This extract from chapter 4 of David Copperfield,
Charles Dickens’ eighth novel published between 1849 and 1950, narrates a scene
from David’s childhood. David, the orphaned narrator, lives with his mother
Clara and their devoted servant Peggotty. When David is about eight years old,
his mother marries a Mr Murdstone. This scene takes place shortly after their
marriage and relates the settling of Jane, Mr Murdstone’s sister, with the
young married couple. Jane immediately takes control of the house, which happens
to belong to Clara. Clara weakly attempts to resist but yields to the
Murdstones. The narrator seizes this opportunity to define the characters’
personalities and to expose the Murdstones’ manipulative strategy.
I will first discuss Jane’s hypocrisy. I will
then examine Edward’s “firmness”.
As soon as Miss Murdstone enters Edward and
Clara’s house, she makes the point that Clara is such a girl (“pretty and
thoughtless”) that she needs help to look after the house (paragraph 2). Once
she has secured the symbolic keys, she takes her new position as mistress of
the house for granted once and for all (paragraph 3). Although she pretends to
help Clara, she actually robs her of her rights.
When
Clara dares to question this situation, Jane makes a show of being willing to
move out (l. 74-5). This implies two things. She does not want to exert a power
that is rightfully Clara’s without her consent. Neither does she want to be a
cause for dissent between Edward and his wife. Both implicit claims are of
course hypocritical. By making this declaration, Jane moves Clara to beg her to
stay (“I don’t want anybody to go” l. 82) and makes her even more distressed.
Besides, her intervention only heightens Edward’s anger (l. 76) and intensifies
the conflictual tone of the discussion. She even pretends to cry (l. 100-2) to
establish her role as a victim of Clara’s ill-will.
Although
Clara tries to defend herself, she accepts the situation as presented by the
Murdstones. Indeed, the very fact that she does so testifies to their victory.
She acts as a defendant, for instance calling for the “evidence” of a witness
(Peggotty, l. 20-22 and 130) to show her innocence, admitting that she stands
accused and thus playing the role that they have assigned her.
In other words, Jane Murdstone’s hypocritical
behaviour is part of a larger strategy to crush Clara’s personality in order to
establish power in the household. Clara is confirmed as a non-entity in the
house she has inherited from her first husband. The other strategist is of course
her brother Edward, whose own hypocrisy is in great part invested in his
moralistic stance on “firmness”.
The narrator points out that Mr Murdstone
believes in firmness (l. 38-9), adding that in his opinion it is actually
tyranny in disguise (l. 42-4). This in turn implies that not only is Mr
Murdstone tyrannical, but he is also a hypocrite. This is confirmed in the
passage from line 47 to line 59 which portrays him as a perfect pharisee: Mr
Murdstone, in his own opinion, is endowed to the utmost degree of the most
precious quality in the world, namely firmness. Not only does this give him
moral superiority over the rest of mankind, but in addition it affords him
power over them. If he manages to establish authority over others, he will then
also be able to take the moral high ground by naming his power “firmness” and
transforming it into a moral quality. Mr Murdstone can be said to embody a
large part of the Victorian ethos, whose moralistic hypocrisy Dickens
relentlessly criticized, especially in his earlier fiction.
Mr Murdstone’s firmness can be observed in
this passage and opposed to the pliable nature of David’s mother. On the one
hand, a word from her husband is enough for Clara to change her speech. For
instance, after she mentions “her own house” (l. 60), she quickly corrects
herself to call it “our own house” (l. 64) then, without another prompt, “[his]
own house” (l. 67). On the other hand, when Clara tries to move Edward, he
merely repeats the same words (see l. 110 to 124). Reflecting the “stone”
Murdstone, he never budges. As he puts it (l. 132-5), “there is no extent of
mere weakness that can have the least weight with me”. Such is the world
according to Murdstone: others must adapt to him, not he to them. He sets the
rules by which they have to abide.
Rather frighteningly, Mr Murdstone’s words do
not sound like a lover’s but rather like an enemy’s as they imply that this is
no mere discussion or argument but a confrontation, a fight for power. He even
concludes “You lose breath,” which implies that he despises her words. There is
definitely neither love between them nor communication since he is telling her
that he refuses to listen to her. In addition, his words sound like a grim
omen, “you lose breath” suggesting impending death. As Betsey Trotwood, David’s
great-aunt, says to Murdstone in chapter XIV, Clara will die from not being
loved by her second husband.
Eventually, the Murdstones reign together over
a house where “good” is the name of evil and vice versa. They establish
themselves as the rightful masters of Clara’s house and her as a sort of guest,
they make her feel as a wrongdoer instead of a victim, and so on. The evil aura
that surrounds them takes almost Sade-like proportions as they form something
like an incestuous couple, Jane replacing Clara, who is never called Murdstone
in the novel, the name being reserved for Edward and Jane.
Clara is of course their first victim, but we
must not forget David. Mr Murdstone’s final remark reminds us that he has
witnessed the whole scene. However, he is more than just a witness but also a
victim in it. As his great-aunt points out to Edward in chapter XIV, Clara
inherited the house from her first husband, David’s father. Since Mr Murdstone
demanded from her absolute trust in him, she was prevented from providing for
David to inherit the house after her death. So David does not just witness the
Murdstones morally destroying his mother but also stealing his rightful
heirloom from him. David the character does not know it yet, but David the narrator
knows that this scene makes for his destitution after his mother’s death.
Furthermore, there is a discrepancy, even
tension, between David as character and narrator. Whereas David the narrator is
absent from the scene, the narrator is omnipresent through his comments and his
staging of the scene. Maybe David tries to make up through narration his
shortcomings as a character. He lived this scene as a mute and impotent
witness. By narrating it, and by narrating it in the way he does, he stands up
for his mother and rights her wrongs, which he didn’t do as a character.