Endnotes

1  Wilfred Dvorak. “The Misunderstood Pancks: Money and the Rhetoric of Disguise in Little Dorrit.” Studies in the Novel 23.3 (Fall 1991): 339. Dvorak’s article on disguise opens with the acknowledgement that “[e]ver since Lionel Trilling’s famous essay [1961], it has been a critical cliché that the metaphor of the prison and language about imprisonment give unity and meaning to Little Dorrit.” Other strains of Little Dorrit criticism (language, feelings expressed physically, guilt, shame, secrets coming out) can be united via the periperformative for which this project argues.

2  Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2003: 68.

3  Ibid.

4  Sedgwick describes the climax of the sexual plot of the Victorian novel as a moment not of adultery but one in which the “the proscenium arch of the marriage is, however excruciatingly displaced: when the fact of a marriage’s unhappiness ceases to be a pseudosecret or an open secret and becomes a bond of mutuality with someone outside the marriage” (73). This is very interestingly worked out in Little Dorrit, in that the bond of mutuality exists before the proscenium arch of marriage is ever set in place, in Arthur’s obliviousness to Amy’s love for him.

5  Transformations and representations of names are of immense interest. Affery never speaks of Mrs. Clennam by name (33) – nor does the text. Tip becomes Edward once he becomes wealthy. Merdle’s son is represented by a mere “byeword” (207) of gossip.

6  Sedgwick, 78.

7  Amy’s first letter also has these “hint hint” statements, though not as densely or intensely. At the conclusion of one paragraph, for example, is her statement: “I should not have the courage to mention this to any one but you” (392). She also writes of imagining herself in Pet’s place (she intuits that Clennam loved her) and concludes with the sentiments: “I hope you will sometimes, in a quiet moment, have a thought for me. … I have been afraid that you may think of me in a new light, or a new character. Don’t do that, I could not bear it” (393), etc. which finally caps off with her signature “That you will think of me (when you think of me at all), and of my true affection and devoted gratitude, always, without change, as of / Your poor child, LITTLE DORRIT.” This, of course, suggests the possibility of thinking differently of her. Very interestingly, the first letter then focuses on Arthur’s thoughts of her, while her final letter focuses on her own thoughts: “I have no lover” and “I have not dreamed.”

8  See Rebecca Stern, “Moving Parts and Speaking Parts: Situating Victorian Antitheatricality.” ELH. 65.2 (1998): 423-449, for a discussion of Victorian anxieties over the repetitiveness of theatre. It is also worthwhile to note that repetition appears to have particularly negative effects on the novel’s women. Tattycoram hates the admonition given by Merdle to count “Five-and-twenty .. five-and-twenty!” (270), and Fanny is reduced to a “dreadful depression” (580) from her husband’s repetitive speech. Both before and during Miss Wade’s self-narrated section, repetition plagues the text: she has “cruel pleasure in repeating the [still unconventional, periperformative] stab” (550) which suggests less than positive things about Arthur’s mother. In her story, she explains “I repeat the very words I heard” (555), while others around her have “kept up the infamous pretence” (555), and tortured her with “this repetition of the old wicked injury” (560). Miss Wade’s denial of all social forms and stories is her way of refusing the repetition which she sees as the evil of the world.

9  For the dominance of smell, notice for example, the cramped Workhouse is overwhelmed by “smells” (305), and at the convent, “the smell within, coming up from the floor of tethered beasts, [is] like the smell of a menagerie of tethered animals” (363). The theatre has an “unwholesome smell” (77). At Flora’s “a singular combination of perfumes was diffused throughout the room, as if some brandy had been put by mistake in a lavender-water bottle, or as if some lavender-water had been put by mistake in a brandy bottle” (519). Any attempt to contain (whether in a bottle or no) results in a confusion of air. In contrast, in the country “there was a prevailing breath of rest, which seemed to encompass [Arthur] in every scent that sweetened the fragrant air” (279). This lack of a troubling scent has to do with the fact that “[b]etween the real landscape and its shadow in the water, there was no division; both were so untroubled and clear, and, while so fraught with solemn mystery of life and death, so hopefully reassuring to the gazer’s soothed heart, because so tenderly and mercifully beautiful” (280). The division of space creates smells, just as the division of thoughts between the unsayable and words creates a sort of smelliness to language, which is unnatural.

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