The elevation of the idea of the home is connected with the woman question, being rightly seen as part of the propaganda for the 'two spheres' view of life, and for the confinement of women to the domestic sphere. This is not an entirely negative thing. By emphasising the importance and difficulty of the domestic role, as Ruskin does in Sesame and Lilies, the two spheres argument pleads eloquently for women's equal access to education and knowledge. The view of the home as a centre from which the domestic virtues and skills of women should radiate outwards can appear favourable to a greater role for women in society. If in the end such ideas fail as a strategy for advancing women's rights and role, one of the reasons is that writers within the two spheres tradition found it difficult to put together a convincing job-description for the intelligent woman in the home. For example, the character of Ursula in John Halifax, Gentleman represents a determined attempt to show marriage as an equal partnership and to give substance to the domestic role. If such a patient catalogue of the activities of a mature housewife fails, in the end, to make the two spheres view convincing, it is not surprising that Dickens's hurried snapshots of adolescent girls fussing round their menfolk also fail.
Florence sees that, in the house opposite, the eldest daughter, a 'happy little house-keeper', has become a companion to her widowed father, and she longs to play the same part towards her own father. (D&S chi8 p319) Superficially, the girl's domestic companionship consists of nothing more than meeting her father when he returns from his work, and making his tea after dinner. Of course there is much more to the relationship than this - the girl evidently reminds the father of his dead wife - but so far as action is concerned Dickens mentions nothing more demanding than making the tea. Florence is an intelligent young woman, who is able to teach herself Paul's lessons, but we get no sense of how the domestic role is going to make use of her intelligence. When she does find a home in which to become a 'happy little housekeeper', we see her sweeping the hearth and providing
an intelligent housewife should spend her time. Of course, the significance of these acts in their context is much greater than their triviality would suggest. They are acts of daughterly affection such as those which Mr Dombey spurned as blindly as he spurned the Captain's spoons. If this weight of significance does not move us as we are moved by the Captain's silverware, it is no doubt because Florence as a character is less powerfully realised than the Captain.
The limited domestic role was, of course, what middle-class girls were bred for. Geraldine Jewsbury's The Half Sisters, published in the year that Dombey & Son was completed, contains a plea to rethink the upbringing of girls and broaden the range of action open to women. One of the heroines is a girl who, very much like Florence, longs for affection. Living in what her undemonstrative husband reminds us repeatedly is an industrial country, she finds no-one to respond to her capacity for love, until she meets Conrad, an extreme adherent to the two spheres tradition who believes a woman should be a 'softened reflex' of her husband.6 Jewsbury's attack is directed against both the materialism of an upbringing that ignores Alice's aspirations and the 'selfish sensualism' of those who would cultivate the mind and feelings of an Alice, but only in order to make her 'pleasant and graceful' in men's eyes.7 Her novel ends on an uncertain note, however, because she seems to endorse the comment of her other heroine, Bianca the actress, that a woman, even if she does have a public life and public work, is dependent for happiness on finding an object of love 'endowed with a greater and nobler character than her own', and that in the end this does come down to finding a man for whom she is prepared to use her intelligence in arranging his breakfasts, dinners and servants.8
Jewsbury's book is relevant to a discussion of Florence Dombey in two ways. First it is striking that even a thoughtful critic of the prevailing views on women's role finds it hard to flesh out the domestic ideal in a way that convinces us that
6 The Half Sisters (1848; Oxford, 1994) II2 p218. 7 The Half Sisters II3 p226.
Bianca is right to give up her vocation as actress when she marries. We might therefore forgive Dickens for the sketchiness of his representation of Florence's function as domestic angel at the Wooden Midshipman. More importantly, Jewsbury gives what it is hard not to think is a more plausible account of the effects of the sort of upbringing inflicted on both Alice and Florence, in which their yearning for affection is constantly rebuffed and suppressed. Alice is emotionally and intellectually stunted, and the effect of her upbringing persists throughout her short adult life, whereas Florence emerges unscathed. In her father's home she is shown as a repressed and withdrawn child, neurotically prone to tears, but at the Wooden Midshipman she emerges as fully capable of taking control of her life, even to the extent of taking the initiative in overcoming Walter's hesitation. The intense cruelty of her treatment by her father is measured by her tears - but the problem is not that she cries so readily, but that this seems to be the only effect. She divests herself of her neuroses as easily as Oliver Twist divests himself of the marks of the workhouse and Fagin's kitchen. There is in other Dickensian heroes, such as Esther, Amy and Pip, this same inborn power of fighting back against the oppressive environment, but what distinguishes these later heroes from Oliver and Florence is that we get more of a sense of a continuing emotional cost and inner struggle. With Oliver, and even with Florence, we have rather a feeling that Dickens is equivocating. He wants us to believe in the reality of the cruel treatment, but he also requires his hero to emerge unimpaired.9