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

David Copperfield 47She would marry and have new claimants on her tenderness,and in doing it, would never know the love for her that hadgrown up in my heart. It was right that I should have to paythe forfeit of my headlong passion. What I had reaped, I hadsown. (710–711)Having made for so long a ‘mystery’ (699) of his own heart, it is rightthat that heart should now be a secret to the woman who possesses it.There is a symmetry, a poetic justice to his fate that David the authorclearly appreciates: ‘I had bestowed my passionate tenderness uponanother object; and what I might have done, I had not done: and whatAgnes was to me, I and her own noble heart had made her’ (700). Inacknowledging his own error, David measures too his distance fromthe conventional ‘happily ever after’ of the conventional novel ‘hero’.He has married his fairy-tale princess and the marriage proved notthe end of his story but the beginning of a larger loss, a loss foreverpresent to him in the figure of the ‘sister’ who could, and should, havebeen his wife.Yet, in the end, David is allowed not only to love his ‘sister’ butto marry her too. In effect, he both acknowledges the lesson time hastaught him, the impossibility of retracing the road not taken—‘Homewas very dear to me, and Agnes too—but she was not mine—she wasnever to be mine. She might have been, but that was past!’ (701)—andproves it wrong. For Agnes herself embodies a seeming defianceof time and change which coexists uneasily with the insistence onmutability that pervades David’s written memory. Where Dorabecomes ‘the blossom withered in its bloom upon the tree’ (598), anemblem of the inevitable law ‘of change in everything’ (635) Davidhears sounding in the bells of Canterbury cathedral, Agnes remainsfrozen in time, forever associated with the ‘tranquil brightness’ (191)of the stained-glass window in whose frame David first placed her asa child. That is the glory of her final confession to the time-hauntedDavid: she has loved him all her life, and never changed (739).Agnes’s intended symbolic function within David’s life history seemsclear. She fills the void in his heart and mind precisely because sherepresents ‘home in its best sense’ (710). Embracing her as his wife,David holds within his arms ‘the centre of myself ’ (740), a centre hehas lacked for so long. The homeless hero has overcome his spiritual