I. If there's one word that sums up the pervading atmosphere of Little Dorrit, it's claustrophobic. From the first chapter the reader is introduced into a world made mainly of rigidly closed spaces; each level of the novel is somehow constrained, restricted within literal or, more interestingly, metaphorical structures of confinement. This theme of imprisonment gives rise to, and is inextricable from, his emotional response to a feeling of victimization and resentment, an element that gives the novel a suggestively subversive unease that extends beyond the confines of the novel, into Dickens's very heart. literary form. Little Dorrit's powerful humanity lies in Dickens's masterful placement of his characters and the various ways in which they cope with captivity; the intriguing ambiguity lies in whether or not they ultimately transcend the walls that confine them and, indeed, whether this question is even relevant. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essayII. The novel's central prison, the Marshalsea, and the Dorrits, the literal prisoners within it, constitute the origins of the prison theme, from which images of other figurative prisons and their inhabitants draw power and pathos. Part of the idiosyncrasy of a Dickens novel is the way in which its characters, rather than standing alone as focal points of interest, depend on other characters to give them greater shape and dimension; instead of endowing a character with a complete personality, it creates groups of strangely paralyzed, one-faceted entities, disjointed personalities that usually provide more information about the characters around them than interest in themselves. In Little Dorrit, the characters of Amy, "daughter of the Marshalsea", and Miss Wade, daughter of another kind of prison, together shed an interesting light on the themes of imprisonment and resentment, and on their respective narrative functions. Amy Dorrit, the diminutive title character, has lived her entire life within prison walls; she is the only member of the Dorrit family who, when we first meet her, has never spent a night outside the gates. (The only exception to this, found in the chapter entitled "Little Dorrit's Party", is the night she spends with her idiot friend Maggie, literally just outside the gates, separated from her cell by the shortest distance possible.) the title of the book comes to represent his growth under the ruin of the shadow of the wall (p.243). Yet, in stark contrast to the rest of his family, he bears not the slightest sign of bitterness towards his fate. Instead, she relentlessly devotes herself to kindness and servitude towards all those around her; he meticulously hides from his father anything he thinks might remind him of the separation between his world and the one beyond the gates (efforts aided by the bizarre position of ascendancy he holds among the prisoners). Equally ungrateful, he helps his brother and sister in their out-of-this-world "ambitions", arranging dance lessons for his sister, finding job opportunities for his brother. We find an interesting counter-possibility to Amy's modest and humble resignation in the enigmatic character. of Miss Wade. Miss Wade has lived her life imprisoned by the seemingly more debilitating walls of resentment at her orphan status (note the assonance between "Wade" and "Ward"), and in the absolute certainty that every kindness he has ever done her it was cruel condescension. Geoffrey Carter, in his essay on sexuality in the Victorian era, rightly calls it a “…paranoia [that] everything done around [her] is designed to hurt her.”(p.144) The interesting comparison between Amy and Miss Wade lies in this attitude towards the kindness of others. In contrast to the venom with which Miss Wade condemns those who would help her, Amy is all acceptance. After the initial and momentary shame of being "discovered" by Arthur Clennam, she willingly, passively, and gratefully submits to his efforts to help her and her family. His gratitude, in fact, is so strong that it transforms into erotic (or at least semi-erotic) love. Miss Wade on the other hand, because of her bitterness towards all humanity, distances herself from society, particularly that of men, suggesting that her bitterness has transformed into an all-pervading misanthropy that precludes her from the possibility of Love. Amy, whose gratitude towards Arthur has transformed into the tenderest love, ultimately finds happiness and narrative rest in marrying him. Miss Wade, we are led to believe, cannot marry; after the telling of her life story, we cannot help but assume that she will remain to the end of her days a resentful spinster, all possibilities of love stifled by her disproportionate pride and her eternal revenge. (In her essay entitled "Miss Wade and George Silverman," Carol