A Man’s Resolution and a Woman’s Patience: Fighting the Battle of Life

  • Carolyn W. de la L. Oulton
Chapter

Abstract

Throughout his work Dickens’s religious ideology remains dependent on particular espoused gender norms. At the simplest level, his female characters are accorded moral status in line with their purity and selflessness; male protagonists must be active and resolute, striving to attain manliness through vicissitude and inevitably, through work. Dickens pointedly describes many of his heroes as ‘manly’, although the term often suggests nothing more definite than a certain ennobling quality that justifies their centrality in the text. He sometimes uses the word as a vague term of approbation, writing to the Reverend William Harness in May 1854, ‘I heard a manly, Christian sermon last Sunday at the Foundling.’1

Keywords

Moral Status Religious Experience Female Character Freeze Deep French Revolution 
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Notes

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Copyright information

© Carolyn W. de la L. Oulton 2003

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  • Carolyn W. de la L. Oulton

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