"The Reader Whom I Love": Narrative Secrets in David Copperfield

David Copperfield has usually been placed in that hybrid sub-genre of literary narratives known as autobiographical novels or, more recently, autofictions, in default of any more satisfactory or conclusive definition. Until recently, the critical consensus has been that the novel’s early chapters, drawing directly on the autobiography that Dickens abandoned in 1847, constitute a genuinely autobiographical narrative, but that the later chapters demonstrate the author’s concession to the traditional plot of the bildungsroman. William Spengemann, for example, has argued that “only the first fourteen chapters of the novel have any serious claim to membership of the genre [of autobiography].” ¹ Once the narrative moves beyond David’s childhood, the protagonist is increasingly subdued by the discipline incumbent on the Victorian novelistic hero in order to achieve worldly success, leaving the secondary comic or grotesque characters, such as Micawber and Uriah Heep, to sustain the reader’s interest.

This essay will begin by suggesting a different context in which to consider the autobiographical significance of Dickens’s novel. Rather than focusing exclusively on the resemblances between the content of the autobiographical fragment and the plot of the novel, I will examine the narrative strategies by which Dickens constitutes his past as a secret in each case. Using the concept of autobiographical space developed by the French narrative theorist, Philippe Lejeune, I will argue that the confusion between autobiography and fiction that characterizes readings of the novel, is a central component of the narrative project that David Copperfield enacts. By applying Lejeune’s model of the autobiographical pact, I will suggest that the novel takes on additional significance as an instance of a reading contract established between Dickens and his close friend and biographer, John Forster. According to Lejeune’s paradigm, the autobiographer requires the participation of the reader for the pact to be successfully established. The challenge to creative autonomy and insistence on authorial lack represented by the idea of the pact is particularly relevant to the case of David Copperfield, for many of the novel’s narrative techniques were either suggested by Forster, or first tested out on him.

The combination of authorial lack and intimate male friendship which engenders the composition of David Copperfield offers an important corrective to the concept of singularity and self-sufficiency on which the myth of the great writer—or, indeed, that of the autobiographical subject—has traditionally been based. Moreover, this destabilizing combination reproduces itself in the novel, where the austere discipline attributed to the hero fails to mask the resemblances and inter-dependencies between David and those subordinate characters whom the narrative attempts to renounce or discredit. The central sections of my essay, therefore, will trace the recurrent breakdown of the novel’s disciplinary project—a project first examined in an important essay by D. A. Miller (in The Novel and the Police)—in a series of homoerotic scenes that threaten to divert the narrative’s trajectory from the heterosexual union and worldly accomplishment required for formal closure. In interpreting the homoerotic references of Dickens’s novel, I shall be making use of Judith Butler’s analysis of gender identity as a form of melancholia that results from the loss of a primary object of same-sex desire. Butler argues that “there has been little effort to understand the melancholic denial/preservation of homosexuality in the production of gender within the heterosexual frame.” ² The unresolved tension between desire and identification that Butler links to “the law of heterosexual desire” is central to Dickens’s novel; this essay will go on to trace David’s trajectory from same-sex to heterosexual object-choices, and the melancholia that results.

Unable to acknowledge the specifically erotic impetus of masculine attraction, Dickens’s narrative displaces such problematic desire into expressions of maudlin sentimentality or, more drastically, scenes of violent antipathy. Though the hero eventually attains the destiny of a successful writer and married man, the narrative’s predictable course has been radically dislocated by its own secret homoerotic dynamic. The novel’s later chapters, in fact, feature recurring statements of marital and professional disillusionment that are...