Supposing Bleak House

John O. Jordan

• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9780813930749
• eBook ISBN: 9780813930923
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Supposing "Bleak House" is an extended meditation on what many consider to be Dickens's and nineteenth-century England's greatest work of narrative fiction. Focusing on the novel's retrospective narrator, whom he identifies as Esther Woodcourt in order to distinguish her from her younger, unmarried self, John Jordan offers provocative new readings of the novel's narrative structure, its illustrations, its multiple and indeterminate endings, the role of its famous detective, Inspector Bucket, its many ghosts, and its relation to key events in Dickens's life during the years 1850 to 1853.

Jordan draws on insights from narratology and psychoanalysis in order to explore multiple dimensions of Esther's complex subjectivity and fractured narrative voice. His conclusion considers Bleak House as a national allegory, situating it in the context of the troubled decade of the 1840s and in relation to Dickens's seldom-studied A Child's History of England (written during the same years as his great novel) and to Jacques Derrida's Specters of Marx.Supposing "Bleak House" claims Dickens as a powerful investigator of the unconscious mind and as a "popular" novelist deeply committed to social justice and a politics of inclusiveness.

Victorian Literature and Culture Series

1

VOICE

I TOO HAVE A GREAT DEAL OF DIFFICULTY IN BEGINNING TO write my portion of these pages. I know that I find Bleak House to be the most powerful of all of Dickens's novels, and yet I fear that I will never be able to explain adequately to anyone else or to myself why it exerts such a strong hold over me. I know that I have been reading Bleak House for nearly forty years and that each time I reach the point where Esther discovers what she has not quite yet allowed herself to realize is her mother's body lying outside the miserable graveyard, each time she lifts the heavy head, puts the long dank hair aside, turns the face, and recognizes that “it was my mother, cold and dead,” I weep. I weep in part because this scene vividly evokes the memory of my own mother's death. I weep also because the words of disavowal that Esther uses to fend off the terrible knowledge—calling the female figure before her “the mother of the dead child,” words at once mistaken and yet truer than she knows—these words resonate closely with certain crucial facts of my mother's life (and hence of my own), the loss of her first-born child (my older brother) at the age of two and a half, and her death thirty-six years later only one day before the anniversary of that great sadness.

I weep in addition, of course, because the simple and yet chilling words with which chapter 59 comes to a close are so magnificently orchestrated, the narrative voice so powerful and pure. Dickens, or rather Esther—for it is to her that I wish to credit the writing in this and the other chapters that she narrates—slows down the action of discovery into its component parts, each within a separate clause, forcing the reader to experience syntactically the recognition that she at once resists and, unconsciously and in retrospect, knows to be inevitable. After so many chapters, and so many words, the stark monosyllables—“long dank hair,” “turned the face,” “cold and dead”—strike with unusual force. One of the finest things in all of Dickens, this chapter ending (which also ends the penultimate monthly number) is the thematic and emotional climax of the novel. It not only brings to an end the hallucinatory chase sequence involving Esther and Detective Bucket that occupies most of monthly numbers 17 and 18; it also provides closure of a sort to three important and related strands in Esther's inner journey: her quest for a stable, coherent self, for reunion with her mother, and for understanding of the mystery of her origins. What it does for her as narrator, what it omits and leaves unresolved, I shall have more to say about later in this essay.

The difficulty I experience in writing about Bleak House derives not only from my personal associations to the novel or from the worry that I will be unable to convey the special feelings that reading it awakens in me. The difficulty derives equally from my awareness of the novel's critical history and my concern, after so many other critics have written so well about it, that I have little new to add. The novel's critical history weighs all the more heavily upon me when I recall the leading role that friends and colleagues in the University of California Dickens Project have played in contributing to it, from Robert Newsom's pathbreaking 1977 monograph to the excellent subsequent discussions by Lawrence Frank, Albert D. Hutter, Fred Kaplan, Helena Michie, Hilary Schor, Audrey Jaffe, Barbara Gottfried, Marcia Goodman, John Glavin, Garrett Stewart, Gordon Bigelow, James Buzard, Richard L. Stein, Robert Patten, Robert Tracy, Sally Ledger, and many others.¹

