Dickens' Women Read Free Page A

looks? One would believe so, to hear you!’
    â€˜It an’t that!’ cried the mother. ‘She knows it!’
    â€˜What is it then?’ returned the daughter. ‘It had best be something that don’t last, mother, or my way out is easier than my way in.’
    â€˜Hear that!’ exclaimed the mother. ‘After all these years she threatens to desert me in the moment of her coming back again!’
    â€˜I tell you, mother, for the second time, there have been years for me as well as you,’ said Alice. ‘Come back harder? Of course I have come back harder. What else did you expect?’
    â€˜Harder to me! To her own dear mother!’ cried the old woman.
    â€˜I don’t know who began to harden me, if my own dear mother didn’t,’ she returned, sitting with her folded arms, and knitted brows, and compressed lips as if she were bent on excluding, by force, every softer feeling from her breast. ‘Listen, mother, to a word or two. If we understand each other now, we shall not fall out any more, perhaps. I went away a girl, and have come back a woman. I went away undutiful enough, and have come back not better, you may swear. But have you been very dutiful to me?’
    â€˜I!’ cried the old woman. ‘To my gal! A mother dutiful to her own child!’
    â€˜It sounds unnatural, don’t it?’ returned the daughter, looking coldly on her with her stern, regardless, hardy, beautiful face; ‘but I have thought of it sometimes, in the course of my lone years, till I have got used to it. I have heard some talk about duty first and last; but it has always been of my duty to other people. I have wondered now and then – to pass away the time – whether no one ever owed any duty to me.’
    Dickens’ favourite and most autobiographical novel was David Copperfield . It’s interesting to note that this was the book that the young Sigmund Freud gave to his fiancée.
    Luckily, Dickens could never have read Freud, whose Interpretation of Dreams was published twenty-nine years after Dickens’ death, indeed I doubt if he would have written a line if he had read him, but there is a psychological truth in Alice’s character, which convinces despite the somewhat melodramatic language. It has its own reality.
    The second relationship, which parallels Alice Marwood’s and her mother’s, is that between Edith Dombey and her mother, the truly grotesque Mrs Skewton, one of Dickens’ most shocking descriptions:
    At night, she should have been a skeleton, with dart and hour-glass, rather than a woman, this attendant; for her touch was as the touch of Death. The painted object shrivelled underneath her hand; the form collapsed, the hair dropped off, the arched dark eyebrows changed to scanty tufts of grey; the pale lips shrunk, the skin became cadaverous and loose; an old, worn, yellow, nodding woman, with red eyes, alone remained in Cleopatra’s place, huddled up, like a slovenly bundle, in a greasy flannel gown.
    Relish the passion in this confrontation between Edith and ‘Cleopatra’:
    â€˜Why don’t you tell me,’ it said sharply, ‘that he is coming here to-morrow by appointment?’
    â€˜Because you know it,’ returned Edith, ‘Mother.’
    The mocking emphasis she laid on that one word!
    â€˜You know he has bought me,’ she resumed. ‘Or that he will, to-morrow. He has considered of his bargain; he has shown it to his friend; he is even rather proud of it; he thinks that it will suit him, and may be had sufficiently cheap; and he will buy to-morrow. God, that I have lived for this, and that I feel it!’
    Compress into one handsome face the conscious self-abasement , and the burning indignation of a hundred women, strong in passion and in pride; and there it hid itself with two white shuddering arms.
    â€˜What do you mean?’ returned the angry mother. ‘Haven’t you