Bleak House
Bleak House is a twin narrative. It faces in two directions (past and present); it incorporates two worlds (private and public); and it is told in two voices, one of which is serious, often pained, or realistic, the other parodic, playful, and deliberately artificial. Their mixture produces uncanny and undecidable effects. Bleak House, the orphan’s vacant space stands for Nemo and, more, for the nameless metonym and countless metonyms that are put in place of the (paternal) metaphor or the name of the Father, the original of whom seems to be Hawdon. This orphan chronicle “exposes incoherences, omissions, absences and transgressions which in turn reveal the inability of the language of ideology to create coherence. The orphan narrative of Bleak House, Dickens’s comic practice perverts turns aside and subverts his critical program.
The quantitatively largest category of lexical items which contextually point to the ‘original’ speaker or his or her consciousness are quite evident. Frequently there is little evidence for such an alignment except in the reader’s stylistic perspicacity. Such cases are usually discussed in terms of ‘stylistic deviation from the norm’. When free indirect discourse evokes a character’s ‘voice’, the idiomaticity of the phrasing, the more colloquial (or more learned) tone (as the case may be), the too enthusiastic or too sceptical evaluation of the matter in hand-all these may hint at the other-directedness of the linguistic representation.
The story’s heroine, Esther Summerson, shares the narration of Bleak House with an omniscient narrator. Whereas her perspective is restrospective, considered, and compassionate (though sometimes quite sharp), his is highly rhetorical, witty, satiric, and immediate, told in the present tense. The omniscient narrator’s impassioned language incites us to outrage at the world’s wrongs; Esther, in sharp contrast, provides a moral lens on characters and events, and shows us how to live with Christian responsibility in an imperfect world.
The book’s plot hinges on the Chancery case of Jarndyce and Jarndyce, the complications and costs of which make it a standing joke within the legal profession. Ada Clare and Richard Carstone, wards of Chancery, go to live in Bleak House, home of John Jarndyce, who refuses any involvement in the ruinous suit. Esther accompanies them as a comparison for Ada, chosen by Mr Jarndyce. They pay a visit on the way to the philanthropist Mrs Jellyby, who neglects her family while devoting herself entirely to foreign charity.
Meanwhile, at Sir Leicester Dedlock’s county estate, Chesney Wold, Lady Dedlock faints on seeing handwriting on a legal document. His interest roused, the family lawyer Tulkinghorn seeks out the scribe, known only as ‘Nemo’, and finds him dead in squalor of an opium overdose. The waif Jo shows a veiled lady Nemo’s haunts in London; moved on by the police, Jo flees to Bleak House, where he infects first Esther’s maid, then Esther herself, with smallpox. The hypocritical Harold Skimpole betrays Jo to Inspector Bucket.
Language in Bleak House
The domain of Bleak House ‘s parody is, to be sure, a large and varied one so much so, that we inevitably come across texts that are not centrally parodic, in terms of a clearly definable model, but which wear a parodic aura, and are full of echoes of half-remembered writings. They might be called pseudoparodies. Here is an example of pseudoparody as an illustration of some rhetorical techniques:
Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping, and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex Marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping into the
cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out on the yards, and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and small boats. Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners, wheezing by the firesides of their wards; fog in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper, down in his close cabin; fog cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of his shivering little ‘prentice boy on deck. Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog all round them, as if they were up in a balloon, and hanging in the misty clouds.
There is no conscious modelling of one passage on the other; but there is a hazy recollection of rhetorical procedures. We see, for instance, how the pseudoparody has picked up some linguistic features of its Dickensian original, eg the rarity of finite verbs, and the frequency of participle clauses and adverbial constructions. These echoes suggest that a powerfully or idiosyncratically written passage, like the splendid opening of Bleak House, can lodge in a reader’s mind a stylistic record for later reference.
This is one of the ways in which a literary language is created. The devices of some pattern-giving example are registered, as an ingenious mechanism of style; subsequent recollection — the pseudoparodic echo — turns the apparatus to other uses. There are cases of ‘intertextuality’ in which one text recalls another with commentary slyness; in other instances the sense of recollection is vaguer, and the writer appears to be imitating, in general, the kind of rhetoric appropriate to a convention
Comparison of Bleak House with Contemprory Novels
All of Dickens’s most memorable characters define themselves through their speech and a distinctive private language. This method proves well suited to entertaining; it also serves as an effective way to distinguish one person from another in the crowded, panoramic novels typical of Dickens’s fiction. Earliest among Dickens’s favourite devices is the speech tag, a particular exclamation, word, or expression made the sole property of a single character. Linguistic eccentricity at this level ranges from Miss Knag’s dry ‘hem’, hangman Dennis’s macabre wish ‘to work people off’, and Mark Tapley’s repeated efforts to ‘be jolly.
