On close observation of the characterization of Woman Charcters in David Copperfield by Charles Dickens , it reflects that women characters in the novel seem to be lifeless and artificial characters whose resemblance in real life is hard to be found out ..

1. Women Characters in David Copperfield
Prof Govind Prasad Goyal
Programme Coordinator

2. Introduction
• It has been said that Dickens is not generally successful in drawing
female characters and that his men are as a rule better painted than
his women.Let us examine how well he portrayed women in David
Copperfield.

3. Strained and Artificial
• It is true that many of his women characters are strained and artificial.
• “The tragedy of love, the tragedy of pitiful passions, of futile affections, the
tragedy of Juliet(in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet) or of Tess (in Hardy’s
Tess of the D’urbervilles) is outside his range altogether” (Compton-
Rickett).
• Dickens was too little of psychologist to paint such women with great art. A
beautiful woman, without a heart is a common character in many of his
novels but in Dickens’ handling of them they appear devoid of any
semblance to life. They fail to impress us as creatures of flesh and blood.

4. Rosa Dartle
• Such a character in David Copperfield is Rosa Dartle. Miss Dartle is an orphaned
cousin of Steerforth's late father. Mrs. Steerforth brought Miss Dartle to live with
her as a companion once Mr. Steerforth died.
Somerset Maugham speaks of her:
“the most baffling character in David Copperfield is Rosa Dartle. I suspect that
Dickens meant to make greater use of her in the story than he did and if he did not
do so, it was because he feared to offend the public. I can only suppose that
Steerforth had been her lover and she hated him because he abandoned her but
notwithstanding loved him still with a jealous, hungry, vindictive love. Dickens here
invented a character that Blazac would have made much of.”
When Steerforth dies, she shouts that, "He had a soul worth millions of the friends
to whom he stooped!" (56.54). At the same time, Steerforth's presence seems to
taunt and irritate her.

5. Dora, Agnes, Emily
• His other beautiful young women in David Copperfield too fail to impress
us.
• To quote Maugham again, “Dora, drawn after Dickens’s first love (Maria
Beadnell) is too silly and too childish; Agnes drawn after Catherine Hogarth
is too good and too sensible; they are both fearfully tiresome. Little Emily
seems to me a failure. Dickens evidently meant us to feel pity for her; she
only got what she asked for. Her ambition was to be a ‘lady’ and in the
hope, presumably that she would get Steerforth to marry her, she ran away
with him. She seems to have made to him a most satisfactory mistress,
sullen, tearful and sorry for herself and it is no wonder that he grew tired
of her”.
• Thus Dickens failed in delineating beautiful young women; his pictures of
them are vitiated by sentimentalism or moral prejudice as the case may be.

6. The Other Type
• But, as Compton-Rickett has pointed out:
“With another type of woman Dickens is far more successful. With
women past their first youth, who are eccentric in their ways, who have
little or no physical charm, and often no mental brilliance, yet who
have a certain soundness and goodness of heart; with women of this
type Dickens is extraordinarily happy.”
Betsey Trotwood, Mrs. Micawber, Miss Peggotty and Clara Copperfield
are noteworthy examples of this in the novel David Copperfield.

7. Betsey Trotwood
Betsey Trotwood is easily first; indeed she ranks among one of Dickens’
unqualified successes; and from the moment she administers the
strange mixture of restoratives to her young nephew (“I am sure I
tasted linseed water, anchovy sauce and salad dressing”) to her kindly
hints to David about Agnes, almost at the end of the book, she attracts
us to her; what a dear golden-hearted old lady she must have made,
her little peculiarities and occasional acerbity giving an agreeable fillip
to her sterling qualities. Long may her type exist to sweeten human life
and to help the many Dicks-float about the world!” Betsey Trotwood is
indeed an immortal creation of Dickens, who is remembered by every
reader of the novel David Copperfield, even after he has long forgotten
the story in which she appears.

8. Mrs. Micawber
• Mrs. Micawber, too, with her grim determination of not to desert the
husband through trials and sufferings of life, with her robust faith in
the genius of the husband, which no failure of the husband can
repress, her motherly affection for Dickens when he becomes a
lodger with her, is a sweet and amiable lady, despite her
eccentricities. She is a mother image that the motherless young
storyteller loves to dwell upon.

9. Peggotty
Peggotty, the nurse of the child David, who loves the young master
with such devotion as to spend her whole life in his service is another
such sweet creation. She too represents a mother-image and is an
idealized picture of Mary Weller, the servant of the Dickens’ family in
the Chatham days. Her devotion and affection are exemplary. “She is
the hard working mother who presides over the kitchen and pantry,
bakes the pastries, mends the clothes from a bright-lidded sewing box
and has such puzzling alterations of crossness and affection. Although
she is not as idealized as the dream mother of infancy (Clara), she is
more firmly set in a reality that will not altogether melt away with the
years.

10. Clara Copperfield
• Lastly, there is the figure Clara Copperfield, the mother of David Copperfield and the
idealized dream-mother of infancy of the novelist. The pen with which he draws the
character of Clara is dipped in his heart’s blood. Dickens had no happy impression of his
own parents. Quite early in life he was cast adrift in a hostile world to fend for himself,
with his father and mother looking helplessly at him. Hence Dickens’ dream-mother is an
idealized version of his own mother. Clara loves the child David Copperfield with all the
warmth of her affection. Indeed, the boy is the centre of her world. The young widow
finds herself in an awkward position being torn between two pulls, between her
affection for the child David and devotion to her new husband. This cost her dearly, so
that inwardly she was gradually sinking. The picture of the mother is bathed in soft
pathos and tenderness. Child David loses his mother the moment he realizes that he is
not the centre of her world. The death of the mother leaves a blank in David’s life, and he
is sent to work in blacking warehouse of Murdstone and Grinby. Dickens’ own feeling
that his mother was as good dead to him when she was so keen on sending him to
misery of the blacking house is painted in a veiled fashion in these feelings of David
Copperfield. Thus we find that these pictures of women are based on reality though
there is a touch of idealism in their delineation and as such they impress us as persons
whom we have not met in real life.

11. Conclusion
• Thus in portraying some women Dickens did idealize in some way or
other. That is a part of his method. But that he has done it to an
inartistic extent, so that they appear unusual or unreal cannot be
admitted.
• “Taken, as a whole, then, we must pronounce Dickens’ women
characters as ineffective, except when they are either eccentric or
disagreeable” (Compton-Rickett).

12. Reference
• https://nibblepop.com/women-characters-david-copperfield/
• http://etheses.lse.ac.uk/3576/1/Brown_a_sociological_analysis_of_t
he_novels_of_charles_dickens.pdf