MEMORY 77between his nostalgic love of memory and his fear of uncontrollably intrusive
memories. From the start, the faculty of memory is a hero of the novel: it
is associated with the keen perceptiveness of children and with the gentle-
ness of people who sustain the childlike capacity of observation into adult-
hood. The narrator repeatedly calls it up at will, and it obediently produces,
in present-tense images, vivid yet dreamlike snapshots that represent certain
periods of his life. More dubiously, memory is said to superintend wonderful
feats of erasure. When David’s mother dies, after ruining David’s young life
through her remarriage, he claims that he remembered her from then on only
“as the young mother of my earliest impressions.” “In her death,” he claims,
“she winged her way back to her calm untroubled youth, and cancelled all
the rest” (DC 9). When James Steerforth disappears, betraying David and
ruining Emily, David claims that his memories “were as the remembrances of
a cherished friend, who was dead” (DC 32). Once free from his working-class
slavery at Murdstone and Grinby’s, David expresses his relief that “a curtain
had for ever fallen” on that painful life. “I have lifted it for a moment, even in
this narrative, with a reluctant hand, and dropped it gladly” (DC 14). It would
seem that the narrative is quite deeply invested in denying the force of haunt-
ing painful memories, if only for the purpose of creating David as a figure free
from the anger and resentment such memories might call up.
In fact, the reader is allowed to witness such acts of deliberate suppres-
sion precisely because we know so well what they attempt to cover and how
unsuccessful they are. The moments that “tell” of the nostalgic suppres-
sions contain within them the recognition of unalterable pain. When David
tells us of his mother that his memory “cancelled all the rest,” the reader
knows the “rest,” and is hardly surprised when David has to renegotiate his
childhood feelings through his marriage to the Clara-like Dora Spenlow,
or when he projects his shame about his mother’s remarriage into his sus-
picions of Annie Strong’s fidelity. When David mentally “kills” Steerforth
after his friend absconds with Emily, he writes that he cannot stop loving
him: “I should have held in so much tenderness the memory of my affection
for him, that I think I should have been as weak as a spirit-wounded child,
in all but the entertainment of a thought that we could ever be re-united”
(DC 32). The “spirit-wounded child,” protected from shame and social dis-
grace by Steerforth’s patronage at Creakle’s school, is alive and trembling in
the present, visibly re-protecting himself from the pain of naming the ways
Steerforth has used him.
In moments like these, knowledge about the activity of suppression circu-
lates on the surface of the narrative, although the narrator does not interpret
it for us. The relationship between the retrospective narrator-David and the