“THE ART OF VISIBLE SPEECH”: INFERNAL AND PURGATORIAL FIGURATIONS IN GREAT EXPECTATIONS AND A TALE OF TWO CITIES . Sonia Fanucchi A dissertation submitted to the Faculty of Humanities, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, in fulfilment of the requirements of the degree of Master of Arts. Johannesburg, 2009. ii Declaration I declare this dissertation my own unaided work. It is submitted for the degree of Master of Arts in the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. It has not been submitted before for any other degree or examination in any other university. Sonia Fanucchi 30 th day of November 2009 iii TO MY MOTHER FOR FIRST NURTURING IN ME MY LOVE OF THE FANTASTICAL iv Preface The title of this dissertation is taken from the tenth Canto of Dante’s Purgatorio . Here Dante encounters a cliff which is adorned with marble carvings that depict the virtue of humility. The figures in these carvings have the power to enact the scenes in which they are represented, coming alive before Dante’s eyes. Thus the pictures do not merely reflect the virtues that they depict but they dynamically embody them so that they seem to communicate with the pilgrim through a kind of “visible speech”. When reading Our Mutual Friend I first noticed this quality in Dickens’s imagination where figures spring into a dramatic life by enacting more than themselves. I became aware that this allegorical dimension of Dickens’s narrative was tinged with a particularly Dantesque colouring evident in its palpable infernal energy and obsession with death and judgement. This was the initial spur for my thesis. This fascination with the grotesque and the fantastical suggests a connection with romance. Dickens himself acknowledges this fairy-tale quality of his fiction in his preface to the first edition of Bleak House where he states that his intention in this novel was to dwell “upon the romantic side of familiar things”. I am aware that this fantasy quality of Dickens’s fiction which takes one into a symbolic realm is germane to my topic. But my interest in this dissertation is specifically in the way in which Dickens appropriates dramatic techniques or features and how this generates allegory. In the first chapter I survey the most important criticism on Dickens’s imagination and suggest why judging his work by the standards of literary realism does not adequately account for its power or depth. The second chapter is biographical in character and examines Dickens’s fascination with the city, the theatre and the nature of dreams. From this chapter it becomes evident that Dickens was inclined to look beyond the material world towards the supernatural. In chapter three I examine the nature of allegory, noting that it is defined by a continual correspondence between two levels of signification – the literal and the figurative. I further explore the different types of allegory that are manifested in Dickens’s fiction: the allegory of The Pilgrim’s Progress , the Commedia and the Medieval Morality play. The last three chapters of this dissertation discuss the nature of Dickens’s allegorical tendency in A Tale of Two Cities and Great v Expectations . In chapter four I argue that religious language and allusion in A Tale of Two Cities deepens Dickens’s sense of the interaction between the material and the transcendent. The last two chapters focus on Great Expectations and emphasise the balance between continuing realist concerns and the emergence of a symbolic subtext. I would like to thank Father Peter Lestrange and the Jesuits of Campion Hall for allowing me to stay there and conduct research at the outset of this study. A very special thank you is due to my supervisor, Professor Victor Houliston, for his patience, generosity and wise advice. Above all I would like to thank my family – my nonni, my parents, Sylvia, Dario and Leonard – for standing beside me on this long journey. Without their constant love and support I would not have had the strength or the confidence to reach the finishing line. CONTENTS Abstract ii Declaration iii Dedication iv Preface v Bibliographical Note viii Chapter 1: Dickens’s Turn from Realism 1 Chapter 2: The Formative Elements of Dickens’s Imagination: 18 The Biographical Evidence Chapter 3: Allegory in Dickens 45 Chapter 4: “Man’s soaring beyond Man”: Allegory and the Religious Dimension 81 of A Tale of Two Cities Chapter 5: Rewriting Shakespeare: From Burlesque to Melodrama to Morality 112 Chapter 6: Vengeful Allegorising in Great Expectations 142 Conclusion 165 Bibliography 174 vii BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE All quotations from A Tale of Two Cities (1859) are taken from the penguin edition edited by George Woodcock (1970; rpt. London: Penguin Books, 1988). Quotations from Great Expectations (1860–61) are taken from the penguin edition edited by Angus Calder. (1965; rpt. London: Penguin Books, 1985). Quotations from Hamlet are from the Arden Shakespeare edition