| Charles Dickens is one of the great literary geniuses of all time and also one of the most popular. Throughout his life, he wrote 15 major novels, countless short stories and articles. His novels are characterized by unique characters and narrative art so that no one can rival him except Shakespeare in English literature history.Dickens is held in high critical esteem, and admired by his contemporaries and later generations. Many biographies and criticisms have been issued since he died. However, no major study has been specialized in Dickens's presentation of female figures and their myriad interaction with the opposite sex. Today, with the ever-growing interest in gender studies, the time seems particularly ripe for such a study. What does the greatest creative genius in English literature of the last two hundred years have to say about women? How does he present female nature in his fiction? What is his conception of women's role in life? I will argue these problems in four chapters of my thesis.Chapter One opens with the derivation of the title. Coventry Patmore, Dickens's contemporary, in his popular domestic epic The Angel in the House (1854-6), celebrates the virtues of the middle-class heroine Hornoria and her affinity with her father and her husband. Since the publication of the epic, the angel in the house became a household name in Victorian society. She is thought to equal all virtues the patriarchal society required: fond of domestic life, submissive in personality, simple in mind, and chaste in sexuality. My thesis will develop the above overview with three heroines in Dickens's "dark" novels. For most part, the three female figures, Agnes in David Copperfield, Esther in Bleak House and Amy in Little Dorrit, are the emblems of the typical Victorian "angel in the house". They incarnate the most obvious traits of the idealized Victorian middle-class women. These traits are submission to patriarchy, maternal loss, and ascetic love. Their stories begin almost invariably in the immediate context of maternal death or desertion. Therefore, they suffer from a sense of guilt of being born at the cost of their mothers. The sense of guilt never makes them fail in their obligation of implicit obedience to their remaining parent. Throughout their lifetime, they are haunted by the home ruled by patriarchs. Moreover, asubmissive domestic angel is required to know little or nothing of sexual indulgence in Dickens's world. Even after she gets married, she is expected to never desire any sexual gratification for herself. In brief, the frail half of the human species are ignored and even despised irrationally in Dickens's novels.In Chapter Two, I am focusing on Dickens's roles respectively as the son and the husband, the successor, the Victorian and the moralist to discuss why Dickens in dilemma failed to shape the female figures with their souls and fleshes in harmony. The first section cites his biography to explore why and how his mother and his wife had a great influence on the shape of his female figures.The second section traces back to the male-dominated western literary tradition. Throughout the history of western culture, male-engendered female figures have incarnated men's ambivalence not only toward female sexuality but also toward their own physicality. At the same time, male texts, continually elaborating the metaphor of literary paternity, have continually proclaimed that woman's virtue is man's greatest invention. There is a clear line of literary descent from the western literary tradition in Dickens's novels. Women in patriarchal society have historically been reduced to mere properties, to characters imprisoned in male texts, which are dominated by male expectations and designs.In the third section, I center on the Victorian circumstances. Dickens is famous for the loyal recorder of the English character in a period when Great Britain was led onto the road of modernity. As a sensitive and eloquent author, Dickens exposed forcefully the dehumanizing force of the advancing industr...
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