Another aspect of David’s story, also akin to the fairy tale pattern, is that he has friends who shelter and help him, friends, to borrow Mrs. Micawber’s phrase, who will never desert him (“I will never desert Mr. Micawber!” this wonderful character can be counted on to proclaim every time she enters the novel) and who assist in keeping evil at bay. So Betsy Trotwood, the aunt who in Chapter One “walked out and never came back,” is back—there at the end of David’s walk to Dover, never to leave him again and to rout the Murdstones. And Mr. Micawber, whose abiding hope is that something will turn up, keeps turning up himself—in Canterbury, in London where amiable Tommy Traddles, moreover, reappears as his lodger, and then once more in Canterbury, for his heroic unmasking of Uriah Heep.
Of course, it’s not just David’s protectors who keep reappearing. This is a book so centered in the protagonist’s early years that just about all the dramatis personae assemble in its first third—the part readers almost always remember and love best—and then keep coming back as their roles in David’s life and psyche play out. Steerforth is reencountered—“My God, he exclaims, “It’s little Copperfield!”—when David is seventeen. The Murdstones reenter as, respectively, Dora Spenlow’s “confidential friend” and Mr. Spenlow’s client. Even Mr. Chillip, the doctor from the novel’s first chapter, looking “just as he might have looked when he sat in our parlour waiting for me to be born” comes in to give a last report of Mr. Murdstone inflicting misery on a new young wife, while Mr. Creakle pops up as the warden of a model prison in which Uriah Heep, still wringing his hands, and Steerforth’s former valet, the hypocritical Littimer, are incarcerated. Finally, Mr. Peggotty, back in England on a visit from Australia, catches us up on Little Em’ly, Mrs. Gummidge, and the Micawbers—the émigrés we know are there—and tells of a prospering Mr. Mell. No one, nothing from childhood is forgotten. The original cast of characters is always being reassembled and rearranged as the psyche struggles to repair itself.
I realize this may not be entirely reassuring. That the Murdstones are still constraining others’ lives and Uriah and Littimer still at their wiles shows that evil persists and childhood demons never completely leave us. But if we’re lucky, these forces weaken; they get pushed to the outskirts of our stories. David, at long last married to Agnes and surrounded by old friends, is heartening proof that ties to others can be sustained and be sustaining and that experience can feel whole.
It may be my inclination to be positive—so wanting things to turn out right that I’ve often been accused of not giving proper weight to hurt and difficulty, but I can’t help seeing David Copperfield, for all its terrors, as in many ways a gentle book. It tells a painful story but then finds ways to cushion the pain—through humor and the charm and vividness of characters, and also, very importantly, through its setting, a southern English landscape from which mid-nineteenth-century capitalism and urban grittiness have been largely banished. These may be hinted at in David’s London sojourn at Murdstone and Grinby’s or in Betsy Trotwood’s reversals in the stock market. But the young reader of David Copperfield, whether in Beverly Hills, Brooklyn, or a London orphanage, is carried out of herself into one of Dickens’s greenest, most pastoral worlds.
Just look at the opening chapter in which David, from inside his parlor “warm and bright with fire and candle,” feels “indefinable compassion” for his father’s white gravestone “lying out alone in the dark night,” against which the doors of the house are bolted. Then even that outside darkness lifts in the ensuing reflection. “There is nothing half so green that I know anywhere,” the narrator muses, “as the green of that churchyard; nothing half so shady as its trees; nothing half so quiet as its tombstones. The sheep are feeding there, when I kneel up, early in the morning, in my little bed in a closet within my mother’s room, to look out at it.”
