Supposing Bleak House

4. Endings


 4 ENDINGS The only way that Lady Dedlock can escape from the lord of the underworld who controls her secret is to renounce secrecy altogether. To do so is to cast off her identity as grand lady, the frozen mask of boredom that has imprisoned her in a state of deadlock and kept her from living or loving. Paradoxically, the first real act of love that she performs is a repetition of her greatest crime, the rejection of a daughter. When she turns Rosa away from Chesney Wold, however, it is not out of indifference or shame, but to save the girl and allow her to have a future of happiness with the man she loves. Renouncing secrecy also means leaving Sir Leicester, but in stripping herself of his jewels and relinquishing her watch, and in exchanging clothes with “the mother of the dead child,” Lady Dedlock is embracing the painful but more authentic identity that she has tried so long to escape. Changing clothes with Jenny also means becoming homeless; it means accepting her place as, in Guster’s words, “a common-looking person, all wet and muddy” (911). One measure of the extent to which Lady Dedlock has renounced her former identity and embraced “common” humanity is her interaction with the Snagsbys’ serving girl. Because she does not know how to find the burial ground on her own, she must ask for directions, as she did once before of Jo. Guster tells her how to find the graveyard and 68 S U P P O S I N G B L E A K H O U S E agrees to take the letter that she leaves for Esther. “And so I took it from her,” Guster says, “and she said she had nothing to give me, and I said I was poor myself and consequently wanted nothing. And so she said God bless you! And went” (912). In her earlier visit to the graveyard, Lady Dedlock had paid her guide, but never thanked him—vanishing without speaking and leaving behind only the useless gold sovereign that Jo is never able to spend and that brings him more trouble than good. Here, with Guster, she abandons the cash nexus system and enters instead into the economy of the gift, the economy of the poor, who have nothing and want nothing. The blessing that she leaves for Guster repeats and corrects in a finer tone her earlier arrogant and thankless treatment of Jo. Renouncing the regime of secrecy also means that Lady Dedlock must die—of cold, wet, and fatigue, but also, as she tells Esther in her final letter, “of terror and my conscience” (910). She is terrified, no longer of Tulkinghorn, of whose murder she learns from Mrs. Rouncewell, but of the social disgrace and shame that await her if she attempts to continue a life as Lady Dedlock. She is conscience-stricken over the effects that she fears scandal will have on Sir Leicester, but also, and more profoundly, at the knowledge of what she has done to Esther. Nevertheless , in death, or rather in dying, she has become more alive than at any other time when we observe her, and her final words, “Farewell. Forgive,” may be the most authentic she has ever produced. For Esther, the end of chapter 59 is not an ending; it is a beginning, the beginning of a new life. But what are we to make of the life that she reports living? And how successful has her homely Orpheus been in bringing her back from the underworld? How successful was her “psychoanalysis ”? To answer these questions, we must look closely at the six chapters that Esther narrates in the novel’s final double monthly number , and we must attend more carefully than ever to the voice of Esther Woodcourt. In posing these questions and trying to answer them, I am returning to the point in chapter 1 where I began and to two questions that I left dangling in my initial discussion of Esther’s discovery of her mother’s body: what does this scene leave out? and what does it do for Esther in her role as narrator? E N D I N G S 69 What the scene leaves out—what Esther leaves out—is any description of her reaction, then or now, to the discovery of her mother’s body. When we turn to...