SotA Anthology 2015-16
‘Bring him for’ard, and I’ll chuck him out
o‘ winder!’ To suggest however that she
acts simply as Flora’s mouthpiece again
denies ‘the legacy’ her own voice, one
which undoubtedly articulates hostility
towards what she perceives as a threat
to her security with Flora. Even before
David’s ‘disappointment’ in the ‘overgrown’
Flora becomes apparent, she shrewdly
questions the motives for his visit: ‘What
he come there for, then?’ and denounces
him as a ‘fool’. During only their second
meeting her declaration of ‘mile-stones on
the Dover Road’, perhaps best understood
as an exhortation to Clennam to return
from whence he came, precedes her direct
challenge as to whether he ‘wanted to get
rid of her’. The close dependance and
community she has achieved with Flora,
exemplified in their exchange of toast, is
something she fears that Clennam, too
‘proud’ to participate in their habit, will
displace, and it is this insecurity rather
than any advocacy on Flora’s behalf that
accounts for her immediate and constant
animosity towards him.
Careful attention to what Mr F.’s Aunt actually
says pays further dividends. Arriving at
‘DOYCE AND CLENNAM’ she is described
as ‘stumbling over some impediment, and
menacing steam-power as an Institution
with a stony reticule’. These rants against
progressive machinery symbolically unite
‘the legacy’, a title which inextricably
links her to the past, with those backward
thinking forces of the novel that promote
stagnation and quash advancement.
Whilst Showalter (1979) suggests a sexual
connotation to the handbag, its appearance
in Clennan’s workshop more appropriately
images the ‘circumlocutionary’ obstruction
which, ‘Barnacle’ like, plagues not only
the industry of Clennam and Doyce but,
more widely, the nation’s progress. Just
as she articulates resistance to change
on the domestic front, here she points
backwards to pre-industrial times, with
both body and bag firmly entrenched with
‘the whole Science of Government’ against
the future. Vitriolic outbursts and fossilised
bag together become symbols of stasis
and vehicles of outrage against emotional
development and industrial growth. In the
context of tear-stained Flora’s last meeting
with Little Dorrit, Mr F.’s Aunt assumes a
‘stiffened [...] appearance of being past
bending, by any means short of powerful
mechanical pressure’. Positioned on the
steps of the Marshalsea, her ‘bonnet was
cocked up behind her in a terrific manner;
and her stony reticule was as rigid as if it
had been petrified by the Gorgon’s head’.
Both Aunt and handbag, with its Medusean
powers of paralysis, remain unbendingly
resistant to change from any quarter.
Reminiscences
concerning
Henley,
‘Barnes’s gander’, the ‘Great Fire of London’
and ‘your uncle George’ remain for Mr F.’s
Aunt a clear and vital link to her past. In her
rants against Clennam and progress, ‘the
legacy’ speaks not simply on behalf of Flora
and the Barnacles but expresses a personal
longing for a past to which she vainly clings
and yet has lost, a time when she could
express herself and those around her did not
require a ‘key’ to unlock her meaning. Whilst
Dickens offers the reader multiple readings
of Mr F.’s Aunt, each with the potential to
enrich and enliven the novel’s meaning, it is
only through a careful analysis of what she
actually says that her rightful place in the
narrative shifts from the ‘eccentric’ margins
of the story to its very heart.
As no first hand account of Mr Dick’s traumas
are forthcoming, attempts at a psychological
understanding of him are inevitably fraught
with problems. It is through Betsey that
the reader learns that both his name and
family circumstances are abhorrent to him
and that attempts to confront his past in
his ‘Memorial’ result in such agitation that
the ‘troubles’ of King Charles I impose
and his memories remain repressed.
Whilst he is capable of cautioning David
about the cruel madness of the world and
articulating his confusion about how royal
‘trouble’ finds its way into his head, he is
incapable of acknowledging, either verbally
or in writing, how he has been ‘ill-used’. His
edenic retreat in Betsey’s ‘immaculate spot’
provides a safe haven from the ‘Bedlam’ of
a world he cannot face, the detail of which
he does not want even mentioned.