Dickens, Melodrama, and the Parodic Imagination (review)

Field: Arts and Humanities (Social Sciences)

Reviewed by: Dickens, Melodrama, and the Parodic Imagination Chris Hokanson (bio) Dickens, Melodrama, and the Parodic Imagination, by Tore Rem; pp. xii + 239. Brooklyn: AMS Press, 2002, $72.50. Tore Rem's inquiry into the Dickensian uses of parody opens up the study of Boz's works in fruitful directions, successfully reconciling his serious and comic modes. Critics generally scorn parody as derivative and parasitic, but Rem's thoughtful analysis underscores its central role in Dickens's novels as a challenging check on sentimental and melodramatic excesses. Rem refrains from invoking broad definitions of parody (such as Linda Hutcheon's "repetition with critical distance"), opting instead for a narrower conception more closely aligned with Margaret Rose's view of parody as "the comic refunctioning of preformed linguistic or artistic material" (19, 20). He is primarily concerned with examples of Dickens parodying specific professional discourses and styles—or larger structural modes at work in his fiction—instead of more specific parodies of particular literary predecessors. Rem's main thesis is that Dickens engages parody to assert and then subvert the sentimental and melodramatic conventions of his stories, so that "melodrama never completely rules and becomes too threatening in its seriousness and monological tendency" (14). For example, when writing about Martin Chuzzlewit (1843-44), he shows how Dickens's parodic portrayal of family life (in particular the Pecksniffs) undercuts the Victorians' idealized doctrine of domesticity that usually prevails at the end of his novels. Dickens's parodies, especially in his early works, aim primarily to coexist and not attack, content to provide an alternative perspective that allows ambiguity to challenge pat readings of his novels. Rem's study impressively covers a lot of territory, demonstrating how Dickens's parodies challenge not only sentimental depictions of the idealized "Angel in the House" but also the contrived final resolutions of his novels. Rem's chapter on Great Expectations (1860-61) is most satisfying. He contributes to the recent critical conversation concerning the significance of Wopsle and the Hamlet chapter. Wopsle's performance is clearly melodramatic in its reliance on understood gestures and clichés that demand a direct correspondence between what he externally does on stage and what Hamlet internally is feeling. Rem convincingly shows that Dickens's parody of Wopsle's histrionics serves as a warning to Pip not to judge truths from appearances alone. After all, it is by perceiving events superficially, through a melodramatic lens, that Pip has misled himself into believing Miss Havisham is his benefactress. This study's shortcoming is that Rem does not always contextualize his interesting findings enough, leaving unexamined many cultural and historical implications that would further bolster his claims. His concentration on Dickens alone prevents him from [End Page 541] fully explaining how the author's parodies represent a larger literary trend evolving in Victorian literature. Rem is right to assert that throughout Dickens's oeuvre, parodies are often warm, and I would argue that Dickens's works actually reflect a Victorian move away from the Romantic use of parody as a politicized mode of mockery and toward a domesticated version, its acerbic edges blunted. But what could be causing this transition? One answer can be developed from Rem's major claim that Dickens uses parody to expose the inauthenticity of language. As Rem notes, Dickens parodies various new discourses, such as journalism and legalese, in The Pickwick Papers (1836-37) to mark them as deceptive, especially when compared to Sam Weller's comic speech, which is seemingly made more authentic by his knack for breaking from conventional uses of language and professional cant. I would go one step further, though, because the structure of a parody itself—which is always dependent on something already said—shatters the illusion that language can ever be an instrument used to express thoughts and experiences that exist prior to language. A parody's very nature leads one to challenge the idea that there is an authentic, grounding truth that words can capture. This possibility was too disturbing for most in the nineteenth century to face except when tempered and manifested as play. Rem does not explain how parody in the Victorian age primarily became another apparently innocent language...