Motifs are recurring structures, contrasts, or literary
devices that can help to develop and inform the text’s major themes.
Mothers and Mother Figures
Mothers and mother figures have an essential influence
on the identity of the characters in David Copperfield.
Almost invariably, good mother figures produce good children while
bad mothers yield sinister offspring. This moral connection between
mothers and children indicates Dickens’s belief that mothers have
an all-important role in shaping their children’s characters and
destinies.
The success of mother figures in the novel hinges on their
ability to care for their children without coddling them. Miss Betsey,
the aunt who raises David, clearly adores him but does not dote
on him. She encourages him to be strong in everything he does and
to be fair at all times. She corrects him when she thinks he is
making a mistake, as with his marriage to Dora, and her ability
to see faults in him helps him to mature into a balanced adult.
Although Miss Betsey raises David to deal with the difficulties
of the world, she does not block those hardships. Instead, she forces
David to confront them himself. In contrast, Uriah’s mother,
Mrs. Heep, dotes on her son and allows him to dominate her. As a
result, Uriah develops a vain, inflated self-regard that breeds
cruel behavior. On the whole, Dickens’s treatment of mother-child
relationships in the novel is intended to teach a lesson. He warns
mothers to love their children only in moderation and to correct
their faults while they can still be fixed.
Accented Speech
Dickens gives his characters different accents to indicate
their social class. Uriah Heep and Mr. Peggotty are two notable
examples of such characters whose speech indicates their social
standing. Uriah, in an attempt to appear poor and of good character,
consistently drops the “h” in “humble” every time a group of Mr.
Wickfield’s friends confront him. Uriah drops this accent as soon
as his fraud is revealed: he is not the urchin-child he portrays
himself to be, who grew up hard and fell into his current character
because of the cruelty of the world. Rather, Uriah is a conniving,
double-crossing social climber who views himself as superior to
the wealthy and who exploits everyone he can. Mr. Peggotty’s lower-class
accent, on the other hand, indicates genuine humility and poverty.
Dickens uses accent in both cases to advance his assertion that
class and personal integrity are unrelated and that it is misleading
to make any connection between the two.
Physical Beauty
In David Copperfield, physical beauty
corresponds to moral good. Those who are physically beautiful, like
David’s mother, are good and noble, while those who are ugly, like
Uriah Heep, Mr. Creakle, and Mr. Murdstone, are evil, violent, and
ill-tempered. Dickens suggests that internal characteristics, much
like physical appearance, cannot be disguised permanently. Rather,
circumstances will eventually reveal the moral value of characters
whose good goes unrecognized or whose evil goes unpunished. In David
Copperfield, even the most carefully buried characteristics
eventually come to light and expose elusive individuals for what
they really are. Although Steerforth, for example, initially appears
harmless but annoying, he cannot hide his true treachery for years.
In this manner, for almost all the characters in the novel, physical
beauty corresponds to personal worth.
