Perhaps, but they didn't live in a shabby cottage with a dead garden featuring a pedestal without a statue. The message seems clear enough: Oppressed women! Your would-be liberators will only lead you to deeper misery. Return to security. Return to love.
I'm not defending Miss Wade, by the way, or putting down Amy Dorrit (or Dickens, who obviously knew nothing of the sensitivities of our times). My question is genuine. It comes from my curiosity about what will follow post-modernism. In Dickens' time, women like Miss Wade were usually seen the way Dickens presents the character: as dangerous firebrands with an air of perversion about them. But women like Amy Dorrit, if any even existed, were the ideal. Today most women are encouraged from girlhood to show the ironical/cynical skepticism of a Miss Wade and to eschew the earnestness of an Amy Dorrit as a kind of folly.
I genuinely wonder what comes next, that's all. I suspect, as I wrote on another thread, that today's second graders are going to insist on dramatic moral changes (as Dickens & Co brought moral changes to the world they had inherited from Henry Fielding and Laurence Sterne). My question is what comes next? I suspect that irony is about to be largely replaced by earnestness. So will characters like Amy Dorrit become the new role models--even for feminists? Or will writers find other models?
As far as Christians using "graphic language" goes, it's "Let your aye be aye and your nay be nay," isn't it? And that was probably so that first century Jews didn't swear by the gods of their occupiers ("Yes, by Jupiter!"--that sort of thing). That doesn't mean the Philistines weren't a bunch of f---ing sh--s at times.