Select ONE or TWO brief passages (2 or 3 pages each at most) from Dickens's fiction - Analyse the use of dialogue OR the presentation of the narrative voice.

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P3/T3 Charles Dickens

Reading Semester I 2001/2002: Module 326 and 380

Select ONE or TWO brief passages (2 or 3 pages each at most) from Dickens’s fiction. Analyse the use of dialogue OR the presentation of the narrative voice.

‘Shrinking back’ as ‘she rose up’ Florence put ‘out her hands to keep her off’. This may sound like the beginning of a gothic thriller, but it is in fact an opening line from the reunion between Edith and Florence in Charles Dickens’s Dombey and Son. The dialogue that proceeds is highly melodramatic and intensely passionate. In many ways the choice of diction, syntactical arrangement, content, gesture and tone not only illuminates the two heroines at the heart of the novel, but the encroaching world, symbolised in Cousin Feenix, that contains them. In this climatic confrontation, almost a contribution to the contemporary debate of what constitutes womanhood, we meet the two distinct females ‘looking at [each] other over the gulf of the irrevocable past’.

Florence’s panic-stricken ‘shrinking back’ from Edith suggests she has entered the depths of hell and illustrates the polarisation between the virtuous and the fallen. The anthesis of her scream ‘No, no! Mama!’ in which she both shuns Edith and calls for her suggests an almost attraction-repulsion dilemma for Florence. This figure of grace is being made to confront the darker-side of the social harmony she has since created. The spiritual light that surrounds her is overwhelming, particularly when set against the ‘ever darkening room’ that entraps Edith. In true melodramatic fashion the ‘children of light’ struggle with ‘the children of darkness’. She is hyperbolically described as the ‘purest and bestest of natures’, from whom Edith begs for mercy: ‘upon my soul I am innocent’. She places her soul in Florence’s hands believing that she alone has the power to redeem it. In a post-sacred era she becomes a substitute ‘Good Angel’, and as Philips (1861) wrote, she holds ‘an eminence which [many] do not reach in the world’. Certainly Edith does not. She ‘is’ a fallen woman, ‘Guilty of much! [note the emphasis through capital letters] Guilty of that which sets a waste between us evermore…Guilty of a blind and passionate resentment…but not guilty [a sudden change to lower case] with that dead man [her assumed lover]’. In a melodramatic gesture she falls ‘beneath [Florence’s] touch [and sinks] down on her knees’. The desperation here is breath taking and the syntax gives the impression, that like her tears, the words are flooding from her.

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The passionate tone brings into the dialogue an interruption from Cousin Feenix with his ‘slipshod speech’, which introduces a contending (masculine) voice. His monopolisation of a substantial portion of the conversation reflects Lakoff’s argument that ‘in general, the one who has the floor…has the most power…’. His presence, for the benefit of his own masculine pride, demonstrates the lack of privacy that these female characters have in the world. His reference to ‘my friend Dombey’, and ‘my friend Gay’ establishes an almost symbolic masculine network around the two ‘lovely and accomplished’ women. This exhausted anaphora serves to bring the network closer ...

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