In addition to the perversion of the locus of castration anxiety, the powerful female also disrupts the meaning derived from what Ferdinand de Saussure calls the sign. With the two principles of the sign, the signifier and the signified, Saussure charts the linguistic process of marking (signifier) to concept (signified) to the referent or image (sign) that has an arbitrary association to the markings on the page or the sound-image produced by those marks.30 While the association between the marks on the page and the sound-image and the sign is always, in Saussurean linguistics, arbitrary and conventional, the Victorian period’s obsession with classification portrays a societal (and, perhaps aesthetic) push toward “fixed” meaning. As the nineteenth century progressed, the medical profession’s curiosity about the female body shows a clear indication of a desire to know or to figure her out. Additionally, the female mind became a preoccupation of many writers during this time period, which points to a drive (by the medical, literary, and legal professions) to explore the limits of the female body and mind in order to have an concrete knowledge of their constitution. Furthermore, the legal and educational systems worked hard to pin women down, in a sense, to govern marriage and divorce, child custody
issues, property ownership, and proper feminine decorum while setting standards for appropriate feminine activities, dress, hygiene, etc. Coventry Patmore’s poem, “The Angel in the House” did as much to fix the meaning of the ideal woman in the Victorian period as the medical, legal, educational, and social systems. The angel in the house has a clear sign in Victorian fiction – its status is not arbitrary, but carefully and methodically fixed. Certainly for Dickens’s the image ideal of the “proper” Victorian woman came easily to his mind. His literature is full of the recognizable figure and represents the period’s insistence on making the definition of woman less arbitrary and more stable.
Despite the Saussurean notion of arbitrary meaning in the sign, the concentrated efforts during the nineteenth century to explore her, define her, and fix her in a linguistic certitude highlights an important message for Dickensean readers: a fear that woman can exist in the slippage between arbitrary and fixed meaning; a fear that woman can subvert the efforts of social systems in order to make her image meaningless (without a fixed meaning in Victorian
society)—or worse beyond linguistical representation at all (without an ideal image in Victorian society). Woman, therefore, could mean the submissive help mate who manages the home and nurtures her husband and children, or woman could mean the cruel and neglecting figure opposed to the patriarchal rule. The second of these signs emasculates and damages the Victorian masculine ego-ideal. Dickens’s literature presents a forum for which the grotesque woman (grotesque in her arbitrary meaning) suffers harsh punishment in order to reinstate the fixed image of Victorian femininity (and, hence provide for the growth of masculine identity as well).
Woman’s resistance to a “fixing” in language must first occur at the linguistic level and, therefore, this resistance operates within a structure of violence. Lady Dedlock, Miss Havisham,
Molly, Estella, Mrs. Joe, and Madame Defarge are grotesque representations of femininity and in their perversion of the feminine ideal, they are violent, sexually irregular, unforgiving,
unsympathetic and vengeful characters. Dickens’s preoccupation with violence and his ability to express violence in language leads to narratives that are always on the verge of a linguistic rupture. In these moments, the language cannot fully represent the violence Dickens intends. Instead, Dickens must use an unstructured structure. The narratives in Bleak House, Tale of Two
Cities, and Great Expectations are most compelling when they stretch the limits of linguistic
signification—when, through a process of mimesis, the language slips in order to lend meaning through the slippage instead of through the marks on the page. To put it more clearly, Dickens must imitate through language the violence that resists linguistical structuring. This imitation takes shape because of his use of ellipses, dashes, fragment sentences, and tense shifts. The manner of the narrative appears “frantic” on the page so that the way Dickens writes lends the meaning to what he intends. To speak violence is to give structure (through the narrative) to a physical act that is innately unstructured. Take the following excerpt from Great Expectations as an example of this linguistic failure. Pip has just confronted Miss Havisham and forced her to recognize her cruel manipulation of Estella and him. After he secures financial support for Herbert, elicits a woeful “O! What have I done! What have I done” (394) from the wasted woman, Pip “could look upon her without compassion, seeing her punishment in the ruin she was, in her profound unfitness for this earth” and take his leave of her, “the vanity of remourse, the vanity of unworthiness” (394). When Pip returns to assure himself of Miss Havisham’s safety, he witnesses a “great flaming light spring up” and Miss Havisham coming toward him in a “shrieking” “whirl” of fire (397).
