Dombey and Son:家父長制神話の崩壊とフローレンスの役割

Dombey and Son (1848) is Dickens's seventh novel, published in monthlyparts by Bradbury & Evans, from October 1846 to April 1848, with the illustrationsby Hablot K. Browne (1815_1882), and published in one volume in 1848.Conceived by Dickens as novel about pride, Dombey and Son exhibits more carefulplanning and execution than the novels that precede it. Its characters andsituations all contribute to the development of the main theme, which the novelexpresses in the symbolic opposition of the railway and the sea.When the story opens Mr. Dombey, the rich, proud, frigid head of the shippinghouse of Dombey and Son, has just been presented with a son and heir,Paul, and his wife dies. The father's love and hopes are centered in Paul, theodd, delicate, prematurely old child, who is sent to Dr. Blimber's school, underwhose strenuous discipline he sickens and dies. Dombey neglects his daughter,Florence, and the estrangement is increased by the death of her brother. WalterGay, the frank, good-hearted youth in Dombey's employment, falls in love withher, but is sent to the West Indies by Dombey, who disapproves of their relations.He is shipwrecked on the way and believed to be drowned. Dombey getsmarried to Edith Granger, the proud and penniless young widow, but his arroganttreatment drives her into relations with his villainous manager, Carker, withwhom she flies to France, fiercely repelling, however, the natural view he takesof the situation. They are pursued, Carker meets Dombey in a railway station,falls in front of a train, and is killed. The house of Dombey fails ; Dombey has losthis fortune, his son, and his wife; his daughter has been driven by the illtreatmentto fly from him, and has married Walter Gay, who has survived hisshipwreck. Thoroughly humbled, Dombey lives in desolate solitude, butFlorence returns to him.The representation of Florence' s flight from her father takes the initiativein Dickens's later representations of feminism, but Florence's return is differentfrom the return of Louisa Gradgrind in Hard Times (1854); Florence asksDombey to forgive her after the flight while Louisa reproaches her father for hismistake of education. Florence still has the concept of Victorian ideal woman byasking her father to forgive her. After the collapse of the patriarchal myth, theonly person who can relieve Dombey, is Florence. Dombey who is still stiffkeeping his self based on social value, opens his eyes to natural human conditionwith the help of Florence. Therefore, it seems reasonable to conclude thatDickens prepared, not only the context of the relief of Florence who flied fromher father, but also the context of the relief of Dombey in Dombey and Son.

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