Why some girls are Adored and some girls are Settled for

Charles Dickens' Love Stories

The most terrible lie that our materialist world indoctrinates in us is that passion is a “fantasy” and is not to be relied upon for finding “real love”. That the day dreaming fancy, the obsession with a voice, a pair of lips, the excitement that comes with eye-contact, the anticipation of waiting for night to end so that he may see her again the next day, maybe just for a few seconds, the waiting by the phone for him to call, the fragrance from his shirt when he finally pulls her close...that these things are immature lusts of youth. And yet these are the feelings that spark in us the intuition that there is more to the world than merely the material and that our passions are what lead us up and beyond the mundane to the transcendant. These are the things that are the prerogative of artists to communicate in their work, and for all people to feel when they are young and healthy. 

Yet the modern world dismisses the passions as the imprudent dance of hormones. It insists that the fairy tale love we not only read about, but feel in the throbbing prime of youth, is just that, a fairy tale. This lie has led many young men and women to settle, to slip into grey compromise for the sake of social acceptance, or to abate the heavy smog of loneliness that can set in if one does not find a way to bind that passion into a covenant. Perhaps, in order to make this settling easier, we assuage ourselves and each other with the lie that the passion was not real at all; there is nothing more to the “electricity” between people than the surge of testosterone and progesterone which dies like the bloom of cherry blossoms in June, seared into brown spuds with the hot sun of summer which we take for truth. “It was just the silliness of youth”. “Marriage was historically never about love, love was invented by Hollywood” they say, even as Ovid wrote his Metamorpheses and Shakespeare wrote his Romeo and Homer wrote his Paris.

There is one writer in particular I focus on today, and his name is Charles Dickens. Dickens was a writer who understood great truths in his bones and his sinew, but he was not consciously aware of them. This is why his characters and his stories were so human. The author seemed to struggle along with them, in a very human way, against the vicissitudes of life. One way in particular that Dickens’ young men struggled was against women.

“If only I could get myself to love you, Biddy” laments young Pip in Dickens’ Great Expectations. But instead Pip loved Estella, the cruel, condescending, capricious and devastatingly beautiful Estella. The girl of his dreams! “If only Dora could be more like you Agnes” languishes the eponymous David Copperfield in Dickens’ other famous novel. Young David is so in love with Dora that he cannot eat, drink or sleep without thinking of her. Dora has captured his heart. And yet it is Agnes whom he knows is the more practical and prudent choice, but, for some unknown reason, he cannot choose her.

Men write incessantly on the internet about “Red Flags” and “Green Flags” in women and what makes some women more attractive than others. They are just as clueless, however, as little girls gossiping about the list of requirements they have for Mister Right. Most people are strangers to their own desires and when they let their feet walk and their hearts wander, they often do not fall in love with whom they believed they would. They surprise themselves. Men fall in love with women who have tattoos and short hair though they swore they wouldn’t; women fall in love with men who are shorter than them or don’t make as much money as they expected, and neither feels like they settled, but rather, that their expectations did not account for the mysteries of love and desire. But love is not totally a mystery. There are some internal principles by which the heart is governed, though they workings seem eclectic on the surface. There is a very logical way to understand why a man might fall in love with Estella and not Biddy; with Dora and not Agnes. This is what I explain here. 

Both Great Expectations and David Copperfield are considered bildungsromans, meaning stories about a young person coming of age. In Great Expectations, we follow a young boy named Pip and in David Copperfield, the eponymous David (also known as Trotwood). Both experience a great deal of abuse and neglect in their childhoods and are rescued by benefactors who adopt them and give them a better life. And both deal with the problems of the passion of youth as it comes up against prudence and practicality in the affairs of women. Both Pip and David have a prudent woman in their lives, and a crazy impractical one, and both fall in love with the impractical choice.

On paper, Biddy and Agnes, are each the prudent choice for the young men to marry. Biddy is a girl in Great Expectations that the main character Pip grows up with. She is kind, compassionate, thoughtful, and never cruel. She is reliable and good. She would make an excellent wife and mother. But Pip can never love her. In the modern world, we might say it’s because Pip is “toxic” and that he loves Estella, a wealthy and proud girl, because he has a “traumatized view of relationships” but this is just modern psychobabble. I know this because our passions do not lie. Our passions can be destructive, such as by making Pip fall in love with a cruel and capricious girl like Estella, but they do not lie. The reason Pip loves Estella, he makes abundantly clear when he explains how her situation makes him feel like a hero who will save her from a wicked spell that has been cast over Satis House where she lives. Estella’s cruelty is a part of this magic spell because he knows that her adoptive mother (a kind of Evil Stepmother) as turned her cruel, and once Pip becomes a gentleman and marries Estella, he can save her. Estella allows Pip to be the hero in his story in a way that Biddy does not.

