Orbiting the Center and Oscillating from It:

Amy Dorrit and Harriet (Tattycoram) in

Little Dorrit by Charles Dickens.

Feminism, Sem. 2, 2010-2011

Prof. univ. dr. Adina Ciugureanu

Hristo Boev doctoral student, 1st year

at the University of Ovidius Constanta, Romania

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 Feminism is said to have been unkind to Dickens, and for a good reason, too. The female characters
he created in his novels strictly conform to the directives of the patriarchal society being rewarded or
penalized respectively for their faithful clinging to the center (the phallus) or rebellious detachment from it.
Yet, Dickens‘s guilt, from a feminist point of view, would lie not in the fact that in his novels he depicted a
patriarchal, phallocentric society (that was the type of society he was living in), but in that he portrayed the
ones moving away from the center as doing so not so much because of their being conscious of a different
feminine identity, which should entitle them to something better, but rather because of their ignorance or
inability to stay close to it. From this point of view, Dickens does not, even half-heartedly, give credit to the
rise of emancipation between 1830 and 1850 which saw women increasingly occupying positions in public
and private institutions in England and consequently becoming more independent of men, something that
Meredith did not fail to do in The Egoist (1879) in his portrayal of Clara or Charlotte Brontë in Jane Eyre
(1847) through the eponymous heroine. In Women’s Time (1981) Julia Kristeva speaks of a sexual difference
and its relationship to the symbolic contract with society as well as of the inseparable conjunction between
the sexual and the symbolic in determining the nature of woman, suggesting that the specificity of feminine
perceptions of the world should be properly reflected in the contract with society, which, in its
sociosymbolic essence, is perceived by women to be vastly sacrificial for them1. In Consuming Fictions:
Gender, Class and Hunger in Dickens’s Novels (1994) Gail Houston develops this idea a step further
suggesting that in his novels Dickens cannibalizes women at the expense of men, that they are seen in post-
Darwinian terms: usually portrayed as effete beings, are sick, and are literally destroyed to ensure the
survival of the men (e.g. Oliver‘s and Paul‘s births from Oliver Twist and Dombey and Son) leading to the
self-annihilation and anorexia of the former due to their abstaining from consumption 2.
To ascertain the veracity of the above said in a relationship to the portrayal of female characters with
Dickens, I am going to apply a feminist analysis to passages from Little Dorrit (1857) in compliance with
the rationale given by Toril Moi of men making use of feminist criticism and applying it to non-female
authors.3
In an attempt to find some redeeming qualities in Dickens‘s depiction of women, we might resort to
George Gissing‘s claim that in reproducing the life he knew, Dickens may have exaggerated some traits of
his male characters in their drive for power, but there was no exaggeration in his portrayal of women. 4 To
prove his point in his critical study of Dickens written in 1898, Gissing highlights certain recognizable types
of women in the society of his time and in juxtaposing them to the ones from Dickens‘s novels (e.g. Fanny,
Flora, etc), he establishes a number of matches.5
Counterarguments to the above statement, however, are not hard to find: Dickens, like any other
author, picked out certain types of the full spectrum to be found in society and chose to portray them in a
certain light thus advancing his ideas of humanitarian paternalism, not authoritarian, but still restricting
women: also, as shown by Virginia Woolf in her brilliant essay A Room of One’s Own (1929), even in

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patriarchal societies, women were often shown to possess wisdom revealed in some of the most profound
thoughts in literature falling from their lips being adored and highly respected by men.6
While still an object of adoration, Amy Dorrit inspires the male characters from the novel (John,
Arthur Clennam and Mr. Dorrit) with her full subscription to patriarchal norms and acquiescence to the
definition of the Other, which is made manifest in her conduct and manner of speech. On the same principle,
the other character I propose to analyze in this essay – Harriet alias Tattycoram will be shown to be
suffering from her oscillating from the center in her rebellion as well as being rewarded for her subsequent
repentance.
A passage as indicative of the above said as any other in the book is the following:
― ‗Amy, Mr Clennam. What do you think of her?‘
‗I am much impressed, Mr Dorrit, by all that I have seen of her and
thought of her.‘
‗My brother would have been quite lost without Amy,‘ he returned.
‗We should all have been lost without Amy. She is a very good girl,
Amy. She does her duty.‘
Arthur fancied that he heard in these praises a certain tone of custom,
which he had heard from the father last night with an inward
protest and feeling of antagonism. It was not that they stinted her
praises, or were insensible to what she did for them; but that they
were lazily habituated to her, as they were to all the rest of their
condition.‖7

