Towards a Language of Dolls

An alternative route into thinking about Jenny's critique of childhood and appearance is offered by Henry James's famously harsh 1865 review of Our Mutual Friend, describing her as

James extends his criticism to Dickens's literary method: “it is one of the chief conditions of his genius not to see beneath the surface of things. If we might hazard a definition of his literary character, we should, accordingly, call him the greatest of superficial novelists” (9). He claims that “Mr Dickens is a great observer and a great humorist, but he is nothing of a philosopher” (9). I will return to this claim, but the first thing to note is that in many respects, and especially by the realist criteria James employs, he is right to call Jenny deformed and unnatural.Footnote ⁸ She is not a believable depiction of childhood in the terms realism demands. This criticism can be turned around, however, if we recognise that Jenny's role is precisely to deform conventional depictions of childhood, to call the natural into question by means of the unnatural.

Such deformation takes place in part through Jenny's duality: angelic in her rooftop haven, she is also bound up with the corruption of London, being described as “a little quaint shrew; of the world, worldly; of the earth, earthy” (243; bk. 2, ch. 2). This description anticipates Dickens's 1868 story “George Silverman's Explanation,” where the young Silverman is called “a worldly little devil” (380; ch. 3). In this story, ironically, it is the child's very naivety, his lack of knowledge of anything beyond the most basic desires, and hence inability to show sorrow for the deaths of his parents, that leads him to be condemned as devilish. In both cases, the development of the child has been warped by a youth spent amidst urban poverty and deprivation. For this reason, Hilary Schor argues, James is wrong to say Jenny is unrealistic, since the distorting effect of urban life, which Jenny embodies, is itself an important aspect of realism (198). Yet Schor still retains an assumption that realism is the goal, whereas I am suggesting that Jenny disallows the very terms James uses to judge her.

To engage with realism, perhaps the key novelistic genre of the nineteenth century,Footnote ⁹ is to engage with questions of the natural and the unnatural, a dichotomy Dickens addresses in Dombey and Son (1846–48) when the narrator asks whether in parts of London it is not now “natural to be unnatural” (684; ch. 47), deploring magistrates and judges who, “calling up some ghastly child, with stunted form and wicked face, hold forth on its unnatural sinfulness, and lament its being, so early, far away from Heaven – but think a little of its having been conceived, and born and bred, in Hell!” (684; ch. 47). Dickens fundamentally transforms the Victorian opposition between the naturally divine and naturally sinful child, insisting that nature is not fixed but socially and environmentally determined. Heaven and Hell, rather than existing within the child, are external frameworks that might be altered or substituted for one another by human actions. From this perspective, there is a radical difference between Jenny Wren on the rooftop and Jenny Wren in the streets below, since her movement between these locations shifts the interpretative context in which she is situated, and it is this, rather than any essential identity, that determines how the child should be read. Jenny, though, goes further than this. As I have already suggested, she is able to symbolically exist in two locations at once, both rooftop and street, Heaven and Hell. In adopting multiple discursive positions, Jenny not only shows the unnatural to be natural, as in Dickens's earlier passage, but also draws attention to the framework of realism that enforces such distinctions, suggesting that the choices it presents are not neutral but ideologically determined.

More radically than shifting between states, then, Jenny continually pulls apart identity, the basic category of realism. Writing to Marcus Stone, the illustrator for Our Mutual Friend, Dickens said of Jenny, “A weird sharpness not without beauty is the thing I want.”Footnote ¹⁰ This sharpness, which is central to Jenny's assault on identity, comes through in several ways, most clearly in her “bright grey eyes,” which are “so sharp, that the sharpness of the manner seemed unavoidable. As if, being turned out of that mould, it must be sharp” (222; bk. 2, ch. 1). It is also evident in the needle Jenny uses to do her work; in her real name, Fanny Cleaver; and in her relationship to language, such as when she reacts to a question from Bradley Headstone about her relationship with other children “as if the word had pricked her” (224; bk. 2, ch. 1).Footnote ¹¹ This sharpness symbolises Jenny's ability to pierce through appearance and conventional forms of identity, cleaving apart signifiers and signifieds.

