Dickens and the Daughter of the House

This book examines the role of 'legless angels' (George Orwell), 'angry women' and 'good daughters' in Dicken's narratives.

Hilary M. Schor (Author)

9780521042635, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 24 September 2007

248 pages
22.9 x 15.4 x 1.5 cm, 0.377 kg

'Hilary Schor's book has a noble end: to save Charles Dickens for a feminist readership. And she has succeeded. In the end, with the help of Schor's analysis, one cannot but admire the subtle ways in which this Victorian genius, very much like his contemporary Tennyson in 'The Lady of Shalott', let his heroines sign their names to their own stories.' English Studies

Feminist criticism has not been kind to Charles Dickens. The characters George Orwell referred to as 'legless angels' - Little Nell, Agnes Wickfield, Esther Summerson and others - have been conjured as evidence of Dickens' inability to create 'real' women. Critics wishing to rescue him have turned to the dark, angry women - Nancy, Lady Dedlock, Miss Wade - who disrupt the calm surface of some of Dickens' novels. In this book Hilary M. Schor argues that the role of the good daughter is interwoven with that of her angry double in Dickens' fiction, and is the centre of narrative authority in the Dickens' novel. As the good daughters must leave their father's house and enter the world of the marketplace, they transform and rewrite the stories they are empowered to tell. The daughter's uncertain legal status and her power of narrative gave Dickens a way of reading and writing his own culture differently.

Acknowledgements
Introduction
Part I. Making Fictions: 1. The uncanny daughter: Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickleby, and the progress of Little Nell
Part II. On Not Committing Adultery in the Novel: 2. Dombey and Son: the daughter's nothing
3. Hard Times and A Tale of Two Cities: the social inheritance of adultery
Part III. The Daughter's Portion: 4. Bleak House and the dead mother's property
5. Amy Dorrit's prison notebooks
Part IV. A Violent Conclusion: 6. In the shadow of Satis House: the woman's story in Great Expectations
7. Our Mutual Friend and the daughter's book of the dead
Notes
Index.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: fiction, novelists & prose writers [DSK]