Dickens’ Dombey and Son: Patriarchal Performance and Victorian Politics of Culture

Aisik Maiti is a student of MA English (Semester IV) at the University of Calcutta (Main Campus). An avid reader, he has presented papers at national and international conferences. He has publications in international journals and academic blogs, and his areas of interest include literature and the other arts, nineteenth-century studies, and Indian writing in English. Twitter: @AisikMaiti

The politics of culture underpinning the Victorian notions of home, family, identity and belonging are nuanced and textured. Dickens’ work, critically classified at times under the tradition of the condition of England novels significantly sheds light on how Victorian constructions of familial life informed the larger societal structures. Dickensian social themes often include disruptions in domestic spaces indicating larger societal and discursive shortcomings. While nineteenth century textual discourses often accommodated commentaries about social life, Dickens’ work further embodies a commentary of the binaries which accompanied the discourses of sociality.

The cultural politics surrounding gender certainly play significantly in all of Dickens’ corpus, however in Dombey the critique of the patriarchal discourse is very prominent as it deals with the location of discursive identities within the frameworks of family and society, which are essentially regulated by male-defined structures.

Dickens weaves into the textual fabric of Dombey the Victorian notion of pride which the titular character embodies. Throughout the novel, Dombey displays a connection with materialism and dissociates himself from spirituality in any form or shape. In the entire critique of the patriarchal discourse which the subtext embodies, autobiographical memory also becomes an important factor, connecting the fictional terrain with Dickens’ own personal experiences.

The cultural environment is mostly one of repression and subtextual fears of the unknown within a paradigm of technological advancement being a characteristic marker of Victorian progress. In Dombey, it is undoubtedly the railways, which has much more significance in terms of its materiality. In terms of social currency, the railways in Dombey signify the influx of modernity into the rubric of tradition and much more:

“… among objects close at hand and almost in the grasp, ever flying from the traveller, and a deceitful distance ever moving slowly within him: like as in the track of the remorseless monster, Death!” (Chapter 20, ‘Mr. Dombey goes upon a Journey’, p. 311)

Central to the understanding of the cultural politics of gender in the text, is the binary operating between the public sphere and the domestic. Neat demarcations between the public and the domestic, present across the entire corpus of the writer, be it Great Expectations or Pickwick Papers, are further appropriated into notions of femininity and access to social spaces in a time-period when social agency defined social existence.

In Dombey and Son, the Victorian binary between the ‘angel in the house’ and the ‘fallen woman’ is represented in obvious ways in the characters of Florence Dombey and Edith respectively. Within the economy of powers in the text, Florence’s character, her choices and the recognition of her own location within the structure is always in a state of flux, in a structure which at the outset categorizes her in superlatives: “… Miss Dombey the most beautiful, the most amiable, the most angelic of her sex.” (Chapter 62, ‘Final’, p. 945)

The textual ambivalence becomes important, as the narrative accommodates its sociological comment within the operating structures of power. As Kristina Aikens points it out,

“With its emphasis on separate spheres, its depiction of Florence’s superhuman healing powers, and its concern with redeeming the patriarch, Dombey and Son certainly seems more interested in a mildly gradual improvement of the status quo than in radical change.” (Aikens, p.89)

At the centre of all the intersecting moral discourses of Dombey is the titular figure, whom Dickens describes as “one of those close-shaved close-cut monied gentlemen who are glossy and crisp with new bank notes, and who seem to be artificially braced and tightened as by the stimulating action of golden shower-baths.” What the reader finds is a representation of the proud Victorian gentleman who has both agency and access to monetary and hence social power. This consequently engages with the question of masculinity and its ramifications in the Dickensian corpus. A text like Dombey which intricately engages with the idea of a dysfunctional family and patriarchal lineage, embodies a commentary on this. Andrew Sanders writes, “The dysfunctions of the Dombey family are, therefore, magnified in a dysfunctional society … the dysfunctions deny not just proper mutuality but the very nature of intertwined human and divine love.” (Sanders, ‘Introduction’, p. xxv)

This evidently sheds light on notions of Victorian scepticism and the development of ideological models which could provide an implicit counter-discourse to this. For instance, “The earth was made for Dombey and Son to trade in, and the sun and moon were made to give them light.” (Chapter I, ‘Dombey and Son’, p.12)

In an article on masculinities in Dombey, Rosemary Coleman writes that the novel deals with the ‘vexed subject of bourgeois masculinity.’ (p. 125) Analysing the sources of Dombey’s pride, Coleman argues, “Unable to perform the role of authoritative husband, too distracted even to pretend to fulfil his role as mercantile magnate, Dombey demonstrates his impotence in both the private and the public spheres.” (Coleman, p.131)

What Dombey, the text as well as the character, faces is a resistance as well as redemption from the Victorian myths of continuity of the system.  The death of the male heir, and by the expulsion of the daughter someone beneath her social station is both subversive to the narrative position of the text and the ideological position on Dombey. The ending becomes particularly significant, as Dickens writes about Dombey’s profound love for his granddaughter:

‘He is fondest of her and most loving to her, when there is no creature by. The child says then, sometimes:

“Dear grandpapa, why do you cry when you kiss me?”

He only answers, “Little Florence! little Florence!” and smooths away the curls that shade her earnest eyes.’ (Chapter 62, pp. 947-8))

Therefore, Dickens in his experimentation with the modes of inscribing discursive instabilities into writing, was accommodating a lot from different narrative and cultural models available. In Dombey, Dickens weaves into his commentary on the politics of culture a commentary on the collapsing values which nourished it. The restored family, the message of reconciliation, regeneration, the emergence of a new order, everything reflects the Victorian concern with temporalities and the preservation of historicity: ‘… from his daughter, after all, another Dombey and Son will ascend’—no ‘rise;’ that was Mrs Toots’s word — ‘triumphant!’ (Chapter 62, p. 946).

(Some of the research here is a part of my paper presented in the PGR/ECR Long 19^th Century Seminar – Dickensian Special, Manchester Metropolitan University, 2021: “Politics of Culture, Family and Discursive Assimilation: Victorian Contemporaneity in Dickens’ Dombey and Son and David Copperfield”)

Bibliography:

1. Dickens, Charles, and Andrew Sanders. Dombey and Son. Penguin Books, 2007.
2. AIKENS, KRISTINA. “The Daughter’s Desire in ‘Dombey and Son.’” Critical Survey, vol. 17, no. 2, Berghahn Books, 2005, pp. 77–91, http://www.jstor.org/stable/41556109
3. Coleman, Rosemary. “How ‘Dombey and Son’ Thinks About Masculinities.” Dickens Studies Annual, vol. 45, Penn State University Press, 2014, pp. 125–45, http://www.jstor.org/stable/44372230