One example of such “cleaving” is her challenge to Bradley Headstone, a schoolmaster who has come to her house to visit Lizzie Hexam, when he fails to guess her line of work:

When Headstone responds, “Ladies’ bonnets?,” Jenny answers, “Fine Ladies’. . .Dolls’. I'm a Doll's Dressmaker” (223; bk. 2, ch. 1). Through this riddling game of forfeits, which confuses love and hate, and introduces madness by referring to Bedlam, Jenny breaks up identity into multiplicity.Footnote ¹² One letter, “B,” becomes a series of different signifiers, arranged in a nonsensical string, albeit one that seems to critique the treatment of women in the period: loved for their beauty, hated for their brazenness, courted in pubs and restaurants, presented with gifts such as bonnets, patronised with nicknames such as Bouncer and, sometimes, consigned to the madhouse. Is the answer to the riddle, then, “Bride?” In any case, Bradley's attempt to solve it is turned into another riddle by Jenny when she tells him she makes clothes for “Fine Ladies” who are also “Dolls” – but are dolls being compared to ladies here, or ladies to dolls? The answer, of course, is both, but this does not help us decide whose dresses the dolls’ dressmaker makes. As Schor points out, “it is possible. . .to read for some time before the text settles the description of the ‘dolls’ and the ‘dolls’ dressmaker” (200). For Pam Morris, drawing on Mikhail Bakhtin's concept of dialogism, such discrepancies and discontinuities in language are evidence of Dickens's employment of marginal voices in his novels, leading to a “corrupting dislocation from things ‘as they are’” that suspends the possibility of locating a univocal meaning in Dickens's work (128). It is these discontinuities that prevent his novels from being realist in any simple or conventional sense.

Jenny's use of language is very different than that of another little girl in Our Mutual Friend: Mary Anne, a student at the school Lizzie's brother Charley attends, who is quizzed by her schoolmistress about grammar:

This is an attempt to fix language, to separate it out into clearly delineated meanings and regular structure. In Jenny Wren's world, however, any such fixed grammar becomes unsustainable, as ridiculous as saying “her name's Bouncer and she lives in Bedlam.” Bradley Headstone is another character who attempts to fix meaning, railing against Eugene Wrayburn's “shifty evasions” (291; bk. 2, ch. 6). Wrayburn, a dandyish gentleman, repeatedly deflects Headstone's arguments, outmanoeuvring him both linguistically and in their shared pursuit of Lizzie Hexam. In an inversion of Jenny's call to Riah to “come up and be dead,” Bradley Headstone calls to Rogue Riderhood, a boatman and criminal who threatens to destroy Headstone's social position, to “Come down!” into the mud of the Thames, holding him with a grip like an “iron ring” (781; bk. 4, ch. 15), symbolising his attempt to control meaning. In Pam Morris's words, Headstone lacks a “capacity for playful self-invention,” unlike Jenny and Wrayburn (133). While Wrayburn is a very different figure than Jenny – older, male, able-bodied, socially elevated – their shared approach to language, along with their shared interest in Lizzie, constitutes an important link between them.

Perhaps the most significant exchange between Jenny Wren and Eugene Wrayburn concerns Lizzie. It occurs towards the end of the novel, in a chapter called “The Dolls’ Dressmaker Discovers a Word,” and seems to pin meaning down into a single word: “wife.” In fact, as I will show, this exchange retains the logic of riddles that permeates Jenny's dialogue throughout the text. While Wrayburn lies, apparently dying, Jenny tends him, acting as “an interpreter between this sentient world and the insensible man” (720; bk. 4, ch. 10):

Jenny discovers this word, which Mortimer calls a “clue” (723; bk. 4, ch. 10), as if unravelling a riddle, one Eugene can express only by repeating the same name – Lizzie – “millions of times.” Jenny, though, unlike Mortimer, understands the slipperiness of signifiers, that they may not mean what they appear to mean. The word “wife” is like a deferred – or fractured – answer to the riddle Jenny posed to Bradley Headstone (“I love my love with a B”), which he could not fully answer. His guess – bonnets – was, after all, part of the question, whose terms he was not able to escape, making the riddle like the “abstruse No Thoroughfares” (533; bk. 3, ch. 10) into which Wrayburn leads Headstone during his hunt for Lizzie. If the word “bride” was implied by Jenny's riddle, then Eugene's delayed answer is to replace this word with “wife” (implicitly), and then with “Lizzie” (explicitly), in a metaphorical chain that threatens to keep unfurling even as Jenny cuts it off, or rather adds to it by interposing the missing term. Whereas Headstone struggled to understand Jenny's riddles, Jenny can comprehend the riddling language of Eugene's sickness. Eugene, meanwhile, understands her conceit of mixing women and dolls, hinting of his plan to make Lizzie his mistress with the words, “I think of setting up a doll, Miss Jenny” (237; bk. 2, ch. 2).