A. Bock calls attention to the "authority and conviction" with which she tells her story, and the resulting lack of interest the reader has in "her actual mood"; there is an apparent finality to the way her story is isolated within a chapter, almost as if she is now forever married to her own grievances. It has been suggested that the bitterness and Miss Wade's isolation arise from this frustrated homosexuality, and while this is a perfectly plausible and valid statement, it seems an unnecessary extrapolation, detracting from the powerful image of her exile. Its didactic purpose in the narrative, (if really needs one), is the fact that she is relegated to eternal isolation, something that, in terms of Victorian literature, is achieved just as effectively through asexuality as it would be through homosexuality.) In Little Dorrit, as in Bleak House, Dickens suggests the possibility that gratitude gives rise to erotic love and, therefore, narrative fulfillment, a suggestion that has deep and complex implications in a socially minded nineteenth-century novel. In a form that comes from the closure of the marriage, we cannot help but read a kind of intended judgment in the contrasting stories of these two women; in a novel populated only by deeply constrained characters, the fact that love and marriage can only take place in the absence of struggle against confinement, indeed only with a total resignation to confinement, seems, at the very least, contradictory to the agenda of a reformist novel. The ambiguity of the novel's final statement is compounded by the fact that Amy, although the central character, remains somewhat ambiguous herself. (One of the difficulties in reading Dickens is that his characters, in their aforementioned flatness and monotony, are very reluctant to "come to life" - they seem, often, imprisoned on the page.) The reader wonders whether he does not suffer from a neurosis as intense as Miss Wade's, which manifests itself in her addiction to having to bear the burden of her family's misfortunes alone and to thanklessly but tirelessly serve and nurse them. (Dickens is a master at revealing the deeply British "no need to complain" mentality, a resentment that manifests itself in a rigorous but latently hostile goodwill.) When the family's fortunes change and the Dorrits leave the Marshalsea, Amy fades into melancholy completely despondent, finding relief only in a new maternal relationship with her uncle; hisreturn to England is a return to his old life, with Arthur replacing his father. Viewed this way, we're not sure what to make of her eventual marriage to her new "patient," hesitant to see this final union as a triumph, a liberation, or even a life-change. (Interestingly, two of the final chapters are titled "Closing In" and "Closed," confounding the reader's expectation that this novel, pervaded by bars and gates, will "open" at last.)We have another ambiguous element in the discussion about resentment and its resolution in the story of Tattycoram. If Miss Wade is Amy's lookalike, we might see Tattycoram as a sort of parallel universe version of Miss Wade, her return to the Meagles being an alternative to Miss Wade's professed belief that if one is "...shut up in any place to pine and suffer...", one should "...always hate that place and wish to burn it, or raze it to the ground..." (p.35). The ambiguity of Tattycoram's story lies in Dickens's non-comment on the Meagles' treatment of their charity case, and the reader is not entirely sure that they are not hypocrites, disguising arrogant condescension as charitable kindness. "Count to twenty-five" is a thinly veiled euphemism ("Repress! Repress!"), and there is a vague trace of uneasiness in the image of Tattycoram, in the throes of rage, hypnotically counting to twenty-five. Command of Mr Meagles (p.314). Given the traditional Dickensian mode of closure – the characters are condemned or rewarded by the novel's concluding events – the reader is not sure what to make of Tattycoram's return to his "cell" within the Meagles family (just as we find it difficult to see the marriage of Amy as a liberation). We have another interesting and (typically Dickens) puzzling study of ideas of repression and resentment in Arthur Clennam, who stands out as one of the strangest characters in Dickens's imaginative population. . (Despite Arthur's dark presence and vague outlines, there is a palpable weight to his brooding consciousness; at times throughout the novel, particularly in passages dealing with Arthur's unrequited love, one feels that Dickens, the narrator often distant, he is remarkably close.) The repression of her ardent love for the Meagles manifests itself, quite clearly, in hostility towards the evil Henry Gowan, her successful suitor. "... Clennam still thought that if she