Seeing "our Sister-Women Suffer": Responding to Assaults against Women in Barnaby Rudge and David Copperfield

Abstract: This article examines sexual assaults on young female characters in Dickens's Barnaby Rudge and David Copperfield in the context of scholarship on violence against women in Dickens's fiction and through the lens of #metoo as applied to literature by recent feminist scholars. As a frame of reference for reading, #metoo demands attention to violence against women and provides a way of seeing beyond the elements of discourse that blur our notice of the frequency and intensity of fictional assaults. I argue that the girls in these novels seem preordained to their experiences by the conventions of the novels' dominant tropes – the coquette and the fallen woman – and by their fictional communities' perception of their motives. Regardless of their naivete or their resistance, and despite the obvious guilt of the male villains, the female victims are blamed by Dickens's narrators, characters, and readers for being the objects of violence or seduction.