Supplement to Episode 1: David Copperfield’s Dilemma and The Method of Perceiving a Shape

We’re looking for the shape of the story, seeking the ways it impresses itself upon our imaginations. But the shape of a story is complicated. With a simple object, say, a water glass, we could press its base or its rim into the sand, or dip it in ink and press it on paper, and see the outline of its shape. A story, though, is a whole, made of many parts, each part jutting out in altogether different directions.

As we read, it presses down on us, first from this angle, then another, first lightly, then with force. At the book’s end, all those different angles and pressures are like shadows of memory, difficult to recollect the shape of. The shape of the whole becomes a vague map, more a feeling than anything. To me, the point of literary reflection is not to cover plot or search for hidden clues or cite passages, but to grasp some central image internal to the book, and investigate that image for the ways it might reveal those pressure points and angles of force that impressed us in the moment, but fell away as the book went on. Here’s an image. Imagine a young child standing in between two adults. One adult is hardened with angry resolve, demanding, unyielding, always enforcing, never obliging. The other swoons, listens, laughs, adores—maybe a little too much, in fact, this second one now bends down and begs the son for adoration in return. The first kind of character is defined by what the novel actually refers to as “firmness”. In the imagination of the novel, those who are firm are well-defined, undeterred by others, determined on their own will, and, often, force others to bend to it.

David Copperfield is always on the move. From his childhood home to the home of his housekeeper; raised by a single mother, to living with his stepfather and his sister; to boarding school, then another. Along the way, he consistently finds himself under the care of these firmer characters. His stepfather Mr. Murdstone and his sister Miss Murdstone being the foremost agents of firmness.

Recollecting on life with the Murdstones, David says this:

“Firmness, I may observe, was the grand quality on which both Mr. and Miss Murdstone took their stand. Their creed, as I should state it now, was this. Mr. Murdstone was firm. Nobody in his world was to be so firm as him. Everybody was to be bent to his firmness.”

We're never quite let in on the motivations of Mr. Murdstone in marrying David's mom, Clara, and taking on the project of a stepson. Clearly not for the pleasure of it. Not for some romantic idea of marriage and family, surely.

Throughout the novel, we find Murdstone waiting around in silence by the fire, or in the drawing room, or seated at the table, doing nothing at all except seemingly baiting young Copperfield to do or say anything that would resemble opposition to his will. His punishments were swift and brutal.

But why? What would compel him to choose this life? Should we trust our narrator when he says that Murdstone did it merely for want of bending wills to his own firmness? That sounds extreme. Nor is Copperfield an objective narrator.

To even begin exploring this question, we need to know what firmness is, which means to distinguish what it's distinct from in the world and vocabulary of the novel, which also gives us another angle of impression in the story. The counterpoint of firmness is something like sensitivity, call it an extreme sensitivity, or porousness.

Here’s a pretty natural picture of porousness: on a cold winter night when the fire crackled in their living room and they sat happily together with their maid Peggotty, David would feel the chill of the wind outside where his father's grave weathered the snow and ice, even feeling guilty to be inside and warm and happy. After church one Sunday, after the story of Lazarus so penetrated his imagination during the sermon, he thought that the graveyard might come alive at any moment. Later, as a young man, a housekeeper tells David that she's left the shaving things for him and that when he's done, breakfast is ready at the table. When he comes down for breakfast, he's choked with shame. His cheeks are smooth. He has no need to shave, though the housekeeper noticed how quickly he came down. Should he have waited longer? Did she do it as a joke in the first place? Does she sneer at his boyishness when her back is turned?

This is the kind of sensitivity that ranges well beyond emotional perception. For David, the emotions and concerns and words of others penetrate his own person, his own thoughts and feelings with ease. Whereas Murdstone struggles to produce a single thought from the perspective of another, David’s mind is molded to the shape of somebody else’s position. Firm on one end. Porous on the other. These are states of selfhood.

Children are naturally porous. We associate ourselves with our surroundings, especially the people taking care of us, slowly learning to differentiate our own “I” from the world’s otherness as we grow up. This is the broad, biological process of differentiation, and it’s the same kind of process we undergo in early adulthood as we’re pressed to break from the tribe of family and become a mature, individuated self.

What we call the ability to emotionally self-regulate might be the performance of whatever spiritual muscle that undergoes this processes of differentiation—to be self-regulated is the singular ability of the differentiated individual to remain within their own boundaries of self—being a part of the world but not disturbed or infiltrated by it.

David's mom, Clara Copperfield, and then Clara Murdstone, is not differentiated in the way that adults are meant to become. If the Murdstones have intense walls around their own person, Clara has no walls. The gate is open and the fence is chicken wire. David said of his mother:

“She couldn't bear not to love anyone who was around her.”

