Blooms Literary Themes - THE HEROS ... - ymerleksi - home

David Copperfield 41another version. In perpetual children like Oliver Twist and Nell,the condition of orphanhood draws largely on the religious, folkand fairy-tale associations that cluster about the figures of foundlingsand holy innocents. In both the inherent pathos of the youngorphan is underscored by the mythic potential of a single image:an unprotected child wandering amid a hostile adult world. Davidtoo, in his early experiences in London and on the Dover road,plainly draws on similar traditions. But in him orphanhood goeson to assume an additional, spiritual dimension, becoming a potentsymbol of a larger loss. Want of parents, and its corollary the wantof a home, mean want of a fixed identity for David, ‘home’ nowfunctioning as both the source, and the refuge, of selfhood. ForNicholas Nickleby the death of a father had chiefly meant economicvulnerability. For David Copperfield the loss goes infinitely deeper,his resulting homelessness an emblem of the alienation it is the taskof his life to overcome.In effect, Dickens brings together in David Copperfield two major,but previously separate, preoccupations of the early novels. Davidunites the parentless child—victimized and suppressed—representedby Oliver, Smike, Nell and the Marchioness, with the ‘natural’hero—imperfect, unliterary and developing—anticipated in NicholasNickleby, attempted in Martin Chuzzlewit and abandoned in WalterGay. What he does not obviously further, however, is a third, equallyimportant strain which emerges at the end of this early period. ForCopperfield suspends the exploration tentatively begun in MartinChuzzlewit, and temporarily abandoned in Dombey and Son, of thepossibilities inherent in linking the experience of the recreated ‘hero’with the overtly ‘social’ preoccupations that are now coming to shapeDickens’s artistic concerns. And this would appear to have been adeliberate decision. According to Forster, Dickens’s completion of thesecond chapter of the novel (‘I Observe’) defined to himself ‘moreclearly than before, the character of the book; and the propriety ofrejecting everything not strictly personal from the name given to it’.The introductory words ‘The Copperfield Survey of the World as itRolled’ were, in consequence, dropped from the work’s title, whichthen became ‘The Personal History, Adventures, Experience, andObservation of David Copperfield the Younger, of BlunderstoneRookery, which he never meant to be published on any account’. There