she tries to comfort her father after Paul's death and is sternly rejected. We are continually assured, in this scene, of the glowing love within her breast; sent back to her room she embraces the dog, Diogenes, and sobs out, "Oh, Di! Oh, dear Di! Love me for his sake!" Presumably she means for Paul's sake, since that is what her father will not do; but it would fit equally well to read it as "love me for Papa's sake, since he will not love me himself." The moral situation here is very plain: Florence loves unconditionally and will not accept, or even see, that her father does not deserve her loveif she accepted that, the love would not be unconditional. But Dickens of course knows that he does not deserve it and tells us so insistently. This means that there is a gap between Florence's view of Mr. Dombey and the author's, and he keeps singing her praises for it. She is praised, in short, for her imperceptiveness.
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The figure of the holy fool is not sentimental, because it embodies a paradox: to be foolish in this world can be wisdom by God's standard. But Florence is not a holy fool, because we are not meant to laugh at her or find her ridiculous. Although she fails to see what is in front of her eyes, she receives only credit for that. This is clear if we compare her to the two figures who act as foils to her selfless love, Susan and Toots. Susan Nipper is much more clear-sighted, and knows that Mr. Dombey does not deserve Florence's loveand tells him so. The scene (chapter 44) could easily be made pathetic (for it does cost Susan her place), but it is in fact comic ("I may not be a Peacock; but I have my eyes"), and so there is no danger of Susan displacing Florence as the heroine. Toots, on the other hand, is the holy fool, constantly ridiculous and selflessly devoted. His worship of Florence is expressed in a parody of romantic love: "Miss Dombey, I really amm in that state of adoration of you that I don't know what to do with myself. If it wasn't at the corner of the Square at present, I should go down on my knees" (chapter 41). But this devotion is quite compatible with his marrying Susan, as a kind of demonstration that, though it is a sublimation of sexual feeling, the sexual element is not to be taken seriously. Susan and Toots represent two ways of avoiding sentimentality, and Florence is caught between them.
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The sentimentalist, we can say, is blinded by his tears, so that he can share Florence's imperceptiveness, even when he knows the truth. If we take the term "blinded" literally, we shall then be using the mimetic criterion invoked by all three of our twentieth century critics, that sentimentality misrepresents reality: a child's death, even when it is not of meningitis,
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