Sunday, February 08, 2004
It seems to me that a large preoccupation in books three and four of OMF is the tying-up of loose threads. Usually, these threads of narrative are getting tied together, in the form of a marriage between characters. In fact, it seems that nearly everyone is coupled up with someone else by the end of OMF. Bella and John are married and have a baby, Lizzie and Eugene finally sort themselves out and make their feelings official, Lavvy and George have come to some kind of agreement, and the Boffins, the Wilfers, the Veneerings and so on have been coupled up all along. Mr. Venus even manages to win over Pleasant Riderhood, and Dickens seems to be pointing towards a happy union between Jenny Wren and Sloppy, of all people, when he describes their meeting. All in all, there are very few single characters of consequence by the end of the novel. Bradley Headstone and Rogue Riderhood could certainly be considered bachelors (though Rogue was married at one time, I believe), but, of course, they’re dead. Most of the other single men have some kind of deficiency. Silas Wegg is old, missing a leg, and also a rather horrible person. Fledgeby is similarly horrid. Twemlow seems to have never recovered from various mistakes in his early life and is generally unfit for relationships. In fact, the only single persons who might be eligible for a mate at the end of OMF are Mortimer Lightwood and possibly Georgiana Podsnap.
That’s two out of –how many-? And for all we know, if Dickens were to write a sequel, he might have paired those very two together and thus gotten rid of all of the single characters at a stroke. So what does that mean? Ok, I confess it, I have no idea. But it struck me as really a little bit odd, and I wanted to explore it a bit for my blog this week, even if I can’t manage to come to a conclusion. What –could- it signify? Perhaps Dickens was simply a hopeless romantic (or believed his readers to be?). Maybe it says something important about the idea I talked about in my blog on the second book of the novel. Most of the couples in the book who are truly in love manage to bring some kind of profit forth from the dust mounds, or from the river, or both. Maybe Dickens is just reinforcing the idea that love is an important facet of virtue. The feminist in me wants to claim that it says something sinister about the control of powerful women… Bella Wilfer and Lizzie Hexam become –way- less interesting as people when they change their last names (this part of me shudders all over when it considers a match between Jenny Wren and Sloppy). Is Dickens using the marriage of his characters to shift control of their lives from these women to suitable men (neither Bella’s nor Lizzie’s respective fathers can be said to have much actual control over the women at any point)? Perhaps its simply a tidy way to wrap up the storylines at the end of the book. I don’t know. I’d be very interested to hear anyone else’s ideas on the subject.
That’s two out of –how many-? And for all we know, if Dickens were to write a sequel, he might have paired those very two together and thus gotten rid of all of the single characters at a stroke. So what does that mean? Ok, I confess it, I have no idea. But it struck me as really a little bit odd, and I wanted to explore it a bit for my blog this week, even if I can’t manage to come to a conclusion. What –could- it signify? Perhaps Dickens was simply a hopeless romantic (or believed his readers to be?). Maybe it says something important about the idea I talked about in my blog on the second book of the novel. Most of the couples in the book who are truly in love manage to bring some kind of profit forth from the dust mounds, or from the river, or both. Maybe Dickens is just reinforcing the idea that love is an important facet of virtue. The feminist in me wants to claim that it says something sinister about the control of powerful women… Bella Wilfer and Lizzie Hexam become –way- less interesting as people when they change their last names (this part of me shudders all over when it considers a match between Jenny Wren and Sloppy). Is Dickens using the marriage of his characters to shift control of their lives from these women to suitable men (neither Bella’s nor Lizzie’s respective fathers can be said to have much actual control over the women at any point)? Perhaps its simply a tidy way to wrap up the storylines at the end of the book. I don’t know. I’d be very interested to hear anyone else’s ideas on the subject.
