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

48Charles Dickensorphanhood and found in Agnes a home at last. She is the end ofa journey begun many years ago, the completion, as David himselfindicates, of the circle of his life:Long miles of road then opened out before my mind: and,toiling on, I saw a ragged way-worn boy, forsaken andneglected, who should come to call even the heart now beatingagainst mine, his own. (739)As a ‘happy ending’ it is doubly problematic, in the fact of its presenceas well as its form. Is David after all to achieve nothing more orless than the familiar ‘heros’’ reward? Yet it is important to distinguishhere between intentional limitation and imaginative failure. Agnes’sapparent immunity to the novel’s own laws of change must be thesource of some dissatisfaction, for that defies the narrative’s veryorganizing principle. Additionally, to a twentieth-century sensibility,the figure from the stained-glass window, eternally pointing upwards,must be still more unsettling in her capacity as an emblem of matureemotional fulfilment. As Alexander Welsh has demonstrated, thesymbolic associations of the angel in the house have a disturbingtendency to become conflated with those of the angel of death. Andthe stillness and tranquillity so consistently associated with Agnesdo carry with them intimations of this ultimate stasis. She representsa denial of energy, her union with David constituting a limitation,a diminution, a loss. But it is a loss that forms part of an essentialpattern. Robin Gilmour, in his excellent essay ‘Memory in DavidCopperfield’, identifies David’s movement from child-wife to angelbride,so inseparable from his own self-discovery—and so unsettlingfor modern readers—as designedly forming a state of emotionalcontraction. It marks, in his estimation, a loss of passionate intensitywhich balances David’s increasing material success, and explains hisnarrative’s tone of quiet melancholy. Viewed in this light, Agnes andthe depleted domesticity she represents become a part of David’sgeneral chastening, a deliberate embodiment of the limits he mustlearn to accept. Through the medium of his retrospective narration,David does, in fact, resign himself to the inevitable losses time bringsin its wake. But that they should be inevitable is itself a source ofcontinuing regret. There is a price to be paid in the substitution of