86 KNOWING DICKENS
does so by manipulating her sexual reputation to destroy Dombey’s good
name. At the moment when Carker’s long seduction is to be consummated,
however, she substitutes the power of speech for the submission of sex, assail-
ing Carker with pages of narrative in which she gives her own account of
the emotional transactions that have led her to flee with him. This narrative,
Dickens claims, is so ferocious and powerful that it successfully repulses and
delays Carker, whose force is bent under the stream of words. As in Nancy’s
accusation scene, the violent outpouring of a woman’s language unmans the
villain who buys and sells women. It is also the kiss of extinction; after the
speech Edith disappears from the world, surfacing only to clear her name
with Florence and to send her away with the injunction to “think that you
have left me in the grave” (DS 61).
The burst of narrative rebellion that is a tacit act of obedience is repeated
in the story of Edith’s cousin Alice Marwood, the literally fallen woman who
mirrors Edith’s emotional prostitutions. Alice tells her story first to her mother
and then to Harriet Carker. Both narratives end in assertions of loyalty to
those who have corrupted her; the first story reunites mother and daughter,
the second warns Harriet about the dangers that threaten Alice’s seducer and
Harriet’s brother James Carker. The woman with a past turns, in Dickens’s
hands, into a woman who can save her soul, though not her life, by telling her
tale. Dickens compressed the pieces of Edith’s story into a suffocating knot
when he invented Rose Dartle, a heroine consumed “by some wasting fire
within her” (DC 20). Rosa crashes through her long years of insin^ uating
silence at the moment David tells Mrs. Steerforth of her son’s death. She tells
of her obsession with the man whose violence has disfigured her, accusing the
stricken mother of the double crimes of distorting Steerforth’s nature and of
taking his love away from Rosa herself. The accusation of the parent and the
repressed sexual secret are collapsed into one, and Rosa’s fire burns out into a
frozen final tableau of continued service to the object of her rage.
Louisa Gradgrind enacts a milder version of the pattern after she has
submitted unwillingly to an arranged marriage with Bounderby, and then
to the seductive powers of James Harthouse. At the climax of Hard Times
she returns to tell her father the story of her emotional history and falls,
senseless but saved from degradation, at his feet. Replacing the sexual fall
that has already occurred in the craven fantasies of Mrs. Sparsit, this literal
fall recharges and renews the father-daughter relationship that is the origi-
nal source of Louisa’s lifelong despair. “You have brought me to this,” she
accuses, and cries out against her father’s attempt to hold her up, as if to enact
before his eyes the connection between his educational system and her fallen
inner world (HT 2.12).