I. If there's one word that sums up the atmosphere in Little Dorrit, it's claustrophobic. From the first chapter, the reader is introduced to a world mainly composed of rigidly enclosed spaces; each level of the novel is somehow linked, restricted within literal or, more interestingly, metaphorical structures of containment. This theme of imprisonment engenders, and is inextricable from, its emotional response, a sense of victimization and resentment, an element which gives the novel a suggestive and subversive unease which extends beyond the confines of the novel, to the very heart of Dickens' story. literary form. The powerful humanity of Little Dorrit lies in the masterful Dickensian disposition of its characters and the different ways in which they deal with imprisonment; the intriguing ambiguity lies in the question of whether or not these works transcend the walls that enclose them, and whether this question is even relevant. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get the original essayII. The novel's central prison, the Marshalsea, and the Dorrits, the literal prisoners within, constitute the origins of the prison theme, from which images of other figurative prisons and their inhabitants derive their power and pathos . Part of the idiosyncrasy of a Dickens novel is the way in which its characters, rather than standing alone as central points of interest, depend on other characters to give them more shape and dimension; Rather than giving a character a full-fledged personality, he creates groups of strangely paralyzed and faceless entities, personality breakdowns that generally provide more information about the characters around them than interest in them. -themselves. In Little Dorrit, the characters of Amy, the "Marshalsea's child", and Miss Wade, a child from another type of prison, together shed interesting light on the themes of imprisonment and resentment, and on their respective narrative functions.Amy Dorrit, the diminutive main character, has lived her entire life within the walls of the prison; she is the only member of the Dorrit family who, when we first meet her, has never spent a night outside the gates. (The only exception to this, which appears in the chapter titled "Little Dorrit's Party", is the night she spends with her idiot friend Maggie, literally right outside the doors, separated from her cell by the furthest distance short possible.) The title of the book represents that she grew up under the scourge of “the shadow of the wall” (p. 243). Yet, unlike the rest of her family, she bears no signs of bitterness towards her fate. Rather, she tirelessly devotes herself to kindness and servitude to all those around her; she carefully hides from her father anything that she thinks might remind him of the separation between her world and the one beyond the gates (efforts made easier by the strange position of ascendancy he occupies among the prisoners). Equally ungrateful, she helps her brother and sister in their external "ambitions", organizing dance lessons for her sister, finding job opportunities for her brother. We find an interesting counter-possibility to Amy's wise and humble resignation in the enigmatic character. from Miss Wade. Miss Wade lived her life imprisoned by the seemingly more debilitating walls of resentment associated with her orphaned status (note the assonance between "Wade" and "Ward"), and by the absolute certainty that any kindness shown to her was cruel condescension. Geoffrey Carter, in his essay on sexuality inthe Victorian era, rightly calls it "...paranoia [that] everything that is done around her is designed to hurt [her]". (p. 144) The interesting comparison between Amy and Miss Wade lies precisely in this attitude towards the kindness of others. In contrast to the venom with which Miss Wade condemns those who would help her, Amy is all acceptance. After the initial, momentary shame of being "discovered" by Arthur Clennam, she willingly, passively, and gratefully submits to his efforts to help her and her family. Indeed, his gratitude is so strong that it transforms into erotic (or semi-erotic in any case) love. Miss Wade, on the other hand, due to her bitterness towards all humanity, withdraws from society, especially the society of men, suggesting that her bitterness has turned into a pervasive misanthropy that makes her excludes the possibility of love. Amy, her gratitude to Arthur having transformed into the tenderest love, finally finds happiness and narrative rest in marrying him. Miss Wade, we are led to believe, cannot marry; after the story of her life, we can only assume that she will remain an acrimonious spinster until the end of her days, all chances of love snuffed out by her disproportionate