This of course included the cruelty of the Murdstones, which was of special interest to David since his life had been basically blown up by them. There is a desperation in Clara's inability not to love and find deep connections with everyone around her, an anxiety pushing her toward that kind of intimacy at all costs. Why? The one with no walls around the self needs the approval and affirmation of others. This is Clara. To not be a differentiated self is to not have a self, to have no ground beneath one's feet. Clara needed the ground of another to stand on, to feel safe and secure.

In fact, I first read this book four years ago, long before I had this distinction between a firm and sensitive self. In the novel, it's this moment where Clara is expressing her love for her son David in a note. On the margin I wrote something messed up about the way the mother loves the son.

It's from a scene in which we have, for the first time, seen Clara come home with Mr. Murdstone. Peggotty questions Clara’s choice to give herself away—which seems extreme, but maybe she just knows Clara; maybe she knows this is not the right time. Clara, in dramatic response, moves towards David and responds to Peggoty by speaking to her son. David remembers the scene this way:

“Then, turning affectionately to me, with her cheek against mine, Am I a naughty mamma to you, Davy? Am I a nasty, cruel, selfish, bad mamma? Say I am, my child. Say yes, dear boy, and Peggy will love you. And Peggoty’s love is a great deal better than mine, Davy. I don't love you at all, do I?”

Sure, it's an emotionally fraught moment. What it serves to show, though, is that for the porous kind of person, the one who is penetrated and disturbed by the world around her, love can never be for the other. Love is always for constituting oneself, for securing oneself, for scoring ground to stand on through the strength of the other (consider how this is literally childlike, as in how children are supposed to be).

Back to firmness. The kind of firmness displayed in the Murdstones is a self so rigidly defined that it resorts to exerting its own will on the world and the others around it. It resorts, essentially, to a kind of violence. This is not an issue of basic morality, right and wrong. It's an issue of character—how one over time has built the constitution of their soul. Murdstone's fear of other, of anything different than his own narrowly defined and rigidly performed life, pushes him to mold others to his own will and desire. Which is exactly what David watched him do with his mother and attempted to do with him.

Clara's own lack of self-possession, her undefined borders, run parallel to the spiritual shape of Murdstone. Whereas the latter doubles down on purity and self-righteousness, enacting violence against the otherness he fears, Clara is so unsure of herself, so porous, that she gives Murdstone a free pass to enter her own person and demand that she becomes what he would like her to become.

So of course, Murdstone ended up marrying Clara Copperfield. It is the desire of that ultra-firm soul to find an unsure and flexible one, someone that will let him in, someone whose adoration he could be sure not to lose. Of course he was content to live out those years of his mid-life in a strange and restrained silence by the fire waiting for David or Clara to slip up, for David to ask something of Clara, or for Clara to show any kind of affection. He lived to squash what was different. It was not a kind of sick pleasure to demand that the world take the shape of his own soul, it is a spiritual need of the rigid, firm soul.

That need of the rigidly defined soul to mold others to its own shape spurs from the bet they make with reality. The bet is that this life and this mode and no other is the way to be a human, the way to be my ‘I.’ Anything but molding others to their own shape and will would be a challenge to that bet—proof of its flimsiness.

In both extremes, the porous and the rigid or firm soul, these characters live in order to justify themselves. If one is undefined, then anxiety pushes her towards others so that she might use the strength or love of another for her own assurance. If one is so defined that protecting and defining the borders around his identity become his soul preoccupation, then he will see any form of life different from his own as a threat to the self and identity he has created. Making his circles small, he chooses his company in order to easily pound and mold others into a pleasing shape. Both forms of justification involve manipulation. Both end in violence; that is, an infiltration and disrespect of another’s person and identity.

Aristotle defined virtue as the mean between two extremes. What sits between porousness and firmness? Is it differentiation? Selfhood?

But as with story, so it is with these issues of identity. We’re not talking about one single virtue. The angles and sides of the soul on which these issues press are manifold. Whatever sits between porousness and firmness is a complex whole in and of itself. Too big to see from any one angle or be well defined by any one action.

How about love?

For instance, hovering just above the surface of the story’s balance between the firm and the porous is the ghost of Mr. Copperfield, David's biological father.

Did Mr. Copperfield prey on Clara as Mr. Murdstone did? Is his malevolence and manipulation simply not remembered?

Consider the particular distinction in their reactions to Clara’s self-doubt, a basic manifestation of what we’re calling porous self-hood.

When Clara was in self-doubt, we see Mr. Murdstone pounce, chide her for being foolish, and tell her exactly what he desired her to do. He used her own feeling of self-doubt and uncertainty, her own need to use others as ground to hold herself up, as a manipulation device to get what he wanted out of her.

In her past, however, her first husband would say: “A loving heart is better and stronger than wisdom, and that he was a happy man in hers.” He praised her loving heart. That is all.

It is in between this juxtaposition of firmness and porousness where the drama of David’s life takes place. Keeping this image in mind and allowing the narrative to gather up meaning to the image is the way into the story’s dramatic life.