Abstract
Little Dorrit is both a narrative about authority and an examination of the authority of narrative. The novel links vocation with sonhood and storytelling with fatherhood and self-generation. Little Dorrit, however, tells a double story, of a daughter as well as of a son. If the son’s story relates the search to replace the father and to discover paternal authority, the daughter’s story details the horrors and consolations of incestuous desire and generational collapse. Storytelling that seeks the father as origin reveals paternal deception and inauthenticity; incestuous structures of desire attempt to collapse genealogy on the hero and heroine, making paternal origin unknowable and creating an overdetermined narrative ending. Dickens’ double story, then, identifies yet questions genealogy and the patriarchal family as metaphors for narrative structure.
Published Version
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