Bleak House and the Struggle for the State Domain

Approaches to Bleak Houseutilizing Foucault's ideas have produced powerful readings of the text as implicated in--even complicit with--the discursive elaboration of the disciplinary modes of regulation and surveillance that establish and maintain a bourgeois social order. D. A. Miller, for example, discusses the novel as part of the project which, by idealizing the private rectitude of the domestic sphere, ensures that the family must persistently police itself. ¹ For Foucault, the construction of the private sphere is simply the means of a more efficient dispersal of systems of control. Paradoxically, it is the power of Foucault-influenced readings of texts that causes unease. They tend to construct a totalizing account of the narrative in which all aspects are understood as elements of a carceral order. Thus Miller, in his reading of Bleak House, associates the Court of Chancery with a labyrinthine modern policing and surveillance regime, even though the text is at pains to associate it with the ancienrégime of the Dedlocks and foreground its "hoary" antiquity; the ruling class and Chancery are "things of precedent and usage; oversleeping Rip Van Winkles." ² As Kathleen Blake has recently pointed out, current interest in Benthamism within Victorian cultural studies is frequently mediated through Foucault; it is Foucault's panopticon, not Bentham's, that is so often invoked. ³

Blake's return to Bentham is timely, but we need also to attend to the history of Bentham's ideas as the century progressed. There is a tradition, partly self-proclaimed, partly stemming from Matthew Arnold, of identifying the middle class with Utilitarianism, whether Utilitarian thinking is understood as progressive, philistine, or panoptic. Yet, by the 1840s and 1850s, Utilitarianism was far from a unitary movement or body of ideas. The Westminster Review, for example, after the death of James Mill in 1836, often took a milder Benthamite line than The Edinburgh Review. ⁴ Invoking an oversimplified version of Benthamism is part of a larger conceptual problem within Victorian cultural studies. There is still a tendency to work with a monolithic model of the middle class which historians like Linda Colley and Dror Wahrman, and cultural critics like Mary Poovey are dismantling. ⁵ These recent studies indicate the many interconnections between the upper stratum of the middle class and the landed aristocracy and the comparative separation of that higher bourgeois fraction from the lower middle class. Regional loyalties also frequently cut across economic affiliations. Intra-class divisions may be as telling in some contexts as inter-class conflict. My reading of Bleak Houseaims to rearticulate the many ways in which the text constructs an imaginary site for rehearsing the complex hegemonic inter- and intra-class struggles of the mid-century that formed part of the making of the modern British state.

Given the historicizing approaches that Bleak House has elicited from critics, it is surprising that its dialogic engagement in the political debates of its own time has been so little studied. ⁶ Particularly striking are the many warning reminders in the text of revolutionary struggles for state power: these include Boythorn's allusion to the gunpowder plot, the tradition of the ghost's walk dating back to the Civil War, repeated references to the French Revolution, and Miss Flite's apocalyptic waiting on the opening of the seventh seal when, according to theBook of Revelation, "the kings of the earth, and the great men, and the rich men" shall be destroyed while the poor "shall hunger no more . . . and God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes" (169, 140, 373, 81). ⁷

Such allusions in Bleak Houseare hardly surprising given that Dickens was writing in the aftermath of the 1848 revolution in France and of Chartism and cholera in Britain. The journalism of the time, from all political and religious perspectives, was full of accounts of events in France in 1848 and of the earlier revolution in 1789, stressing the need for government in Britain to...