Becoming Human: Dombey and Son and the Economy of the Pet

Abstract

ABSTRACT While much has been written about Charles Dickens’s figuration of the daughter as a means of salvation for the capitalist father in Dombey and Son, the figure of the pet, which bears enormous ideological weight, is underanalysed. Attending to the style, content, and purposes of the symbolic and psychic economy of the pet, I argue that the distinction of public and private on which Dickens relies is interchangeable with another dichotomy he labours to establish between the untamed and the domestic. Examined from this angle, the novel’s chief concern is with the possibility of becoming human - that is to say domesticated - within a relentlessly feral world. It is through intersubjectivity that the stray canine becomes Diogenes the pet, a process that prefigures, and as I will show intimately related to, Paul Dombey’s own metamorphosis.