The reading of Bleak House that most closely parallels my own and that I currently hold in highest esteem is the chapter that another friend, Carolyn Dever, devotes to the novel in her excellent study Death and the Mother from Dickens to Freud. Like Dever, my interest in the novel focuses chiefly on the Esther narrative and on the melancholy fascination with the mother that lies at the heart of Esther's autobiographical account. Like Dever, I find that in many ways the novel anticipates psychoanalytic explanations of the formation of subjectivity and that it is usefully read alongside and through the lens of psychoanalytic theory.² Dever writes eloquently of the ways in which Esther's ambivalent search for the mother structures her autobiography and produces uncanny displacements and repetitions in her narrative. She tracks with exceptional acuteness the recurring fantasies of dead mother and dead child that haunt Esther's imagination and that establish her as “a ghostly presence, a living absence, within her own autobiography.”³ She gives particularly fine readings of Esther's relationship with her doll and of the painful reunion scene between Esther and Lady Dedlock in chapter 36, showing how Esther in this scene is forced to acquiesce in her own abandonment by a mother who no sooner reveals herself as living than she commands her daughter to “evermore consider her as dead.”⁴ Although “not technically rejected here,” Dever writes, “[Esther] has had rejection dictated to her.”⁵ In effect, the scene of reunion reenacts the original trauma of birth and maternal abandonment, once again leaving mother and daughter symbolically dead to each other and yet condemned to remain alive, only this time with more certain evidence of the mother's now conscious and deliberate betrayal.

My reading of the novel differs from that of Dever not so much in the way we view Esther's character and psychology as in the greater emphasis I give to questions of voice and temporality in her narrative. My focus is on Esther as narrator and what it means for her to tell the story of her life, looking back on it as a married woman from the perspective of seven years. At the risk of oversimplifying, I might say that I am more interested in Esther Woodcourt than in Esther Summerson, although this distinction overlooks the confusion of subject positions that results from her use of the first-person pronoun together with past-tense verbs that lack temporal specificity. The pronoun “I” and even the proper name “Esther” are ambiguous. They can refer either to Esther the character at different points in her life or to the Esther who writes her “portion of these pages”—or sometimes to all of these. The signifiers slide; utterance and enunciation blur, merging past and present selves in ways that often render the distinction impossible.⁶

Esther's account in chapter 18 of seeing Lady Dedlock in the church is a good example of how this blurring occurs. It is an uncanny moment—not the first that Esther records, but one of the most important. After describing the unsettling effect that the sight of Lady Dedlock's face had upon her, she writes, “I—I, little Esther Summerson, the child who lived a life apart, and on whose birthday there was no rejoicing—seemed to arise before my own eyes, evoked out of the past by some power in this fashionable lady” (292). What bears emphasizing here is the way in which three distinct times and three separate selves converge in the space of only a few words: the Esther who saw Lady Dedlock in the church, the memory of a younger self that emerged spontaneously at that time, but also the Esther who, in writing about this moment, reexperiences it in the present. The double (and italicized) pronouns, together with the proper name, delineate, at the same time that they conflate, these three identities, anticipating Jo's astonished question in chapter 31 (in a very different context): “Is there three of ’em then?” (493).

The structure of repetition that characterizes Esther's narrative and that produces so many uncanny moments in her text derives from two main sources. In its simplest form it is a result of the fact that she writes in the past tense. “Narrative,” writes Peter Brooks, “always makes the implicit claim to be in a state of repetition, as a going over again of a ground already covered: a sju

et repeating the fabula, as the detective retraces the tracks of the criminal.”⁷ Retrospective narration necessarily involves discursive repetition, but retrospection also has other potentially interesting consequences. Most notably, for my purposes, it entails foreknowledge on the part of the retrospective narrator of as yet unnarrated events. In Bleak House, this means that Esther Woodcourt knows from the beginning everything that will happen to Esther Summerson. It means that she knows and remembers the reunion scene narrated in chapter 36, even as she begins to write, and it means that she always sees the corpse of the dead mother waiting for her at the end of her journey through the stormy night. The foreknowledge that results from narrative hindsight at times disrupts Esther's linear presentation of her story, producing detemporalized, associative connections in which the memory of events that remain to be told impinges on the present moment of her narrating. The result is a complex layering of temporalities that adds to the uncanny effect of the narrative as a whole.⁸

To say that Esther already knows the story of her past and repeats it discursively in her narrative, while accurate, does not give a complete picture of her role as narrator. There are things about her past that Esther knows but does not understand; there are things she is unaware that she knows and that she is therefore incapable of telling; and there are things that she knows but does not want to know. In a sense, then, we can say that her story is still to a great extent unknown to her. In retelling it, she is in effect reexperiencing it as she writes, and this reexperience has the potential to shed new light, for her as well as for the reader, on events that have already happened. Part of Esther's goal in writing is thus to understand not the facts of her life but their meaning. To adopt Brooks's metaphor, we might say that Esther here is the detective of her own life, sifting and interpreting her past for clues that will help her better to understand and come to terms with it in the present. At the same time, some of the knowledge that she acquires by writing about herself and some of the memories that she reawakens in going back over the past are painful to her, and she often tries to avoid thinking about them, shaking her mental keys and taking herself dutifully to task with the familiar refrain “Esther, Esther, Esther.”⁹ If Esther is a detective, she is often a reluctant one.

