ENGL389
Figure 1: Mr Dick and his kite, illustrated by Frank Reynolds.
of the vulnerability and essential humanity
of those whose behaviour falls outside the
realm of centricity.
attacks meaningless in order to mirror the
world’s cruelly random and chaotic forces.
The assumption that her mental affliction
necessarily renders her sentiments
senseless demonstrates that Wilde,
like Pancks, Flora and David, has paid
insufficient attention to at least some of
what she has to say. Throughout the novel
she clearly and consistently verbally attacks
Clennam. Showalter (1979, p.37) suggests
that these ‘interjections and imprecations
are not random or irrational but carefully
timed to coincide with Clennam’s displays
of “heartlessness” towards Flora’. Amongst
Flora’s torrent of rambling sentiment are
hints of the resentment that she harbours
against her erstwhile amour but which
she is constrained from fully articulating:
‘More than I can say myself [...] for I
might have been dead and buried twenty
distinct times over [...] before you had
genuinely remembered Me’. Whilst Flora’s
expression of her feelings is restricted
by social decorum, her charge suffers no
such inhibitions as her rudeness towards
Clennam escalates to threats of violence:
The danger, however, of a narrow focus
on Dickens’s literal representation of the
mental affliction of his ‘great eccentrics’
is that the reader is distracted from
endeavouring to grapple with the ‘profound
secret and mystery’ at the heart of each
of these ‘human creatures’ (Dickens,
2003). Wilde, placing Mr F.’s Aunt at ‘the
analogical center’ of the book, asserts that
in her vicious, irrational and indiscriminate
attacks the re ader finds the ‘most powerful
and singular expression’ of the novel.
These onslaughts are ‘Nobody’s Fault’:
they are simply, he suggests, ‘in the nature
of things’ and to that extent they mirror the
indiscriminate and senseless nature of life’s
dark forces (Wilde, 1964, pp. 34-35). The
poor and innocent suffer because life, like
Flora’s charge, is disordered and ruthless in
its attacks. The problem with such a reading,
however, is that it not only denies Mr F.’s
Aunt personhood, it denies her voice; her
words must per force be irrational and her
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