air, realizing that he is both better and worse than he presents himself. When he claims that he is a man to be doubted because he is a bad idle dog, she replies "Then why don't you reform and be a good dog." Her directness when talking to adults could remind us of Paul, but although, like him, she is disconcerting to talk to, it is not, in her case, the sharpness of innocence.
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And second, there is the liminality. She belongs not to childhood but to a borderline state that overlaps with adulthood. "Child or woman?" asks Miss Abbey in a whisper when she first meets her. Jenny is thirteen, perhaps fourteen, no older (after all) than Little Nell, but there is never any doubt that Nell is a child. In Jenny's case, however, almost every detail suggests ambivalence. She is a doll's dressmaker. (Those who make dolls for sale usually buy the wax or china figure that they then clothe, so the expression is accurate, but it also holds the suggestion of not being a real dressmaker, of having and not having a real adult trade.) Then there is her handling of her father. She is not the only Dickens heroine who mothers her father (there are Agnes Wickfield, Amy Dorrit, and, of course, Nell looking after her grandfather); but Jenny is the only one who has devised a myth to draw attention to the reversal. She speaks to him as if she were the one in authority (to which he submits), and even reproaches herself after his death for not bringing him up properly.
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Then there is the obliquity of her name: she is really called Fanny Cleaver but is known as Jenny Wren by her own choice, and even prints this on her cards. "Miss Jenny Wren," the card runs, "'Dolls' Dressmaker. Dolls attended at their own residences." It is a parody of a visiting card. And when she sings at her work, "trolling in a small sweet voice a mournful little song, which might have been the song of the doll she was dressing, bemoaning the brittleness and meltability of wax" (4:8), it is hard to say if this is pathos, or a parody of pathos. (That is after all common enough in Dickens. The comic parts of
Nicolas Nickleby
read very like parodies of its melodrama and pathos, and Alexander Welsh has discovered in Mrs. Gamp an uproarious parody of most of the commonplaces of pathetic death.)
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Jenny's song belongs both to real humanity and to the doll world: the pathos is a joke (not flesh but wax is grass) without ceasing to be sad. And her appearance is equally ambivalent: she is small and looks like a child, but she is small because crippled, and she has an abundance of long golden hair, as if to cast a glow of sexuality over the shrunken, virginal, undeveloped body. This is taken up in the imaginary figure of "Him," the fantasy
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