The Alienation Of The Characters In Charles Dickens’ Novel

Charles Dickens is a great realism writer in Britain in19century. In his writingcareer, more than30years, he has painted a broad picture of the middle of19thcentury of England. Dickens portrayed a lot of characters in his novel such as the manwho abandoned the human nature and their personality and went to be abnormal.Above all, Dickens’s pen has touched to the core problem of capitalist industrialsociety-alienation.Alienation is a fixed, standardized academic term, which is more and more usedto describe the social and the human condition. The center meaning of alienation isseparation. The alienation of man means a certain social phenomenon of man’s livingcondition, that is, the man, as a whole existence in natural-social system, whosehuman nature’s internal unity was damaged, and the the integrity of the existence wasgoing to be separated and missed little by little in reality.In Dickens’ novels, the character’s alienation mainly displays in two attributes:nature and social. The natural attribute is bestial nature inhibits the human nature,physical property suppresses the human nature and extreme rationality depressiveshuman nature. While the social attribute mainly displays in the alienation ofrelationships between man and man, and also man and society. In the way of seekingfor the progress, human beings, at the same time, created a lot of material wealth andspiritual wealth, such as politics, law, education system, and all kinds of political andeconomic theory and scientific rationality, etc, which in turn to be the power rulingand persecuting others, and resulted to destroy the integrity of human’s existence andled to the distortion and deformity of the human nature.Dickens put many kinds of art gimmicks such as materialization, exaggeration,repeat, contrast, perspective-changing together to vividly demonstrate the feature ofhuman’s alienation-depressive and abnormal-under the control of Material desire,which highlighted the theme of man to be beast, article and machine. Although theway to demonstrate the alienation of characters is a little bit simple, Dickens did havethe sharp and former eyesight, since living in the early stages of the development ofmodern capitalism, he has been keenly aware that the expansion of tool and technicrationality, which the extreme development of the modern industrial society destiningto bring about will reject and press the human rationality, destroy the inner unity ofhuman nature and the integrity of human’s existence, all of which will result to hinderthe healthy development of human nature, and then caused the distortion andalienation of human beings. The close attention and exploration to human, and the anxiety to people’s statement and existence from Dickens is still far reaching andsignificant nowadays.