Female images in the novel «Dombey and Son»

Typically for a Dickens novel, Dombey and Son emphasizes the necessity of the bourgeois nuclear family by first lengthily orchestrating its near collapse and then (peremptorily) sketching out its triumphant resurrection. The mechanism for this dynamic of collapse and resurrection is the novel's construction of sentimental feminine flawlessness, specifically in the figure of Florence Dombey. Sentimentality performs a double movement here: within the narrative frame it both constructs the perfect (always subordinate, passive, and structurally heterosexual) female subject of ideology and electrifies that narrative's potential for framing, at that same moment, eroticized relations between women.
“Dombey and Son”  is a feminist novel.” Why? Because the focus of the novel is on what happens when Dombey has a daughter instead of the desired son.
Mrs. Dombey dies shortly after giving birth to her second child, a long-awaited son.  The eldest Dombey child was a girl and Mr. Dombey didn’t see much use in daughters: “But what was a girl to Dombey and Son! In the capital of the House’s name and dignity, such a child was merely a piece of base coin that couldn’t be invested–a bad Boy–nothing more.”

Собственная разработка