Drowning in early Dickens
2005; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 19; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1080/0950236042000329654
ISSN1470-1308
Autores Tópico(s)Contemporary Literature and Criticism
ResumoClick to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Acknowledgements I would like to thank Victoria Margree for giving incisive and innovative feedback during the later stages of writing this article. I am also indebted to the delegates of the ‘Dickens and Sex’ conference (Institute of English Studies, University of London, 20 March 2004), and in particular to Holly Furneaux, who enthusiastically listened to a different version of this article and enabled me to re-evaluate my critical approach. Notes 1. William A. Cohen, Sex Scandal: the Private Parts of Victorian Fiction (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996). 2. ve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985). 3. harles Dickens, The Old Curiosity Shop, ed. Angus Easson [1840–41] (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985). 4. eorge Eliot, Daniel Deronda, ed. Terence Cave 1876 (London: Penguin, 1995). 5. ee Ron M. Brown, The Art of Suicide (London: Reaktion, 2001), pp. 146–93, and B.E. Maidment, Reading Popular Prints: 1790–1870 (2nd edn) (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001), pp. 138–73. 6. nevitably, the process of drowning involves saturation, rot and decay; what is significant is that the nineteenth century focused on these processes in an historically unprecedented way. 7. he process of drowning is made up of several stages. First, there is oxygen starvation, the need to hold one's breath underwater; eventually the body's breathing reflex forces the subject to open the lungs, causing the subject to cough up the water just inhaled, resulting in the inhalation of more water, at which point the larynx seals the air tube to protect further water from entering the lungs. This is why most drownees are found to have only a little water in their lungs; so, the drownee's body literally kills itself in the act of protection against the water. Eventually, due to lack of oxygen, the heart stops and, some minutes after, brain damage is caused by lack of oxygen, then it dies too. 8. harles Dickens, The Pickwick Papers, ed. Mark Wormald [1836–37] (Harmondsworth: Penguin. 1999). 9. harles Dickens, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, ed. Angus Wilson and Arthur J. Cox 1870 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985). 10. Ron M. Brown, The Art of Suicide, p. 153. 11. Helen V. Emmitt, ‘“Drowned in a willing sea”: freedom and drowning in Eliot, Chopin, and Drabble’, Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature, 12, (autumn, 1993) pp. 315–32, p. 315. There are other, similar readings: Mary Jane Lupton's ‘Women Writers and Death by Drowning’ (Amid Visions and Revisions: Poetry and Criticism on Literature and the Arts, ed. Burney J. Hollis (Baltimore, MD: Morgan State University Press, 1985), pp. 95–101); a text that appropriates drowning as a uniquely feminine experience. 12. Charles Kingsley, The Water-Babies 1863 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995). 13. Maureen Duffy, The Erotic World of Faery (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1972), p. 283. 14. Peter Ackroyd notes in his London: the Biography that the Thames is unique among British rivers by being gendered as masculine, he also includes a series of references to poets who use the term ‘Father Thames’ (London: Chatto & Windus, 2000), p. 541. A number of images also appeared throughout the century in Punch which depict Father Thames soaked in excrement. One such example is the mirthful Father Thames and his Children Introduce Themselves to the Fair City of London (3rd July 1858), p. 5. Consequently, the idea of the Thames as a ‘Father’ was a widely held cultural assumption. 15. William Wordsworth, The Poems: Volume One, ed. John O. Hayden (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977), pp. 574–5. 16. Edmund Spenser, The Shorter Poems, ed. Richard A. McCabe (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1999), p. 491. 17. The Rape of the Lock, ed. Cynthia Wall (Boston, MA: Bedford Books, 1998), Canto II, l. 4. 18. The Pleasures of Melancholy: A Poem (London, 1746), l. 161. 19. ‘Mac Flecknoe, a satire upon the true-blue Protestant poet T.S.’, in The Works of John Dryden: Poems 1681–1684 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), l. 38. 20. Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend, ed. Stephen Gill [1864–65] (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), p. 874. 21. The Pickwick Papers, p. 71. 