Jenny's interposition between Mortimer and Eugene shows not only that she is a liminal figure, halfway between this world and the next,Footnote ¹³ but also that she knows appearances are always deceptive and that every word refers to a host of others. If Jenny is an “interpreter,” then her approach to interpretation is not to close down meaning but to open it up, exposing language to its internal differences and multiplicities. In doing so, she simultaneously opens up the embedded ideologies and social structures that lie concealed within language.

Such embedded ideologies are nowhere more active than in relation to gender roles, about which Jenny's sharpness is particularly acute. She constantly blurs the distinction between ladies and their dolls, as when she describes the “fine ladies” (223; bk. 2, ch. 1) she works for by saying, “They take no care of their clothes, and they never keep to the same fashions a month. I work for a doll with three daughters. Bless you, she's enough to ruin her husband!” (223; bk. 2, ch. 1). Here, the wealthy customer who orders dolls’ clothes from Jenny becomes a doll herself, her dresses as much subject to the childish whims of fashion as those of the dolls she owns. Later, Jenny's sharp gaze becomes a tool for turning fashionable ladies into dolls:

Jenny's gaze makes the fashionable world a world of dolls, upending conventional power relations by transforming “great ladies” into slaves. At the same time, the implication is that this great lady is already a slave to fashion; indeed, the ladies generally enjoy Jenny's appraisal, accepting their position as the object of the public gaze. Jenny's social inversion, therefore, is also the revelation of a concealed social truth.

More than this, with her act of surveillance, Jenny adopts the position of the doll. As Eugenia Gonzalez has argued, nineteenth-century doll tales typically presented dolls as “agents of surveillance” (35). Such dolls became active observers, but only by transferring their passivity to their owners. Dolls were imagined to watch their owners, invariably young girls, becoming “instruments available to parents for shaping their children” (35). Jenny similarly “shapes” the ladies she sees, by “cutting out’ and “basting” their images, putting them in the position of a child, regulated by the gaze of her doll. Jenny's innovation, though, is to sell the women's images back to them and their daughters in the form of dolls’ dresses. In this way, the great ladies become complicit, as consumers, in the very gaze that renders them childlike. This commodifying process is indicated by the way Jenny chooses her models as if choosing goods, remarking, “You'll do, my dear.” Most disturbingly, the image that returns to these women is more perfect than they are themselves, since Jenny has “hollowed out” and “sloped away” any imperfections. The world of dolls is not just a version of our world, but a better version. For such women, the socially expected response is to become ever more doll-like, in the hope of replicating and perfecting these already replicated images.

Jenny's business card emphasises the doll-like nature of her customers:

The implication here is that the residences Jenny attends are nothing but dolls’ houses, playthings for women who have no real power. Bella Harmon, a doll-like figure herself throughout much of the novel, reacts against this view of women when she tells John Harmon, “I want to be something so much worthier than the doll in the doll's house” (663; bk. 4, ch. 5). Despite this assertion, a little later Bella's father observes that her baby “seemed to make her younger than before, reminding him of the days when she had a pet doll and used to talk to it as she carried it about” (736; bk. 4, ch. 12). Once Bella refuses to be a doll, she must instead become a child again, nursing a doll of her own. Such, it seems, is the fate of women in middle- and upper-class Victorian society.Footnote ¹⁴ They become “perfect slaves,” both to fashion itself and to the textually absent men who bankroll their purchases.

Yet this equation of women and dolls, convincing as it seems, is not allowed to settle. There are other dolls in the text, notably Jenny's father, nicknamed “Mr Dolls” (527; bk. 3, ch. 10) by Eugene Wrayburn, who has no idea of his real name. Here, rather than the father giving his name to the daughter, the daughter's title is conferred on the father, subsuming his identity and authority under hers. In fact, Mr Dolls's entire relationship with Jenny is inverted; she calls him a “disgraceful boy” and “wicked child” (522; bk. 3, ch. 10), taking on the role of his long-suffering “parent” (710; bk. 4, ch. 9).Footnote ¹⁵ As in Great Expectations, Dickens parodies the view of children as “naterally wicious,” since Mr Dolls's wickedness results from his alcoholism, a socially-produced form of sinfulness. Rum has become “the only meaning of which he was capable” (710; bk. 4, ch. 9), directing his actions and leading ultimately to his unpleasant death. More than the drink itself, though, the concept that Mr Dolls is capable only of a single meaning is what is important here, in contrast to Jenny's ability to multiply and transform meanings. By clinging to one meaning, Mr Dolls has no capacity to survive in the world of the modern city, which requires the flexibility of constantly re-making definitions. Like Bradley Headstone, another rigid figure, he ends up dead.

