Dickens and Masculinity: The Necessity of the Nurturing Male

Abstract

It is a critical, if somewhat dated, commonplace to fault Dickens’s characterizations as two-dimensional and to note that this two-dimensionality is most obvious in his conventional portrayals of ideal young men and women. His ideal women are small, docile and domestic; his ideal young men earnest, industrious and strong, or so the stereotype goes.¹ Both types of characterization reflect the separate spheres of men and women brought about by the Industrial Revolution and codified in conduct books by Sarah Ellis, Sarah Lewes, Isabella Beeton and others. In Dickens’s characterizations, those who stray from the ideals can become the butts of comedy or criticism or both. But social histories and literary studies of the past ten to fifteen years have increasingly questioned how widely accepted the gender ideals were and just how separate the ‘separate spheres’ of men and women. In addition, recent Dickens criticism increasingly questions long-standing assumptions about Dickens’s gender characterizations. Catherine Waters, Natalie Cole, Lyn Pykett and others have shown that in Dickens, as in real life, gender is almost always more complicated than a simple binary system.² Throughout his career, and increasingly toward the end, Dickens questioned the very gender norms that he himself had helped to establish. In particular, Dickens undermines rigid gender divisions through male characters who embody the feminine ideal of a warm, affectionate nurturer, and sometimes even display the physical frailty and unfitness for the professional world typically associated with Victorian concepts of women.