Dialectics and Ideology in Dickens’ Dombey and Son: Reification of the Mental Content

Abstract

The paper, relying on Marxist and Lacanian psychoanalytic theories, fosters several ways to apprehend non-mimetic characterization in Dickens’ Dombey and Son by theorizing the ways in which aesthetic, political, historical ideologies articulate themselves in means of representation. Since the influence of the visual arts on the novel is central for my argument, this paper attempts to give substantial critical consideration to Dickens’ representation of images and their double meaning that help understand social ideological relations in the bourgeois society. Visual representation, as a metaphor for the role of materiality in characterization throughout Dickens’ work and the role of fetishes, depicts the reification of the subject under capitalism. Visualization technique captures the flux of shaping characters and their function in everyday life. This aesthetic technique has led to reevaluation of Dickens’s use of visuals as a unique feature in fiction of the highest quality. Hence, representations of the inward life in fiction are merely linguistic approximations of something which cannot be wholly captured in language.