When his alcohol-riddled dead body is carried home to Jenny's parlour, the final transformation of Mr Dolls into his namesake takes place: “there, in the midst of the dolls with no speculation in their eyes, lay Mr. Dolls with no speculation in his” (712; bk. 4, ch. 9). Dickens refers to Macbeth Act III, Scene 4, where Macbeth says to Banquo's ghost, “Thou hast no speculation in those eyes/Which thou dost glare with” (ll. 94–95, 982).Footnote ¹⁶ For Nicholas Royle, this means that “speculation is haunted by the spectral” in the novel, supporting his reading of Jenny's dolls as neither living nor dead, and hence uncanny (51). Dickens's use of the phrase might also have a financial implication, a sense present in the novel when Mrs Lammle refers to her husband's ‘base speculation’ (129; bk. 1, ch. 10): Mr Dolls has, after all, failed as an economic provider for Jenny. The great ladies in the park notably also lack speculation in this sense: they do not make money, only absorb and display it, becoming commodified in the process. Jenny, by contrast, does speculate in several ways, not only by looking, but also by making money and making meanings.

Mr Dolls is like Jenny in one sense though: he confuses easy categorisations of childhood. Not literally a child, though repeatedly called one, he is at once devilish in his alcoholism, and doll-like in his marionette-like tendency to collapse upon his chair (528-30; bk. 3, ch. 10) and in his submission to Jenny, as when she orders him to “[g]o up stairs and get me my bonnet and shawl” (523; bk. 3, ch. 10). This submission demonstrates the defining feature of Mr Dolls: his absence of will. All his actions are driven by either Jenny or rum, the only forces which impart meaning to him. He alters depending on which is present before him, as Jenny alters depending on whether she is on the rooftop garden or in the city below. He, though, lacks Jenny's ability to determine her own fate in the face of competing interpretative frameworks.

Truth, Fashion, and a Philosophy of Dolls

Another important doll encountered in Our Mutual Friend is “Mrs. Truth.” An actual doll this time, Mrs Truth is employed by Jenny in her interrogation of Bradley Headstone, whom she orders to “look this lady in the face. This is Mrs. Truth. The Honorable. Full-dressed” (337; bk. 2, ch. 11). Mrs Truth serves as Jenny's double, confronting Bradley with the same piercing gaze:

In Mrs T., Jenny creates a doll in her own image, blurring the line between her and her creations. This continues after Mr Dolls dies, when Jenny sees her own funeral dress as an extension of the dresses of her dolls, telling Riah that “having knocked off my rosy-cheeked young friends, I'll knock off my white-cheeked self” (713; bk. 4, ch. 9). Mrs T. reveals Jenny's gaze as one that identifies truth, but only, paradoxically, if it becomes the detached and reified gaze of a doll. In the passage above, Jenny's gaze is separated from her body, transferred to the doll and to the needle she jabs towards Bradley's eyes. It would be a mistake, though, to think that the truth which is identified is something hidden behind surface appearance. Instead, the transference of the gaze onto the doll, an imitation whose name is Truth, reveals that surface appearance is itself the new truth of modern society. Significant here is Jenny's assertion that Mrs T. is “Full-dressed.” She draws attention not to essences but to clothes, which for her as for Carlyle (see below) function as a metaphor for appearance in general. In the world Jenny inhabits, meanings and identities are fluid, and truth is malleable, becoming in Nietzsche's formulation “a mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, anthropomorphisms” (250). For Jenny, as for Nietzsche, “[t]ruths are illusions about which it has been forgotten that they are illusions” (Nietzsche 250).

