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3.3.1 Emily’s experience 8
3.3.2 Agnes’ support 9
4. Dickens’ inheritance and breakthrough of view on female 10
4.1 Dickens’ inheritance 10
4.2 Dickens’ breakthrough 11
4.3 Overall status of woman and some changes in the Victorian era 11
5. Conclusion 12
6. References 14
1. Introduction
Charles Dickens, a celebrated English critical realist writers of the 19th century, created a number of works including novels, short stories, essays , which still enjoy worldwide popularity nowadays. Marx highly praised Dickens’ achievement that Dickens exposed the truth of polity and society, who is much better than any politician and socialist. Therefore, Dickens studies all the time attract much attention in the domain of literature researches of Victorian Era, mainly including studies on his thoughts, themes of his works, writing techniques, comparative research, biography and translations of his works.
There are already numerous remarkable achievements on his critical realism, humanitarianism, view on female, family and marriage and his techniques like exaggeration, humor, characterization. For example, many researches start from literature tradition, social background and life experience to probe Dickens’ view on female and his masculine awareness.
Dickens was a representative master of characterization, whose novels mostly were character-centered. E.M. Forster(2005) argued that Dickens’ characters belong to flat character, which were of deficiency in the change of personality and in the complexity of humanity. However, successful characterization lies on the its contribution to the final effect the whole work produces. Foster also admitted that Dickens’ cognition of human was not superficial. (Luo Jingguo, 1981) Thus, the unique charm of his characters still earns worldwide acclaim. Some scholars classify Dickens’ characters into different categories or focus on a specific character to access his art of characterization. Some compare his characters with other writers to show his contribution to English literature.
Among Dickens’ persified characters, female character is one of the important aspects of Dickens studies that can be a good approach to understand his male consciousness, view on female and marriage. Some researchers classify female characters into different types and then demonstrate their features. Another research aspect is the relationship between women in Dickens’ life and those in his works. M. Slater’s Dickens and Women is a comprehensible book about women who have a close relationship with Dickens, which connects female characters in Dickens’ work with those women, which help people better understand Dickens’ characterization. Some scholars compare Dickens’ female characters with Jane Austin, Thackeray, Hardy and so on, while Some have worked on the functions of female in the novel and influence on male characters. However, most researches pided a female character into simple category, without considering the complexity of influence. They simply define the influence of one female character as three categories, positive, negative and no specific influence. However, different features of one’s personality could lead to complicated influence and the influence is changeable in different stages of life, for every coin has two sides and nothing is fixed in the world.
This paper will avoid this weakness through dialectic analysis of female characters in David Copperfield. Dickens used the first person to describe the story, which means that all descriptions of plots and characters are all from David’s view. Therefore, we can directly find David’s impression of female characters that will help us better examine their influence on David. Besides, there are two “David” in the story. One is old David who review his whole life, while another is young David who is growing up in the story. Young David’s changes on behaviors and thoughts and old David’s reflection of life both are good way to indicate the far-reaching influence of female characters.(Zhao Yanqiu,1995)