An Almost Angry Sorrow: Cartesian Envy in Dombey and Son

Dombey and Son is often interpreted as a novel about pride. However, pride may be merely a corollary of the envy that is arguably more significant in the novel. Nearly every event in Dombey and Son is motivated by one character’s desire to disturb another in the enjoyment of something the other has. The envy of Dombey and Son, furthermore, is distinctly modern, adhering to a model established in René Descartes’s 1649 The Passions of the Soul. This article argues that while Descartes cannot be considered a direct influence on Dickens’s novel, the conception of envy in each depends on subjects’ evaluating themselves in relation to others by calculating their deservingness of socially conferred benefits against their conception of others’ worthiness of them. In both texts, envy’s physical origins establish it as a state of being rather than a response to circumstances, and in both envy is considered universal and not in itself a question of morality. In Dombey, Cartesian envy serves capital by establishing and maintaining a hierarchy of merit, and social surveillance by installing the mechanism of this hierarchization within each individual. The article discovers elements of envy even in the youthful protagonist’s striving for affection and belonging.