The same device also appears in later novels ( Wemmick’s ‘portable property’ and Joe Gargery’s ‘old chap’ and ‘I say, you know! Pip’ in Great Expectations) and in a more extended and sophisticated form. Take the opening chapter of the second half of Little Dorrit, when eight characters arrive at the convent of the Great Saint Bernard. Dickens carefully avoids calling any one of them by name; he has no need to because the individualizing and typifying language-features of each are already familiar to the reader.
Steven Connor’s excellent deconstructionist reading of Bleak House (in his Charles Dickens, 1985) explores precisely the great length of Dickens’s text, and the paradoxical. mistrust of great length of written language evinced by the novel–embodied chiefly in the endless production of text by Chancery, all the legal documentation that is productive, ultimately, of nothing. Connor also explores the way the novel sets up the binary opposition between written and spoken language, only to problematize it. Derrida Of Grammatology (trans. Gayatri Spivak, 1978) explores precisely this supposed opposition between speech and writing, and identifies what it calls ‘logocentrism’, the abiding sense that the spoken is somehow superior to the written (more immediate, more authentic, and so on). This hierarchical binary structure is then subjected to analysis that destabilizes it.
It is not that deconstructionists set out to show that Dickens is somehow muddled or self contradictory; all texts, to one degree or another, function in this manner, presenting a vision that purports unity whilst elaborating subtexts at odds with the surface meanings. Dickens’s texts are so appealing to this school of thought partly because they are so multifarious, the proliferation of signification is so proudly displayed, the writing plays so joyously with the slipperiness of meanings. The novels are also peculiarly aware of their own textuality; they all in various ways express the potency of storytelling in making sense, albeit contingent sense, of the world.
The most obvious distinction between types of narrator is whether they are third person or first person. A third person will use the pronouns ‘he, she, it’ or ‘they’ and a first person narrative will largely use the pronouns ‘I’ and ‘we’.
Examples of each method of narration can be shown using short extracts from Charles Dickens’s novel Bleak House which has a double narrative, one part in the third person and the other narrated by a young woman, Esther Summerson.
Early in the novel we are given a description of Sir Leicester Deadlock, with the narrative in the third person.
“Sir Leicester is twenty years, full measure, older than my Lady. He will never see sixty-five again, nor perhaps sixty-six, nor yet sixty-seven. He has a twist of the gout now and then, and walks a little stiffly. He is of a worthy presence, with his light grey hair and whiskers, his fine shirt-frill, his pure white waistcoat, and his blue coat with bright buttons always buttoned. He is ceremonious, stately, most polite on every occasion to my Lady, and holds her personal attractions in the highest estimation. His gallantry to my Lady, which has never changed since he courted her, is the one little touch of romantic fancy in him”.
The first person narrative of Esther Summerson begins:
I have a great deal of difficulty in beginning to write my portion of these pages, for I know I am not clever. I always knew that. I used to say to my doll, when we were alone together, ‘Now Dolly, I am not clever, you know very well, and you must be patient with me, like a dear!’
In the very simplest of terms, we can see the difference established in the narratives by the use of the pronouns ‘him’/’his’ in the first extract and in the pronoun ‘I’ in the second. This means that the narrator in the first extract is an observer outside the action of the novel, whereas the narrator in the second extract is somehow involved inside what is to follow. Although useful as starting points, though, these distinctions are very general. Further questions need to be asked about the narrators.
We have already noted above that one aspect of narrative involves the idea of knowledge, of how much the narrator knows at any given time. How much knowledge the narrator has needs to be worked out by the reader, although clearly the narrator must know something, or there would be no story to tell at all. Although working out the amount of knowledge shown by the narrator will usually require reading more than a short extract, the examples above from Dickens already give us considerable clues.
The third person narrator knows a lot about this man externally, and implies a lot about him as character too. The reader can work out his age, that he has grey hair, how he dresses and so on. We also might guess from the name that he has been given that he is a man set in his ways. We learn that he is stately and polite to his wife, although as readers we may wonder if these are very romantic ways to treat a partner. Our doubts about Sir Leicester are increased by the final sentence. If this is all he can manage in terms of ‘romantic fancy’, then he is probably a very unimaginative man.
From the evidence of this short extract we can say that the narrator knows quite a bit about this man in terms of his external appearance, which is stated directly, and also about internal aspects of his thought and behaviour, which is implied.
