In Victorian male fiction hair occurs as a recurrent synecdoche, as a part of the object which represented female sexuality. Women’s hair related problems were seen as indicators of pathologies challenging not only domestic relationships but also social order and political stability. Hair became a criterion of classification, and hairiness suggested sexual abnormality, madness and weak-mindedness, a belief also supported and promoted by scientists. By a semiotic approach to images of female hair in Charles Dickens’s novel “Dombey and Son”, this paper aims at identifying the way in which women’s hair representations functioned as indicators for the (de)stabilization of patriarchal power in the Victorian age.