hadn't made that strong decision to avoid falling in love with Pet, she would have taken a dislike to this Henry Gowan." (p.203) In the chapter entitled 'Nobody's Disappearance', (note the extent of Arthur's repression - not only does the Arthur who is capable of love 'disappear', he never existed, he was always 'nobody'), Arthur gives up all hope of finding love: "... he ... finally gave up the dying hope that had not wavered in anyone's heart, with great pain and difficulty, and from that moment became in his eyes, as if for any such hope or prospect, a much older man had done with that part of life." (p. 326). From now until the end of his days he is a bachelor, mourning the loss of his true love, and enjoys the reader's sympathy, especially because, far from allowing his forever broken heart to become embittered, he remains the kind and selfish type. deleting character that we have known from the beginning. One would expect, then, that his marriage to Amy would ultimately bring a sense of suffering rewarded, a broken heart happily mended. This is definitely not the case. Arthur does not fall in love with Amy, rather he succumbs to the centrifugal force of his life, of which she is "the vanishing point": "He had traveled thousands of miles to [her]; before [her]restless hopes and doubts were exhausted; [she] was the center of interest in his life; and darkened skies." (p.702) Only one hundred pages before the end of the novel, Arthur wonders if "...wasn't there something repressed on his part that he had silenced as soon as it emerged? ...that she must not think of loving him, that she must not take advantage of his gratitude..."(p.700). This is the first time the reader knows of such past feelings; or Dickens needed a way to end the novel, or Arthur is inventing his love for Amy, deriving it, perhaps, from the terror of loneliness and from a gratitude towards her because she loves him. Arthur rejects her in his request to let her pay the his debts and free him from the Marshalsea; the shame of accepting his help would be too great After his fortunes change (again), their engagement is understood to be all Amy's; Arthur doesn't say a word in this scene: it's his turn to be all passive acceptance after Arthur is freed - Doyce promptly reappears to take care of his debt - the wedding can take place, a wedding the reader notices. two things: first, that the marriage makes Arthur's, and indeed the novel's, appellation for Amy obsolete; second, that marriage is marked by a decided lack of the redemptive glory or triumphant liberation that we expect, or at least hope for, by the end of this claustrophobic novel; the reader is left with the image of Amy and Arthur, lost in the "roaring streets" among "the loud and the impatient, the arrogant, the rebellious and the vain", making "their usual tumult". (p.787) III. What then should the reader do with these ambiguities? How are we to reconcile the two novels that seem to vie for eminence within Little Dorrit? On the one hand we have a novel that "...teaches us in the manner of Piers Plowman and Pilgrim's Progress the need to transcend individual personal will..." (p.114). Dickens biographer Fred Kaplan suggests the following for an outline of the novel: "...wealth becomes a prison, the Marshalsea becomes a place where freedom, achieved only through self-discovery, is possible, and the world of Experience provides the context in which honesty, moral rectitude, and hard work determine self-esteem." (p.343) As tempting as it is to leave the analysis in this well-delineated state, it fails to take into account Dickens's endlessly fascinating, (often frustrating) ambiguity of tone and plot. Despite the novel's narrative condemnation of Miss Wade and exoneration of Amy, the reader is left somewhat unsure whether or not to follow these judgments. (This is due partly to the strange pathos of Miss Wade's story, and partly to the notable lack of suggestion of transcendence in the novel's final passage.) Lionel Trilling wrote that "it is part of the complexity of this novel that it deals with society in so harshly that those of his characters who share his social bitterness are thereby condemned." (p.40) Elaborating on this point, Brian Rosenberg thus succinctly summarizes the novel's problematic duality: "The ubiquitous prison image, the exhaustive portrait of the Office of Circumlocution, and the saga of Mr. Merdle - among many other things - combine to form a ferocious attack on the values ​​and practices of mid-Victorian society, with particular emphasis placed on society's tendency to deny freedom, hinder initiative, and corrupt even the best intentions. Yet this angry novel seems at times to internalize and support the assumptions of the culture it denounces." (p.39) The term 'angry novel' is particularly apt;.