A first person narrative is inevitably limited in its knowledge by definition a person who is in the action of the story can only know about what they see, do, and are told about, and how they personally react to events. The narrator here does not describe herself in an external way but she does give some clues as to how she sees herself as a person. In other words her knowledge, as shown here, is internal rather than external.
The first person narrator, though, seems less reliable. She even tells us to doubt her right at the start, suggesting that she has not the skill to tell her part of the story well. Conversely, though, her very protestations of inadequacy may suggest to the reader that she is honest, that she will do her best to tell the truth. A further issue here involves a question of context: whereas in Dickens’s time a typical young woman may have protested her unworthiness and talked to her doll, in modern times we expect our women to be a bit more dynamic. This could mean that while Dickens intends us to have faith in this narrator, as modern readers we are less inclined to do so
Through the 1850s and 1860s, partly under the influence of Dickens’s huge success, the myriad subgenres of previous fiction coalesced into broader categories. Religious problem novels (such as Newman’s Loss and Gain, 1848), historical fiction, Detective Fiction (particularly the work of Wilkie Collins) and social problem novels were all popular. Dickens was never drawn to religious topics, and his historical novels ( Barnaby Rudge and A Tale of Two Cities) are occasional forays into the field rather than concerted attempts to write in that genre. But detective fiction influenced several later novels ( Bleak House, Our Mutual Friend, and Edwin Drood), and in a sense Dickens had always been a ‘social problem’ novelist, with later works such as Hard Times merely the development of his earlier concern at specific social ills. Something different is seen in works such as Elizabeth Gaskell Mary Barton ( 1848) and North and South ( 1855) or Disraeli Sybil ( 1845), which are more properly termed ‘Condition of England novels’, insofar as they attempt, however crudely, to view the problems of England systemically instead of as a matter of individual abuses. Dickens’s late novels, and particularly Bleak House and Little Dorrit, pick up on this impulse, and attempt to conceive of social ills as a network of interrelations and issues, rather than the doings of a few evil individuals.
But having identified a few dominant genres during this period, it has to be said that placing Dickens aesthetically amongst his fellow novelists is a less than satisfying business. There seem to be very few vectors of influence from other writers to Dickens’s work. Partly this is because Dickens was so unique, a fact recognized at the time (for instance, in his nickname the ‘inimitable’). There are many places where Dickens drew in one form or another from the fiction of his contemporaries, but the itemization of these borrowings does little actually to contextualize Dickens’s output. For one thing, the novelists he was most likely to be influenced by are not those from the 19th-century who have been canonized as classics. There are, for instance, very few female novelists whose fiction impinges on Dickens.
Charlotte Bronte and her sisters failed to impress him: a memoir of his conversation at Gad’s Hill towards the end of his life records him as saying that he ‘had not read Jane Eyre and said he never would as he disapproved of the whole school. He had not read Wuthering Heights’ (quoted in Ackroyd 1990, p. 837). His notion of the more ‘passionate’ branches of Victorian fiction is brutal in its reductiveness (‘They met she shrieked and married him’). The more balanced, and conventionally Domestic Fiction of Mrs Gaskell was more to his taste. He highly praised Mary Barton, offered his suggestions on Ruth ( 1853), and serialized Cranford ( 1851-3) and North and South in Household Words. But his attitude to female authors was dependent upon them remaining within their appropriate (i.e. domestic) sphere. Not for nothing does Bleak House contain a satire upon the movement for female.
There were several male Victorian novelists, now considered to be somewhat of the second rank, whose influence upon Dickens is more palpable. One is Edward Bulwer-Lytton, whose novels are now unread but who was popular enough in his own day. Critics have discerned the influence of Lytton Newgate novel Paul Clifford ( 1830) upon Oliver Twist, of Night and Morning ( 1841) upon Bleak House, and of the Gothic-magical Zanoni ( 1842), set partly in the French Revolution, upon A Tale of Two Cities. Dickens thought highly enough of Bulwer-Lytton’s judgement to follow his advice and change the ending he had originally planned for Great Expectations. On the other hand, it is difficult to establish any pattern of influence from Bulwer to Dickens more substantial than the occasional plot device or character-quirk.
Stylistic Devices in Bleak House
The language of the Bible and the Book Of Common Prayer, as well as, of course, Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, were so deeply impressed upon his culture–and upon the always-responsive ear of Dickens–that religious references come thick and fast even in contexts that seem hardly to put religion at issue. In giving a chapter of Bleak House the title “‘Our Dear Brother'” (11), for example, Dickens draws on a phrase out of the funeral service that all his readers would readily recognize, and thereby simply announces that a burial is going to take place without calling up any specifically religious issues–though he does make a moral point through a characteristically Dickensian irony: the ‘dear brother’ will hardly be treated as dear or a brother at all, for he is to be laid to rest in a filthy and overcrowded burying ground in a noisome slum, good for nothing but spreading disease. There is thus a large body of nominally religious allusion whose function may be best described as literary.
