Nobody’s weakness


Dickens was far from a religious writer.  He certainly wasn’t as preoccupied with his characters’ quarrels with God, as was his admirer and literary disciple, Dostoevsky.  It’s a sure bet that when a character in one of his novels starts in on religion, that character is a hypocrite.  A preoccupation with religion—and it’s always religion not God or Jesus Christ—is almost always a vanity, a preoccupation of the character with that character’s own moral and social superiority.  Religion is a convenient tool for puffing oneself while keeping others in their place.  The most religious character in Little Dorrit, for instance, the hero Arthur Clennam’s mother, is a domestic tyrant who in the course of bullying tirades against her son and servants will point warningly at the stack of religious books she keeps constantly at hand as if they are angry demons that would rise up and hurl themselves at the sinners in the room if she wasn’t there to hold them back.

But most of Dickens’ characters are believers.  They seem to accept without question the existence of God and even the most uneducated and uninstructed characters, like Jo the street sweeper in Bleak House and Nancy the prostitute in Oliver Twist, have heard of Christ and heard enough about his teachings to recognize their fundamental truth and to be comforted by them.  The best of his characters are Christ-like in their self-sacrifices and determination to live out the Golden Rule.

Dickens wasn’t a devout church-goer—he doesn’t seem to have liked churches very much as places; in his novels no church or chapel is ever as pleasant and as welcoming as the dimmest, dingiest tavern in the most rundown inn—but in his writing he was more than just nominally Christian as a default of time and place.  He believed in the teachings of Jesus—the two commandments, “Love one another” and “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” and the Sermon on the Mount—as correctives.  He believed that the world could be made a better place if would all be kinder to one another and in all his finished novels this happens.

Except in Little Dorrit.

In Little Dorrit, both the novel and the BBC adaptation now showing on PBS’ Masterpiece Classic, kindness, love, decency, Christ-like self-sacrifice, have virtually no power to change anything.   Amy Dorrit’s constant devotion to her family and all her efforts to keep them fed and clothed are rewarded only with increasing selfishness on the parts of her father, brother, and sister.  Arthur Clennam’s attempts to help the Dorrits and undo the harm he believes his family has done to theirs come close to bringing about his own self-destruction.  Virtue isn’t even its own reward.  It’s practically a sickness.

At best, its a neurosis.

Both Arthur and Amy are actively kind.  They go way out of their ways to help others.  But both of them seem motivated as much by guilt as by innate decency and their efforts to help others are almost always at the expense of their own needs and egos.  Kindness is by definition an act of self-effacement.  But Arthur and Amy seem determined to efface themselves right off the pages of their novel.  Their desire to do unto others  is practically a desire to disappear.  Arthur has a habit of thinking about himself in the third person with the name of Nobody.  And while Amy, Little, Dorrit’s littleness—she is so short and slight of build that she is often mistaken for a little girl—can be read on one level as symbolic of her child-like innocence and purity of heart can also be seen as the physical expression of her life-long habit of shrinking herself so as not to be noticed by her family and call attention to herself as a person in her own right with needs and desires apart from theirs. 

In Dickens’ other novels the kind and loving hearts triumph over the selfish and malicious ones, although sometimes just be out-living them, and they manage to create some happiness for themselves and a few other characters who become their adoptive and extended families.  In Little Dorrit the selfish and malicious characters have the upper-hand from beginning to end.  There is very little chance for the kind and loving hearts, but then their main conflict is not with the selfish and malicious characters, but with themselves.  More than they have to survive the machinations of the scheming Flintwinch or the murderer Rigaud, Arthur and Amy and the other good characters have to survive their own temptation to utter self-effacement and few of them, not even Arthur, manage to resist completely.

This makes Little Dorrit something of an anomaly among Dickens’ novels in that it is the least plot-driven of all his books.  Not much actually happens, onstage at any rate.  The drama and conflict occur within the heads of Arthur and Amy.  It is Dickens’ most psychological work.  Which is a problem if you’re adapting it for television.

Another problem is that it is Dickens’ least comic work.  In fact, it is almost unrelievedly grim.  The kind of eccentricities and idiosyncracies that enliven the grotesque and comic characters and make them either lovably funny or bitingly satirical in his other books are in Little Dorrit more realistically rendered as symptoms of deep-seated neuroses.  Take Flora Finching, Arthur’s old flame, whose reappearance in his life after more than twenty years have passed since their parents broke up their romance is a shock and a disappointment to him because Flora has had the bad luck of having aged less than gracefully.  She has become fat and plain and silly.

