This post is contributed by AV Nordgren (they/them), a last-semester graduate student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign studying Library & Information Science with a focus on archives and special collections.

Is Little Dorrit’s Miss Wade a lesbian? Or is reading her as such merely wishful thinking? In the years since the novel was written, her character has often been interpreted in a sapphic manner. One such example of this is Annamarie Jagose’s 2002 text, in which she calls Miss Wade’s homosexuality “an open secret” (Jagose 42). Still, she is not the only reader who has made this initial interpretation, a gut reaction of sorts for many of us. Miss Wade’s lesbianism, of course, is never made explicit within the novel and therefore never confirmed. However, everything exists within a context. At the time Dickens was writing Little Dorrit, it would not have been safe for him to outwardly depict Miss Wade or any other character as homosexual. For this reason, the evidence we find exists beneath a veil of subtext because, at the time, there was no other choice. Queerness, in every form, was seen as a violation. Much of this subtext and its implications are thoroughly explored by Holly Furneaux in her 2009 book Queer Dickens. And yet, despite the fact that this queerness exists only in a glance, a sapphic interpretation of Little Dorrit still finds a sound basis in the novel itself.

In this little side story we see play out, Miss Wade is shown to seduce Harriet “Tattycoram” Beadle – the adopted companion to the beloved “Pet” Meagles. Eventually, Harriet runs away to be with Miss Wade; Mr. Meagles and Arthur Clennam pursue her in an attempt to convince her to return. It is here that we find the most explicitly sapphic scene of Dickens’s body of work: “…that lady’s influence over you,” Mr. Meagles says to Harriet, “is founded in passion fiercer than yours and temper more violent than yours. What can you two be together? What can come of it?” (Dickens 349). There’s something in those two questions he shoots at her, something with great resonance. To be queer today is not easy. Truthfully, it has never been easy to be queer. There’s always been repercussions for deviating from what Audre Lorde once called the “mythic norm”– this constructed sense of normality that is impossible to ever really achieve but is how we structure power in a distinctly heteronormative and cisnormative society (Lorde 116).

For many of us, marginalization is part of our daily lives. When Mr. Meagles looks at Miss Wade and says, “I don’t know what you are, but you don’t hide, can’t hide, what dark spirit you have within you”, he brings her queerness into recognition (Dickens 351). While she is still represented in the text as a temptress figure, the evil seductress of poor Tattycoram, Miss Wade has a sense of agency nevertheless.

But why does this matter? After all, not everyone reads Miss Wade as a sapphic character. But the very fact that she can be read in this manner brings power to marginalized readers. Interpretation matters, especially and uniquely to readers who are marginalized in some way. In an increasingly digital world, we’ve used the internet to create a culture of fans. Fandom has become a sense of identity, of community, and of connection. More importantly, fandom has become a way to advocate for ourselves and for our own representation.

Fandoms do this in several ways. One way which comes to mind are the petitions for canceled shows such as Our Flag Means Death and Shadow & Bone going around online at the moment in an attempt to convince studios to reverse their decisions. Another manner of fan advocacy is something that was first discussed by Roland Barthes in 1967: “The Death of the Author.” This refers to the removal of an author’s authority over their work and the claiming of the texts for the fans themselves. In some cases, this is a deliberate act, such as in the case of JK Rowling, who is the author of the Harry Potter series. Rowling is still alive and well, but over the past several years, some of her statements have caused large numbers of her fans to turn their backs on her. The ones that do still consume Harry Potter do so with an acknowledgement of its shortcomings and far more mindfulness.

With authors such as Dickens, “The Death of the Author” does take place but in a more natural sense because, of course, in Dickens’s case, the author is literally dead. With Dickens, we cannot determine what his intention is. We will never know if he intended Miss Wade to be considered a lesbian and Harriet to be her girlfriend. These are things we do not have answers to and never will because he’s not here to answer them. However, we can find our own answers and those answers have power, even if their origin is not clearly located in the canonical text.

The stripping away of an author’s authority over their own work, while controversial at best, is inherently compelling. As the author dies–whether this death be literal or figurative–we bear witness to the “birth of the Reader” (Barthes 130). In other words, fandom gains creative control. Partially, this is due to what scholars like Ebony Elizabeth Thomas call “restorying.” It’s a nuanced concept, but at its core, restorying is about how fandom and the fans that make them “read and write themselves into stories that have heretofore marginalized, silenced, and excluded them” (Thomas & Stornaiuolo 317). Reading Miss Wade as a lesbian character then, is not a matter of circumstance. Instead, it becomes an active choice. By choosing to accept this reading into our own understanding of Dickens, we are choosing, ultimately, a story of rebellion; we are choosing to read and interpret as an act of protest.

What’s important to acknowledge is that Miss Wade is not the gold standard of lesbian representation. While the text itself is generally neutral on the subject, Mr. Meagles does, in fact, paint her as a sinister seductress figure when he says things such as: “If it should happen that you are a woman, who, from whatever cause, has a perverted delight in making a sister-woman as wretched as she is (I am old enough to have heard of such), I warn her against you, and I warn you against yourself” (Dickens 351). Here, he demeans her. What sticks out, most of all, is the word “perverted.” For centuries, queer people have been called perverts, deviants, sinners. For centuries, we have survived nonetheless. Mr. Meagles may call Miss Wade’s act of sapphic desire “perverted” and warn her and Harriet both against their ill ways, but it does not change the fact that they exist. They still exist and that means something.

Even so, there are certain readers who argue that Miss Wade is actually problematic representation if she is representation at all and, for this reason, should not be read as a lesbian character. In a 2014 text, Shale Preston posited that “…Dickens’s pathological depiction of Miss Wade is far from prestigious and therefore far from worth foregrounding”, suggesting that Miss Wade is coded in a sapphic manner but that her lesbianism and sexual variance is part of what steeps her in villainy (Preston 223). However, the fact remains that so many of us who are queer read Miss Wade and her relationship with Harriet in a different manner. Instead of seductress, she becomes savior. Instead of corruptor, she becomes enlightener. The relationship between Miss Wade and Harriet Beadle mirrors what so many queer people know even now and, for that reason, we find power in it.

Works Cited

Barthes, Roland, and Seán Burke. “The Death of the Author.” Authorship: From Plato to the Postmodern: A Reader, Edinburgh University Press, 1995, pp. 125–30. JSTOR.

Dickens, Charles. Little Dorrit. New York, Penguin Books, 2003.

Lorde, Audre. “Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Redefining Difference.” Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches, Crossing Press, 2007, pp. 114-123.

Jagose, Annamarie. “Remembering Miss Wade: Little Dorrit and the Historicizing of Female Perversity.” Inconsequence: Lesbian Representation and the Logic of Sexual Sequence, Ithaca, NY, Cornell University Press, 2002, pp. 37-56.

Preston, Shale. “Miss Wade’s Torment: the Perverse Construction of Same-Sex Desire in Little Dorrit.” Changing the Victorian Subject, Adelaide, Australia, The University of Adelaide Press, 2014, pp. 217-240.

Thomas, Ebony Elizabeth, and Amy Stornaiouolo. “Restorying the Self: Bending Toward Textual Justice.” Harvard Educational Review, vol. 86, no. 3, Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard Educational Publishing Group, Fall 2016, pp. 313-338.