This is by no means to say that Dickens held no religious views, but rather that his frequent allusions to scripture and Anglican liturgy provide no very sure guide to them. In all his writings, Dickens is outspoken in his dislike of Evangelicalism and Roman Catholicism, but, especially in his fiction, he is very reluctant to make professions of a specific faith beyond the most general sort of Christianity. Nothing more surely aroused his suspicions about a person’s religious faith than a public profession of it, and this aversion formed a fundamental feature of his dislike of evangelicals and Dissenters. It is likely too that his awareness that his readers held widely differing religious views–that he numbered many Roman Catholics and Jews among his audience as well as AngloCatholics and every conceivable variety of Protestant–provided additional motivation for avoiding circumstances that would touch off sectarian debate, which he characterized in a letter as ‘unseemly squabbles about the letter which drive the spirit out of hundreds of thousands’.
Dickens’s parents were Anglican, but evidently entirely uninterested in the dogmas of the Church of England and probably not very regular in their worship. As a small boy in Chatham Dickens seems to have attended services at a nearby Baptist chapel. There is little positive evidence about Dickens’s religious thinking throughout the 1820s and 1830s, but it is in the latter decade, a period of significant reform in England.
It is evident at the time of his first American trip in 1842 that he was hopeful of finding in the United States political and religious institutions more progressive and effective than Parliament and the Church of England. At the time he looked enthusiastically to the new nation’s ideals of liberty and equality as promoting a future that might reward merit and free itself of ancient and hidebound class prejudices. He was, moreover, certainly attracted by the separation of church and state in the United States, and while he was soon to be profoundly disappointed in American politics, he was very taken at least by the UNITARIAN circle that he encountered in Boston. Indeed, his interest in Unitarianism was virtually the only enthusiasm he managed to bring back with him undamaged at the end of the trip, and it survived for at least a year or two and possibly as many as five.
Characters Language Refer to Their Behaviour
Ultimately, the confusion of figures is more than an amusing coincidence, though. Its serious and presumably real consequence is that the lateral displacements of Chadband into anonym (and the reverse) subvert the potential for social criticism and the correction of real(ly) grave conditions in the name of the pleasurably perverse doublet that the copy-writer returns (to) in excess.
“The Skimpole” operates similarly. But, as is proper to a situation in the I’s narrative, Skimpole works directly through substantive as opposed to stylistic (d)effects. His disturbing duplication of Esther’s providential perspective has already caught our attention, and one further repetition is worth note, as it shakes up the established Ideal or promotes unsettling results. Like the “little” Esther, the “childe” Harold too longs for an idyllic estate that is remote from “sordid realities,” as Bleak House is, and he visualizes an atemporal paradise of “perpetual summer. Age or change should never wither it” ( 68 ; ch. 6). It is significant that Harold’s portrait precedes, if not allusions to the threat of change, which are present from I’s traumatic beginning, then at least her more fully realized representation of constancy. When we read I’s version, then, we cannot help but recall that the Skimpole said it first and that he said so in response to Ada as well. Our recollection makes for a misdeal in an Ideal who sincerely copies a dilettante’s defects.
And the copy-writing ends/originates nowhere. But Mr. Quale is “always repeating Mrs. Jellyby’s answer to us like an interpreter” ( 41 ; ch. 4). Her answer is evidently another’s answer, or piece of philanthropic copy, while his “mission [is] to be in ecstasies with everybody else’s mission, . . . that . . . was the most popular mission of all” ( 183 ; ch. 15). In the meantime, Lawrence Boythorn (the little phallus) goes about reconstructing spurious genealogies of fathers and sons ( 106 -7; ch. 9 and 220 ; ch. 18). “The Boythorn’s” figures are perversely reminiscent of those in the Dedlock portrait gallery and the next intentionally so: “That fellow is, and his father was, and his grandfather was, the most stiff-necked, arrogant imbecile, pigheaded numskull . . . born in any station of life but a walking stick’s” ( 108 -9; ch. 9). Mr. Badger is an other copy, the Mrs’ “third.” Badger takes the place of Swosser and Dingo, whom he repeats authoritatively/for authority in speech or letters and whom he presumably doubles, deferentially, in comic Oedipal bed. Copying also replaces the I, among other sites, and without danger of confusion, in the book’s second “celebrated” “little body”–proper name of “Smallweed,” nicknames of “Small,” “Chickweed,” “Bart,” and the like. Coincidently, Small “himself” is a copy of the copy (clerk) Guppy. “He dresses at that gentleman (by whom he is patronized), talks at him, walks at him, founds himself entirely on him” ( 245 ; ch. 20). And Guppy, this “little fish,” he is “just the same.” When Esther’s clerk is not copy-writing law or copying lawyers, he is miming the romantics, that is when he is not confounding all “three of ’em.” In his “literary” ventures, Guppy duplicates “the other one.” Here, I have in mind the anonym who indiscriminately copies high art, including segments of Macbeth (136; ch. 11 and 364; ch. 29); Hamlet (392; ch. 32 and 503; ch. 40); and Paradise Lost (76; ch. 7) together with pop art: nursery rhymes, snatches of contemporary songs, ballads, and such. But Guppy also imitates the Ideal who copies and is a copy of Victorian kitsch. This dead metaphor is another name for the bit part or metonym, which has elsewhere been entitled “the angel in the house.”
