Dickens' Most Vacuous Heroine

[Jackson Richardson]

The Dickens Fellowship of London is holding an event later this year to debate who is the most vacuous heroine in his work.

http://www.dickensfellowship.org/Events/dickens%E2%80%99s-most-vacuous-heroine

Who would you vote for?

Jackson

[kev67]

Tricky,
I have read:

A Christmas Carol
Oliver Twist
David Copperfield (Agnes Wickfield)
A Tale of Two Cities (Lucy Manette)
Bleak House (Esther Summerson)
Hard Times
Great Expectations
Our Mutual Friend


There's a heroine in Oliver Twist who is so vacuous that I can't remember her name so it would have to be her. She was in the boring middle part. Esther Summerson is not too bad really. Lucy Manette has to be pure and vacuous or how could Sydney Carlton loathe himself so much for having syphilis? Agnes Wickfield and Dora Spenlow would appear to reflect Dickens' own marital problems, so it is unfair to castigate them. Say Dora was Dickens' wife, Catherine Hogarth and Agnes Wickfield was Ellen Ternan, the girlfriend. Dickens was apparently very moved when he re-read David Copperfield before starting Great Expectations, which was just after he split from his wife and took up with his mistress, so there might be something in that. I cannot remember the name of heroine in Hard Times, but she has been damaged by her upbringing, so it's unfair to blame her. Great Expectations and Our Mutual Friend had quite tough female characters. I think Dickens was getting criticised for weak female characters while he was alive. I read somewhere Charlotte Bronte had a go at Esther Summerson.

[Danik 2016]

I think you mean Rose Maylie, Olivers Aunt. I agree with you.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rose_Maylie

[Jackson Richardson]

What makes many of Dickens’ heroines boring and unconvincing is not so much that they are vacuous as that they lack any individuality, other than their circumstances, which are typically being uncomplaining victims.

Emma Haredale is the formal heroine of Barnaby Rudge – she is rescued by the hero from danger and marries him. I don’t think she has a single line of dialogue. She has no character any more than Rose Maylie (who is irrelevant to the plot), Madelaine in Nicholas Nickleby or Mary Graham in Martin Chuzzlewit.

At last Dickens recognised his weakness and describes and mocks his infatuation with a pretty, vacuous girl in the person of Dora. Dora may be a vacuous girl, but as a character she is up with the best of them with Jingle, Bumble, Swiveller , Mrs Nickleby, Mrs Gamp, Miss Havisham and the rest. She is genuinely funny. And – a stroke of genius – she recognizes as she is dying what David can never admit – that he should never have married her. I don’t find that at all sentimental. I find it convincing and very moving.

Having got over his sentimental attitude to young women by creating Dora, Dickens can then go on to create Estella, Flora Finching and Bella Wilfer. (We still have Rosa Budd and Lucie Manette though.)

Jackson

[kev67]

I liked Dora, for me she was the best character in the book.

[Jackson Richardson]

Esther Summerson may be toe curlingly embarrassing with her sentimentality but she isn't vacuous. Her eagerness to please can be seen as a reaction to her horrendously emotionally deprived childhood and she can see right through frauds like Skimpole, Mrs Jellaby and Mr Turveydrop. She is also the only Dickensian heroine not to be pretty and lose what looks she has with smallpox, although I wish she wasn't so twee about letting us know.

The role of uncomplaining beatiful female victim in Bleak House is not Esther but Ada. I find her very boring as a character, but I appreciate her situation as a result of her love of Richard (a middle class Dick Swiveller with a tragic ending and not so amusing on the way.)

Jackson

[Danik 2016]

I think all these vacuous Dickensian girls obeyed a model of 19 C heroines. Almost each of his novels contains at least one of them. As a contrast the Bröntes created heroines with stron wills and strong personalitys.

[kev67]

I think you mean Rose Maylie, Olivers Aunt. I agree with you.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rose_Maylie

Yes, that's her.

[Scheherazade]

I think all these vacuous Dickensian girls obeyed a model of 19 C heroines. Almost each of his novels contains at least one of them. As a contrast the Bröntes created heroines with stron wills and strong personalitys.I agree with you, Danik. In Dickens' novels, female characters are often props, either supporting or hindering the main character, often shallow and weak. Dare I suggest they reflect Dickens' view of women in his life?

For me, TGE is the novel with most worthy female characters, which is, I realise, the opposite of what the OP is asking.

That event does seem interesting
Might consider attending.

