Filth, Liminality, and Abjection in Charles Dickens's Bleak House

I have avoided sexuality, but filth is unavoidable and asks to be treated humanely.

—Sigmund Freud in a 6 September 1899
letter to Wilhelm Fleiss ¹

And Oppenheimer said, It is merde. I will use the French. J. Robert Oppenheimer. It is merde. He meant something that eludes naming is automatically relegated, he is saying, to the status of shit. You can't name it. It's too big or evil or outside your experience. It's also shit because it's garbage, it's waste material.

—Don DeLillo ²

Writing of Engels's The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844, Steven Marcus points out that middle-class consciousness around the 1840s and 1850s underwent a rather drastic change, disturbed in large part, as Marcus puts it, by the fact that "millions of English men, women, and children were living in shit." ³ We can, however, read a surprisingly large number of Victorian novels written during this period without once encountering those conditions recorded by Friedrich Engels, Henry Mayhew, Edwin Chadwick, and others. When Nicholas Higgins takes off his boots, for example, before entering the Hale household in Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South (1854), a novel that draws extensively upon Gaskell's own firsthand familiarity with Manchester, the same city that provides the material for Engels's essay, we may suspect that he does so because he has been tromping through those streets that Mayhew and Engels write of, but the novel does not tell us so. On the other hand, we cannot read much of Dickens without becoming aware of the general foulness and smelliness of the world he describes, and thus readers have paid attention to what he has to say, turning their attention not only towards his excremental vision but also towards the ways in which he is situated within the age's larger concerns with matters of sanitation and disease. Since this essay is concerned with bad smells and other unpleasant things, I would like to map out briefly the distinctions between the directions of my inquiry and those of earlier ones, beginning with two studies which, although pursuing questions in some respects quite different from my own, nevertheless raise a number of issues that I too hope to examine.

Arguing that it was in "the reforming text as much as in the novel that the nineteenth-century city was produced as the locus of fear, disgust and fascination," Peter Stallybrass and Allon White in their essay, "The City: the Sewer, the Gaze and the Contaminating Touch," range over a number of writers, including Mayhew, Chadwick, Engels, and Freud as well as various parliamentary reports, examining the ways in which the double impulses of disgust and desire are registered in what they identify as the "transcodings of psychic desire, concepts of the body and structuring of social formation across the city's topography." Theoretically grounding their essay largely upon Bakhtin's inquiries into the nature of the grotesque and the carnivalesque, Stallybrass and White are not primarily concerned with the question of abjection or with Bleak House, but they are interested, as am I, in the instability of the boundaries between the named and unnamed. They note of Mayhew's "London Labour," for example, that it covers "not all forms of labour but those forms which, lying on the margins of the nameable . . . characteristically embody the carnivalized picturesque." Similarly, remarking on Engels and Dickens's Little Dorrit, they observe how "the representation of filth which traverses their work is unstable, sliding between social, moral and psychic domains." ⁴

Drawing upon Norman O. Brown's Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History (1959) and its examination of Freud's inquiry into the psychoanalytical significance of excrement in the general neurosis called human culture, Michael Steig's "Dickens's Excremental Vision" is concerned more with the unspeakable than the unnamable, locating in Bleak House and, to a lesser extent in A...