LANGUAGE ON THE LOOSE 49done their work, and Amy has taken on herself the role of the guilty party:
“As if she had done him a wrong which her tenderness could hardly repair,”
she lavishes affection on what the narrator has earlier called “his degenerate
state.” It is little wonder that Amy’s “burst of sorrow and compassion” at the
end of the chapter is so double-edged: “No, no, I have never seen him in my
life!” She refers to the fantasy of “what he really is,” but expresses it in the
familiar phrase that disavows any personal connection.
Dickens does not stint on the evidence of Mr. Dorrit’s abusiveness and
Amy’s collaboration. She is the subject of his rages when she consorts with
the poor, breaking the family illusion that the Dorrit family is still as genteel
as it once was. She helps maintain the family fiction that Mr. Dorrit’s chil-
dren do not work for wages, and she knows it; as she tells Clennam, “I could
never have been of any use, if I had not pretended a little” (LD 1.14). What
she so diligently protects, her father secretly knows: we discover at the time
of his release that he is perfectly aware of his children’s employment. When
he is suddenly rich, one of his first concerns is to erase that stain: “We owe
it as a duty to them, and to ourselves, from this moment, not to let them—
hum—not to let them do anything” (LD 1.35). The narrator acknowledges
his pretense; Little Dorrit does not.
Dickens displays here an impressively acute knowledge of the dynamics of
intra-familial psychological abuse. Whether he arrived at it from his experi-
ence as a child or from his experience as a husband—or both—we cannot
be sure. He covers the knowledge the way Amy does, with protestations of
her innocence. Yet she is allowed the classic Dickens kind of self-recognition:
she sees in Pet Meagles’s devotion to Henry Gowan what she will not say
about herself. As she writes to Clennam, “you may be certain she will love
him, admire him, praise him, and conceal all his faults, until she dies. I believe
she conceals them, and always will conceal them, even from herself. She has
given him a heart that can never be taken back; and however much he may
try it, he will never wear out its affection” (LD 2.11). Like Dickens, she can
articulate what she sees in someone else.
When he dramatizes Dorrit’s extreme sensitivity to any real or imagined
slight to his class status, Dickens writes from the most volatile part of him-
self. In the second half of the novel Dorrit’s pretensions are wedded to his
extreme terror lest others know of his prison past. The random look on a ser-
vant’s face can make him feel that he has been found out. When a domestic
attendant pauses for an instant before obeying an order, Mr. Dorrit, “seeing
the whole Marshalsea and all its Testimonials in the pause, instantly flew at
him” (LD 2.15). As Dorrit declines inside this mental prison, his tendency to
project his own suffering and abjection onto his brother Frederick becomes