David will soon be expelled from this womb with a view—cast out from his room, house, and green countryside. Thus the pastoral is qualified; it is never untinged by loss. Rooks, after all, even at the outset, have deserted the Rookery, and the pigeon house and dog’s kennel are empty. Snakes come into the garden: Mr. Murdstone, Uriah—that’s part of the book’s fascination—but even when the sea rises in storm to punish Steerforth for seducing and abandoning Little Em’ly and claim as well the good Ham Peggotty, the reader is drawn into a world that can only be called enchanting. I was happy to be transported to Sussex, to Yarmouth, to Canterbury. I was delighted to travel by coach with Barkis, to enter Mr. Peggotty’s boat of a house and meet its colorful inhabitants, or even, at the nadir of young David’s fortunes in London, to encounter the wonderful Micawbers and to lose myself in their phrases and fantasies. David Copperfield, more than any other novel in my early reading, laid the foundations in my mind and heart of an ideal of England, an ideal I have continued to cherish and believe in despite all the dystopic novels of Doris Lessing or Martin Amis I have read since, despite my own first-hand knowledge of a post-WWII to twenty-first-century country in decline. I could understand all Steerforth’s faults, but I was also seduced by his immense charm. Steerforth was England. Peggotty and her brother were England. Little Em’ly was England. David was England. Even ’umble, treacherous Uriah Heep helped to round out the picture as the snake in England’s garden. . . . And I gave my heart to them all.
Thus, through David I entered a completely absorbing, “knowable community”—the critic Raymond Williams’s wonderful phrase for a world of imaged coherence—to which the narrator himself is attached by bonds of memory and love. When, like my colleague, I returned to the book as an adult, I was struck by how strongly the force of memory colors the telling of the story. Despite the question hanging over the book of whether David will turn out to be the hero of his own life, David Copperfield is, above all, one of those books that look back on the past with at once aching and lyrical nostalgia for the felt experience of childhood. The past is remembered with compassion; pain is recast as reverie. Even the pain of the time at Murdstone and Grinby’s softens in retrospect. Thinking how he made up stories about the debtors in Kings Prison, David reflects: “When my thoughts go back now to that slow agony of my youth . . . when I tread the old ground, I do not wonder that I seem to see before me, an innocent romantic boy making his imaginative world out of such strange experiences and sordid things.”
Memory, which itself is a form of imagination, is David’s gentle and compassionate friend, recovering dear past moments that then exist for him almost out of time—Worthsworth called these “spots of time.” David’s “spots of time” include memories of the beach at Yarmouth with Little Em’ly; of his first evening home on holiday from Salem House with the Murdstones thankfully absent from the house; of Salem House itself, when he stops on his flight to Dover to sleep in a haystack behind a wall at the back of the school and remembers, not smarting under Mr. Creakle’s ruler or feeling shame at his placard, but “lying on my old school-bed, talking to the boys in my room.” Here experience is filtered through a double layer of memory with David the narrator’s nostalgically remembering the ten-year-old boy, who is already nostalgically transforming his school days. The tyrannies of Salem Hall fade into bedtime stories evoked in a pastoral haystack.
The power of memory in David Copperfield is linked to the faculty of love. Steerforth, fearing his own fallen nature and the changes it might work, pleads to his friend, transformed into a flower: “Daisy, if anything should ever separate us, you must think of me at my best, old boy.” But David’s answer goes one better, removing Steerforth from all vicissitudes of best and worst: “‘You have no best to me, Steerforth,’ said I. ‘And no worst. You are always equally loved and cherished in my heart.’”
Loving remembrance of his mother, of Steerforth, of Dora restores them to David Copperfield. Loving, compassionate remembrance of the past reconstitutes it whole, with no best and no worst. At one point when David is coming out of the theater after seeing Julius Caesar, he is filled with “the mingled reality and myster
y of the whole show.” The play becomes “like a shining transparency” through which he sees his “earlier life moving along.” This passage seems to me the achievement of the novel. To revisit the past is not to deny its hardships but to deny “any severing of our love.” The past then looms through the creative force of remembrance like “a shining transparency.”
My past is my experience of Beverly Hills, of my mother and brother, of Rosemary Hall and Pam Wilkinson, Sue Stein and Judy Wilson. My past is also my life of reading, which I began young. The early reading of David Copperfield is as much a part of my personal history as anything “real” that happened to me. David Copperfield happened to me. It is one of my spots of time. The book has become like a shining transparency through which I see my earlier life moving along.
