Gender and Body in Dickens's Novels

CONVERSION LONG AWAITED

In Great Expectations (1861), Dickens presents us with the conversion par excellence of a Victorian "gentleman," for Pip's journey touches on each of the three Augustinian paradigms: the choice of cities, proper use for true enjoyment, and conversion through memory, repentance and amendment of his confessed sinful ways. Pip, as a result of his evolving moral fortitude, ultimately chooses the lasting goodness of humility and charity over the fleeting pleasures of earthly goods, in Pip's case, those of status and extravagance. In the process of Pip's moral transformation, his definitive Bildung, we will witness his becoming one who fits Augustine's model of the repentant, reformed sinner:

Someone who can see, without imagining any flesh-bound things seen. ...not someone who argues, not someone who wishes to seem to see what he does not see ... someone who will stand up against the senses of the flesh and the blows with which the soul has been beaten by means of them, who will stand up against human custom, withstand human praise, who will be sorry on his bed (Ps. 4:4), who will rectify his spirit (Ps. 77:6), who will not love vanities and go in search of lies.1

In keeping with this definition, Alexander Welsh maintains that, in Dickens, "the earthly city is properly associated with greed and selfishness, and hence with money," with the vanities, then, that the repentant will reject. Additionally, Welsh2 quotes Augustine on the creation of the two cities: '"Two cities have been formed by two loves; the earthly by the love of self, even to the contempt of God; the heavenly by the love of God, even to the contempt of self." Not surprisingly, Pip's Bildung involves his marked turn from a reliance on the earthly city to his trust in, attraction to, and membership in the Heavenly City, again in the form of an heavenly prospective within the Dickensian landscape. While the Bildung of Pip's4 predecessor, David Copperfield, unfolds quite differently, it is clear that what John Forster says of Copperfield's plot, as well as of Dickens's "subtle penetration into character" can be said, too, of Great Expectations': As we read both boys'5 autobiographies, "by the course of the events we learn the value of self-denial and patience, quiet endurance of unavoidable ills, strenuous effort against ills remediable; and everything in the fortunes of the actors warns us, to strengthen our generous emotions and guard the purities of home." Thinking back, also, to our6 readings of the third-person account of Martin Chuzzlewit and Esther's narrative in Bleak House, we can extract these common lessons, as well as what Arthur Quiller-Couch announces as Dickens's repeated message: "Take into your heart God's most excellent gift of Charity; by which I mean let Charity begin at home, in that kingdom of God which is within you, let it operate in your own daily work; let itbut extend to your own neighbours who need your help; as so--and only so--will the city of God be established on earth."

Considering Augustine's delineation of the two cities, when we contemplate the Dickensian city--and we must, for each novel is not unlike a city unto itself--we might envision a two-tier London. In this world, the lower tier is peopled by the Sikeses and the Heeps and the Jonas Chuzzlewits, the upper by the Brownlows andthe Wickfields and the Tapleys. If we align the selfishness and arrogance and8 irreverence of the lower to the earthly city and the charity and humility and reverence of the upper to the Heavenly City, we recognize the Augustinian model ,the only destination of salvation, the city which, while on its pilgrimage home, "lives a life of righteousness, based on its faith, having the attainment of [God's]peace in view in every good action it performs in relation to God, and in relation to a neighbor, since the life of a city is inevitably a social life." On its pilgrimage,9 this City is open to wayfarers--potential expatriates--seeking to shed their earthly baggage, to amend their lives, to achieve the upper tier through patient and willing service and self-sacrifice. It is just such a journey from Self to Other on which we join Piln his chapter on Great Expectations, J. Hillis Miller's explains, "At the center of Dickens' novels is a recognition of the bankruptcy of the relation of the individual to society as it now exists, the objective structure of given institution sand values. Only what an individual makes of himself, in charitable relations to others, counts."10During the course of the novel, in a series of moral epiphanies--each one as initially deflating as it is ultimately fulfilling--Pip's transformation transpires, as he remakes himself according to the Christian models of his honest, charitable friends. Forster applauds Dickens's characterization, noting "the way[Pip] reconciles his determination to act very shabbily to his early friends, with a conceited notion that he is setting them a moral example."11Equally applaudable, in my opinion, is Dickens's depiction of Pip's eventual transformation from the satirical Victorian "gentleman," to a Newmanesque gentleman who "has his eyes on all his company; ... is tender toward the bashful, gentle towards the distant, and merciful toward the absurd."12

Robin Gilmour offers valuable insight into Dickens's multi-faceted personal perspective on the "gentleman," such a noteworthy aspect of Victorian society:

Dickens did "not share the gentleman's conventional ignorance" of the struggles of the lower classes; rather, early in his life "he discovered for himself how thin and precarious was the partition that separated the lower-middle-class family from the abyss of urban poverty; and he knew from his own experience ... how desperately an aspiring young gentleman would struggle to escape" the risk of falling into thatabyss.13Gilmour explains that unlike his contemporary Thackeray, raised in the world of gentlemen, Dickens--who lived outside that world as a child and within that world as an adult--could offer a spectator's view of the gentleman that proved invaluable to his thematic intentions. As we have discussed, in the characters of young Martin Chuzzlewit and Richard Carstone, Dickens presents readers with a third-person point of view, revealing the problems inherent in an obsession with gentlemanly status, exacerbated by the dangers of long-bred familial greed and a corrupt legal system, respectively. Martin, who eventually accepts the guidance of his friend, saves himself and his family as he becomes a Christian gentleman. Richard, who will not yield to the