Supposing Bleak House

By John O. Jordan

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

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Release date: Feb 23, 2011
• ISBN: 9780813930923

Book preview

VICTORIAN LITERATURE AND CULTURE SERIES

Jerome J. McGann and Herbert F. Tucker, Editors

SUPPOSING

Bleak House

JOHN O. JORDAN

UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA PRESS

CHARLOTTESVILLE AND LONDON

University of Virginia Press

© 2011 by the Rector and Visitors of the University of Virginia

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

First published 2010

1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Jordan, John O.

    Supposing Bleak House / John O. Jordan.

        p.       cm.—(Victorian literature and culture series)

        Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8139-3074-9 (acid-free paper)—ISBN 978-0-8139-3092-3 (e-book)

  1. Dickens, Charles, 1812–1870. Bleak House. I. Title.

PR4556.J67 2010

    823′.8—dc22

                                                                                   2010020833

Unless otherwise noted, all illustrations are by Hablot K. Browne, etchings from original serial parts of Bleak House, 1852–53. (Courtesy of the Department of Special Collections, Stanford University Libraries)

For Jane

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

ILLUSTRATIONS

1. The appointed time

2. Mr. Guppy's Desolation

3. The little church in the park

4. Consecrated ground

5. The Little old Lady

6. The Ghost's Walk

7. Lady Dedlock in the Wood

8. The Young Man of the name of Guppy

9. The Mausoleum at Chesney Wold

10. Sunset in the long Drawing-room at Chesney Wold

11. Becky's second appearance in the character of Clytemnestra

12. The Mausoleum at Chesney Wold, working drawing

13. The Mausoleum at Chesney Wold, drawing, 1853?

14. The Mausoleum at Chesney Wold, lithographic transfer?, first bound edition

15. The Mausoleum at Chesney Wold, etching from 1938 edition (reprinted 2005, Nonesuch edition)

16. Rose Maylie and Oliver

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

LONG CONTEMPLATED, THIS BOOK WOULD NOT ALLOW ITSELF to be written until it was ready. When the time came, it offered itself with unstinting generosity. Lengthy incubation in this case entails great indebtedness. I owe thanks in the first instance to Murray Baumgarten and Ed Eigner, who brought me along when they had the idea of starting a Dickens research group at the University of California. To Murray in particular, the Dickens Project's founding director and my longtime co-conspirator in all things Dickensian, I owe a debt of gratitude for colleagueship that extends over four decades and that includes many conversations about Bleak House.

An early version of chapter 1 was presented at the 2001 Dickens Universe gathering in Santa Cruz. I am grateful to friends, students, and colleagues for their positive response on that occasion and to delegates at the 2009 Uneasy Pleasures conference in Jerusalem, where I presented a later version of this chapter. The book's appendix appeared in the March 2010 issue of Dickens Quarterly and is reprinted here with the kind permission of the journal's editor, David Paroissien.

To Bob Newsom and Hilary Schor, two passionate, expert readers of Bleak House, I owe special thanks for their long friendship and for innumerable exchanges about Esther and about Dickens. So many of the ideas that appear in these pages first took shape in conversations between the three of us that it is sometimes difficult for me to know to whom they properly belong, though of course I bear ultimate responsibility for the words on the page. Bob read the entire manuscript, offered many useful suggestions, and was especially helpful in sharpening my understanding of the novel's illustrations.

Others who read the manuscript and provided useful advice include Bob Patten, who took valuable time away from his own research to check first editions of the novel at the Rice University library; Dick Stein, whose encouragement came at a crucial moment; Lou Breger and Jon Varese, each of whom saved me from embarrassing mistakes; and Tim Peltason, whose detailed comments helped improve my argument at several points. Helen Hauser provided important research assistance in London. Lunch conversations with Michael Warren, Gary Miles, and Galia Benziman advanced my work in ways of which they may not be fully aware.

A series of informal study sessions with JoAnn and Greg Bellow proved valuable in developing my ideas about psychoanalysis. Even when Greg and I disagreed—especially when we disagreed—our exchanges forced me to clarify my thinking and look for further evidence to explain what I was trying to say. The book is better as a result of our dialogue. At a later stage, Estelle Shane gave me incisive comments on some of the psychoanalytic ideas I was trying to work out.

Without the assistance of libraries and librarians, this project would have been impossible to complete. I am grateful to the staff of McHenry Library at the University of California, Santa Cruz, for timely help in processing interlibrary loan requests. For assistance in locating illustrations and for granting permission to reproduce them, I thank John Mustain and Mattie Taormina at the Stanford University Libraries, Katharine Chandler and Joseph Shemtov at the Free Library of Philadelphia, Moira Fitzgerald at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, and David Marshall of Duckworth Publishers. At several points my research has been supported by grants from the Academic Senate Committee on Research at the University of California, Santa Cruz. I appreciate the committee's confidence in my work.

The memory of two people who will never know how much I owe to them looms large in the background of this book. One is my mother, Mary Hamilton Thompson Orr Jordan, whose presence can be felt on almost every page. The other is Sally Ledger, whose untimely death in early 2009, just as a draft of this book was nearing completion, left a large hole in the community of nineteenth-century scholars of which I am a part. The importance for me of Sally's work on Dickens is especially evident in chapter 6.

To JoAnna Rottke, the Dickens Project's incomparable coordinator, and to Jay Olson, computing assistant at UC Santa Cruz, I am grateful for help in preparing the manuscript for publication. To Cathie Brettschneider at the University of Virginia Press, I am thankful for many courtesies, for her patience in answering questions, and for her faith in this project. Thanks go as well to Colleen Romick Clark, herself a Victorianist, for her supportive and sharp-eyed copyediting.

My greatest debt is to my wife, Jane, who shares her life with me and from whom I have absorbed much that is in this book. Her love and confidence in me made it possible for Supposing Bleak House to be written.

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,