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.Such femininity must be safely externalised if David is to attain manliness andsecure the status of a gentleman.James Eli Adams identifies the sense in which:Middle-class professionals (including male writers) legitimated their masculinityby identifying it with that of the gentleman, a norm that was the subject of protracted52 Romantic Friendship in Victorian Literaturecontention throughout Victorian culture & throughout the first half of the nineteenthcentury it was reshaped as an incarnation of ascetic discipline and infused with the fabledVictorian earnestness.(Adams, 6 7)In this sense, it is important for David to outgrow the enthusiasm of his youth, withits elements of idealistic fervour but also the threat of uncontrolled  or, in the novel sown terms,  undisciplined passion.Accepted models of masculine developmentdictate that in order to attain self-mastery, he must overcome the femininity implicitin his deference to Steerforth and ultimately provide himself with a complementaryfemale figure, who will serve as a repository of feminine virtue, external to himself.He first attempts to do this in his relationship with the inept Dora Spenlow, whoinspires his first real efforts at manly work.But David s chivalrous desire to tirehimself out in her service belongs in the province of youthful impulse, rather thanprofessional self-sufficiency.In a chapter appropriately entitled  Enthusiasm , herecalls with wry amusement how:I got into such a transport, that I felt quite sorry that my coat was not a little shabbyalready.I wanted to be cutting at those trees in the forest of difficulty, under circumstancesthat should prove my strength.I had a good mind to ask an old man, in wire spectacles,who was breaking stones upon the road, to lend me his hammer for a little while, and letme begin to beat a path to Dora out of granite.(David Copperfield, 505)His very idealism at this stage is symptomatic of a persistent immaturity, representedby the recurring trope of the undisciplined heart.It is only as he gains literary famethat he comes to regard himself in terms of earnestness and masculine achievement,and so becomes a worthy husband for the long-suffering Agnes.As Myers wrylyputs it:The deaths of Dora and Steerforth are narratively fortuitous.They relieve David of alife-long commitment to erroneous youthful choice, an instance of authorial generositycommon in mid-Victorian novels.(Myers, 118)Tellingly, the deaths of Dora and Steerforth, the inadequate wife and the unsuitablefriend, merge in David s mind, as he mourns:all that I had lost  love, friendship, interest & my first trust, my first affection, the wholeairy castle of my life & (David Copperfield, 793)The symbolic expulsion of each figure from the narrative allows David to progressand mature, and in overcoming his double loss, he is finally able to redefine himselfwith a fully integrated masculine identity.The very fact that his autobiography is written in the supposedly secret, feminineterms of Jane Eyre (David insists that the manuscript is for his own eyes only) servesto differentiate this private account of his early years from the successes of his laterlife, in which he gains public acclaim and a wide readership for his novels.As Herbert Sussman explains:Extraordinary Reserve 53For the Victorians manhood is not an essence but a plot, a condition whose achievementand whose maintenance forms a narrative over time.(Sussman, 13)This constant process of self-definition is painfully familiar to Steerforth, who blameshis own failure to fulfil his potential on the absence of a paternal role model.Actingup to prescribed roles, as Juliet John has shown, he  experiences himself from theoutside (John, 177), playing the part of a decadent aristocrat in a melodramaticmoral scheme, even as he envies David s transparent  and equally melodramatic sincerity.The complicating social determinism of the text hints at the inevitabilityof the actions by which he is condemned.As John explains:A consequence of Dickens s increased emphasis on the social construction of selfhoodand its ethical exhibitions is that he dilutes, or at least unmasks, his melodramatic art.Dickens appears to dress his characters as either villains or heroes whilst questioning theessentialist ethical scheme which produced them.(174)For David, this dichotomy remains particularly crucial, as he struggles and finallysucceeds in the autobiographical imperative to overcome early humiliations andreinstate himself as the hero of his own life.In MemoriamTennyson s famous mid-century exploration of love and loss in In Memoriam islinked to Dickens s David Copperfield, published in the same year, both by its centraltheme of premature death and by its close analysis of the reaction of the bereavedfriend, who offers an account of his own response to bereavement, culminating ineach case in some level of recovery.Both In Memoriam and David Copperfield takethe narrator or speaker through a crisis of faith, from which a new understanding anda greater strength or  discipline can be achieved.Unlike the fictional autobiographyof David Copperfield, In Memoriam is a series of elegiac poems inspired by theactual death of Tennyson s close friend Arthur Hallam.But many of its narrativestrategies are comparable to David s, as the poetic voice explores the intensitiesof a youthful romantic friendship in retrospect.In place of David s ambivalenceand somewhat unconvincing forgiveness of Steerforth, which is to some extentconditional on his death, Tennyson expresses an admiration of his friend that islikewise based on unfulfilled potential, but in this case the friend s potential forgreatness has been tragically precluded rather than marred by his own corruption [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]