The Littleness of Little Dorrit

Abstract

This essay challenges prevailing interpretations of Amy Dorrit’s petiteness as a symbol of her abstemious self-sacrifice or of women’s infantilized position in Victorian culture. Examining Little Dorrit literally rather than symptomatically shows that Charles Dickens highlights the protagonist Amy’s small size on a spectrum of human variation, rendering in detail corporeal experiences in a physical world built for taller people. While the plentiful critical readings interpreting Amy as symbolic are illuminating, they depend on the unreliable points of view of other characters. Aware of others’ misperception of her in contrast to her understanding of herself, Amy develops a painful double consciousness that nonetheless gives her a capacity to see from more than one viewpoint. Shifting readers away from seeing Amy through the eyes of her misperceiving friends and family, Dickens critiques symptomatic reading and links Amy’s compassionate capacity for comprehending multiple perspectives to the omniscient narrator’s expansive point of view.