pride and eternal vengeance. (In her essay "Miss Wade and George Silverman," Carol A. Bock calls attention to the "authority and conviction" with which she tells her story, and the resulting lack of interest in the reader's “his current state of mind.” There is an apparent finality in the way his story is isolated in its own chapter, almost as if it is now forever linked to his own grievances. It has been suggested that bitterness. and Miss Wade's isolation stemmed from a frustrated homosexuality, and while this is a perfectly plausible and valid assertion, it seems an unnecessary extrapolation, detracting from the powerful image of his exile in. the narrative, (if it serves one at all), is that she is relegated to eternal isolation, something that, in the terms of Victorian literature, is achieved just as effectively by asexuality. than through homosexuality.) In Little Dorrit, as in Bleak House, Dickens suggests the possibility that gratitude gives rise to erotic love and, therefore, narrative. fulfillment, a suggestion that has deep and complex implications in a 19th-century novel of a social nature. In a form that derives from the closure of marriage, we cannot help but read a kind of intentional judgment into the contrasting stories of these two women; in a novel populated only by deeply constrained characters, the fact that love and marriage can only take place in the absence of a struggle against confinement, or even only with a total resignation to confinement, seems for the less contradictory with the agenda of a reform novel. The ambiguity of the novel's final statement is compounded by the fact that Amy, although the central character, remains somewhat ambiguous herself. (One of the difficulties of reading Dickens is that his characters, in their aforementioned flatness and monotony, are very reluctant to "come to life" – they often seem imprisoned on the page.) The reader wonders if she does . does not suffer from a neurosis as intense as Miss Wade's, which manifests itself in her dependence on bearing the brunt of her family's misfortunes alone and serving and caring for them mercilessly but nonetheless tirelessly. (Dickens is a master at exposing the deeply British "must not complain" mentality, a resentment that manifests itself in rigorous but latently hostile goodwill.) When family fortunes changeand the Dorrits leave the Marshalsea, Amy sinks into a totally despondent melancholy, finding relief only in a new maternal relationship with her uncle; his return to England is a return to his old life, with Arthur replacing his father. Seen from this angle, we don't really know what to think of his possible marriage with his new "patient", hesitant to see this definitive union as a triumph, a liberation, even a change of life. (It is worth noting that two of the final chapters are titled "Closing In" and "Closed," which confounds the reader's expectation that this novel, steeped in bars and doors, will "open" at the end. end.) We have another ambiguous element in the discussion of resentment and its resolution in the story of Tattycoram. If Miss Wade is Amy's double, we can see Tattycoram as a sort of parallel universe version of Miss Wade, with her return to the Meagles being an alternative to Miss Wade's professed belief that if one is " ...locked up anywhere to pin and suffer...", one must "...always hate this place and wish to burn it, or raze it..."(p.35). The ambiguity of Tattycoram's story lies in Dickens's failure to comment on the way the Meagles handled their charity affair, and the reader is not entirely sure that they are not hypocrites, masking the haughty condescension beneath charitable kindness. “Count to twenty-five,” is a thinly veiled euphemism (“Suppress! Suppress!”), and there is a vague trace of dread in the image of Tattycoram, in fits of rage, counting hypnotically up to twenty-five. Commissioned by Mr. Meagles (p.314). Given Dickens' traditional mode of closure – characters are either doomed or rewarded by the novel's closing events – the reader is not entirely sure what to make of Tattycoram's return to his "cell" within the Meagles family ( just as we struggle to see Amy's marriage as a liberation). We have another interesting and (typically Dickensian) puzzling study of ideas of repression and resentment in Arthur Clennam, who stands out as one of the strangest characters in Dickens's imaginative population. . (Despite Arthur's dark presence and vague contours, there is a palpable weight to his brooding conscience; one senses at times throughout the novel, particularly in passages that deal with Arthur's unrequited love, that Dickens, the often distant narrator, is noticeably close.) The repression of her ardent love for Pet Meagles manifests