iv
THE ONE PART OF David’s past that never softens for him is the history with his stepfather, Mr. Murdstone. When Miss Murdstone reenters the novel as Dora’s companion, David has the opportunity to say to her, “Miss Murdstone, . . . I think you and Mr. Murdstone used me very cruelly, and treated my mother with great unkindness. I shall always think so as long as I live.” This is an important utterance. It remains within the bounds of civil discourse but manages, nonetheless, to convey unvarnished truth. I find it interesting that when, a few chapters later, David reencounters Mr. Murdstone—the character who, after all, is the primary villain—his language, though still truthful, is more constrained. Mr. Murdstone reenters the text for just a few pages as a client for whom David’s father-in-law, Mr. Spenlow, is helping to obtain a marriage license (the reader shudders to anticipate Mr. Murdstone’s next victim). The meeting occurs in Mr. Spenlow’s office. Peggotty, for whom David is transacting some legal business, is present as well. Mr. Spenlow unwittingly suggests that David knows “this gentleman,” and the two old antagonists exchange cool greetings. Then Mr. Murdstone addresses himself to Peggotty:
“And you,” he said, “I am sorry to observe that you have lost your husband.”
“It’s not the first loss I have had in my life, Mr. Murdstone,” replied Peggotty, trembling from head to foot. “I am glad to hope there is nobody to blame for this one,—nobody to answer for it.”
“Ha!” Said he; “that’s a comfortable reflection. You have done your duty?”
“I have not worn anybody’s life away,” said Peggotty. “I am thankful to think! No Mr. Murdstone, I have not worrited and frightened any sweet creetur to an early grave!”
He eyed her gloomily—remorsefully I thought—for an instant; and said, turning his head towards me but looking at my feet instead of my face:
“We are not likely to encounter soon again;—a source of satisfaction to us both, no doubt, for such meetings can never be agreeable. I do not expect that you, who always rebelled against my just authority, exerted for your benefit and reformation, should owe me any good will now. There is an antipathy between us—”
“An old one, I believe?” I said interrupting him.
The scene ends with Mr. Murdstone continuing to impugn David’s character. Both, however, are mindful of their obligation to behave as gentlemen, and David wonders what constraints he might have shed if he had not felt anxious about what Peggotty, less class-bound than he, might have gone on to say. But in a sense David gets to have it both ways. He behaves as a gentleman, yet between his own cool comments and Peggotty’s more biting sarcasm enough truth gets spoken: Mr. Murdstone is called to account.
In my own life, I never had the chance to reencounter Bow Wow. I was never able to tell him how he had scarred me and afflicted my family. I never experienced the catharsis of showing him I knew the harm he had done us, naming it with accuracy and without fear. So Bow Wow remained the bogeyman of my imagination, a shadow in my psyche. Then one day, a good six or eight years after the death of my mother, I learned that Bow Wow, too, had died. An old California family friend had read a short obituary in the Los Angeles Times. Perhaps it was Bow Wow’s link with my mother that earned him this notice. Or the fact that in his later years, he had become a hanger on—almost a kind of mascot—of the Los Angeles Rams. I calculated he must have died in his seventies and had trouble thinking of him as an old man.
To learn of Bow Wow’s death was a relief. The death meant he could never pop into our lives again to harm or embarrass us, never again send me a card, as he had last done when I married at twenty-six, thirteen years after his exit from our home, addressed to “Princess Wendy Westbrook” and offering the perverse gift of a hundred Hail Marys to be said for me at Beverly Hills All Saints Catholic Church. He could never boast again to the football players he hung out with of his years with Sheilah Graham; never again write to Matthew Bruccoli, the Fitzgerald scholar, about his alleged cache of Scott Fitzgerald papers. Perhaps I could now move a step further away from my still simmering rage. But I was left strangely disquieted at old business left unfinished.
My mother had resolved her history with Bow Wow by cutting him literally out of the story. In our family archives we have a picture from the reception celebrating her wedding to Bow Wow of my mother with Marilyn Monroe, but not a single one of her and Bow Wow, though that means some of the pictures were torn in half. His name was stricken, too. She would refer to him either as “the monster” or as “my unfortunate third husband.” But at the same time she stored him up as material for fiction. Though she never did more than compile a few notes for it, she talked about writing a short story called “Athlete’s Foot,” in which the protagonist dreams of being a great athlete but is thwarted by his small feet (Bow Wow hadn’t been the college football star he had claimed to be—that was just one of his lies.). At the end of the story, my mother planned for this character to redeem himself by dying to save a girl from drowning in the ocean. She thus managed to turn Bow Wow into, if not a hero, at least a comic villain, you might even say something out of Dickens, a blowhard wobbling on small feet, easily toppled. As for me, though I linger with my Dickensian trauma, an experience akin to that of the young boy working in the blacking warehouse, the reversal and shame to which he returns again and again, I have hopes as well of more release from it.
