More interesting, undoubtedly, are the instances of the blurring of masculine and feminineafforded by the two marriages outside of Florence and Walter’s that are held up as exemplary: theToodles’ and the Toots’. In both cases there is a striking mutuality of authority. Dombey turns to Mr.Toodles to verify the terms of his contract with Polly, but Toodles’ laconic reply is simply “Polly heerd it. . . . It’s all right.” And the point is underscored:“As you appear to leave everything to her,” said Mr. Dombey, frustrated in hisintention of impressing his views still more distinctly on the husband, as the strongercharacter, “I suppose it is of no use my saying anything to you.”“Not a bit,” said Toodle. “Polly heerd it. She’s awake, Sir.” (69-70; ch. 2)
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15 Toots’ marriage to “the Nipper” similarly inverts the masculine pride of Dombeyism in several ways.Toots always defers to Susan’s judgment. As he says, “If ever the Rights of Women . . . are properlyattended to, it will be through her powerful intellect” (946; ch. 60), and one of his greatest delights in hismarriage is the succession of girls that Susan bears. “The oftener we can repeat that most extraordinarywoman,” he exclaims, “. . . the better!” (972; ch. 62). I do not mean to deny that there is at the same time plenty in this novel to make a modernreader cringe, and especially things having to do with questions of sex and of class.

We might wish bothToodles and Toots to be intellectually a little more powerful, and we might wish Polly and her husbandto be a little less humble. I really do wish that Susan had not met Florence on her return in her oldservant’s dress. But even as we cringe we ought to appreciate the point. The kind of learning that Toodles and Toots lack—think of the Charitable Grinders and Dr. Blimber’s—is better left unlearned;the reddening with which Polly says “she hoped she knew her place” (68; ch. 2) isn’t a humble blush, butan angry flush; and the Susan who puts on her old dress for Florence is thereby asserting that she’s thesame woman who, among all the characters in the novel, is the first of only two to go before Mr.Dombey and, face to face, stick it to him.

humwww.ucsc.edu/dickens/ bibliographies/dombeybiblio/EMBODY.pdf