MEMORY 87These stories dramatize the disturbances that fed Dickens’s deep ambiva-
lence about autobiographical confession. Rages against parents who use chil-
dren as capital and against seducers who use women as objects are closely
conflated. Damaged children turn into women fallen, in name if not in
fact. There is a clear emotional continuity between the repressed shame of
the used child and the expressed sexual shame of the adult woman, whose
narrative of fallenness is her only weapon of revenge. The act of storytell-
ing is a proclamation of that continuity, a deliberate retrieval of the past in a
narrative that insists on connections that a parental figure represses or denies.
The story effects no liberation; instead it binds the teller more closely to the
target of her rage. It channels the woman’s passion in a narrative that suc-
cessfully burns it out, leaving her either dead or deprived of a sexual future.
This pattern of invention offers a remarkable unfolding of the fears hidden
in Dickens’s 1842 joke about autobiography as suicide: “I may one of these
days be induced to lay violent hands upon myself—in other words attempt
my own life” (3.61). Safely distanced in the figure of a woman, the repeated
story also implies that shamed and vengeful autobiographical outbursts are
unmanly, unfit for a gentleman’s repertoire.
Dickens’s abandonment of respectable married life shifted the tenor of
his memory writing. Personal memories appear in a few of the Uncom-
mercial Traveller pieces he published in All the Year Round, but they are now
recalled in a context of changing times; the glossy sheen of time traveling
disappears. The fiery outbursts of passionate women diminish: Estella has a
minor outburst against Miss Havisham in Great Expectations, but she does not
die for it. Male characters turn autobiographical, as John Harmon does in
Our Mutual Friend. The shift is most marked in two first-person narratives
that directly confront the self-delusion at work in long-standing resentment:
Miss Wade’s “The History of a Self-Tormentor” in Little Dorrit and the 1868
story “George Silverman’s Explanation.” Both stories are imagined as self-
contained written narratives composed by isolated characters who write in
the hope of justifying their lives. The two pieces were written many years
apart, and reveal quite different pathologies of deprivation, but they share a
tonelessness that is unusual in Dickens’s work. They read as if he were trying
to create voices of sheer loneliness, stripped of every charm, humorous fancy,
satirical exaggeration, or syntactical energy that made his work “Dickensian.”
Yet their cases present different sides of a very Dickensian coin.
Miss Wade turns the shame of the illegitimate orphan into a proud dis-
trust, reading every human kindness as a self-serving pretense. Although she
represents herself as a passionate person, her intense jealousy comes through
as an instrument for the cold torture of her “love” objects. The engines of