Since becoming a mother of two children, I have paid special attention to the role of “mother”. Recently, I re-read the novel David Copperfield, written by the British novelist Charles Dickens in the mid-19th century. In addition to re-reading the British social life at that time, I read the different personalities of various characters. One new gain is a new understanding of the character of Clara.
Clara had been a beautiful, tender, affectionate, and pitiful woman, but now she was not a proper mother. She had love for her children, but for a mother, especially a mother who lost a child, love is not enough.
She lacks intelligence, tenacity and, above all, growing awareness. Most of the tragedy of David Copperfield’s childhood is due to this mother, not because she remarried, but because her mind has been stuck in the youth – simple, childish, a little capricious, meet things to hide, lack of responsibility.
David’s mother, Clara, was an orphan and worked as a childminder for a family. David’s father frequented the house, and soon after they met, David’s father, who was twice Clara’s age, proposed to her, and they were married.
David was born six months after his father died, when his mother was not yet twenty. In addition to leaving Clara a fixed estate and a loyal servant, Pegtie, David’s father also bought an annuity, part of which Clara inherited. Clara received almost a hundred and five pounds a year.
But after her husband’s death, Clara was still worried and sad every day. She did not know whether she could get through the difficulties in front of her. She relied on the care of her servant Peggerty and had no idea or plan for how to raise the children in the future.
The arrival of David’s aunt Trowood Betsy had given her some illusion of dependence. But Betsy liked girls and left when David’s mother Clara gave birth to a boy.
After giving birth to David, Clara grew up with the help of Peggerty with David Copperfield, but Clara, a former childminder, was less than qualified as a mother.
When she told him the story of Lazarus’s death and resurrection, he was so frightened that he dared not go to sleep. A little older, Clara goes out on a date, asks Peggerty to keep David company, and in return, allows David to stay up late at night… These are all details. The biggest harm to David is that Clara fell in love with him. Because of Clara’s immaturity, the life of mother and son began to fall into despair.
We try to analyze the mistakes Clara makes step by step because of her immaturity, from love to marriage to illness and death.
First, Clara has a new relationship and is almost married. Instead of negotiating with David, now five or six, to let the child adjust to the new member of the family, she chooses to hide and deceive the child.
As a mother in her early 20s, Clara could have loved and married again. Clara had not thought about how to tell her son about her mother’s love affair. She was immersed in her own love affair. She might think that David was a child and could deceive him and coax him.
So she went on a date and told David to go to a neighbor’s house for a late-night snack. When his mother came back, David found that with her was a man with fine black hair and a black beard, who had accompanied them from church the previous Sunday.
She had met her mother’s boyfriend several times but did not know his name, and apparently she had not introduced him to him. Clara must have thought of David as a thoughtless child.
The intensity and manner in which a child acquires an impression does not depend on an objective fact or situation, but on the way in which the child views and judges the fact or situation.
David Copperfield had not yet been able to recognize that a mother should have a life and remarry. He looked only at the facts of the moment and the circumstances of the moment.
It is because of Clara’s concealment and lack of guidance that David Copperfield sees Murdstone, Clara’s future husband and the creator of David’s nightmares, as his enemy from the very beginning.
Stone started out wanting or pretending to be friendly with David.
He patted me on the head, but, somehow, I disliked him and his deep voice, and I envied his hand touching my mother’s when it touched me — as it did. I tried to push it away.
How normal it is for a child, who belongs to his mother, to feel like someone else has taken him away, and it’s reasonable to be hostile. It was time for Clara to formally introduce Murdstone to David and tell him that he would soon have someone else to love him.
But Clara didn’t. She just stopped David. This puts the child slightly off balance, feeling that his mother is scolding him for a stranger. From that moment it was evident that the harmony of their new family had not been established. David Copperfield identified Murdstone as a nuisance.
Because of Clara’s improper handling, the initial lack of communication foreshadowed the tragedy that followed.
Then Clara hands David Copperfield over directly to Mourdstone to take him out to meet friends. There is no mention of them taking the children out together, but rather Murdstone takes them to his friends, who laugh at David, who doesn’t quite understand. But it was clear that David was no better impressed with Morderstone this time.
Even before Clara’s remarriage, Murdstone and David had communicated effectively, and Murdstone had not intended to please the child with his actions. With the baby still unknown, Clara decides to get married and keep it a secret from David.
Clara then remarried without David’s knowledge, and two months later, the truth was told not by herself but by Peggerty. She went down the wrong path and didn’t show the maturity a mother should have.