The passage itself is self-explanatory enough in revealing Amy Dorrit as the paragon daughter of the
house completely resigned to self-sacrifice and self-denial, the latter being taken for granted by the male
members of the family. An interesting moment in the passage is Arthur‘s inward protest and antagonism,
which at their face value are critical of the Dorrits being accustomed to Amy Dorrit‘s dutiful service in the
house (the prison cell of the Father of the Marshalsea), but another interpretation would not be without
sufficient grounds, either – and namely that Arthur expresses an egoistic desire to possess Little Dorrit and is
resentful of the fact that she has devoted herself to being a protective sheath for her family and not to him. It
is evident then that Dickens approved much more of angelic daughters orbiting the phallus (the male
representatives of the family) than of wives as the latter would inevitably have more feminine characteristics
as well as more independence than the former with the resulting consequences of their partial participation
in the decision-making as well as developing full-blown femininity where a woman would traditionally be
seen as the Praying Mantis, the Mandrake, the Demon8. The opposite pair of patriarchal characteristics for
the woman as the Muse, the Goddess Mother Beatrice constituting the ambivalence as an intrinsic quality of
the Eternal Feminine 9 that Simon de Beauvoir speaks of in The Second Sex (1983) is sadly denied to wives
in Dickens‘s novels.
The role then allotted to the Victorian savior10 – Amy Dorrit, Florence or Jane Eyre as a woman for
the hearth defines her as immanence, an eternal presence guaranteeing the survival of the male members of
the family. As Simon de Beauvoir further argues, it is in no way a vocation, any more than slavery is the
vocation of the slave11.
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 Little Dorrit, in her total self-denial, embraces the prison within as a home and excludes the world
without as posing untold unnamed dangers threatening to break her orbit around the phallus:
―I particularly want you to remember,
that when I come outside the gate,
I am unprotected and solitary‖12

These are Little Dorrit‘s words to John a little after she informs him that she will never be his wife. It
has been observed by many that Amy Dorrit offers generous protection and is indulgent in self-sacrifices for
anyone except John. The reason why he is cut off from Amy‘s effusive protectiveness is clear – he makes a
direct claim to her as a protector by proposing to her, which automatically would deprive her family of her
protection. This act of attempted appropriation, therefore, accounts for the direct rebuff that he suffers as a
result. The other male character who suffers a similar fate all along almost to the end is Arthur Clennam as
suppressing her sexuality in denying his advances to her sanctifies and secures Amy Dorrit the patriarchal
prize denied to Little Nell from the Old Curiosity Shop.
Evoking Derrida‘s ideas of binary oppositions, we can see that Maggy, the idiot girl liberated from the
prescriptive norms of fallocentrism, does not carry any weight due to her worthlessness (she cannot be
considered as a prospective mother) to be able to enter into orbit of a phallus and is therefore exempt from
the obligations of having to conform and can, as a result, voice the pent up expression of suppressed sexual
desire in Little Dorrit, thus suggesting her marriage at the end of the novel by referring to her as Little
Mother.
Virtue rewarded cannot, however, be the development another female character from the book is to
undergo. Harriet (Tattycoram), an orphan girl temporarily moves away from the center – the Meagles family
who have adopted her and jocularly christened her Tattycoram for their own amusement. She does so in a
natural rebellion to the abominable treatment she receives from them as the following passage goes to show:
― ‗Not without another effort,‘ said Mr Meagles, stoutly.
‗Tattycoram, my poor dear girl, count five-and-twenty.‘ ‗Do not reject
the hope, the certainty, this kind man offers you,‘ said Clennam
in a low emphatic voice. ‗Turn to the friends you have not forgotten.
Think once more!‘
‗I won‘t! Miss Wade,‘ said the girl, with her bosom swelling high,
and speaking with her hand held to her throat, ‗take me away!‘
‗Tattycoram,‘ said Mr Meagles. ‗Once more yet! The only thing I
ask of you in the world, my child! Count five-and-twenty!‘ ‖13
This scene, of course, is ridiculous with Arthur Clennam joining in the chorus with the Meagles
entreating Harriet to count to twenty-five, thus denying her the right to make her own decisions. In her
rebellious act of moving away from the center Harriet oscillates to Miss Wade, one of the spinsters
populating Dickens‘s novels portrayed as a dark presence – irrational, delirious, furious, unsatisfied
(considered a protolesbian by some critics), a marginal character closer to the edge of the phallocentric
universe on the borderline with chaos. In directly challenging a male authority – Mr. Meagles, from the
point of view of positionality 14 as developed by Foucault in The Order of Things (1966) and then adapted to

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the purposes of feminist criticism by Kristeva (also discussed by Toril Moi in Feminist, Female, Feminine),
she temporarily assumes a subject position the others being in an object position to her.
In the patriarchal world of Little Dorrit, though, with the attenuating evidence of her being an orphan,
she cannot be left as a satellite in the orbit of Miss Wade forever and has to come back to the Meagles
repentant to resume her perpetual object position:
― ‗Oh! I have been so wretched,‘ cried Tattycoram, weeping much
more, ‗always so unhappy, and so repentant! I was afraid of her from
the first time I saw her. I knew she had got a power over me through
understanding what was bad in me so well. It was a madness in me,
and she could raise it whenever she liked. I used to think, when I got
into that state, that people were all against me because of my first
beginning; and the kinder they were to me, the worse fault I found
in them. I made it out that they triumphed above me, and that they
wanted to make me envy them, when I know—when I even knew
then—that they never thought of such a thing.‖15

