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

44Charles Dickensso desperately. That Uriah feels the negative bond in his turn is madeevident by his vicious outburst late in the novel, when he is being‘exploded’ by Micawber: “‘You think it justifiable, do you, Copperfield,you who pride yourself so much on your honor and all the rest of it, tosneak about my place, eavesdropping with my clerk? If it had been me,I shouldn’t have wondered; for I don’t make myself out a gentleman(though I never was in the streets either, as you were, according toMicawber), but being you!’” (641). Similarly, something of the fascinationSteerforth holds for David obviously resides in his assured possessionof the status Uriah, and his example, call into question. Even atSalem House, David is attracted by Steerforth’s social image—‘hisnice voice, and his fine face, and his easy manner, and his curling hair’(75)—which contrasts so markedly with Uriah’s creeping lowness. Andwhen they meet again as adults his admiration for Steerforth’s styleand manner—his ease with servants, his social grace, his ‘gentlemanly’accomplishments—is just as compulsively undiscriminating.Emblems of a radical failure of self, these distorted reflectionsembody a fate that clearly threatens David too. But he is notsurrounded by negative exemplars alone. If Steerforth and Uriah illustratethe consequences of a fatal self-estrangement, Tommy Traddles,yet another of David Copperfield’s fatherless sons, demonstrates thepotential of a properly disciplined self to secure a refuge. Where Steerforthand Uriah destroy homes, Traddles creates one. This, surely, is thesignificance of the house for which he and Sophy work and plan: “‘Then,when we stroll into the squares, and great streets, and see a house to let,sometimes we look up at it, and say, how would that do, if I was madea judge?’” (725). Traddles functions in many ways as a more convincinglyrealized version of Tom Pinch in Martin Chuzzlewit, minus theexplicit moralizing and the rhetoric of insistent pathos. With his genialpeculiarities—the comic head of hair and the skeletons—his simplenature and quiet virtues, Tommy offers an alternative to the spurious‘heroic’ glamour of Steerforth. Early detecting the selfishness lurkingbeneath Steerforth’s surface charm, Traddles’s patience, determinationand good sense define the sort of domesticated, moral heroismDavid himself must embrace, his ability to estimate such heroism at itstrue worth serving as an index of his own growing maturity. Tommyembodies too the positive answer to Murdstone ‘firmness’: determination,energy and self-reliance, motivated and softened by love for his