Clara let Peghetti take David back to his brother’s house for two months. When David returned home, his mother did not come out to meet him. For a young child, at this moment, he had a premonition that something bad was going to happen. He thought his mother was dead.
But Clara was sitting in the living room with her new husband. Her new husband, Mr. Goldstone, was a particularly manipulative man. But Clara was not mature enough to allow him to manipulate her into not welcoming her child. At the beginning of her marriage, Clara had an inheritance from her late husband, and her new husband was living in Clara’s house, so she could be her own master.
Clara’s innocence, naivety and kindness were used by Mr. Stone again and again without her realizing it. Then he was gradually controlled by his new husband, pushing himself and his son into the abyss.
Clara asked Peggerty to tell David the truth that she had remarried. The worst thing was that in the two months since David had been gone, Clara and her new husband had changed David’s house and added a big dog that Morderstone had brought to the yard.
David experienced the fright of a big dog barking, and his mother left her grief and lay down in her new house, wrapped herself in a corner of the sheet, and cried herself to sleep.
In the evening Clara and Peggerty came to see David. When Clara found David crying, she thought Peggerty had told David not to marry her again.
I hid my tears in my bed, and when she tried to pick me up, I pushed her away with my hands.
“It’s all your doing, Pettie, you cruel thing!” ‘said my mother.’ I know all about it. You turn my child against me, and against everyone who loves me. I wonder how you can live with yourself. What do you mean, Peggerty?”
Mother can remarry, but please properly arrange your children, first of all, before marriage to communicate with him, after marriage to keep his original living environment as much as possible, do not make too much change, not to change without his permission.
But Clara did not understand, and naively put the blame on Peggerty. This infantilism was a sign that their new family would never get along.
Clara’s biggest mistake was to leave David to her new husband to educate her without effective communication after marriage.
When Murdstone heard the noise, he first grabbed David and then continued to bewitch Clara. Clara showed her love for her new husband in front of her children.
He drew her close to him, whispered something in his ear, and kissed her. When I saw my mother’s head resting on his shoulder and her arm against his neck, I knew she had such a soft character that he could shape it into anything he wanted.
It was the most immature aspect of Clara’s character that a child could see a pattern that she did not understand at all. She could entrust her responsibilities to anyone who wished. Just as she had left the finances of the family to Murdstone’s sister, she now left David to Murdstone to educate.
It is not to say that step-family stepparents cannot participate in children’s education, but education should be conducted under the premise of full understanding and good communication. Murdstone and David clearly lack effective communication, they do not know each other, but Clara gives David to Murdstone.
He closed the door, sat down in a chair, and pulled me to stand before him, looking me in the eyes without moving. My own eyes, I felt, were equally fixed on him.
The man’s arbitrary, the child’s stubborn, now the air condenses, David said that encounter is unforgettable, indeed, the shadow of childhood is with a lifetime.
“What’s that on your face?”
“It’s mud.” I said.
Of course he knows as well as I do that my face is streaks of tears, but even if he asked me the same thing twenty times, and struck me twenty times each time, I would rather break my tender heart than tell him so.
If we ask a child why he is lazy, we should not expect him to realize that we want to know the root cause of the problem, and we should not expect a child to tell us why he is lying.
Murdstone was clearly prepared to use intimidation against the disobedient child. He told David that if he had a disobedient horse or dog, he would beat it, or even beat it to death, to make it obey.
Faced with a threat from an adult, David was clearly frightened. He washed the tears from his face under his blackmail.
“Clara, dear,” he said to my mother, after I had washed my face as he had ordered, he still took me by the arm and led me into the drawing-room, “I hope you won’t suffer any more. We’ll soon get over that childish temper.”
By this time Clara must have thought that her children had been educated by her new husband. As a mother who has been with her children for several years, she should have a thorough understanding of her children. Such a kind child, suddenly have such a change is not to find behind the reason?
“When a child’s behavior starts to deteriorate, or something new and unpleasant happens, we should pay attention not only to when the behavior starts, but also to why.” “Said Alfred Adler.
A word of encouragement and explanation, a word of pity for my youth and ignorance, a word of welcome to my home, a word of comfort to make me feel that this was still my home, would have made me not outwardly fake him, but filial to him in my heart, not hate him, but respect him.
I knew it must have been very sad for my mother to see me standing in the room, trembling and uncomfortably; A moment later, as I stole to a chair, her eyes followed me, and her expression grew more melancholy — perhaps because she did not see the free and lively steps of my childhood — but the words did not come out, and the time for them had passed.