This stance can be detected in Jenny's contempt for Bradley's claim that he wants to speak to Lizzie “for her own sake” (338; bk. 2, ch. 11), at which she shakes her fist at him and turns Mrs T. to face the wall. Bradley's suggestion that things can be valued “for their own sake” assumes the existence of an internal or essential truth. It makes meaning immanent, locating it within the object towards whom we direct our attentions. For Jenny, by contrast, meaning is relational, generated by the socially and culturally inflected stance we take towards the other. Truth is not located in the desired object but in the desiring subject's relation to it. Jenny's father, for instance, is only recoverable as an object of care if she approaches him in the guise of a mother approaching her child; she loves him not for his own sake, but for the childhood she wishes to see in him, and which has been denied to her. Similarly, her love for Riah is inseparable from his occupation of the position of her “godmother,” a relationship she desires and therefore produces. The most extreme example of this is Jenny's imagined husband, to whom she continually refers, though he is nothing more than her own projection. Jenny creates a discursive place for her husband, stating, “Wherever he may happen to be just at present, or whoever he may happen to be,. . .I know his tricks and his manners, and I give him warning to look out” (233; bk. 2, ch. 2). This constitutes a reversal of conventional social relationships, since it is Jenny, the wife, who determines her husband's place, rather than having her social existence defined by him. In each case, she shows that social interactions take place among previously determined roles (godmother, child, husband, and so on), rather than arising out of the essential nature of the person addressed. She also demonstrates, however, that the rigid nature of such positions can be brought into question, by substituting the people supposed to fill such roles for others, who might be inappropriate (Riah), inverted (Mr Dolls), or non-existent (her husband).

This mobility of meaning which Jenny brings about, and which destabilises signification, continues through her adoption of multiple names and titles. Although she introduces herself to Charley as “the person of the house” (222; bk. 2, ch. 1), she describes herself to Headstone as a doll's dressmaker (223; bk. 2, ch. 1) and is known to Lizzie as Jenny Wren. All these are pseudonyms, however, since her real name – insofar as anything about Jenny is real – is Fanny Cleaver (233; bk. 2, ch. 2). Jenny sets up names like masks, or clothes, creating new identities and confounding the possibility that any particular identity is final or definitive. None of her names, however, fully fit her, making her like her dolls, who are “[v]ery difficult to fit. . ., because their figures are so uncertain. You never know where to expect their waists” (278; bk. 2, ch. 5). This resistance to “fitting” disrupts the conventional structures of power which determine the social position of children, a topic discussed by James Kincaid, who proposes finding ways to “worm ourselves partly free” (Child-Loving 7) from the usual distinctions between adult and child. These, he argues, are always sexualised, either explicitly or implicitly. One way to do so is through “play,” a state in which, says Kincaid, “[t]here is no power (or none that goes anywhere), no logic, no order of any kind, even grammatical” (8). This concept is distinct from the conventional understanding of play represented by a girl playing with her dolls, which is primarily a means of socialisation. Jenny not only activates a state of play like Kincaid describes, but shows that it is already part of the language we inhabit, especially in the modern city, where seemingly settled meanings and social roles break apart.

Through her playful critique of appearance and order, Jenny is in the tradition of Thomas Carlyle's novel Sartor Resartus (“The Tailor Re-Tailored”) (1833–34) and its protagonist, Professor Teufelsdröckh, who invents a “Philosophy of Clothes.”Footnote ¹⁷ This allows Teufelsdröckh to see “in the solemnities and paraphernalia of civilized Life, which we make so much of, nothing but so many Cloth-rags, turkey-poles, and ‘bladders with dried peas’" (50; ch. 10). For Teufelsdröckh, as for Carlyle, the world is mere appearance or clothing, behind which lies a divine truth. As the Professor explains, “if you consider it, what is Man himself, and his whole terrestrial Life, but an Emblem; a Clothing or visible Garment for that divine ME of his, cast hither, like a light-particle, down from Heaven? Thus is he said also to be clothed with a Body” (57; ch. 11). The world we see is a world of clothes, as supposedly explained at great length in the volume written by Teufelsdröckh, a description of which is relayed by his British editor. According to this imaginary text, “[t]he first purpose of Clothes. . .was not warmth or decency, but ornament” (30; ch. 5). From the start, humans have been concerned to conceal and decorate, which is appropriate, since for Carlyle our bodies are a mere form of clothing for our immortal souls. Clothing is a problem, though, because it blocks our access to truth, which as a result of this association with nakedness picks up an implicit sexual charge in Carlyle's novel.

Teufelsdröckh's fictional, and Carlyle's real philosophy are both based on this conception of appearance as clothing, said to have first occurred to the Professor while wondering whether

This view of the world, derived from German idealism, renders all appearance ephemeral – a kind of “air-image” – but does so, in the end, only to assert individual identity more forcefully, as the only true reality and only route to God. The doll's dressmaker, however, is also a Professor, telling Riah that “we Professors who live upon our taste and invention, are obliged to keep our eyes always open” (716; bk. 4, ch. 9). She offers her own critique of appearance, fashion, and identity, but whereas for Teufelsdröckh there is a “divine ME” beneath the world of appearance, in Jenny Wren's philosophy appearance, like her dresses, conceals not people but dolls, which are themselves imitations, undoing any sense of an essential truth to be discovered.

