Destabilizing Happily Ever After: Dickens’s Conflation of the False Bride/Fairy Bride Motifs in David Copperfield

Abstract

In Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield (1849-50), naïve David calls his wedding to Dora Spenlow a “fairy marriage” (531), apparently using the term in the same sense that “fairy-tale wedding” is popularly used today: to describe the romantic obtainment of happily-ever-after between a bride and groom, characterized by a sense of the fantastic or unreal. As a child, Dickens too had been seduced by a dream of fairy-tale ecstasy: in a nostalgic description of finding “Little Red Riding Hood” on his Christmas Tree, he reminisces, “She was my first love. I felt that if I could have married Little Red Riding-Hood, I should have known perfect bliss. But,” he continues significantly, “it was not to be” (Christmas 291). While David is a blind young dreamer, Dickens the adult writer is made sadder and wiser not only by his deeper understanding of fairy tales but also by his own life experience. Dickens knew by then that traditional fairy tales don’t always end on the wedding day—often as not, they go on to relate the continued torments visited upon the bride and groom by nightmarish in-laws, or by one another—and this knowledge runs through the heart of the novel. The truth is, as Kelly Hager explains, “Dickens’s most autobiographical novel is concerned in a multiplicity of ways with the institution of marriage and the miseries it causes” (990). Dickens’s use of the phrase reveals his understanding of its true implications: “fairy marriages” are as likely to result in misery as in happiness.