Esther's efforts to resist painful knowledge about herself do not always succeed, however, and it is the return of these thoughts, often against her will, that is the second main source of repetition in her narrative. Many of the uncanny repetitions in Esther's narrative arise out of her unconscious mind and derive from the pressure of forgotten or half-remembered events on her present awareness. As both character and narrator, she is haunted by an upsurge of strange, unbidden memories that take her back again and again to the earliest moments of her life. Associated with her doll, her godmother, and especially her mother's face (all versions perhaps of the same lost original), these memory fragments cluster around an experience that she can never consciously recall but about which she has many fears, doubts, and fantasies: the moment of her birth. Esther reports that she first began to wonder about the circumstances of her birth when, as a young girl, she realized that there was no rejoicing at home and no holiday at school on her birthday. She writes that on one particularly melancholy recurrence of that day she broke down in tears and asked her godmother, “Did mama die on my birthday?” (30). Thus, from early on, Esther imagines her birthday as a death-day. She fears that the mother whom she never knew as a child died in giving birth to her and that she may therefore somehow be responsible for the mother's death. Much later, in chapter 36, she reports having learned from Lady Dedlock's letter the “true” story of her birth: that she had “not been abandoned by my mother,” that the godmother of her childhood, “discovering signs of life in me when I had been laid aside as dead,” had reared her in rigid secrecy and concealed her existence from the baby's mother, who began to suspect that her daughter was still alive only after their unexpected encounter in the church (583).

The story is plausible enough. Moreover, it finds corroboration (in chapters told by the other narrator) in the evidence that Mrs. Chadband, the former “Mrs. Rachael” of the godmother's household, gives to Inspector Bucket in chapter 54, as well as in Lady Dedlock's melodramatic soliloquy at the end of chapter 29: “O my child, my child! Not dead in the first hours of her life, as my cruel sister told me; but sternly nurtured by her, after she had renounced me and my name! O my child, O my child!” (469). Alongside and in competition with this account, however, Esther retains the fantasy not only that her mother died in giving birth to her but also that she herself died and, more horribly yet, that her mother wished her dead, deliberately abandoned her, may even have buried her body within hours after she was born. Although contradicted by the evidence of her senses (since both she and her mother are manifestly alive), this phantasmatic, nightmarish counternarrative nevertheless persists in Esther's unconscious, rising sometimes almost to the level of conscious memory and producing strange narrative effects, including the impression that she and her mother are ghosts haunting each other, both of them alive and at the same time dead.

Horrifying as well as fascinating, these thoughts alternately repel and attract her. She is drawn irresistibly toward them, but also does her best to avoid them. The alternation between these contradictory feeling states, what Dickens elsewhere famously called “the attraction of repulsion,”¹⁰ results in a curious syncopation in Esther's narrative, a zigzag rhythm in her prose that she repeats literally on the occasion of her reunion with Ada after recovering from the illness that scars her face. Just as, on that occasion, she first runs eagerly down the road to greet her friend and then retreats shyly to the safety of her room, so in her narrative she vacillates awkwardly between passages of direct, sometimes powerful openness and moments of coy reticence and evasion.

At times, Esther seems to be a much more knowing and self-aware narrator than critics generally give her credit for being, although one must read carefully in order to pick up the subtle, often oblique signs of this awareness. Consider, for example, her report in chapter 36 of reading the letter from Lady Dedlock that purports to tell the truth about Esther's origins. Dever correctly emphasizes the devastating implications that these revelations have for Esther at the time, but she does not point out some of the small lexical and rhetorical cues that indicate Esther's subsequent and, I think, more critical response. “Safe in my own room,” Esther writes, “I read the letter. I clearly derived from it—and that was much then—that I had not been abandoned by my mother” (583). Whenever Esther interrupts herself, as she does here with the clause set off by dashes, we need to pay close attention. The sentence juxtaposes two distinct temporalities and two slightly different responses. In one, Esther “clearly” derives that her mother did not abandon her; in the other, she states that this information was consoling to her “then.” Without stating exactly what her response is “now” in the time of writing, she implies that it differs from what it was initially. The alert or perhaps suspicious reader may conclude that Esther Woodcourt has revised her opinion about what once was “clear” to her younger self.