A philosophy of clothes is also a philosophy of fashion, with Teufelsdröckh remarking that “in Clothes, as in all other external things whatsoever, no fashion will continue” (37; ch. 7), making it appropriate for an “old-fashioned” child such as Jenny. This term, which Dickens applies to Paul Dombey in Dombey and Son, is associated with Jenny by the “low old-fashioned” (222; bk. 2, ch. 1) armchair in which she first appears. To understand the term, and how it relates to Jenny's philosophy, we can turn to Dickens's description of Paul himself.Footnote ¹⁸

Though not yet five, Paul has developed a “strange, old-fashioned, thoughtful” manner, like “one of those terrible little Beings in the Fairy tales, who, at a hundred and fifty or two hundred years of age, fantastically represent the children for whom they have been substituted” (Dombey 98; ch. 8). To be old-fashioned, then, is to be fashioned as if one is old, to have the appearance of age whilst being chronologically young. It is also to be out of time, to be anachronistic or inappropriate, as Paul is when he provokes the speculation that he might be a changeling. Like Paul, Jenny's age seems impossible to determine: “her poor figure furnished no clue to it, and her face was at once so young and so old. Twelve, or at the most thirteen, might be near the mark” (224; bk. 2, ch. 1). Also marking her out as old-fashioned is Jenny's propensity, due to her disability, for the company of adults rather than children: “I always did like grown-ups. . .and always kept company with them. So sensible. Sit so quiet. Don't go prancing and capering about! And I mean always to keep among none but grown-ups till I marry” (225; bk. 2, ch. 1).

Jenny's “intimations of immortality” are part of this old-fashioned state, since they put her out of phase with the everyday world, indicating an ability to perceive what is not present: she can “smell roses” (238; bk. 2, ch. 2) when she works, for example, recalling Paul's sensitivity to what “the waves were always saying” (Dombey 117; ch. 8) at Brighton. This is Paul's own intimation of immortality, since it signals his impending death (236; ch. 16). In both cases, the child sees, hears, and smells differently from others. Such old-fashioned children, Andrews observes, seem to literalise Wordsworth's formulation “The Child is the father of the Man” (131). Yet making this concept literal risks making it grotesque, since it erases childhood from the figure of the child, leaving behind only a parody of age. Such literalisation goes beyond a simple reversal, because uprooting Child and Man from their accepted social relations disassociates apparently fixed signifiers and signifieds, suggesting that both childhood and age are identities which might be performed by anyone given the right conditions. This is the case with Jenny and her father, and with Lizzie Hexam and Pleasant Riderhood, two other daughters who act as “mothers” to their fathers in the novel.Footnote ¹⁹

As Robert Newsom observes, another meaning for old-fashioned is “death-like” (97), the narrator of Dombey and Son talking of “[t]he old, old fashion – Death!” The meaning of fashion as clothing is present here, Newsom points out, with the narrator calling death “[t]he fashion that came in with our first garments” (Dombey 241; ch. 16, Newsom 98). Death, then, following Teufelsdröckh, is the first and prototypical ornament. This sense of fashion as death-like recurs in Dickens in the name of Lady Dedlock, the representative of the world of fashion in Bleak House.Footnote ²⁰ Fashion, in Lady Dedlock's world, lacks any living essence. It is free to constantly change because it is no more than a shell or ornament. This is the philosophy of fashion that Jenny – close to death herself as an old-fashioned child – both propounds and transforms. The world as she sees it, and especially London, is equally without natural innocence and natural sinfulness. Indeed, it cannot be construed in these terms, as Jenny cannot. This does not lead to stasis for Jenny, however, but to nearly limitless possibilities for playful reinterpretation.

Walter Benjamin considers the connection between fashion and death in The Arcades Project, quoting a line by Giacomo Leopardi (1798-1837): “Fashion: Madame Death! Madame Death!” (62). Fashion calls to death, signalling a desire for her. Jenny, we might recall, calls to Riah, her “godmother,” to “come up and be dead!,” putting her in a similar position to Leopardi's Fashion. Benjamin goes on to develop this link:

Fashion reinvents herself to escape death, of which she is nonetheless a parody. Any fashion that fails to change is no longer fashion, but old-fashioned, out-of-date. The old-fashioned is therefore fashion that has been de-mystified, which has revealed its death-like face. This gives another meaning to the old-fashioned child: s/he is the figure that unravels the concept of childhood.