The law clerk Guppy, rejected as a suitor by Esther, seeks independently to unravel the mystery, but on the night appointed to meet Nemo’s landlord, Krook, is horrified to find that he has died of spontaneous combustion. Tulkinghorn, suspicious of Lady Dedlock, blackmails Trooper George into handing over copies of Nemo’s writing. It is revealed that Esther is the illegitimate child of Lady Dedlock and Nemo. Jo dies at George’s shooting gallery, attended by the young surgeon Allan Woodcourt. After a confrontation with Lady Dedlock, Tulkinghorn is murdered in his chambers. George is arrested for the murder, but the evidence seems to point to Lady Dedlock, who flees from Bleak House. Bucket proves that her fiery French maid Hortense is the murderess. Accompanied by Esther, he goes in search of Lady Dedlock and finds her dead at the gates of a squalid city churchyard where Nemo is buried.
Trooper George is reunited with his mother, Mrs Rouncewell, the Dedlock’s housekeeper. He refuses to work for his brother, a successful industrialist, and goes instead to Chesney Wold to tend Sir Leicester, who succumbed to a stroke when his wife ran away. Richard, whose fecklessness is fatally increased by his placing hopes on the outcome of the Chancery case, is estranged from Jaryndyce, secretly marries Ada, and dies in despair when the Jarndyce and Jarndyce case is abandoned, all its assets consumed in court costs. Esther, having dutifully accepted an offer of marriage from Jarndyce, is given by him to her true love, Alan Woodcourt. Ada and her child are looked after by Jarndyce.
Conclusion
It is difficult to decide to what degree the writing I is aware of her narrative’s profitable coincidence, but it is not difficult to determine one of I’s writing effects. That is, the exemplary “young lady” cannot be taken seriously (simply/Skimpoley) as genuine but must also be read as artifice–and thus, the “pattern” for a (dis)similar line of perverts, who mimic the father in a variety of ways.
And the trouble does not end here, in the critical portrayal of copy, but in its exuberant and playful returns–or rather, in between “the two of them”: that is, within the principle of reality and the principle of pleasure on the border of sense and nonsense. Both processes are at play in Esther’s recollection of Jarndyce, whose case incorporates both Law and Father in the doublet “dada.”
The ending of Bleak House is a dramatic case in point. In it, a final version of the family romance is played out between Ada and Jarndyce in such a way as to repeat Esther’s original relation with the Guardian. The repetition binds any possible anxiety, in the process keeping things (egos and their Ideal Imagoes) constant, encrypted–safe.
References
- Dickens Charles ( 1948 edn) Bleak House, New Oxford Illustrated Dick- ens, Oxford University Press: London Jakobson Roman. “Two Poles of Language and Two Types of Aphasiac Disturbance.”
- Fundamentals of Language. Roman Jakobson and Morris Halle . The Hague: Mouton, 1956.
- Jardine Alice A. Gynesis: Configurations of Woman and Modernity. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1985.
- Jones Ernest. The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud. Ed. Lionel Trilling and Steven Marcus. New York: Basic Books, 1961.
- Kaplan Caren. “Deterritorializations: The Rewriting of Home and Exile in Western Feminist Discourse.” Cultural Critique 7 (Spring 1987): 187-98.
- Kauffman Linda. “Passion as Suffering: The Composition of Clarissa Harlowe.” Discourses of Desire: Gender, Genre, and Epistolary Fictions. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1986.
- Kennedy Valerie. “Bleak House: More Trouble with Esther?” Journal of Women’s Studies in Literature I ( 1979): 330-47.