Consider also the strange comment that Esther adds after she finishes summarizing the contents of the letter. “What more the letter told me, needs not to be repeated here. It has its own times and places in my story” (583). Readers of this passage, whose importance is suggested by its being set off in a paragraph of its own, have sometimes been puzzled by Esther's failure to make good on her apparent promise to say more about the letter at a later point in her narrative. Instead, these readers note, Esther burns the letter and never mentions it again. Such readings of the paragraph are mistaken, I believe. Here, perhaps more directly than anywhere else in her narrative, Esther reveals not so much the content of her revised understanding of her mother's letter as the process by which that revised understanding makes itself known both to her and to the reader.

Notice Esther's use of the trope of prosopopoeia. It is not Lady Dedlock who tells Esther “more,” but the letter itself that speaks and that presumably tells a different story from the one that Lady Dedlock wants Esther to believe. Notice also Esther's emphasis on repetition as well as her use of the small spatiotemporal adverb “here.” What “more” the letter “told” her may indeed “need” to be “repeated,” but not “here,” not at this point in her narrative. Instead, “it has its own times and places in my story.” The times and places where the unspecified “more” is repeated are scattered across the entire narrative. They speak through Esther in the form of flashbacks, unbidden recurring memories, and other uncanny repetitions. They emanate largely from Esther's unconscious, and they are the signs, the symptoms, of the unclaimed experience that shapes so much of her narrative.¹¹ What stands out in this passage is Esther's greater than usual awareness that there are things she somehow “knows” but cannot say and that these things have a life and temporality not entirely under her control, their “own times and places in my story.”

One further example—perhaps conscious, perhaps not—of the intrusion of a memory from her earliest infancy into Esther's account of her mother's letter deserves mention. Esther summarizes the central message of Lady Dedlock's letter thus: “Her elder and only sister, the godmother of my childhood, discovering signs of life in me when I had been laid aside as dead, had, in her stern sense of duty, with no desire or willingness that I should live, reared me in rigid secrecy, and had never again beheld my mother's face from within a few hours of my birth” (583). Although perfectly grammatical, this rather lengthy complex sentence contains an odd shift in focalization toward the end that betrays its narrator's special preoccupation. The sentence has one grammatical subject, “Her…sister,” that governs two past-perfect verbs: “had…reared” and “had never again beheld.” The two verbs, however, are separated by intervening prepositional phrases and distanced from their grammatical subject by an apposition and a participial clause, with the result that the connection between the subject and especially the second of the two verbs is attenuated. The weakening of this connection, combined with the substitution of “my mother's face” for the expected and more consistent “her sister's face,” locates this perception, not within Lady Dedlock's discourse, but within Esther's. There is no particular reason for Lady Dedlock to emphasize the fact that the godmother had not seen her sister's face “from within a few hours of [Esther's] birth,” but there is every reason for Esther to do so. The shift in focalization revises Lady Dedlock's explanation and turns it into an oblique observation by Esther on her loss of connection to her mother's face while still a newborn infant. By the end of the sentence, we are no longer with the godmother, but at the scene of “my birth.” Once again, the trauma of early maternal loss insists on speaking, perhaps unconsciously, through the language of Esther Woodcourt.

In focusing on the conflicted subjectivity of Esther's narrative, I do not mean to disregard entirely the ways in which she functions objectively as a force for good in the social world of the novel. Many critics have found in her a principle of coherence sufficient to offset the tendency toward drift and anomie depicted in the other narrative.¹² With her commitments to duty and responsibility and her belief in a beneficent providence, she embodies the conservative Victorian values that derive from and exert their authority over the domestic sphere. Moreover, through her actions she represents a force of charity that is conspicuously missing elsewhere in the world of the novel. Certainly, wherever she goes, she displays remarkable managerial abilities. Restoring order to broken or chaotic households is one of her chief roles in the book, and to a considerable extent she manages the task of narrator in a similarly quiet and orderly fashion.

For the most part, however, I tend to view this “Good Esther,” as Dever calls her, as a defensive mask, a false self constructed in order to make up for the early deficits in her life. “I often thought,” Esther writes of her experience at Greenleaf school, “of the resolution I had made on my birthday, to try to be industrious, contented,...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• 1 - Voice
• 2 - Illustration
• 3 - Psychoanalysis
• 4 - Endings
• 5 - Dickens
• 6 - Specters
• Epilogue: Christmas
• Appendix: The Ghost in Bleak House
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index