DICKENSIAN CONCEPT OF ANDROGYNY: GENDER RELATIONS IN DAVID COPPERFIELD

Abstract

Dickens wrote in times when women were officially possessions of their husbands, fathers or of any male who was acknowledged as the head of the family. Families forbade their girls to read novels whose heroines were contentious such as Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall and Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. Although Dickens is widely attacked for his feeble female characters in line with the angel in the house doctrine, according to his great granddaughter Lucinda Dickens Hawskley, he is the fruit of the able women in his life aside from the Victorian ideals. Elizabeth Dickens, his paternal grandmother, was a housekeeper who inspired him with her kind nature and storytelling. It was his mother, Elizabeth Barrow, who taught him mathematics, literacy and Latin. According to Dickens, to be a complete human being, the masculine sides of men should be harmonized with the feminine traits of women. Similar to the influential women in his life, Dickens’ weak, angelic female characters are, at the same time, the women who complete a lack in men and enable them to become ideal human beings via their feminine characteristics. In this respect, a new type of androgyny, which the paper names as the Dickensian androgyny, might be observed in Dickens’ male characters. Accordingly, this paper aims to dwell on Dickens’ concept of androgyny to grow into a complete human being through the harmony of male and female characteristics as mirrored in his character David in David Copperfield.  

Keywords

• Charls Dickens
• David Capirfield
• Androgyny
• Gender Relations

DICKENS’IN ANDROJENLİK KAVRAMI: DAVID COPPERFIELD’DA TOPLUMSAL CİNSİYET İLİŞKİLERİ

Abstract

Dickens wrote in times when women were officially possessions of their husbands, fathers or of any male who was acknowledged as the head of the family. Families forbade their girls from reading novels whose heroines were contentious such as Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall and Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. Although Dickens is widely attacked for his feeble female characters in line with the angel in the house doctrine, according to his great granddaughter Lucinda Dickens Hawskley, he is the fruit of the able women in his life aside from the Victorian ideals. Elizabeth Dickens, his paternal grandmother, was a housekeeper who inspired him with her kind nature and storytelling. It was his mother, Elizabeth Barrow, who taught him mathematics, literacy and Latin. Apart from his family members, there were copious impressive women in Dickens’s life including the novelist Anne Thackeray Ritchie, the anti-slavery campaigner Elizabeth Jesser Reid; and Elizabeth Gaskell whom Dickens encouraged to write about bastardy and prostitution which were not fitting subjects for female novelists of the time. Similar to the influential women in his life, Dickens’s weak, angelic female characters are, at the same time, the women who complete a lack in men and enable them to become ideal human beings via their feminine characteristics. In this respect, the concept of androgyny might be observed in Dickens’s male characters. Accordingly, this paper aims to dwell on Dickens’s concept of androgynous self to grow into an ideal human being through the amalgamation of male and female characteristics as mirrored in his character David in David Copperfield.

Keywords

• Charles Dickens
• David Copperfield
• androgyny
• gender relations

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