MEMORY 85character momentarily stops the action of a novel to confront an audience
with a story of past suffering. Until late in Dickens’s career, such characters
are generally female—women who are in some way tainted, physically or
mentally “fallen.” They are the vessels, marked by shame, that are allowed to
carry the angry and resentful aspects of Dickens’s autobiographical impulse.
The stories, told by Nancy in Oliver Twist, by Edith Dombey and her cousin
Alice in Dombey and Son, by Rosa Dartle in David Copperfield, by Louisa
Gradgrind in Hard Times, and, in a different form, by Miss Wade in Little Dor-
rit, all make some connection between the release of a woman’s suppressed
story and the extinction of her life force.
Nancy, the thieves’ moll, tells a tale at the cost of her life. Soon after her
first appearance as a successful actress in Fagin’s service, Nancy saves the kid-
napped Oliver from a beating by falling into a passionate rage. While Fagin
calls uneasily for “civil words,” Nancy lashes out with the story of her child-
hood corruption and her twelve years of degradation at his hands. “Not speak-
ing, but pouring out the words in one continuous and vehement scream,”
she turns language into a passional force that, in the act of accusing Fagin
vindicates her own virtue (O T 1.16). The risk she takes to protect Oliver
from her own fate is repeated and heightened when she goes secretly to
Rose Maylie to report on the underworld plot. This act of tale bearing both
betrays and reaffirms Nancy’s loyalty to Bill Sikes and the life of the gang.
As she refuses Rose’s offer of asylum, Nancy tells her, “I am drawn back to
him through every suffering and ill usage, and I should be, I believe, if I knew
that I was to die by his hand at last” (OT 3.3). Dickens writes frequently of
the loyalty of the abused woman in his early work, but in this melodramatic
version, the loyalty that will culminate in Nancy’s extinction is the final sign
of her redemption.
Edith Granger of Dombey and Son is similarly trapped between the social
roles pressed upon her and the “better feelings” elicited by the vicinity of
an innocent child. “Burning” with “the indignation of a hundred women,”
Edith prepares for her unwilling engagement to Dombey by casting her
mother’s crimes in her face (DS 27). Telling in her own way the long-
repressed story of her childhood, she accuses her mother of destroying it, of
“giving birth to a woman,” of turning her youth into “an old age of design”
and shaping her as an object of barter in the marketplace. Edith sees her
education as a kind of prostitution for which there is no redemption; her
mother’s social designs merge into a conviction of her own corruption. At
the same time the accusatory telling is, paradoxically, her way of expressing
loyalty to her mother, for the end of her story is an implicit acceptance of
Mrs. Skewton’s marital bargain. When Edith rebels against that bargain, she