CONCLUSIONS

ABOUT REALISM BLENDED WITH ROMANTIC ELEMENTS IN DICKENS'S WORK

At the end of the first chapter, I was saying that I would try to find out if Dickens belonged to Realism, Romanticism, or both of them.

In fact, he depicted the world as it was, criticising its negative aspects, underlining the discrepancies between poor and rich, analysing in detail the unjust legal system of his time, writing about the workhouses, the debtors' prison, the orphans or the children of the streets becoming thieves. However, he also created an idealised contrastive world, with a concern for myths, symbols and archetypes. As a man of his age, Dickens had a realistic vision upon reality, but the characters and the taste for mystery belong to the Romantic world. René Wellek said that Romanticism means genius, imagination, sincerity of the feelings, but may also show concern for the social side of life reflected in a literary wo 14414g619o rk[i]. Dickens's novels present tough and personal experiences of life in an original manner, full of fantasy, taste for the occult, magic and dream, as a result of his own Romantic sensitivity and well meaning nature.

His novels have a great variety, a digressive touch and develop a certain kind of generosity. They reflect the nature of the Victorian urban society with all its discordance, conflicts, constraints and extraordinary physical and intellectual energy that characterised the English society in the 19^th century. He observed with a critical eye the evils of the world he lived in: poverty, violence, corruption, and egotism. He felt all these as a generalised plague, as an infected atmosphere that spread all over London, and this is why the settings in his novels often suggest a recent deluge that couldn't purify the world of sins. It is the case of the London muddy streets, pictured in Oliver Twist, or the Tom-all-Alone's neighbourhood in Bleak House as well as the swampy places where Pip was born (Great Expectations). There is always a sinister waterside, with its black shadows and murderous secrets, and the desolate marshes, which stick a chill to the heart of the readers. Even the streets, that seem so common to us, when they are seen as everyday business places, reflect the archetype of the labyrinth.

The houses, castles or official institutions are often described in sombre colours to stress the decay, moral disintegration and corruption of society. Dickens originally dramatised social institutions and consequences that probably were not accessible to common observation.

At the same time, Dickens's novels are full of Romantic symbolic images and situations suggesting the desperate isolation of the individual. The grotesque and the eccentric in his characters become almost the norm, suggesting that life is atomistic and irrational[ii].

The gallery of the characters is illustrative for the exceptional qualities of the Dickensian talent to create authentic figures, by their psychological complexity, physiognomic and vestimentary details, habits and tics, biographical antecedents and behaviour in special situations.

The characters that populate the gloomy places are often pictured in antithesis, and they are often perceived through an archetypal, Romantic vision. The negative characters appear as associated with shade and darkness to counterpoint the qualities of the positive characters. The chameleonic Uriah Heep is set off against the pure Agnes Wickfield - patterned on the archetype of the angel, the underworld where Fagin rules, symbolising Hell, is opposed to the Maylie-Brownlow universe, pictured like a terrestrial heaven, Esther, Ada and Richard as opposed to the corrupted staff of Chancery Court.

Dickens had a typical Realist way of building his characters, following four steps[iii]: creating the specific environment, presenting the character in the auctorial voice and by means of the indirect voice of other characters. Then he introduces an alteration of the character, rendered by a negative suggestion, followed by its aggravation, by gesture and replies, their meaning being often stressed in a parallel image lent from the animal kingdom. The simplest way of portrayal Dickens used was the suggestive name and a typical gesture that becomes the character's mark.

The concern for the negative characters' association with animals is almost symptomatic with Dickens. Uriah Heep is like a serpent, Bob Fagin is like a reptile, and Vholes is like a predatory bird. Dickens's novels abound of archetypal images in different hypostases. For example, the archetype of the devil is symbolised by the snaky nature of Uriah, the wild feline appearance and psychology of Hortense, the raven structure of Lord Chancellor or his tools. Another hypostasis of the evil forces is embodied in Miss Havisham, who seems to be a ghost or a living corpse.

Their contrast, the ideal world of pure light and perfection is shown in characters such as Rose Maylie, Pegotty, Agnes Copperfield and Agnes Wickfield, Dora Spenlow, Esther Summerson, Joe Gargery and Biddy.

The Realistic structure of Dickens's novels is rendered by his concern for social institutions, family life, and social structure and discrepancies.

The family universe is subjectively rendered. He often presented in contrast the notion of family as an ideal social cell, and what really happened inside it. A leitmotif of many of Dickens's novels is the orphan child. Oliver, David, Esther and Pip were all raised by their relatives or benefactors. Dickens's own childhood trauma is reflected by the theme of the orphan; his early years were happy, but soon, because of his father's going to the debtors' prison, he had to leave school and go to work for his family. Later, his mother preferred to let him work than send him to school again. This is why Dickens felt like a motherless child and his viewpoint on the family can be inferred from his books. For him, the ideal family is under a grave stone. All the natural fathers of the main heroes are dead; the others are stepfathers, tyrannical and cruel, as Mr. Murdstone was to David.

Another motif explored by Dickens is the journey, as a concrete version of the "stream of life", met in all these four analysed novels: each of the main characters goes away from home, more or less forced by the circumstances. This motif is often associated with the city. After the journey, the characters reach London, with its muddy and foggy streets, with its social discrepancies, with its own power of corruption and disintegration. The city is usually seen in a Romantic vision, like a huge mineral being that corrupts and perverts human souls.

As an effect of his own experience with justice, Dickens never ceased to critically present the legal system and its exponents, no matter that it was embodied by a single person - Jaggers in Great Expectations, or it was the subject of an entire complex novel - Bleak House.

The structure of his books, as well as the characters, follows the pattern of the chain; the subplots are subtly intermingled and the characters cannot be separated one from another. This unity is a realistic device that he mastered better at his maturity than in his youth.

A red-wire passing through all his books is the image of the prison. The real prison - where Micawber goes for sometime, is extrapolated in Miss Havisham's castle or even in Chancery, because once you have entered there, you cannot escape anymore. Therefore, again the two images: reality and fantasy, superposed like two film frames.

The endings are usually happy and predictable. The author knows what happens to his characters and this is, beside the novels' structure, another point that makes the unity of his books. The happy ending is a reminiscence of the old idea of the triumph of good, as well as a reflection of Dickens own optimistic nature. The end, when good triumphs over evil, is an apotheosis of a God loved man[iv].

Therefore, we cannot separate the critical attitude toward society from the Romantic vision upon people and facts. Dickens touches in the reader's soul both sides: reason and emotion, thinking and feeling. His idealist temper could never be defeated by the cold voice of his brain; his mind and heart worked well together. Consequently, his work couldn't have been Realistic or Romantic; it is both at the same time. As Monica Bottez said, Dickens was with one foot in the camp of Romanticism and the other in that of Realism.