Fashion as newness, part of Benjamin's definition, defines Dickens's Mr and Mrs Veneering, a couple described as “bran-new people in a bran-new house in a bran-new quarter of London” (17; bk. 1, ch. 2). But fashion is always also the repetition of the same under a new guise, like the dolls whose dresses Jenny makes, who are death-like in their passivity, yet “never keep to the same fashions a month” (223; bk. 2, ch. 1). The word “dolls” also suggests prostitutes, women who “doll themselves up,” as Pam Morris points out (137). The combination of sexuality, passivity, and fashion this implies is encapsulated in Benjamin's famous formulation, “the sex appeal of the inorganic” (79). Derived from Marx's concept of the fetishism of commodities, this phrase suggests that desire in modern life is driven by artificiality and novelty, allowing capitalism to conceal its fixed and deathlike face behind superficial change. Jenny, like other modern Western subjects, inhabits this world of shifting and ephemeral surface, but in her hands it becomes a space of play. She shows that the tools of modern life can be turned against social conventions and fashions, allowing them to be transformed, sliced open, and unpicked.

Little Margery and the Bonnet

In the last section of this article, I want to draw together the concerns I have explored through a specific example of how Our Mutual Friend critiques the conventional conception of the “good child” through the figure of Jenny Wren. This can be done by looking at “Little Margery,” a character, along with “Thomas Twopence,” in the moralising children's books given to pupils at Charley Hexam's ragged school.

This school is “pervaded by a grimly ludicrous pretence that every pupil was childish and innocent,” a pretence “much favoured by the lady-visitors” (215; bk. 2, ch. 1) who represent middle-class morality and its conception of childhood. This pretence, which stands in for any genuine engagement with the realities of poverty in London, is sustained by stories in which children act as ciphers for middle-class ideology. One book, “the Adventures of Little Margery,” features a child who

This, the narrator ironically remarks, is supposed to be excellent reading for “[y]oung women old in the vices of the commonest and worst life” (215; bk. 2, ch. 1). Margery is an impossibly ideal child, so perfect that she becomes uncanny, to the extent that she puts into question the whole middle-class conception of childhood, revealing the moral and self-denying child desired by middle-class reformers to be a fantasy. She seems an extreme example of James Kincaid's claim that childhood is a realm established for the benefit of adults, which actively harms real children. For Kincaid, “The idea of the child can hardly put up with actual children” (“Dickens” 30), being constructed instead as a blank slate onto which adults can project their own needs and anxieties, particularly sexual ones. Yet Kincaid here risks turning the “actual” or “real” child into an alternative ideal, replacing one “truth” about childhood with another – whereas Dickens's novel, as I have indicated, puts into question the very structures of realism which allow the concept of the “actual child” to be perpetuated. Nonetheless, Kincaid does allow us to see that a child like Margery may be just as sexualised, through the desirability of her inherent innocence and goodness, as the vice-ridden young women of Hexam's school.

Above all, Margery presents an idealised image of the Romantic child: she lives “in the village cottage by the mill” (215; bk. 2, ch. 1) and plays among sheep and turnips, presenting a stereotypical image of rural England that provides a wholly insufficient model of childhood for anyone born and bred in working-class London. Margery is old-fashioned herself then, not only because she reproves the fifty-year-old miller as if she is his senior, but because she represents an anachronistic model of childhood that the modern city has rendered untenable.

Margery also functions as an inverse image of Jenny. As Margery admonishes the miller, so Jenny does her father; as Margery shares her food with singing birds, so Jenny imagines she hears birds singing while she works (238; bk. 2, ch. 2), and even her name is a child's term for the wren (“jenny wren,” OED). While Margery denies herself bonnets, Jenny makes bonnets, doing so, as she tells Headstone, from straw, which Margery plaits. Both girls are, in the end, equally peculiar and artificial, except that Jenny is aware of her own artifice. Particularly suggestive here is the recurrence of bonnets. A bonnet is the weapon used by Bella, another childlike woman or woman-like child, to attack her father (50; bk. 4, ch. 4, 648), and the item repeatedly associated with her dimples (318; bk. 2, ch. 8, 452; bk. 3, ch. 4, 726; bk. 4, ch. 11). It is what old John Harmon used to violently seize from Mrs Boffin's head when she tried to protect his son, a vulnerable child (95; bk. 1, ch. 8). A bonnet, along with “drapery,” conceals “any fragment of the real woman” (122; bk. 1, ch. 10) in the case of Lady Tippins, and conceals Jenny's golden hair, which comes spilling out when Miss Abbey undoes her bonnet (434; bk. 3, ch. 2). It is also, as noted above, what Jenny sends Mr Dolls to collect, in her role as his mother.

