Angelic and Demonic Womanhood: The Provocative Power of Convergent Identities in Dombey and Son

Abstract

Plenty has been written about how Dickens divided his woman characters into two primary types—the angel in the house and the fallen woman—and how this binary categorization produces a lack of female agency in Dickens’s works due to the predictable fates these women meet: marriage and domestic bliss for the angel in the house and death for the fallen woman. This article builds on the growing body of research that challenges traditional conceptions of the angel in the house and fallen woman in Dombey and Son by redefining the measure of female agency not as the woman character’s ability to control her circumstances but as her ability to provoke an unexpected respect in the Victorian middle-class reader through her spiritual capacities and to take on a self-authorizing form that challenges abusive forms of patriarchy. By this redefinition of female agency, it becomes clear that the novel’s angel in the house, Florence Dombey, and fallen women, Edith Granger and Alice Marwood, are not polar opposites but actually reflections of each other, two modes of women demonstrating resilience by utilizing their defined roles to assert their dignity and contend with the class and gender power structures in which they are embedded.