MEMORY 79Perhaps the most disconcerting scene in the novel occurs when David,
hidden behind a door, watches Rosa Dartle attack the fallen Emily. The con-
frontation between the two women who share a history of loving Steerforth
presents a case of excessive rage against one who mirrors back the self. Rosa
vehemently denies that she and Emily have anything in common, although
she is drawn to her because she wants to gaze upon, reject, and threaten to
expose an image of her own helplessly abject love. David represents himself
as frozen and mesmerized by the scene, through which he watches the drama
of his complicity in Emily’s fall and his mixed identifications with persecutor
and victim. He is guilty like “innocent” Emily of attraction to Steerforth as
to a promise of gentility conferred; he is guilty like Steerforth of the class
contempt that Rosa vents in the scene. Throughout the surrogate drama we
are reminded of the ludicrous position in which David hides, watching once
again the punishment of a lower-class character who has been put in danger
by David’s failure to recognize what he knows about Steerforth.
The question of how to live with a painful, humiliating past is parceled
out among many characters in the novel, with David’s story just one among
them. Rosa Dartle’s scar writes her past on her body, and she makes the writ-
ing visible by inflaming it with rage. Betsey Trotwood obsessively purges
her tiny lawn of donkeys, but cannot keep her exiled husband from mak-
ing periodic returns. Mr. Dick transforms his traumatic memories into the
metaphor of King Charles’s head, but he cannot keep that head out of his
memorial. Uriah Heep’s class humiliation becomes a revengeful desire to
humiliate the middle class in return. Mr. Micawber erases his past failures
by living in an ever-hopeful present that condemns him to a life of cyclical
repetition. Agnes Wickfield endures silently amid the humiliations of her
father’s alcoholism and the Heeps’ predatory invasion of her private space.
And so forth. Ultimately the right answer to the problem of living with
past pain is to forgive rather than to revenge oneself, but the vengefulness of
characters like Rose Dartle and Uriah Heep is essential to David’s recording
of those emotions he does not name in himself.
Such scenes of dreamlike displacement extend the narrative resources with
which Dickens creates his innocent yet knowing protagonist. Early in the
novel the distinction between knowing child and telling adult is based on
the adult’s acquisition of reasoned argument. David’s instinctive dislike of
Mr. Murdstone “was not the reason that I might have found if I had been
older... I could observe, in little pieces, as it were; but as to making a net of
a number of these pieces, and catching anybody in it, that was, as yet, beyond
me” (DC 2). The child knows, without having to articulate it, that Murd-
stone’s “firmness... was another name for tyranny,” while the adult narrator