it may dissolve and reorder itself in the imagination. These heroines need a family history to unravel, a "particular web," confining but defined, in order to stand out among "That tempting range of relevancies called the universe" (Middlemarch, p. 105). There is "an element of tragedy which lies in the very fact of frequency" (p. 144), but these unique heroines escape the repetition compulsion of a finite society, with its su- perstitious attachment to dead forms it does not understand. An

of The Writings of George Eliot, Warwickshire ed., 25 vols. (Boston: Houghton Mif- flin, 1907), p. 279, quoted in Levine, "Determinism and Responsibility," p. 278.

48Frank Kermode's terms in The Genesis of Secrecy, pp. 7-8. 49"Narrative and History," pp. 462, 471.




imaginative revision of the past can break the deadlock, yielding progress in lives and histories. "One reason why history rarely repeats itself among historically conscious people," Edward Carr says, "is that the dramatis personae are aware at the second perfor- mance of the denouement of the first."50 Remarkable lives of common people are historical, worth recording, because they offer examples, Carlylean warnings: let there be no more Children of the Marshalsea, no more Circumlocution Office; "with our daily words and acts," let us not prepare "the lives of many Dorotheas" (p. 612). And yet we need more heroines of everyday life. Or rather, the readership needs these histories of the rare woman who transcends the common lot, exalting all who know her.

University of Virginia

50What Is History?, p. 90.



Little Dorrit and Dorothea Brooke: Interpreting the Heroines of History

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