Hair Apparent; or, Dickens's Public Hair

Abstract:

Dickens plays off the strange hybrid nature of hair throughout his fiction. Hair is both alive and dead, public but also private, part of and not part of the body. Dickens uses hair to create both comedy and pathos, and it projects key aspects of many characters while simultaneously defying their control. Through hair, Dickens raises epistemological questions about the human tendency to categorize the world in binaries, and he suggests that all such categories misrepresent reality and fail to capture the complexity of human experience.