Author of himself: Dickens, literacy, and the artist's fight with art

Abstract

This study explains the contradiction between the positive view of literacy that Charles Dickens expresses in his letters and speeches, and the increasingly negative portrayal of literacy in his novels in teens of Otto Rank's theory of the ¿artist's fight with art.¿ In the face of the positive role literacy played in Dickens's career and self-definition, the presentation of literacy in his novels darkens. We see this process in the fading potential for reading and writing to sustain the spirit. Dickens describes the proper role of reading through characters who escape negative environments by reading but retain a childlike sense of wonder formed from their reading and actively engage with the world. After Bleak House , reading and writing's capacity to inspire fades until Our Mutual Friend , where the strongest response to literature comes, ironically, from an illiterate, Noddy Boffin. A second way of seeing Dickens's negative view of literacy is through the appearance and activity of writing. David Copperfield and Pip react to writing visually in terms that echo Dickens's reactions to his own and others' handwriting, but the unhappy outcome of Pip's life as compared to David's suggests Dickens's less positive view of writing. Dickens also manifests his growing apprehensions about writing through the darker contexts of struggling writers in the later novels. Dickens also expresses his antagonism towards literacy in his description of the transmission of literacy. Typically, Dickens shows complete illiteracy to be dangerous through the illiterate's alienation and susceptibility to manipulation. Public schools fail to solve this problem since incompetent, abusive masters run them. In the early novels, selfless and nurturing private teachers offset pernicious educators. In the later novels, Dickens describes the acquisition of literacy as inessential to happiness. Characters who struggle with learning become the happiest and most morally redeeming characters in the late novels. A final instance of Dickens's antagonism to literacy is his growing emphasis on oral performance. Dickens's emphasis on performing his early works suggests that they required revision, and the fact that Dickens performed them orally also questions the sufficiency of writing to express his intentions fully.