The Victorian Freak Show: The Significance of Disability and Phy ...

itself, though it retained some of the more positive potential that Bakhtin celebrates in the pre-modern carnival. For Stallybrass and White:

Such a conflicted Victorian response to the grotesque helps cast images of physical difference as part of a dialogic negotiation, rather than as a rigidly transgressive or norm-affirming force.

Pam Morris argues that Dickens' fiction is best understood through Bakhtin's dialogic concept of the novel. In her reading of Dickens' presentation of social class, Morris suggests, “Dickens's novels are discursive events, reactive and dialogic. Words in his texts are saturated with the shifting power struggles active within the heteroglossia of the era” (39). Morris argues that Dickens' fiction, peopled with characters from all social strata and shaped by the unresolved arguments and concerns of Victorian popular culture, transcends the rhetoric of an individual author. His novels thus “need to be repositioned as…the multi-vocal dialogue, the heteroglossia, of active social intercourse” (Morris 2). She adds that, in a work of Dickens, subplots and minor characters alter the ideological impact of the text and “may even shift the focus of the novel centrifugally away from the center towards the margin” (11). As a result, “contending voices, materializing hegemonic and non-hegemonic marginalized viewpoints, are brought into a dialogic relation in Dickens's texts, and thus articulate those oppositional voices and ideological antagonisms of the era, silenced within dominant discourse” (Morris 10). We cannot take the ideological implications of a main character or main storyline at face value in Dickens' novels, as this “dialogism extends, also, into the imaginary ‘solutions’ the narratives construct for the social problems inscribed within them, so that the resolution of the main story is often implicitly challenged by values asserted in the subtext” (Morris 10).