In last Sunday's New York Times Book Review there was an essay near the back that discussed Dickens's heroines and the way in which people in literary circles have perceived them as passive, "legless angels," nonsexual, insipidly virtuous virgins who are too good to be real, too perfect and sinless to be interesting. The classic and oft-cited example of this is Agnes Wickfield in David Copperfield, known as the woman who "points upward." (I'm not going to go into a big explanation of that gesture. See the article, or read the book for details.) The essayist, Peter Gay, wrote that, contrary to most Victorian and post-Victorian critics of Dickens, "...I have loved Agnes Wickfield all my life." This is his launching point into what was for me a wonderful defense of these supposedly boring, namby-pamby victims of life. I have always loved and admired the Dickens women for those very qualities that people criticize them for, and, in fact, have used these women as role models for my personal interpretation of submission, as ideals to strive for. I've also found them extremely sexy, when viewed from a D&S perspective. I'm going to attempt to describe a little of what I see in Dickens's female characters that causes me to identify so strongly with them. If I'm successful, I may then attempt the more-arduous task: explaining just what it is that I find so sexy about these Victorian goody-two-shoes.

Please keep the following distinction firmly in mind: I find Dickens' heroines to be role models for qualities that I think are important to my submission. I do not find Dickens' heroines to be particularly submissive. Set next to a modern woman, they may seem to be so, but, although their sterling personal qualities set them apart as rare individuals, their relationships to power seem perfectly normal for their time. To belabor the obvious, I also am not under any illusion that Dickens was writing about power exchange, as we use that term on ASB, at least not more than any other "vanilla" author of that period did. As far as I am concerned, he knew nothing about this beastie that enthralls us so.

This Victorian author did, however, have extraordinary insight into the human heart, and his women, his best women (for he has all kinds), personify some remarkable qualities that are little valued in this age of "self-help." (I suspect it was all this reading of Dickens that made me find the character of Robin in Sara Adamson's S&M work, The Marketplace, so drab and wanting as a potential role model--anyone remember that book review I did on ASB a while back? Dickens' shining characters put little Robin, with her petty selfishness, indulgences, and emotional weaknesses--despite all of her hard trying--to shame.) The remarkable qualities of Dickens's women were qualities that I, both before and after I was aware of my submissivness, have blindly undertaken to acquire, without knowing their names. Reading Dickens gave me words for emotional realities that I have been reaching for all of my life.

Mr. Gay's favorite heroine is Agnes. Mine is Little Dorrit, in the novel of the same name. I think this may be because this was the first work of Dickens that I read, and like a first love, she enchanted me utterly. Part of her charm certainly comes from the painful comparison Dickens draws between her and her rival, Flora. Where Little Dorrit is patient, Flora is impetuous. Where she is modest, never thinking that Arthur, the man she admires with more than a platonic interest, might feel an equal affection back, the latter is vain, throwing herself upon the man she desires to mold into her lover and imagining, therefore, that he must love her passionately in return. Dorrit is down-to-earth and realistic in her poverty and makes the best of what little she can obtain, while Flora, in her idleness, invents intrigue and romance around the man she lusts after and comically assigns to him emotions toward her that are opposite to the way he actually feels. Where Little Dorrit is discrete, Flora runs off at the mouth (if you've read the book, you may remember her conversational style: she speaks in paragraphs as long as the ones I write [no kidding--g] but with no period mark in them except at the end of the paragraph). Little Dorrit holds her impoverished family together, financially and psychically, with the long hours she spends doing low-paying seamstress work and with the solicitousness which she visits upon them when her work is done. Flora is comparatively well off, but, having no one to care for, cares for no one but herself and falls into crying spells and moods of self-pity at the drop of a hat. Although her bankrupt father treats her with contempt and scorn, Little Dorrit is so devoted to this wretched inhabitant of a debtors' prison, that, to protect his pathetic self-pride, she not only hides her wage-earning from him, but turns down much needed charity from Arthur, the man who admires her so (and who, in turn, is admired by self-absorbed, motor-mouth Flora).

Dorrit would be enchanting even without Dickens' contrast of her to that reminder of human failing, Flora (and, to a lesser degree, Dorrit's selfish and conceited sister Fanny, her ne'er-do-well brother, and her hurtful, callous father), all plotting and scheming, doing their "what's in it for me?" dances in the background. Dorrit is an innocent, and in Dickens's world this means she is always in danger of being consumed by those who would use her for their own evil ends. But her innocence, in a strange way, is her saving grace. It protects her by making her oblivious to the evil intentions of those who surround her, intentions which the reader is not spared. Little Dorrit cannot conceive of such evil (except in very small ways: she is deeply sorry, for instance, for the abysmal state of self-pride and denial that her father has sunk to), and so her cheerful and steadfast spirit is not broken by the knowledge of what others intend for her. (The theme of evil surrounding innocents recurs in Dickens. Agnes, the heroine of David Copperfield, is threatened by the scheming machinations of that creepy bucket-o'-slime Uriah Heap; another heroine almost becomes the victim of a gang rape by a group of middle-aged gentlemen led by her supposed "protector." The child characters of Dickens are likewise threatened by the adults, who try to use them without regard for their lives or well-being.)