itself quite clearly in hostility toward the infamous Henry Gowan, her successful suitor. "...Clennam always thought that if he had not made the decisive resolution to avoid falling in love with Pet, he would have taken a dislike to this Henry Gowan." (p. 203) In the chapter titled "The Disappearance of Nobody", (note the extent of Arthur's repression - not only does the Arthur who is capable of love "disappear", he never existed, he has always been "nobody"), Arthur abandons all hope of ever finding love: "...he...finally gave up on the dying hope that had wavered in no one's heart, so much to his pain and trouble, and from that moment he became in his own eyes, as with any similar hope or prospect, a much older man who had done it with this part of life; (p. 326) He is now single for the rest of his days, mourning the loss of his true love, and he has the reader's sympathy, especially as far from leaving his heart forever broken. become bitter, he remains the good and self-effacing character we've known all along, so one might expect his marriage to Amy to bring him a certain sense of rewarded suffering.broken heart happily mended. This is definitely not the case. Arthur does not fall in love with Amy, he rather succumbs to the centrifugal force of his life, of which she is “the vanishing point”: “He had traveled thousands of miles towards [her]; anxious hopes and doubts had appeared before [her]; [she] was the center of his life's interest; [she] was the end of all that was good and pleasant beyond, there was only simple waste; and darkened skies. » (p.702) Only one hundred pages before the end of the novel, Arthur wonders if “… there wasn't something repressed on his side that he had stifled as it emerged? ...that he must not think of such a thing as she loves him, that he must not take advantage of her gratitude..."(p.700). This is the first time that the reader experiences such past feelings; either Dickens needed a way to bring the novel to a close, or Arthur is inventing his love for Amy, perhaps drawing it from a fear of loneliness and a gratitude to her for it; love. The dynamic of their union is strange. Arthur refuses her in his request to let her pay his debts and free him from the Marshal Sea; the shame of accepting her help would be too great. again), their engagement becomes understood It is interesting to note that the initiation of the engagement is entirely up to Amy; Arthur does not say a word in this scene – it is her turn to passively accept it. is that after Arthur is released - Doyce reappears in time to pay off her debt - the marriage can take place, a marriage about which the reader notes two things: first, the marriage renders Arthur's marriage obsolete , and even that of the novel, appellation for Amy; second, that marriage is marked by a distinct lack of the redemptive glory or triumphant liberation that we expect, or at least hope for, at the end of this claustrophobic novel; the reader is left with the image of Amy and Arthur, lost in “the noisy streets” among “the noisy and the greedy, the arrogant, the rebellious and the vain,” making “their usual tumult.” III. So what should the reader do when faced with these ambiguities? How can we reconcile the two novels which seem to struggle within Little Dorrit for eminence? On the one hand, we have a novel that "...teaches us in the manner of Piers Plowman and Pilgrim's Progress the necessity of transcending individual personal will." .."(p.114). Dickens' biographer Fred Kaplan suggests the following for the outline of the novel: "...wealth becomes a prison, the Marshal Sea becomes a place where freedom, acquired only through self-discovery, is possible, and the world of experience provides the context in which honesty, moral rectitude, and hard work determine self-esteem. ambiguities of tone and plot. Despite the novel's narrative condemnation of Miss Wade and Amy's exoneration, the reader remains somewhat uncertain as to whether or not to side with these judgments. (This is partly due to the strange pathos of Miss Wade's story, and partly to the notable lack of suggestion of transcendence in the novel's final passage.) Lionel Trilling wrote that "this is part of the complexity of this novel which treats society so bitterly that those of its characters who share its social bitterness are thereby condemned. (p.40) Expanding on this point, Brian Rosenberg succinctly summarizes the novel's problematic duality: prison, the exhaustive portrait of the Circumlocution Office, and the saga of Mr. Merdle - among other things - combine to form a scathing attack on the values ​​and practices of mid-Victorian society, with particular emphasis on society's tendency to deny liberty, thwart initiative, and corrupt.