Supposing Bleak House

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 1 VOICE 2 B L E A K H O U S E 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. Aftersomanychapters ,andsomanywords,thestarkmonosyllables—“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. 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 VO I C E 3 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...