4. Streetwalkers and Homebodies: Dickens's Romantic Women

Abstract

Lennox's and Wollstonecraft's novels, on one level, seem to maintain romance as a consoling realm: their novels seem to set it up as a (woman's) form within which women writers and their heroines can escape or elude constricting power relations . Yet their treatment of romance also reveals the way such power relations trap us all in wishful structures. Such treatment does not only provide a way to attempt to circumvent power; it also allows a way to analyze power, and Lennox's and Wollstonecraft's portrayals of this system emphasize how woman is deployed as a category with­ in and enabling it. Charles Dickens's novels continue to use women and romance to seem to deny and console . Dickens's work appears to manifest its wishfulness differently from that of the women writers I have ana­ lyzed so far; rather than gesturing to some autonomous female realm in his work, the figure of woman and the form of romance become scapegoats whose implication in power suggests autono­ my for men and novels . Yet, although such differences seem to point to the difference between male and female writers, their different stakes in constructing women and romance, Dickens's work also breaks down such categories of gender and genre . What his work defines as the feminine and romantic also inhabits it, and reveals its own inheritance within a system of power.