That I got them off, closed with her, threw her down, and got them over her; that I dragged the great cloth from the table for the same purpose, and with it dragged down the heap of rottenness in the midst, and all the ugly things that sheltered there; that we were on the ground struggling like desperate enemies, and that the closer I covered her, the more wildly she shrieked and tried to free herself; that this occurred I knew through the result, but not through anything I felt, or thought, or knew I did. I knew nothing until I knew that we were on the floor by the great table […] Then, I looked round and saw the disturbed beetles and spiders running away over the floor, and the servants coming in with breathless cries at the door. I still held her forcibly down with all my strength, like a prisoner who might escape; and I doubt if I even knew who she was, or why we had struggled, or that she had been in flames, or that the flames were out […] (397)
The retelling of the violent interaction between Pip and Miss Havisham has an immediacy about it but must reside in the past tense. So, with all this time having passed by, Pip is still unable to fully express the moment of his violent attempt to save her. The incoherent sentence structure, with the succession of subordinating conjunctions leads the reader through a series of actions that even the narrator fails to understand then or now: “I knew nothing” and “not through anything I felt, or thought, or knew I did.” Additionally, the faulty syntax works to obscure the subject of the sentence, which further highlights language’s rupture and inability to signify violence. Pip confuses the actions of rescue and the actions of violence: “I still held her forcibly down with all my strength, like a prisoner who might escape” and Miss Havisham “shrieked” and they
struggled like “desperate enemies.” Curt Hartog argues in his article “The Rape of Miss Havisham” that the scene illustrates “a rich nexus of psychological intentions, the core being a
symbolic revenge—rape—aimed at violating and degrading Woman in order to free the self from fixation” (259). By conflating the language of eroticism and the language of violence, Dickens sets up a system in which the signification of violence and erotic desires are co-dependent.
Another example of this linguistic co-dependency occurs in the description of Mrs. Joe’s brutal attack. After Mrs. Joe makes clear her desire to be Orlick’s “master” and his response to her display of authority by claiming “I’d hold you, if you was my wife. I hold you under the pump, and choke it out of you” (111 and 112) Pip and Joe find Mrs. Joe on the kitchen floor “lying without sense or movement […] knocked down by a tremendous blow on the back of the head” (117). The result of this blow to the head is Mrs. Joe’s inability to be on the ram-page from that day forward and, more significantly, her loss of signification all together. The
“gloomy aberration of mind,” (120) imbecility, and communication through “mysterious” signs that would appear on her slate (121) indicate a failure of language to speak of violence. The curious “T” Mrs. Joe traces on the slate does not stand for toast, or tar, or tub (121), but is rather a pictorial representation of a hammer. In the retelling of violence, language falters and becomes abstract and beyond all signification. In fact, Pip never actually narrates the moment of his sister’s attack; the reader pulls together a notion of its brutality by scattered clues: his sister’s condition, the discarded weapon and, later, the brutal nature of her attacker, Orlick. Just as in the moment of Pip’s “saving” the burning Miss Havisham, Dickens imbues the language of violence with eroticism. Pip “lustily” calls the word hammer in his sister’s ear, to which she
enthusiastically “hammer[s] on the table” to express “a qualified assent” (121). When Pip summons Orlick to the kitchen in hopes his sister will denounce him as her attacker, Mrs. Joe expresses an “anxiety to be on good terms with him” and was “much pleased by his being at length produced.” At her motioning, Orlick is offered a drink and she “showed every possible
desire to conciliate him”(122). The hammer, an obvious phallic symbol stands to represent Orlick (the man with power over her) and, therefore has further meaning as the transfer of power (from Mrs. Joe to her “master”). Mrs. Joe receives a sensation of pleasure in calling him to stand before her, as Pip notes: “After that day, a day rarely passed without her drawing the hammer on her slate” (122). Conflating violence and desire, Dickens points an inability to separate the two. And, if the two stand together in the field of signification, Dickens, in order to rid the text of one, must rid the text of the other.
In Tale of Two Cities, Dickens’s conflation of eroticism and violence can be clearly noted when…
There could not be fewer than five hundred people, and they were dancing like five thousand demons. There was not other music than their own singing. They danced to the popular Revolution song, keeping a ferocious time that was like a gnashing of teeth in unison. Men and women danced together, women danced together […] they advanced, retreated, struck at one another’s hands, clutched one another’s heads, spun round alone, caught one another and spun around in pairs, until many of them dropped […] then the ring broke, and in separate rings of two and four they turned and turned until they all stopped at once, began again, struck, clutched, and tore […] No fight could have been half so terrible as this dance. (288-89)
The men and women in this “healthy pastime changed into a means of angering the blood and bewildering the senses” (289) gnash their teeth, strike, clutch and tear. Dickens calls the Carmagnole “warped and perverted” and the language here works to support my argument: Dickens confuses the language of violence and the language of eroticism (bodies clutching and
tearing at each other) to such an extent that the two languages become one in the same. In this process of conflation, the author has no choice but to extinguish both narratives of eroticism and desire. Dickens’s insistence in the conflation throughout his oeuvre serves a grand reformatory purpose: by linking violence and erotic sexuality, Dickens is able to control the two parts of the dangerous feminine ideal and expel them from his textual productions. In order to excise the grotesque female, he must go further than narrating her propensities towards violence (an
inaccessible process given the difficulty of language to fully represent the narrative of violence). Dickens must bring the feminine form—the body—center stage as a way to show how violence disfigures the feminine body. Once the body appears in the text, Dickens can play with it, recover it, mutilate it, dismember it, and erase it.