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The field of research of this thesis covers three main areas: the novels of Charles Dickens; fairy tales and storytelling; and notions of women as reflected in feminist literary theory. A reading of selected novels by Dickens provides the primary source. That he copiously drew on fairy tales has been explored in such notable works as Harry Stone's, but the thesis concentrates on Dickens 's propensity in his creation of female protagonists to give them a voice which is vivified through fairy tale. The analysis of fairy story through narrative theory and feminist literary theory functions as the basis of an exploration of the role female narrative voices play in a reading of the novels which reveals a more sympathetic vision of the feminine than has been observed hitherto. The context of this study is Victorian attitudes to women and that modem criticism has not sufficiently acknowledged Dickens's insight into of the condition of women; much of this is discovered through an examination of his use of fairy tale wherein the woman is bearer of imaginative and emotional capacities magically bestowed. The research aims to counter the view of Dickens's novels as being sexist, through the iIluminatory characteristics of fairy tale. Dickens activates his women characters by means of their often being tellers of tales replete with fairy tale imagery, and their tales are almost always seminal to the novelist's moral purpose.

Recognizing that the grotesque is a common characteristic of much popular art, and recognizing that grotesque images are integral to the sensual world of Dickens' novels, the thesis seeks to discover what grotesque images are shared by Dickens and contemporary popular artists, and whether similar meanings can be attributed to their use in the caricatures, the pantomime, the gothic novels, and childrens' literature and in Dickens' fiction. The essence of grotesque art can best be understood from a survey of historical grotesque images and the thesis traces these briefly. The grotesque image usually involves the double face, two or three beings united within one formal structure. It may however be typified by its extreme ugliness, its deviance from aesthetic standards of beauty. Or it may exist as a mimic re-creation of man in man-made terms, through costume or mask, or as a puppet, robot or doll. The grotesque humour in the caricatures, the pantomime and the nursery rhymes, with its dispensing with boundaries between the animate and the inanimate and mimic re-creation of the world in new forms, implies a delight in the sensual qualities of the material world. In the gothic novels the grotesque images, particularly the complex of images revolving around prisons, are seen to function as physical manifestations of the obsessive reasoning and fears that plague the characters. The grotesques in the fairy tales are related essentially to the role of magic, supernatural power in these tales being wielded either through object-talismans or by grotesque figures. Dickens merges grotesques from all these sources into one fictional universe, and consequently any one grotesque in Dickens' work may recall imagery from several of these art forms, as well as the traditional images. The thesis does not attempt a comprehensive study of the grotesque in Dickens' novels. It examines only three novels, The Old Curiosity Shop, Our Mutual Friend, and The Mystery, of Edwin Drood, with references to A Tale of Two Cities and Hard Times, analyzing the thematic patterns that revolve, around the grotesques. In The Old Curiosity Shop the grotesque hallucinations of Nell, her grandfather, and the narrator are linked to their passivity, their fear of confronting or having to manipulate a naturalistic reality. Quilp and the other natural grotesques are, on the other hand, seen to resemble clowns, in their use of the grotesque image as a source of comedy, and in their skill at using this humour to control their environment. Our Mutual Friend is approached from one viewpoint only, though it is one considered vital to the nineteenth century British imagination, the relationship of its grotesque imagery to children's art. Through meshing picturesque figures of innocence with the vicious, the deformed and the decaying, Dickens establishes a vision of beauty growing out of the destruction of innocence and the imaginative vitality of anarchic grotesques. In The Mystery of Edwin Drood the architecture of the cathedral city gives material shape to the type of obsessive thinking that permeates The Old Curiosity Shop, and concurrently functions as a spell-bound environment for those who seek to deny their relationship with the brutal or ugly. As with the prisons of the gothic novels, this architecture breeds grotesque figures whom Dickens employs for a dual, purpose, to represent the hallucinations of his spiritually trapped characters, and as a natural artistic counterpart to the cold rigidity of the cathedral. / Arts, Faculty of / English, Department of / Graduate

More than any other Victorian novelist, it is Dickens who has been regarded as a fit subject for reading aloud in the family group. This thesis represents an attempt to understand how, in his fiction, Dickens regards and makes use of the concept of the family group, how the domestic interior relates itself to other aspects of the novels. It soon becomes apparent, as this inquiry is made, that the image of the domestic interior is central to Dickens’ novels and the thesis undertakes an examination of, primarily, two novels in order to demonstrate that this is so. The two novels chosen, Martin Chuzzlewit and Bleak House, were written with an interval of about nine years between them. The former stands at the end of what might be called the first stage of Dickens’ career but it looks, in some respects, towards the later novels, of which Bleak House is one of the first. In Martin Chuzzlewit we see a novel whose concerns are with the family and the problems of authority, paternity, selfishness and altruism. These concerns are expressed through descriptions of the places in which family groups reside or by an investigation of what takes place within those residences. Investigated, too, are the reasons for which the Individual leaves home and the consequences of such a leaving. It is concerns such as these which link the English and American sections of the novel. Bleak House raises similar questions but extends and examines them in a structure which embraces English society as a whole. The examination, that is, is more complex than that undertaken in Martin Chuzzlewit. Nevertheless, it too is concerned with family life and, through his observations on a number of households and the individuals included in and excluded from them, Dickens expresses his criticism of society in its entirety. The house is a house but it is also a metaphor for the larger organization of England. Through understanding the quality of the life lived within the houses which Dickens describes, the reader can understand many of the values embodied in the novels. Dickens recognized that the nature of a nation's life as a whole is largely dependent upon the nature of the life lived within each individual household. The connection between the house and the civilization is a close one, as we see in Martin Chuzzlewit. Houses, however, are relatively fixed structures and in Bleak House the notions of tradition, of time and change, decay and corruption are explored through their association with the house, and hence the novel’s concern with the new industrialism which is examined as it defines itself in relation to domesticity and the family circle. / Arts, Faculty of / English, Department of / Graduate

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