An Analysis Of Spaces In Little Dorrit

Charles Dickens, a great critical realist of 19th century Britain, is one of the greatest novelists in English literature. Little Dorrit, a novel published serially between 1855 and 1857, is the most significant work among Dickens’s great later works. At that time, this novel was very popular by the people in Britain and Dickens also likes it very much. The domestic scholars and critics pay more attention to studying Dickens’works from all kinds of perspectives all the time. In China, there are a great many of researches of Dickens’works. However, compared with other works of Dickens, the researches of the novel Little Dorrit are very few and Chinese people know very little about the novel. Although researches of Little Dorrit are curiously increasing in recent years, research perspectives of the novel are still very few.This thesis will apply Lefebvre’s space theory to concluding and extracting the typical spaces of the literary text of Little Dorrit. It will be divided into three spaces:physical space, social space and mental space, which will be respectively analyzed in detail and then be digged into the inner connotation. This paper will represent sharp contrast between slum area and society, living space of lower class and the living space of society, and then analyze symbolic meaning of architectures and landscapes. It will interpret the text and reveal complex relation between space and power to represent conflict and resistance between space of state power and space of the poor with Foucault’s space-power theory. It will reveal changes of social structure of Victorian Britain by analysis of change of physical space and explore the underlying reasons of them. Little Dorrit, the heroine of the novel, has changes in her mental space with shifts of her residence. Mental space represents the individual spirit, reflects the reality and exposes individual thinking, ideologies and emotions. This paper will analyze discipline and punish of invisible power of prison space to reveal its negative effect on individual mind by means of Foucault’s space theory.This thesis attempts to show society, culture, politics, ideologies and characters of Victorian Britain the novel embodies through interpretation of space of the novel Little Dorrit. It discusses and analyzes the literary text deepry and attempt to explore writer’s intention and values from perspective of spatial criticism.