Harriet in the end becomes Tattycoram giving up all her claims to independence and freedom
interpreting her own urges for liberty as madness. In a typically Dickensian reversion, unlike Jane Eyre‘s
consistent attitude towards the Reed family, she rejects her initial interpretation of the horrible treatment she
receives by the Meagles as false, embraces imprisonment professing that she has been seduced by the dark
side of the periphery of the phallocentric world of Little Dorrit and is pulled back to the center, thus
strengthening the position of the Meagles by increasing the protective layers separating them from the world
without.
At least two other female characters and their position as regards the center might be worth
mentioning very briefly so that we get a more complete picture of the phallocentric forces constituting the
physical laws of the world of Little Dorrit: Fanny – Amy‘s sister – superficial, opportunistic, desperate to
remain close to the center by marrying into the Merdle family – her motives: to preserve herself from the
powerful centrifugal forces of the increasingly entropic world of the Dorrits and Mrs Clennam –
marginalized as inherently evil (a possible projection of Dickens‘s own mother) confined to a wheelchair
imprisoned in her dismal rickety house restricted in exercising her malignant influence by physical
disability.
It must be mentioned, also, that the marriage between Amy Dorrit and Arthut Clennam is only made
possible after the total dissolution of the center of The Dorrits so that Little Dorrit will need to attach herself
to another center and subsequently enter its orbit.
Rereading Little Dorrit from a feminist point of view makes the novel appear even bleaker and darker
by comparison where all female characters are judged by their distance from the phallus, their sexuality
repressed, the most flagrant example being Amy Dorrit herself who has the quantifier Little attached to her
name even though she is 21 years of age contributing to an enhanced stultifying effect on her character
development.

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 The metaphor of the prison pervading the world of each one of the characters is thus further extended
to each of the male character‘s constituting a prison of their own, which appears to be especially designed
for women.

Notes:

1. Julia Kristeva, Women’s Time (1981),

http://www.wehavephotoshop.com/PHILOSOPHY%20NOW/PHILOSOPHY/Kristeva/Julia.Kristeva.Wom
en%27s.Time.pdf, p.21
2. Gail Turley Houston, Consuming Fictions: Gender, Class, and Hunger in Dickens's Novels, Carbondale IL:
Southern Illinois University Press, 1994, p.30-43
3. Toril Moi, ‗Feminist, Female, Feminine‘ in The Feminist Reader: Essays of Gender and the Politics of
Literary Criticism by Catherine Belsey and Jane Moore, http://www.torilmoi.com/wp-
content/uploads/2009/09/Feminist_Female_Feminine-ocr.pdf,1989 p.109
4. George Gissing, A Critical Study (1898), http://www.blackmask.com, 2001, p.45-46
5. George Gissing, A Critical Study (1898), http://www.blackmask.com, 2001, p.52
6. Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (1929), A Project Gutenberg of Australia eBook No 0200791.txt,
http://gutenberg.net.au/licence.html, 2002, p.33
7. Charles Dickens, Little Dorrit (1857), Econarch Institute: Rowland Classics, 2009, p.103
8. Simon de Beauvoir, ‗Myth and Reality‘ in The Second Sex (1949),
http://www.en8848.com.cn/d/file/soft/Nonfiction/Obooks/201011/4da2b8ead5592f8bc7291a39e4f2a6fb
.rar, p.33
9. Simon de Beauvoir, ‗Myth and Reality‘ in The Second Sex (1949),
http://www.en8848.com.cn/d/file/soft/Nonfiction/Obooks/201011/4da2b8ead5592f8bc7291a39e4f2a6fb
.rar, p.35
10. Emily C. Constable, Female Saviors in Victorian Literature: Amy Dorrit, 97 (English 61, Brown
University, 1993), http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/dickens/ld/61ld9.html, p.1
11. Simon de Beauvoir, ‗Myth and Reality‘ in The Second Sex (1949),
http://www.en8848.com.cn/d/file/soft/Nonfiction/Obooks/201011/4da2b8ead5592f8bc7291a39e4f2a6fb
.rar, p.40
12. Charles Dickens, Little Dorrit (1857), Econarch Institute: Rowland Classics, 2009, p.233
13. Charles Dickens, Little Dorrit (1857), Econarch Institute: Rowland Classics, 2009, p.352
14. Julia Kristeva, Women’s Time (1981),
http://www.wehavephotoshop.com/PHILOSOPHY%20NOW/PHILOSOPHY/Kristeva/Julia.Kristeva.Wom
en%27s.Time.pdf, p.22-30
15. Charles Dickens, Little Dorrit (1857), Econarch Institute: Rowland Classics, 2009, p.857