That combination of innocence of evil, strength of spirit in the face of adversity; quiet cheerfulness and industriousness; incredible, even inhuman patience; and good will toward everyone, no matter how manipulative or mean, draws me immensely. These women embody almost everything I ever want to be when I grow up. And the qualities, when seen living in the characters Dickens creates, strike me as not only admirable but extremely sexy. Their sexual appeal to a kinky pervert is much harder to explain, but I'm going to have fun trying.

Innocence, especially threatened innocence, is the easiest quality to get a handle on. You don't have to be an ASB rocket scientist to get the Little Red Riding Hood gestalt. We perverts intuitively understand the appeal of a cute little babe in the woods, threatened by a leering, slavering big bad wolf pretending to be her best friend. A-WOOOOO!

Dickens's women tend to be trusting souls: they take people at face value, they believe what they are told, until they are given strong reasons to think differently. They walk blindly into the traps set by schemers, without realizing that they are doing so. But this trust which so often gets them in trouble is indicative of a wonderful quality that few adults have: a lack of cynicism. Such trust makes a submissive capable of experiencing great love and intimacy, when it is directed at the right sort of person: a dominant who will not abuse it or betray it. Trust in your dominant makes you capable of doing scenes with him or her without a safe word, and it will carry you through times when a more cynical person would panic or freak out. Times like when you are completely immobilized, tied up, and your dominant gags you and then pinches your nose shut. Or draws out a knife. Or draws out a gun. Or (my personal nightmare) a cigarette lighter. Or a pair of pliers. Or gets drunk and then draws out the pliers. If you really trust the person, you may be, on the surface, terrified by these actions, but a little part of you deep inside will blindly believe that, regardless of the immediate reality, everything will come out all right in the end. (It may not be the ending you imagine--you may actually be burned with the lighter, while you scream yourself hoarse with agony. But you trust that if you are hurt, you will eventually be OK--that your dominant would not do it if it would permanently damage you in any major way.)

That trust is a wonderful thing: it lets you give up everything to your mistress or master and say, "Take it all, it's yours, no strings [or safe words] attached, all of me is yours to do with howsoever you please." It lets you experience the extremes of the power ride, the stomach-twisting rush of fear, the sinking in your heart as you realize how helpless you really are. Can you imagine (or, for the lucky few--remember) the intensity of that moment: when you know and your dominant knows that he could hurt you beyond your wildest, most insane imaginings, and you cannot stop it from happening, you cannot even stop him from killing you, and you're gagged and bound, unable to wiggle free or even speak a word in your own defense, laid out open like a tender cut of meat waiting for the butcher's knife, and you look beseechingly into His or Her eyes, and you see the sadism, and there is no reassurance there, no response to your silent plea, no relief from the torture of not-knowing, and then all you've got left is what's inside you: your little bit of trust, your tiny hope, your optimism that you chose right, that this person is deeply right, not deeply wrong, that everything will come out all right? Can you imagine the helplessness of that moment? Can you imagine heaven? Can you imagine hell? It's both...at the same time.

Without an ability to trust, this scene would be all hell. With trust, you can face the very worst and emerge unscathed. Probably. As long as the person's not really a psychopath. Or the dominant equivalent of an accident-prone Klutz. (Oop-sie! Sorry about that, Love. I just meant to brandish this red hot poker above your face to scare you. Well, don't you worry about a thing: I hear that eye transplant operations have a remarkable success rate these days!) Or doesn't suddenly crack while you're in bondage and decide he is compelled to do something he's never done before (and will never do again, once he's locked up). But you see, that's why the trust is necessary: to battle those fears, not defeat them, but subdue them just enough so that you have a good-bad time and not a bad-bad freakout.

The innocents of the world often get hurt. But when they win, they win big. And in Dickens's optimistic tales, they emerge unscathed from horrendous perils to live happily every after. As do some submissives.

And then there's modesty. I value this quality so much in Dickens's enchanting creatures probably because it is so undervalued these days. Agnes, Little Dorrit, Kate, and all the others would never think of pointing out their good qualities to others. They live out their lives quietly and industriously and remarkably unselfconsciously. They have their unrequited loves, their tragic disappointments, their frustrations, their childhood issues, as do we all, but, unaided by self-help psychology books, they do not turn these things into a shrine to themselves. They do not, to use the topical term, coredump. Nor do they call attention to themselves in any other way. Such an attitude is almost unheard of these days. We are encouraged to promote ourselves, sell ourselves, show off, strut our stuff, validate ourselves, explain ourselves to others, insist on our right to be heard. The mistake we make, I think, is in confusing self-liking (or, at least, a lack of self-loathing) with self-promotion. What is ASB besides a couple of hundred people strutting around saying "Look at me! Look at the cool things I do! Look at my ideas!" (Well, it is occasionally a few more things than that, but the commerce of attention transactions takes up the bulk of the bandwidth. Luckily, within that commerce important things sometimes get done: people learn things they didn't know, information is distributed, etc.) And for that matter, what is this very message except a submissive strutting around crying "Look at me! Look at my ideas!" Modesty. It seems almost unattainable to people brought up the way we are. The best most of us seem capable of is its ne'er-do-well brother, false modesty.

