Publisher's Synopsis
This text examines the way Dickens depicted women by relating it to linguistic representations of women in contemporary works like handbooks on womanly conduct, documentary works on prostitution and Florence Nightingale's "Cassandra".;The analysis reveals that Dickens' individual account of the womanly ideal is shot through with contradiction. Fallen women are both degraded and valuable, worthless and powerful and "ideal" womanly women are desirable and undesirable, passive and destructive of the very social structure they are supposed to sustain.;The book's conclusion is that the ambiguous structure between convention and dissent in the language he uses for representing women charges Dickens' novels with their uneasy excitement and power.