My relationship to David Copperfield has a less ambiguous coda. For a few years in the late 1990s, I taught one course each semester at New York University. One day I saw a notice on a bulletin board in the NYU English department announcing a conference in Sydney, Australia, on The Victorians and Childhood. I thought of my Brooklyn College friend Roni Natov, who is a preeminent scholar in Children’s Studies and also a specialist in the Victorian Novel, my field as well. I detached the poster from the wall and took it to Roni.
“You’ve got to try to do this,” I urged her.
“Yes,” she said, “But you’ve got to come, too.”
The deadline for paper submissions had passed, but we got permission to send in a proposal if we could dispatch it the next day. Overnight we concocted a topic and an abstract. Our paper, “Dickens’s David and Carroll’s Alice: Representations of Victorian Liminality,” would examine reverie in David Copperfield and nightmare in Alice in Wonderland, the two expressions of self we identified as liminal. We posited that the reverie is always seeking to repair the psyche’s sense of loss and the nightmare allows for that loss to be expressed without acknowledging any real wounds to the psyche. The books joined for us in their use of the child and his or her wondrous journey to penetrate the margins of Victorian experience. Roni would do the Alice portion, and I the David. Our proposal was accepted, and I wrote my part of the paper with astonishing ease.
My first afternoon in Australia, fresh, or not so fresh, off the plane, I set out on a walk from our motel. I meant only to get a little exercise after the nineteen-hour confinement of the flight from New York to Sydney. With no set destination in mind, I found myself heading towards the ocean, not stopping until, three miles farther, I descended a hill to the expanse of water. The coast was reminiscent of California’s arid cliffs swooping down towards crescent beaches.
I walked onto the sand and stood gazing out to sea, on the opposite side of the ocean I had known and loved as a child. Australia seemed a lot like Southern California before it got so built up and crowded.
When I was a child, David Copperfield had figuratively transported me across a continent and an ocean to the green pastoral landscape of England. Now I had literally traveled across a continent and an ocean to read a paper about that green landscape in a contrasting one of dry hills, rustling eucalyptus trees, and sheer cliffs sweeping down to the Pacific. Dickens himself never traveled to Australia, though a number of his characters do, including the cluster in David Copperfield. Now I had come to the country and continent that had been a remote land of real exile for the British government and for Dickens a place to send characters he didn’t want to kill off but needed to get out of the way, a convenient land of last resort. Yet Australia is also where poor Mr. Mell and improvident Mr. Micawber get to thrive. I felt I was thriving, too. A few years short of sixty and happy in many aspects of my life, I seemed, like David Copperfield, to have come out on the safe side of harm. It was nice to linger a moment with that sparkling seascape before turning from it to move on.
Jane Eyre and Becky Sharp
Reliably popular with students and, to borrow a phrase from Roland Barthes, “moist with meaning,” Jane Eyre is a convenient book to teach. First at the University of Hawaii in the early seventies, and then as I have moved in my life and career to England, Maine, New York, Virginia, and New York a second time, I have turned to it again and again, finding students of all ages, mostly women but men, too, ready to suffer and exult with Brontë’s small, plain heroine, hating those she hates, forgiving those she loves, keeping company with her in her evolution from unloved orphan to charity student, governess, fiancée, schoolteacher, and finally wife. They have applauded her in her defiance of Mrs. Reed, rooted for her in gaining the love of Mr. Rochester, and supported her in her decision to leave him, a would-be bigamist. They have understood why she cannot marry the icy St. John Rivers and then rejoiced at her return to her chastened and symbolically castrated true love. “Reader, I married him” must rank as one of the most deeply satisfying sentences in English literature. I teach the book because it is an important canonical, feminist, and even colonial text, serving to raise questions of narrative, the status of women, realism versus romance, the loneliness and hardiness of the individual, and sexual and cultural politics, to name just some of the inviting topics of discussion; I teach it because I can count on my students’ engagement with it, whether they are English majors or accountants, graduate students or freshmen. Yet Jane Eyre is a novel that has never moved me. It left me cold when I first read it at age ten or eleven, and my interest in it up to this present day has never risen above the academic. It’s a great book for the classroom, but I have never loved it—not it and not its heroine.
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