48 KNOWING DICKENS
Dickens also gathers up the self-deluding egotism and the con-man effect
from his earlier talkers, bringing them into an intimate realm of shared and
unacknowledged shame that marks the pathology of Amy Dorrit’s love for
her father. Amy is offered the life-giving possibility of projecting an image of
good fatherhood onto her beloved Arthur Clennam, but not before the
reader experiences the damage her real father has done. Many critics have
commented on the incestuous nature of this father-daughter bond, and on
Amy’s role as the nurturing mother of her father. What speaks most of incest
in the connection, however, is Dickens’s emphasis on the disavowed shame
that creates the tightness of the bond in the first place. Observed by Arthur
Clennam, Amy repeatedly insists that she feels no shame about her father;
her insistence that he is “Such a good, good father!” (LD 1.9) draws no line
at all between her own much-vaunted innocence and her neurotic denial.
Her mind’s methods rely on the third person as an internal antagonist: when
she visits Clennam at midnight in inadequate shoes, the narrative situates
itself somewhere between his mind and hers: “Little Dorrit had a misgiving
that he might blame her father, if he saw [the shoes]; that he might think,
‘why did he dine today and leave this little creature to the mercy of the cold
stones!’ She had no belief that it would have been a just reflection; she simply
knew, by experience, that such delusions did sometimes present themselves
to people. It was part of her father’s misfortunes that they did.” This treads
a very thin line between knowing and not knowing, which Amy negotiates
by feeling that her father truly belongs only to her. She imagines that she
knows him better than anyone else does, yet “what he really is” is someone
she could never have known: the person Dorrit believes himself to have been
before his incarceration (LD 1.14).
In fact, she knows how bad he is. In the great scene between them
(LD 1.19), her father attempts to manipulate her affections, making a devious
attempt to get her to allow the affections of the turnkey’s son John Chivery,
and so to provide Dorrit with special favor from the prison authorities. In
effect he desires to prostitute his daughter for the sake of his own comfort.
As he speaks, Dickens writes, “he was opening and shutting his hands like
valves; so conscious all the time of that touch of shame, that he shrunk before
his own knowledge of his meaning.” Amy responds only with a hand on his
lips, and a “a dead silence and stillness.” She will not put into words what they
both know. And then, in the classic manner of the abused, she is punished for
what she has heard by her father’s protracted display of abject self-pity, which
ropes her back into his service. During that display Amy has, for the first and
only time in the novel, made a plea for herself: “Only think of me, father,
for one little moment!” By the end of the scene, however, his methods have