Flora insists on behaving as if no time has passed and she is still the young coquette who captured his heart when he was a boy and she was a girl and is such a grotesque parody of her former self that she instantly wipes away all of Arthur’s pleasant memories and leaves him dumbfounded that he could have ever wanted to marry this vain, thoughtless, and ridiculous old woman.  (She, and he, are forty, but the double-standard applies without question.  Arthur is still marriageable while Flora is old enough to be a grandmother.) In another novel, a woman like Flora would be a joke (a cruel joke, since Flora was based on Dickens’ own first love, Maria Beadnell, whom he had recently re-met), but it becomes clear that Flora’s silliness is out of her control.  It’s almost like an allergic reaction, not to Arthur himself, exactly, but to her own feelings about his return.  She’s a widow now and her marriage was childless and, implicitly, loveless, and all she has to show for it is her husband’s crazy and senile aunt whom she has inherited like a family curse.  She is lonely and unhappy and has nursed her old feelings for Arthur as her only comfort.  Now that he is back in her life, she can’t help hoping that his old feelings will come back to him.  Unfortunately, she knows that time has not been kind to her and she hates herself for that as if it was her fault.  Having no idea how to attract Arthur’s interest, no hope of doing so, in fact, she reflexively reverts to the behavior that enraptured him all those years ago, knowing as she does so that what was charming in a sixteen year old girl is probably ridiculous in a middle-aged widow.  The more she tries to recapture her and Arthur’s youth, the sillier she feels, but the sillier she feels the more desperate she becomes to not be herself, to be what she once was.  She’s trapped in a loop of her own self-loathing.

Pathetic, but not funny.

(In this production, Ruth Jones captures Flora’s desperation with a wild and horrified look in her eyes even as she simpers and capers for Arthur, as if she can’t believe the inanities coming out of her own mouth and would give anything to be able to stop herself.)

The same holds true for the novel’s other supporting cast of good-hearted eccentrics, the gruff and tireless Mr Pancks, the bluff and hearty would-be philanthropist Meagles, the hot-tempered housemaid Tattycoram, and the cheerful and devoted man-of-all work Cavalletto.  They all have comic parallels in Dickens’ other novels.  But in Little Dorrit they are desperate neurotics trapped in the loops of their eccentricities.

Without much in the way of action to dramatize and no comic relief to lighten the gloom, screenwriter Andrew Davies and the series’ trio of directors have compensated by picking up the pace.  The first episode whizzed through the opening chapters of the novel, getting so far into the book that I’m wondering why it’s going to need four more episodes to tell the rest of the story.  Either things are going to have to slow down, which will mean slowing down during the dullest and gloomiest parts of the book, or we’ll have to back up and recover some ground, which might be a good thing.  The quickness of the pacing has come at the expense of developing the characters, particularly Mr Dorrit, Amy’s weak and selfish but doting father.

Mr Dorrit is played by Tom Courtenay whom I expect will be superb in the role once he’s given his due.  Mr Dorrit is, in his accidental and well-meaning way, one of the chief villains of the story, in that he is the ruin of everyone who loves him, but in Episode One he’s practically a background character, coming out of the shadows only to provide a foil to Amy’s goodness.

What this production has going for it, though, is a pair of very attractive leads in Claire Foy and Matthew Macfadyen.

Although Arthur routinely thinks of himself as “Nobody,” Macfadyen—Darcy to Keira Knightley’s Elizabeth Bennett in Pride and Prejudice—can’t help making Arthur a definite somebody.  Arthur’s prime instinct is to withdraw.  He can only assert himself when he’s acting on behalf of someone else.  When his own interests are at stake he ceases to matter to himself and becomes listless, ineffectual, almost unable to move.  His pervasive gloom and habit of self-recrimination make him less than pleasant company.  But Macfadyen is too big and too physically active to disappear into the background, and he gives Arthur a latent good-humor that keeps breaking out despite his general melancholy.

Foy, however, is the real star of the series.  In his portrayal of Little Dorrit, Dickens gives into his own conceit too often, forgetting that Amy is twenty-one not twelve and that her small size has a real, physical cause, not just a symbolic one.  She is small because she grew up undernourished in a prison.  But Dickens frequently writes her as if she’s child-sized because she is a child.  It’s as if he’s afraid that if he allowed her any adult thoughts or feelings we might not admire her as much as he wants us to.  The result is the same as with Dickens’ other domestic angels.  Little Dorrit is easy to admire, but hard to like.

But as Foy plays her, Amy is decidedly a grown-up.  Her adult feelings, including anger and resentment, are restrained not repressed or ignored.  She is active, strong, determined, and unhappy.  Her habits of self-effacement, self-denial, and self-sacrifice are products of strong-willed self-discipline more than expressions of neurotic insecurity.  She does what she does because she has to and wants to, not because she is compelled to.  Foy is small but the Little in Little Dorrit is a demeaning insult that she shrugs off as she walks hurriedly towards whatever job she’s assigned herself today.  Foy’s Amy is imprisoned by her own virtue but she’s not caught in a loop and she is the only character who shows any sign that she can break out of her self-imprisonment through her own effort.

Episode Two of Little Dorrit runs tonight at 9 PM EDT.  Episode One is viewable online.  Episode Two becomes available online starting Monday 

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April 5th, 2009
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