Identifying Character-Spaces

An assignment by Michael J. Flynn

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Overview

I teach a two-semester survey of the British novel for graduate students and advanced undergraduates; the first course covers 1700 to 1850, the second 1850 to the present. I change primary texts from iteration to iteration, but David Copperfield always anchors the end of the first course, serving as a transitional piece between early novels structured around the experience of a single main character (Robinson Crusoe, Jane Eyre) and later novels organized around the representation of a larger community (Middlemarch, To the Lighthouse). Copperfield works beautifully in this position because its first half, closely focused on David’s progression, gives way to a second half in which he is increasingly decentered, while Mr. Dick reunites Doctor and Annie Strong, Mr. Peggotty and Martha find Em’ly, Micawber and Traddles corner Uriah Heep, and Ham claims the final confrontation with Steerforth.

I typically spread Copperfield over three or four weeks. I teach the first half of the novel alongside criticism introducing the bildungsroman; students usually have no trouble connecting that criticism to the book, especially when I precede it with Jane Eyre. I pair the second half with criticism on the multiplot novel, like Alex Woloch’s The One vs. the Many—and inevitably, students have a harder time applying his critical approach to Dickens’s “favorite child.” Woloch’s prologue (pp. 1-11) and introduction (pp. 12-42) illustrate and explain his core argument, which imagines nineteenth-century narrative less as linear plot than as a system of “character-space[s]” (13) competing for room in a fictional map, with some of these characters being “engulfed” by the system and forced into cramped corners, and others “exploding” their prescribed bounds and claiming more space than their narrative significance might warrant (26). Many English majors (myself included) are drawn to our discipline because their language skills are better than their spatial skills, so Woloch’s transformation of linguistic data into a spatial image is often difficult for them to process. But my students need to understand Woloch’s character-spaces if they’re going to follow his argument about how the distribution of characters in a novel is related to the division of labor and unequal political representation in nineteenth-century society.

The working notes for Copperfield become immensely useful at this point, because they suggest that for Dickens, the composition of a large, complex novel was less a problem of plotting than one of managing a cast of characters. Certainly there are places in the left-hand memoranda where we can see Dickens drafting a plot. One example is Number XII’s note: “Progress of David to a working state, still tinged, romantically, by his youth and character, and overdone. No similar progress on the part of Dora.” But such places are overshadowed by lists of character names, with minimal commentary about what those characters will do in an installment—just a calculation or record of whether they should or do appear. The note about David’s progress is preceded by “Agnes. Yes. Dr & Mrs Strong? Yes. Jack Maldon? Yes. Mr. Micawber engaged by Uriah.” If we were to tragically lose every extant copy of Copperfield but retain the working notes, the left-hand pages might not be enough to allow us to reconstruct the plot. But they would give us a very good idea of the dramatis personae, their relative importance, and how much space each of them occupies in the novel.

Those characters fight for space in a useful illustration of Woloch’s argument. I like to draw students’ attention to Number IX’s working notes, which start with the memorandum, “No Steerforth this time. Keep him out.” As the Dickens Notes annotations explain (DC.IX.L1), this is partly a matter of pacing: temporarily distracting readers from Steerforth’s interest in Em’ly helps the seduction in the following installment hit harder . But those annotations also note that the installments leading up to this one give “so much space to the development of Steerforth’s character” that other subplots get squeezed out; Steerforth is one of Woloch’s “exploding” minor characters, who threatens to spill over his prescribed limits and swamp the protagonist’s development. “Keep him out” thus reads like a plea from David’s psyche for an escape from Steerforth’s shadow.

In a group activity, I task students with searching the working notes for other examples of minor characters fighting for space, which should not be hard to find. The Murdstones, who are marginalized in the second half of the novel, try to hold on to an antagonistic role in the narrative: Numbers XV, XVI, XVII, and XVIII reveal Dickens repeatedly telling them “No,” as if David is refusing to let them influence his life any further. When the Murdstones finally do worm their way into the final installment (in a second-hand account rather than an in-person appearance), the working notes don’t grace them with a “yes” in the left-hand queries, only a vengeful note in the right-hand record: “Mr Chillip Tells of the Murdstones. Finishes them.” Dickens’s phrasing inevitably reminds contemporary students of the end of a Mortal Kombat match, which helps them connect this moment to Woloch’s argument about novelistic characters fighting for space.

Print transcriptions of the working notes are sufficient for all this, but the spatially accurate transcriptions of Dickens Notes go even further towards literalizing Woloch’s character-spaces. Number IX’s working notes may keep Steerforth out, but they betray his unique influence on the novel by putting his name on a diagonal: he is literally not parallel to the more “engulfed” characters (Traddles, Dora, Uriah, Micawber) who are allowed a small space in that installment. Number XVII includes the chapter “I assist at an Explosion”; the metaphor is that of a mine being detonated beneath Uriah’s feet, but when reading Woloch, it is hard not to think of Micawber himself finally “exploding” into something more than the perpetual comic failure the novel tries to make him. In the notes for Number XVI, Dickens had written “Carry through, the unravelling of Uriah Heep,” and then added in dramatically smaller characters, “always by Mr Micawber”; the notes for Number XVII, by contrast, read “Smash Uriah Heep, by means of Mr Micawber,” with the latter’s name in equally prominent letters.

Once student groups have generated and shared examples that demonstrate a basic understanding of character-spaces, I can lead them into a whole-class discussion of Woloch’s ultimate argument about how fictional character-systems relate to an individual’s identity formation and place in nineteenth-century economic and political structures. Micawber, for instance, may create space for himself in Number XVII, but in the very next installment Dickens ships him off to Australia, because “exploding” characters threaten the narrative primacy and cultural power of the protagonist.

Woloch’s book devotes a great deal of space to Dickens, spending almost a hundred and twenty pages analyzing his construction of character-systems. But when I’m managing my own spatial problems (how do I squeeze the nine-hundred-page Copperfield, six other eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novels, plus criticism, into the cramped confines of a sixteen-week semester?), the working notes provide a helpfully compact illustration of key ideas in Woloch’s argument.

Group Activity Instructions

• With a partner, browse through the working notes for David Copperfield, paying special attention to the left-hand pages, where Dickens posed questions to himself about what he should include in each installment of the novel.

• Look for one or two examples like No. IX’s memorandum about Steerforth, where characters in the novel seems to be competing with other characters (successfully or unsuccessfully) for space.

• Remember that competition can be expressed through content, or the words Dickens uses, as when he reminds himself to keep Steerforth out.

• But also consider that competition might express itself through form, or the way the words appear on the page, as when Steerforth’s name is put on a diagonal which separates him from the other characters Dickens thought about including.

• Take notes about your examples, and be prepared to share these with the class.

Works Cited

• Woloch, Alex. The One vs. the Many: Minor Characters and the Space of the Protagonist in the Novel. Princeton UP, 2003.

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