edited by Harold Jenkins (1982; rpt. London: Methuen, 2000). All quotations from and references to Dante’s Inferno and Purgatorio are from the editions edited by F. Mariani and F. Gnere (Torino: Loescher Editore, 1996). English translations from the Inferno are by Anthony Esolen (New York, NY: The Modern Library, 2003). Quotations from The Pilgrim’s Progress are from the penguin edition edited by Roger Sharrock (London: Penguin Books, 1987). The 1611 Authorized King James Version (AV) is used for all biblical quotations and references. References to the Bible use the standard abbreviation as found in the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary. CHAPTER ONE DICKENS’S TURN FROM REALISM Literary realism and the formulation of nineteenth century realist dogma Realism in literature is a notoriously slippery concept and has changed drastically in significance over the last few centuries: Damian Grant notes that in the eighteenth century a correspondence theory of realism was popular, according to which language is “merely an image of reality” and fiction must be utterly accountable to the material world, seeking to represent it rather than to transform it. 1 This definition did not allow for much imaginative innovation and was soon superseded by the ‘coherence theory’, a more sophisticated theory for which there are still apologists: this posits the notion that the writer’s imagination draws on the facts of the real world in a way that suggests a greater power and significance (p. 15). Both of these theories assume that reality is fixed and objective. Further, they assume that art functions as a kind of mirror reflecting life and that it is through the representation of reality that the author can access a greater, unchangeable truth underlying day to day experience. But such definitions can by no means account for the variety and complexity of author responses to the concept of ‘reality’ and the role of the realist: Wayne C. Booth attempts to make sense of the “mass of conflicting claims . clustering about the term ‘reality’”, by outlining four programmes of realism: the first, he suggests, is a group of writers for whom the subject matter of the text rather than its form is the most significant way of representing reality. Thus the plot should present a convincing picture of life, which, many feel, ought to emphasise life’s darker aspects. 2 These writers depict reality as a broad concept rather than focussing on its specific details (p. 56). The second group that Booth identifies is more meticulous: they attempt to capture the structure or shape of ‘real-life’ events: this raises questions about whether a chain of causality and 1 Damian Grant, Realism (London: Metheum, 1974), p. 11. 2 Wayne C. Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1961), p. 55. 2 conclusive endings are really plausible devices or whether one ought to capture life’s open-endedness (pp. 56–7). The third group of writers is concerned with the plausibility of narrative technique: some believe that the tale should create the sense that it is being related as it would be in real-life while others believe that the author should disguise his presence, creating the impression that the events are occurring spontaneously. Finally Booth suggests that there are those writers for whom realism becomes an “end in itself”, more important even than the truth about reality or the aspect of reality that the author wishes to emphasise; but there are also writers for whom realism is subordinated to other purposes – these include didactic writers like Bunyan or writers like Dickens who considered themselves more objective but who were always ready to sacrifice ‘truth to life’ for ‘truth about life’ (p. 57). Lately the conventions of realism as they were defined in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, have been consciously challenged and undermined by postmodern fiction: Alison Lee argues that postmodern novels set themselves in opposition to realism by affirming the multiplicity and ambiguity of meaning. For the postmodernists ‘reality’ is no longer a stable point of reference but “purely a linguistic construct”. In this way they seek to destabilise the notion that a novel reflects life.3 The move away from realism can further be seen in changing attitudes towards the role of the author: a new group of ‘reader-response’ critics emerged during the 1960s. These critics argue that meaning is created not by the author alone but by the interaction between the text and the reader: each reader interprets the text in a different way according to his own social and cultural background. (pp. 23–4). Thus realism’s assumption of the author’s authoritative knowledge has been compromised. Realism enjoyed its heyday in the mid-nineteenth century during the time when Dickens was writing: the works and critical formulations of George Eliot in England and Gustave Flaubert in France were seminal contributions to the movement: according to W.J.