Walter Benjamin helps us understand the significance of this object when he proposes that women's hats are the nineteenth century's most sexually polymorphous item of clothing:

This lends support to Kincaid's argument that in the nineteenth century children are defined by their desirability and sexuality, even if sometime through a negative definition of non-sexuality (“Dickens” 33). Margery, the story notes, does not wear a bonnet, as it is not part of the natural world. She rejects fashion and along with it sexual allure, yet in the terms of Kincaid's analysis this is itself a sexual position, implying purity and virginity, desirable attributes for girls in nineteenth-century discourse. Bella, too, is part of a framework within which childhood functions primarily for adults: her bonnet, like her dimples, is a partly sexual, partly innocent signifier, reflecting her position poised between childhood and womanhood. Only once she is married does Bella start to reflect critically on her use of her bonnet to attack her father, possibly implying a maturing sense of her sexual position in relation to men: “Did I beat you much with that horrid little bonnet, Pa?” (656; bk. 4, ch. 4) she asks, becoming embarrassed and apologetic. Undoing Jenny's bonnet, meanwhile, seems to reveal her true appearance, in the form of her golden hair. Yet, undermining this, it works to confuse Miss Abbey's sense of Jenny's age and identity: “Child, or woman?” she asks Riah, who replies, “Child in years,. . .woman in self-reliance and trial” (435; bk. 3, ch. 2).

The multiplicity of erotic meanings Benjamin associates with hats makes it appropriate that Jenny is the character who fashions them. To form bonnets is to form meanings, but also to confound them, since bonnets confuse the appearance of women and girls, making it hard to separate out adults and children. In Jenny's case, her bonnet, along with many other factors, makes it impossible to define her sexual status: she is a mother, but also a child; an angel, but also a devil and a doll; crippled, but with beautiful hair; desirous of a husband, but wanting to treat him as a child.

Bonnets, finally, were one of the few forms of female clothing regularly taken on and off in the sight of others. This makes them both alluring and ambiguous, concealing some things (golden hair) and highlighting others (dimples). Such uncertainty is, for Benjamin, precisely the point at which sexuality is generated. One entry in The Arcades Project reads, “Hallmark of the period's fashions: to intimate a body that never knows full nakedness” (68). What is erotic during the nineteenth century, Benjamin argues, is the play of appearance, suggestion, artifice, and ornament – the very world which Jenny Wren inhabits, even if her own sexuality remains in question, which is itself a kind of eroticism in Benjamin's terms. As a highly overdetermined form of clothing, bonnets match Jenny's language: intimating much, but rejecting any final revelation of truth or “full nakedness,” unlike Sartor Resartus, which desires both. Perhaps, then, Headstone is right to respond to Jenny's riddle by saying “ladies’ bonnets,” though wrong if he think this is an easily understandable answer, or that it helps to define and delimit Jenny's character.

In my final reflections I would like to take seriously what Hilary Schor suggests about Jenny Wren's production of fictions: that they align her with Dickens himself, who, Schor argues, moves between “the visionary and the infernal” (201), the divine and the devilish. In this case, Jenny's philosophy is also Dickens's, providing an answer to Henry James's charge that Dickens is “the greatest of superficial novelists” but “nothing of a philosopher.” For Jenny Wren, superficiality itself is the topic of philosophy. Her philosophy is one that critiques appearance by pointing to its superficiality and variability, intimating that there is no essential truth underlying the world, which is always socially and discursively produced. In criticising Dickens, James inadvertently reveals Dickens's basic difference from Carlyle: whereas Carlyle posits a transcendent truth behind the world of appearance, Dickens, through Jenny Wren, offers a philosophy in which there is nothing but appearance. Rather than a philosophy of clothes, we have a philosophy of dolls. In this view, if there is any truth to be found – a truth about what it means to be a child, for instance – this is a function not of the object observed, but of the gaze of the observer. Such an observer may, perhaps, have sufficient sharpness to undo conventional appearances, but only if, rather than proposing an alternative truth, she accepts that in a world of dolls she is also a doll herself.