22. A Lacanian reading of Dickensian drownings (which signify the end of desire, consequently bringing ‘happiness’) would make an interesting study. 23. Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist, ed. Peter Fairclough [1837–39] (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985). 24. The etymology of ‘pornography’ is derived from the Greek for ‘prostitute’ (pornu) and ‘writing’ (graphia). 25. Charles Dickens, David Copperfield, ed. Nina Burgis [1849–50] (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981). 26. Oliver Twist, pp. 415–16. 27. Wilkie Collins, The Moonstone, ed. John Sutherland 1868 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 24. 28. Wilkie Collins, The Moonstone, p. 24. 29. David Copperfield, p. 661. 30. David Copperfield, p. 662. 31. Charles Dickens, Dombey and Son, ed. Peter Fairclough [1846–48] (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985). 32. There are so many examples of such deferral, many more than I have space to consider here. Augustus Egg's triptych, Past and Present (1858) and Gustave Doré's The Bridge of Sighs (1850) both depict drowning through a kind of temporalized metonymy where drowning is either being considered, suggested, or is about to take place. There is also a glut of images of the body that has already drowned, the most famous of which are John Everett Millias' Ophelia (1851–52) and G.F. Watts' Found Drowned (1848–50). Such images manage Victorian propriety very carefully: the dead women depicted are tidily and vigilantly covered from neck to ankle. 33. Charles Dickens, Nicholas Nickleby, ed. Mark Ford [1838–39] (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986). 34. Nicholas Nickleby, p. 288. 35. Nicholas Nickleby, p. 411. 36. Nicholas Nickleby, p. 665. 37. This is of course the opposite of David Copperfield, where the early introduction of drowning – again, on the very first page – with the mention of the ‘caul’ prepares us for the fact that David Copperfield will not drown. 38. The Old Curiosity Shop, p. 44. The passage also functions as a conceptually intratextual throwback to the ‘dismal man’ of The Pickwick Papers. 39. The Old Curiosity Shop, p. 457. 40. See Algirdas Julien Greimas, ‘Actants, actors, and figures’, in On Meaning: Selected Writings in Semiotic Theory, ed. Algirdas Julien Greimas, trans. Paul J. Perron and Frank H. Collins (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press: 1987), pp. 106–20. 41. The Old Curiosity Shop, p. 616. 42. The Old Curiosity Shop, p. 618. 43. See Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's Between Men, pp. 176–77. 44. Charles Dickens, Great Expectations, ed. Janice Carlisle [1860–61] (New York and Boston: Bedford Books of St Martin's Press, 1996). 45. Red hair is a standard signifier of deviance in the Victorian world; this goes equally for other nineteenth-century fiction as well as Dickens; for example, both Uriah Heep and the despised Red Whisker in David Copperfield, Peter Quint in The Turn of the Screw, ed. Robert Kimborough 1898 (New York: Norton, 1966); Lord Steyne in Vanity Fair, ed. John Sutherland 1848 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), Obadiah Slope in Anthony Trollope's Barchester Towers, ed. John Sutherland (1857 Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), and of course Fagin in Oliver Twist. 46. The Old Curiosity Shop, pp. 619–20. 47. Frederic G. Kitton, Dickens and His Illustrators (London: George Redway, 1899), p. 81. 48. See Kitton, Dickens and His Illustrators, pp. 79–120. 49. Letter To H.K. Browne, [?6 or 7 March 1840] in Madeleine House & Graham Storey (eds), The Letters of Charles Dickens: Volume Two, 1840–1841, 12 vols (Clarendon Press: Oxford, 1969), p. 38. 50. See Brown, The Art of Suicide, pp. 146–93. 51. Emmit, ‘“Drowned in a willing sea”’, pp. 317–18. 52. George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss, ed. Carol T. Christ 1860 (New York: Norton, 1994). 53. Eliot, The Mill on the Floss, p. 423. 54. John Everett Millais' Ophelia is wonderfully ambiguous on this point (as was Shakespeare). While the image suggests the depiction of a tragedy, the surroundings which seem to be bursting with life problematise this sense. Does Ophelia return to nature as Maggie and Tom do? Millais refuses to be drawn; although Ophelia floats in idealized surroundings, on closer inspection she is found to be not touching anything that surrounds her. The carefully arranged flowers in her hand only float upon the water and do not seem to touch her at all. Ophelia is not returning to nature as the tragic do; she is not contiguous with it. Instead she is depicted in a sort of watery coffin that acts as a punishing purgatorial stasis.
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