- 63 -
of this tradition (outside the comedy of manners, of course) one might instance Don Quixote
(1605) and, as a later continental example, Madame Bovary (1857). Within the English
tradition protagonists (heroes or heroines) are brought through their misadventures to a
realistic appraisal of their situation and circumstances, including a proper view of their
own personal virtues and failings. The individual has to come to terms with the legitimate
demands of society by realizing what freedom of manoeuvre the individual has within certain
necessary social constraints. Personal fulfilment is inevitably restricted by the equally proper
claims of others to a like consideration. There may occasional be tragic implications in
these competing claims, but the whole is seen essentially in terms of comedy, which is
usually signalled by the conventional comic conclusion of wedding bells.
The Romantic Gothic novel also pits the individual against society, but the protago
nist (who had better be called an "antagonist") never comes to terms with social demands.
The individual is defeated by an unyielding, uncomprehending, and basically unsympathetic
world of men and manners, and ends in total misery, suicide, death. If the final tragedy
is averted, it is only under constraint, restraint by injury, maiming or partial destruction,
even a burning out of passion which reduces the individual to the lowest possible
denominator (as, for instance, in Wuthering Heights, or Jane Eyre and Villette). The
Romantic novel tends to exclude the individual and fragment society, and there is a tragic
reduction, while, by contrast, comedy enlarges the individual by bringing him or her into
a greater social community. In the Romantic Gothic tradition the price of marriage might
be the withdrawal of crippled bodies and wounded spirits.
Where, then, does Dickens's work fall? The only, partly facetious anwer is between
both poles. In Great Expectationsfor instance, Pip comes to terms, and may even marry
Estella, but both he and she are wounded and maimed, and their marriage, if it occurs, is
founded upon the death and destruction of their "benefactors", Magwitch and Miss Havisham.
For the most part, Dickens clearly writes comedies, although hardly comedies of manners.
On the whole, his novels end "happily", although the compulsory inverted commas here
indicate a necessary qualification: how happy, even conventionally happy, are Dickens's
endings?
But Dickens's novels are also full of darkness (increasingly, as you move through
the novels chronologically), Gothic darkness at the beginning and something like a more
than Gothic gloom, a Dantesque or Cimmerian blight, as one reaches the end (Our Mutual
Friend must be the bleakest novel in English literature). Dickens's novels are full of
passionate utterance, which may on occasions be considered melodramatic (here a descriptive
term, not a term of abuse). His novels are full of Gothic effects, which, deliberately, may
be listed at random: family secrets, hidden documents, strange and mislaid wills, abandoned
children and neglectful parents, lost souls wandering through nightmare landscapes,
terrifying broken-down inferno cityscapes, prisons, escaped convicts, with or without irons,
suicides, murderers and the murdered, shrill climatic confrontations, mysterious appearances
and disappearances, sudden explosions, combustions, collapses, corpses and cadavers, diseases,
