Dickens Redressed: The Art of Bleak House and Hard Times, and: Hamlet in His Modern Guises (review)

In these keen and compact studies Alexander Welsh suggests that mourning becomes modernity, literally: mourning is modernity's defining feature. This modernity not only grieves "the loss of some priority," fathers, "prior customs, allegiances, governments, or literary conventions" (Hamlet in His Modern Guises xi), but also assumes the near impossible burden of redressing that loss. Hamlet thus provides an indispensable pattern for the fictions modernity has made for and about itself, a pattern inventively ramified by the novels Welsh covers: Bleak House (1852-53) and Hard Times (1853-54) in Dickens Redressed; Wilhem Meisters Lehrjahre (1796), Redgauntlet (1824), Pierre (1852), Great Expectations (1861), and Ulysses (1922) in the Hamlet book. (The treatment of Hard Times, centered on a superbly sensitive reading of Louisa Gradgrind, seems to me more an appendix to, than an integral part of, his overall argument.)

Thus Charles Dickens, writing Bleak House, seeks redress from sudden and double loss, of his father John Dickens on 31 March 1851, and ten days later of his eight- month-old daughter, Dora Annie. Welsh notes that it was Robert Newsom (Dickens on the Romantic Side of Familiar Things [1977]), who first connected those twin losses to the pervasive "air of mourning or loss in this novel" (Dickens Redressed 13). But, Welsh argues, mourning not only grieves, it works to make grief stop hurting. And so, while John Jarndyce's Bleak House is "a shattered and ruined frame of mind" (17), Charles Dickens's Bleak House is just the reverse, a shattered mind reframing itself to stave off ruin. In Bleak House Dickens the novelist redresses—literally sets upright again—Dickens the son and father.

This redress Dickens achieves by breaking from the Life and Adventures format of his previous work to divide the novel between a satiric narrator, acidly annotating "the meaninglessness of life in the modern metropolis which was London" (13), and the obsessively cheerful Esther Summerson, who centers round herself a domestic plot of romantic tribulation and happy marriage. Welsh reads these voices as contesting. The anonymous narrator piles grief upon grief, while Esther energizes her formidable redressive strategies. Ultimately, her narrative "quietly subsumes the other" as "the satirical present tense voice relents and relinquishes its authority to [Esther's romantic] comedy" (xv, 127).

Esther's mourning reveals her to be, however, not Pollyanna but a monster of narcissism and "secret aggression" (87), that is, someone very much like her creator. Dickens "backs Summerson as willingly as he backed Copperfield, with similarly fatal results to those who come in her path" (40). Her mother Lady Dedlock "died because she deserted her daughter and tainted the latter's life with illegitimacy" (74). Ditto her dad. Ada is beautiful and a lady. Ada therefore loses her husband and winds up in Esther's old menial role at Bleak House, while the narrator modestly rewards herself with the doctor, the new and improved Bleak House, and what may even be--hubba, hubba—the return of her lost looks. Esther thus provides what Welsh takes to be mourning's perfect paradigm: grief corrects loss with fantasy; fantasy generates in turn a narrative of wishes fulfilled, the keenest of which will always be revenge.

Which connects Welsh on Bleak House to Welsh on Hamlet and on all those novels of vanished, tarnished fathers and tormented, overburdened sons that represent Hamlet's Modern Guises. From Johann Wolfgang von Goethe on, however, all these sons bear Hamlet's rue with a difference. Hamlet's modern heirs know that "fathers may die, yet the mission of sons is to live." They tend therefore to find ways to "eschew tragedy and the debt to fathers and turn resolutely...