earticle

영어

This paper aims to examine the social features of Dombey’s pride in Dombey and Son. His pride has the following characteristics: the reduction of the human relations to business transactions, an absolute belief in the power of money, the utilitarian way of thought, and the reified consciousness, all of which comprise the driving force and the dominating principle of the capitalist modernity. Dombey’s life enclosed in the “cold hard armour” of pride is blank to the tender feeling and the gentle sympathy. It is the fundamental irony of this work that Paul, the focal point of all Dombey’s ambition and design, suffers death by Dombey’s own pride, the ethos of which first deprives Paul of his mother, then of his wet nurse, the so-called “second deprivation,” and finally, drives him to death. Another ironical nature of Dombey’s pride lies in that his supposed negation of change with relation to the private sphere is antithetical to his representative character of the social change related to the public sphere. The irony of Dombey’s pride leads to the duality of the modernity, which is symbolized by the railway as the “life’s blood” and the “triumphant monster, Death” as well.