Uriah heep sweet dom factory sealed12/20/2023 ![]() ![]() ![]() There’s another hovering female presence, Mrs Chick’s shabby-genteel friend Miss Tox. ![]() The new baby, she assures her brother, is ‘quite a Dombey.’ The hapless Florence-no surprise here-is definitely not a Dombey. Her own self-deluding vanity is that she provides the necessary sensitivity and feeling in the household, going so far as to ‘forgive’ Fanny for her failings-after all, she couldn’t help not being a Dombey. Her aunt, Mrs Chick, is-what? Dombey’s staunch ally, or acolyte. Her mother’s death is the turning off of the one light in her life, because the other women in the house live by Dombey’s rules. Florence, the daughter, is terrified of Dombey, who generally doesn’t notice her unless somebody else points her out. She is an irrelevance, a failure on his wife’s part-Fanny gets a lot of criticism, which spreads as far as blame for not ‘trying’ to rally from the trauma of childbirth-because the Patriarchy doesn’t recognise daughters. We see it in this first chapter, in Dombey’s frankly appalling treatment of his six-year-old daughter. The thing that gets shouldered aside most forcefully is love. Human beings come and go-Fanny, his wife, is gone by the end of the first chapter-but Dombey and Son remains. Now the firm will be able to carry on as before. Before the death of his own father, he had been the ‘Son’ of Dombey and Son. His sickly wife has just given birth to his first son, and this is literally all that matters. It shoulders aside all other concerns, leaving him a cold, brooding presence incapable of any normal human interactions. Or, rather, that it all revolves around ‘Dombey and Son’, an entity which, we soon realise, has always been his monomaniacal obsession. The 48-year-old Dombey is at the centre of his own patriarchal universe, knowing that everything, and everyone, orbits around him. ![]()
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