All men, young or old, want to feel like heroes, and women who are damsels in distress, make him feel like he can act out his ultimate mythic fantasy. Biddy, in being so put together and sane, does not allow for Pip to become a hero, but rather traps him in what he deems to be a mundane, and very unromantic life, void of poetry and adventure. Of course he cannot love her. Even if objectively she is equally as pretty as Estella, or the more prudent choice.

“So he had adopted Estella, she had as good as adopted me, and it could not fail to be her intention to bring us together. She reserved it for me to restore the desolate house, admit the sunshine into the dark rooms, set the clocks a-going and the cold hearths a-blazing, tear down the cobwebs, destroy the vermin, --in short, do all the shining deeds of the young Knight of romance, and marry the Princess. I had stopped to look at the house as I passed; and its seared red brick walls, blocked windows and strong green ivy clasping even the stacks of chimneys with its twigs and tendons, as if with sinewy old arms, had made up a rich attractive mystery, of which I was the hero. Estella was the inspiration of it, and the heart of it of course. But, though she had taken such strong possession of me, though my fancy and my hope were so set upon her, though her influence on my boyish life and character had been all-powerful, I did not, even that romantic morning, invest her with any attributes save those she possessed. I mention this in this place, of a fixed purpose, because it is the clue by which I am to be followed into my poor labyrinth.” (Charles Dickens, Great Expectations, pg 245)

Similarly, in David Copperfield, David does not love Agnes, even though time and again he admits that she is good, kind, thoughtful and reliable. Agnes is the one that David turns to throughout all the difficulties of his life and she is the one who is his “best friend”. “The influence for all good, which she came to exercise over me at a later time, begins already to descend upon my breast. I love little Emily, and I don’t love Agnes--no, not at all in that way--but I feel that there are goodness, peace and truth wherever Agnes is, and that the soft light of the coloured window in the church, seen long ago, falls on her always, and on me when I am near her, and on everything around” (201).

Yet, Agnes is not his dream girl like Dora is. Dora is a beautiful, charming, childish and stupid girl that David falls in love with on first sight. In fact, he becomes so enamoured with her that he dreams about her, and she plagues his every waking thought too. Dora is very wealthy and in order for David to marry her, he must take on two extra jobs so that he can build his vocation and make enough money to impress first her father Mr. Spenlow and then Dora’s aunts. In other words, David must traverse a gauntlet in order to make himself worthy of Dora’s hand in marriage, and he does! Like Pip, and like all men, David also wants to be a hero and Dora gives him the opportunity to become heroic. Agnes, on the other hand, is convenient, the one quality that makes even the most beautiful woman in the world unattractive.

David Copperfield speaks of Agnes as a source of peace; he loves her, but as a friend, because she does not offer him any opportunity to be a hero. He is unecessary with her, like a baby is to a mother. (David Copperfield falls in love more than once in the story, but never with Agnes.) Meanwhile, he speaks of Dora as source of enchantment. “When I walked about, exalted with my secret, and full of my own interest, and felt the dignity of loving Dora, and of being beloved, so much, that if I had walked the air, I could not have been more above the people not so situated, who were creeping on the earth!” (David Copperfield pg 417). David visits Dora Spenlow’s party and is drunk with his passionate feelings toward her. He brings her flowers for her birthday and cannot even get out the words he intends to say to her. “I had an intention of saying (and had been studying the best form of words for three miles) that I thought them beautiful before I saw them so near her. But I couldn’t manage it. She was too bewildering. To see her lay the flowers against the little dimpled chin, was to lose all presence of mind and power of language in feeble ecstasy.” (411). 

A man who is bewildered is a man who is psychologically in the realm of the wild; he is in unknown territory. The most fundamental truths like hunger, thirst and lust, can bring us back to our primordial selves, but in a known way. A man who must build a fire in the woods is not bewildered because he knows exactly what he must do. A man who listenes to the howling in the night, and wonders what beast lurks near, or a man who looks at the multitude of the cosmos pressing in on him in the dark of the remotest woods thinking about how tiny he is in the grand scheme of things, is bewildered. We know how to fix the hunger, thirst and lust, there is no confusion about it. But bewilderment indicates that we do not know how to navigate ourselves and is caused by things like art, and the contemplation of eternity and mortality. A great work of music or sculpture can bewilder because what the senses perceive in the art work always hint at something more and more. Great works of art are arrows that point to the transcendent, and as such they leave us bewildered, as if they have thrown us up, into a realm beyond the intellect and beyond reason. Falling in love can do the same thing to a man. Agnes is comfort for David, but Dora is bewildering. 

“I hardly knew what I did, I was burning all over to that extraordinary extent.” (413).

“I was intoxicated with joy. I was afraid it was too happy to be real” (413).