But it is quite possible to like oneself quietly, to not always be showing it to the world. It is possible to learn not to crave attention as much as we do, to be satisfied with a little pile rather than an enormous, gluttonous heap. How much better might the little bits of attention that spontaneously come our way taste if we weren't always obsessively seeking them out and gorging ourselves on them?

So what have all these nice sentiments got to do with submission? Well for starters, modesty--when done sincerely--is a useful weapon in the arsenal the devoted submissive uses on him or herself. It gets you feeling the way you want to feel: little, less important than your master (whether in reality you are or not, whether your master thinks you are or not--the point is that you feel less important), less self-focused and -absorbed and more "other" (master) focused and absorbed, happier and more satisfied. You aren't always feeling wounded because this or that person didn't give you the attention you so obviously deserve. Modesty can start one on the road toward humility, a truly blessed state of mind for the submissive. True modesty--in anyone--always draws people, and in a submissive it can act as a magnet, drawing to oneself those individuals who delight in that trait in others, whether they share it or not. Think of it, you submissives reading this: wouldn't you rather be around a dominant who wants you to be modest, to feel less self-important and full of yourself? Wouldn't that be more of a turn-on, wouldn't it get you more into that subservient "devoted slave" headspace that is such a delight to experience? Paradoxically, modesty requires a very high degree of self-confidence (quiet self-confidence) to do right, and by right, I mean, of course, without a trace of falseness. (I believe it works this way because a lot of the more gratuitous strutting or "look-at-meism" emerges out of insecurity. People who don't feel good about themselves tend to proclaim their goodness to the world in tones whose attention-grabbing stridency is in inverse proportion to their sense of inner self-worth.) Modesty is a subtle thing, very difficult to finesse, but well worth the trouble a submissive puts into acquiring it, as it can take you to that indescribably intense "you!--not me!" place that's so pervertedly and perversely satisfying.

Dickens's women exhibit great patience under the most trying conditions. Agnes waits and watches quietly while the man she has loved since childhood becomes infatuated with a ditzy blonde and marries her. She even befriends her rival, Dora, and treats her with great kindness when the oblivious Copperfield brings his gorgeous young wife home to live with them. Little Dorrit waits patiently for her father to change. If only he'd get some money, he'd regain his self-respect, she thinks, as she supports him and the rest of her good-for-nothing family as best she can. And then, when he does come into money and turns overnight into an overbearing pig who crushes her tiny dreams for her own happiness to dust, she patiently accepts that as well. These good women suffer greatly and in silence and apparent tranquility (typically, nobody around them guesses the torments in their hearts), but Dickens makes it clear that they are not on martyr trips, that they are not addicted to suffering for suffering's sake. Each one has chosen to wait out her difficulties patiently and with no hope that these will get better rather than speak about them or try to change the situation in any way because, under the complex interpersonal circumstances Dickens places them in, this is the right thing to do, the thing that provides the most good for the people that they care about.

Patience, which could be defined in the Dickens context as resignation to or acceptance of one's lot, is important to submission in two ways. First, a submissive in an absolute or near-absolute power exchange, who has agreed to submit to his or her master's wishes at any time, whatever they may be, is subject to hundreds of situations each week that try her patience and thwart her will. In these situations, when you are interrupted from some activity you found important or engrossing, when you are asked to do things you just don't want to do at that moment, or when you are denied something that you think is extremely important to you, or it is postponed, you must develop an ability to let go, to relinquish your desire not to do this thing or to do some other thing, and simply obey, ideally with cheerfulness, or at minimum without resistance or ill-will. When you do this successfully, perhaps not all the time but slowly increasing the amount of time during which you let go gracefully, you develop patience.

Secondly, there is a peculiar sort of resignation that goes with an ability to accept a lot of pain when one isn't a deep masochist or able to fly off on Endorphin Airways all the time. This resignation is akin to patience in that it is an acceptance of the inevitable. It doesn't make the pain magically disappear or feel any better, but it does make your head more capable of accepting torture without resistance and without ill-feelings toward your dominant later. If you can get to that place in your mind where you resign yourself to what is to come, no matter how much you dread it or dislike it, you may find that while those elusive endorphins still don't kick in and while the pain still really, really hurts, the whole situation becomes erotically charged for you. I have found that an awareness of my own resignation, in the face of torture or other onerous acts, really turns me on.

OK folks. I've had it with this message. It's getting way too long. I've got a lot more to say and many more Dickens' heroine qualities to write about, but rather than glump them all together in one monster message, I'm going to try something new (or old) and do a Dickens on you: I'm going to serialize this message. Part Two will be along shortly...I hope.