In Dickens’s* Little Dorrit*, architectural structures, and the social structures they represent, can be fragile, corrupt, and precariously propped up, but they can also be oppressive literal and figurative prison walls. Architecture is thus an important site through which the novel works through a central paradox: do solid walls and rigid social structures provide coherent cultural systems, or do they repress individual expression? Does the absence or failure of these structures offer freedom, or only anomie and incoherence? This paper uses Ruskin’s architectural treatise The Seven Lamps of Architecture as a critical lens, especially the final chapter, “The Lamp of Obedience,” about the paradoxical relationship between obedience and freedom in architectural design as well as in cultural structures. While the novel’s walls may make communities legible, they can also be stultifying, without free circulation of air and light, or the free movement of inhabitants. Enclosure fails to ensure knowledge, as physical spaces and institutional structures often defer and obstruct and present dangers, including the diffusion of authority, and the potential for individual oppression by imposed definitions. Little Dorrit’s architectural structures and cultural systems both reinforce and challenge Ruskin’s assumptions about the necessity, plausibility, and desirability of obedience to coherent and bounded spaces. Unlike the consistent, coherent language that Ruskin advocates, Little Dorrit is multi-vocal and heteroglossic, and it is ultimately not possible to reconcile its various individual and intermental perspectives into a unified, knowable whole. Moreover, the tension between obedience and freedom that characterizes the novel’s physical and cultural structures is also crucial to understanding its narrative structures, which ultimately acknowledge the impossibility of containing everything within the pages of its text. The beginning and ending that mark the novel’s limits novel are as porous and contested as the walls of a building or the boundaries that define a culture.
About the presenterJody Griffith
Jody Griffith received a Ph.D. in English in 2015 from Temple University in Philadelphia. Her research interests include nineteenth-century British literature, especially the Victorian novel, as well as theories of culture, intellectual history, and narratology. Her dissertation focused on the parallel uses of architectural, cultural, and narrative structure in the realist novels of George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, and Charles Dickens. She is currently an adjunct instructor at Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania.