On going down in the morning, I found my aunt
musing so profoundly over the breakfast table, with her elbow on the tray, that
the contents of the urn had overflowed the teapot and were laying the whole
table-cloth under water, when my entrance put her meditations to flight. I felt
sure that I had been the subject of her reflections, and was more than ever
anxious to know her intentions towards me. Yet I dared not express my anxiety,
lest it should give her offence.
My eyes, however, not being so much under control as my tongue, were
attracted towards my aunt very often during breakfast. I never could look at
her for a few moments together but I found her looking at me – in an odd
thoughtful manner, as if I were an immense way off, instead of being on the
other side of the small round table. When she had finished her breakfast, my
aunt very deliberately leaned back in her chair, knitted her brows, folded her
arms, and contemplated me at her leisure, with such a fixedness of attention
that I was quite overpowered by embarrassment. Not having as yet finished my
own breakfast, I attempted to hide my confusion by proceeding with it; but my
knife tumbled over my fork, my fork tripped up my knife, I chipped bits of
bacon a surprising height into the air instead of cutting them for my own
eating, and choked myself with my tea, which persisted in going the wrong way
instead of the right one, until I gave in altogether, and sat blushing under my
aunt’s close scrutiny.
‘Hallo!’ said my aunt, after a long time.
I looked up, and met her sharp bright glance respectfully.
‘I have written to him,’ said my aunt.
‘To -?’
‘To your father-in-law,’ said my aunt. ‘I have sent him a letter that
I’ll trouble him to attend to, or he and I will fall out, I can tell him!’
‘Does he know where I am, aunt?’ I inquired, alarmed.
‘I have told him,’ said my aunt, with a nod.
‘Shall I – be – given up to him?’ I faltered.
‘I don’t know,’ said my aunt. ‘We shall see.’
‘Oh! I can’t think what I shall do,’ I exclaimed, ‘if I have to go back
to Mr. Murdstone!’
( David Copperfield, Chapter 14)
David Copperfield is a very human, hero-protagonist. In this extract, we discover him as a young boy, agitated, awkward and vulnerable. Our eponymous hero is feeling desperately worried about his Aunt’s communication with his callously named(and natured) step-father, Mr Murdstone. He fears he may be returned to a life of subjugation and torment. But how does Dickens manage to make David’s feelings so clear to us? Why are we so convinced of the threat to the narrator’s new life with his eccentric Aunt, Betsy Trotwood?
Let’s return to the opening of the extract and pay attention( just as David does) to the curiously overflowing ‘teapot’. I know all students of creative writing are regularly reminded to ‘show don’t tell’ and in this passage, Dickens begins by showing the emotional predicament of both David and his Aunt Betsy without a word of telling at all. If the ‘table cloth ‘ is ‘underwater’ then so are David and Aunt Betsy, in an emotional sense. The problem of David’s stepfather preoccupies both characters and the submerged tablecloth and the overflowing teapot show how chaotic and disruptive such feelings are. The experience of being ‘underwater’ demands that the protagonists must resurface for literal and metaphorical air. Only when the situation is resolved can David breathe again.
If Donald Maas is correct in his advocation of a ‘third-level’ of emotion in a scene, then here we can detect competing feelings, which challenge one another for supremacy and admission. David is eminently respectful to his Aunt and fears the embarrassment of being impolite or demanding. Yet he is very anxious and vulnerable to his core. Look at the terrifying simplicity of David’s question: ‘Does he know where I am, Aunt? ‘ We can hear the implications of David’s anxious question all too well. ‘Where’ David is, represents safety, a refuge from the oppression of ‘Murdstone’. ( Look at the connotations of the stepfather’s name: ‘murder’ conjoined with ‘stone’, surely more than a hint of Freud’s Thanatos about
David’s final speech in this scene releases his feelings in a formal, yet agitated manner. We do not know ‘what’ David might do if he is forced to go ‘back to Mr Murdstone!’ But we can surmise that David feels on the brink of emotional panic and that ‘Murdstone’ represents a form of personal extinction. A potentially devastating moment in David’s autobiography!