[Jackson Richardson]

I'm still bemused as to what TGE is.

Googling for it I came up with this letter to the Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2017/nov/30/what-the-dickens-is-his-name-doing-in-an-article-about-women-seeking-refuge

[Jackson Richardson]

TGE = Great Expectations?

In Victorian women novelists i do not get that sense of women characters without individuality. Compare Hetty Sorrel in George Eliot's Adam Bede with Little Em'ly in David Copperfield. Both working class fallen women, but Hetty has a full inner life, pretty limited person that she is.

I've just noticed Dickens' fondness for calling women "Little". Nell Trent, Emily Peggotty and Amy Dorrit. Mind you, Amy and Nell both have to struggle heroically with the failings of their father figure.

[Scheherazade]

I'm still bemused as to what TGE is.

Googling for it I came up with this letter to the Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2017/nov/30/what-the-dickens-is-his-name-doing-in-an-article-about-women-seeking-refuge

I am sorry. I meant to say GE (Great Expectations). Typing on the Forum app is tricky at times.

I remember reading that Dickens was a serial womaniser and treated women in his life less than honourably at times so it's no surprise that female characters in his novels do not get treated very fairly.

[Scheherazade]

There are Victorian male novelists who produced strong female characters. "Vanity Fair", for example. Or "The Way We Live Now" and "Tess of the D'urbervilles" (though printed a little later, I think?).

So, I am not sure it is a simple case of female authors creating stronger female characters.

[Danik 2016]

Just to amuse yourselves here is the ideal of the Victorian Woman:cademic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/english/melani/novel_19c/thackeray/angel.html

And here is what Virginia Woolf wrote about it:
https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/w/woolf/virginia/w91d/chapter27.html



Cute avatar, Jackson!

[Jackson Richardson]

Thank you for that Danik. When I studied To the Lighthouse at school it was an aspect of Mrs Woolf (as we were taught to refer to her) that wasn’t mentioned. (Although Mrs Ramsey in To the Lighthouse seems to be a Bloomsbury Angel in the House, as far as I remember.)

But I wonder if it is relevant to Dickens’ vacuous heroines. The Angel in the House may be an infuriating stereotype, but running a home with affection and efficiency requires character and backbone.

Dora Spenlow is hopeless as a housekeeper, despite all her efforts. She seems to me a parody of the pretty, vacuous heroine. I doubt whether Dickens’ earlier drippy heroines would be any better.

[Danik 2016]

Thank you for that Danik. When I studied To the Lighthouse at school it was an aspect of Mrs Woolf (as we were taught to refer to her) that wasn’t mentioned. (Although Mrs Ramsey in To the Lighthouse seems to be a Bloomsbury Angel in the House, as far as I remember.)

But I wonder if it is relevant to Dickens’ vacuous heroines. The Angel in the House may be an infuriating stereotype, but running a home with affection and efficiency requires character and backbone.

Dora Spenlow is hopeless as a housekeeper, despite all her efforts. She seems to me a parody of the pretty, vacuous heroine. I doubt whether Dickens’ earlier drippy heroines would be any better.
Jackson. I don´tn think Dickens himself would consider most of the female characters we mentioned here as vacuous. In fact he probably would be offended, if anyone would point out the vacuousness of Rosa Maylie & co. For him it seems they were perfect women, something that included being self efacing and good housewives. Which only proves how much the model of the Angel of the House was incorporated by him.
The problem with Dora is that she doesn´t pass the Angel of the House test: she is not a good housewife and, if I remember rightly she asks forgiveness for it on her deathbed. She also is somewhat willful and childish. But there is always the sacrificial lamb to take over (Agnes as coming from agnus).

[kev67]

I don't think Dora can be accused of being vacuous. She's not very clever, but she thinks about things. It is quite painful when she says things to David which show she has been reflecting on his criticisms of her, like asking him to regard her as his child-wife, or when she challenges him that they are not making the servants more dishonest by not overseeing them more closely. This was something David said to her months previously. You suspect when a couple get married early in a Victorian book that it is not going to work out well, but I had no idea it would go wrong the way it did.

[Danik 2016]

Dora has distinguishable traits of personality. Some biographers even suggest that she was inspired by Dicken´s own mother.

In this sense she is opposed to the Dickensian heroines that exist in all Dicken´s novels, who are perfect, but lack any individuality.
I think Kate Nickleby and Madeleine from the same novel can be added to the lot.