The plight of the figure of the child-woman in David Copperfield and A Pair of Blue Eyes

Abstract

Despite the dis-affinities of Charles Dickens’s and Thomas Hardy’s literary genius, and the dissimilarities in generic form and fictional style between David Copperfield (1850) and A Pair of Blue Eyes (1873), each text features a child-woman, Dora Spenlow and Elfride Swancourt respectively. This affinity amid sundry dis-affinities between these two novels looks less surprising when considering the fact that the Victorian novel seems to be populated by child-women, that is, grown-up women who possess physical and mental features normally assumed to be unique to children. The ubiquity of the figure of the child-woman in the Victorian novel is a literary corollary of the Victorian fascination with childhood and girlhood. The cherished assets of girls – innocence, dependence, naïve charm, tenderness – all conform to the Victorian feminine ideal. This idealised conception of girls inevitably leads to the prolongation of girlhood at the expense of mature femininity, thereby bringing forth a multitude of grown-up girls. Victorian girlhood and the child-woman as a category of age inversion have received considerable critical attention over the past four decades. While much critical attention has been devoted to issues of gender inversion and class inversion in the heterosexual relationships in A Pair of Blue Eyes, few critics have examined the issue of age inversion in the novel. Whereas Dickens’s Dora is a familiar example in critical inquiry into these issues, the study of Elfride as a child-woman in relation to issues of gender and social class interrogated in the novel remains largely a neglected quarry. When read in tandem with each other, each text sheds extra exegetical light upon the fictional treatment of the child-woman in the other. This essay argues that the two novels offer a compelling case for comparative analysis, which will contribute new insights to the ongoing scholarly conversation about the figure of the child-woman and provide a reading of Hardy’s text, in particular, that fills a hole in Hardy scholarship. The selection of these two novels for comparison is not random. In both texts, the representation of the figure of the child-woman is considerably inflected by Victorian conceptions of gender and social class. Both texts demonstrate the ambiguity inherent in the winning characteristics of child-women which initially enhance their desirability but eventually turn out to be detrimental and even death-dealing. The plight of both childwomen is intimately bound up with the instability of male adulthood and masculinity. The autobiographical dimension of both novels invites us to move beyond the level of