Lone, lorn creatures: the matrix of trauma, memory and identity in Dickens' orphan heroes

While orphan protagonists have long been a trope in western literature, Charles Dickens expands this tradition by using his orphan characters as both fictional creations and socially relevant representations. Literary theorists Baruch Hochman and Ilja Wachs posit that the "orphan condition" is a nearly universal sense of loss of self and abandonment which can result from a variety of childhood traumas. Thus, while the characters under study are bereft of parents, and are thus literal orphans, their stories speak to a broader readership through the reader's psychic identification with the orphan. Trauma theory explicates the process of bearing testimony, an act by which the survivor of trauma can redeem a sense of self by sharing the story with an auditor. David Copperfield and Great Expectations, when situated at the matrix of trauma, identity, and language formed by trauma theory, can reveal the sometimes limited efficacy of fiction as a form of testimony. The plethora of orphan texts published in the nineteenth century warrant particular explanation. Thus, it is necessary to investigate the changes to the conception of childhood in the early- to mid-Victorian period as well as to understand the generalized anxiety of the middle class in this period of great change. The legal, social, economic and existential context for the Victorian orphan reveals powerful factors which combined to make the working class mid-Victorian orphan both a source of fear in society and a source for sympathetic representation in literature. David Copperfield is the most obviously autobiographical of Dickens' novels, yet judged as testimony, it is a failure. This failure stems from two separate causes: first, Dickens strips Copperfield of the rage and fear inherent in the orphan condition and instead focuses his energies in the culturally normative values of diligence and earnest striving, and second, the Jack of emotional reporting in David Copperfield makes the novel a story of plot and character rather than a testimony which focuses on the self. Although Great Expectations is a far briefer and less autobiographical novel than David Copperfield, Pip's fuller investigation of his orphan state and the repercussions of that trauma allows this text to acquire the status of testimony.

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