What are Biddy and Agnes to do? Are they to dumb themselves down and become broken or immature in order to gain the affections of the man they desire? This conclusion assumes that the persona Biddy and Agnes each present, is honest. In reality, there is a certain kind of girl who becomes a Biddy or an Agnes. It is not because she is ugly, or intelligent or “mature” that makes her undesirable, a de-sexed friend, or a woman that men may compromise with later in life to abate their loneliness. It is rather, because she is afraid to show her vulnerability to a man. Each woman, you see, requires rescuing. No woman is perfect or happy on her own. “I don’t need no man” is the cope anthem of feminism. Biddy does not reveal her dreams or desires to Pip. She never really shows any of her emotions. She is as closed to Pip and to everyone as the iron door of a castle that sends away the knight who might knocked at the door. Meanwhile Estella, though cruel, is more human. She has weaknesses and passions herself and she is warm one day, cold the next. She reveals herself to Pip emotionally in ways that Biddy does not. Where Estella is cruel, at least she is human. Biddy closed off her emotional world entirely to Pip, how could she evoke anything in him?

Agnes also does not reveal any of her vulnerability to David. Agnes keeps her weaknesses, apprehensions and childishness closed up inside. David always knows that he can rely on her, and has no feeling that he needs to do anything for her. She does not get angry, sad or elated. She is just calm as still water. This is not what is inside, but just what she portrays on the surface. Agnes has trained herself to do this so that she does not trouble or inconvenience anyone else with her humanity. Becoming thus attenuated, she makes herself invisible even to love. Even the Princess, sitting in the tower, trapped by the witch, must sing to let the Hero know where to find her and rescue her.

Though many believe that Dora and Estella were “not right” or “not prudent” choices for their respective protagonist heroes, they were the most human choice for them to make, and the most human objects of affection. 

Prudence in love is important, but it must not come at the cost of passion. Prudence in the absence of passion is mere companionship and convenience; a practical “partnership” to achieve the end of a subdued domestic existence of bodies that exist adjacent to eachother, but never feel the electric spark where each invigorates the other, and makes them feel more than alive. Dickens, in these stories, reveals passion in the absence of prudence and believes that he has debunked passion as wasteful and dangerous. 

Passion is wasteful and dangerous, but what else do you live for? Day dreaming is a waste only to those who are slaves to productivity, not knowing we produce so that we may have more time to day dream. Danger is prohibitive only to the man who does not see the value of the Princess at the end he must rescue. Charles Dickens was a man who understood the truth in his bones, as I have written, but not consciously. This is why he had to kill Dora to make David leave her in the end and be with Agnes.

This is why even when Pip went back to Biddy at the end of Great Expectations, Dickens could not write him into a prudent marriage but sent him off to Cairo, where he could continue to lament over his neve ending passion for Estella, Estella Estella. Dickens’ characters were so human and so true, that even the writer himself could not manipulate them to ending the story in a way that was “more prudent” for him to do. Such is the power of real art, I suppose, it overpowers the artist himself, as he is a medium for something greater which speaks through him. 

Would Pip have been happier marrying Biddy? Would David have been happier marrying Agnes? They would have had more sane lives, perhaps with a lot less trouble in them, but they would have been suffocating, anhedonic lives, full of a different kind of grey trouble that is imperceptible except for a very thin line on the forehead that reveals the adventure that was not taken, the passions that were subdued for pragmatism. Neither Estella nor Dora were perfect, by the way, because they lacked many serious qualities that a man should seek in a wife. However, they did have one quality that is crucial, which is that they were courageous enough to show their humanity and this is what made people fall in love with them.

The modern woman is told to be independent, self-sufficient and capable in order to find a good man. Some traditionalist revivalists have insisted that she should also be capable of good housekeeping and modest in dress and graceful in social composure. Yet none of these qualities mention anything about love. They measure a woman as a man might measure the qualities of a lawn mower he is planning to purchase. You do not win love with your practical qualities, though they are important to cultivate for practical reasons. You win love by daring to be vulnerable and to show your humanity. In fact, if you are willing to show your immaturity, emotionality, childishness, fear, insecurity, you will make yourself more lovely. A woman doesn’t need to fake these things, she only needs to be honest that she has these things, no matter how “put together” she believes herself to be. If Agnes had flown into a jealous rage when David asked her to write a letter to Dora’s aunts asking for permission to court Dora; if Biddy had refused to speak to Pip when he extolled the virtues of Estella in front of her...these women would have shown their humanity. And being thus human and full of passion, perhaps they would have been the object of passion as well, not necessarily from Pip or David, but from another man. Yet Biddy married a Joe, a de-sexed father figure for financial and social comfort, and Agnes finally married David again, but only as a consolation to a lonely widow who still mourned his great love, Dora.

When a woman admits to her humanity, only then will she open herself to being loved, and not merely compromised for. They say that the damsel in distress does nothing and is merely a passive receiver in the great romance, but I say that she is doing something very courageous by even showing that she needs rescuing, by admitting to her vulnerability which some may take advantage of. When the Princess jumps down from the window to the Knight in Shining armour waiting below, she is exposing herself to great risk, and this is a show of great love. To be vulnerable is to trust, to trust is to love, and it is only by loving that we can be loved back.