“It Sounds as Hollow as a Coffin”: The Empty Tomb in Bleak House

Abstract

Oliver Twist’s orphan status and situation are rewritten by Charles Dickens in Bleak House. And as we will find, a comparison to Oliver Twist (1837–9) can be helpful for this particular reading of the novel. Oliver’s marginal position between living and dying, existing and not existing, is one of Dickens’s various portrayals of the commencement of an illegitimate orphan’s unfortunate life. Though Dickens chooses to reveal the orphan’s name in the scene quoted in the epigraph at the beginning of this chapter, the infant is truly born anonymously, his nameless mother dying in childbirth. Born of the soon-to-be-dead mother, the ontological status of the orphan is that of mere rhetorical absence. Mr. Bumble, the pompous beadle, explains: “We have never been able to discover who is his father, or what was his mother’s settlement, name, or con-dition.” Mrs. Mann raised her hands in astonishment; but added, after a moment’s reflection, “How comes he to have any name at all, then?” The beadle drew himself up with great pride, and said, “I inwented it.” (7–8) Oliver Twist’s origin is an early example of the nameless, morbid beginnings that Dickens lends to several of his main characters, including Esther Summerson of Bleak House (I852–3). In a similar fashion to Lucy Snowe, Esther writes in retrospect, looking back on her childhood with a secretive detachment that eludes the expectations of autobiography. We find that along with the third-person narrator’s story (which is paired with Esther’s), Esther’s own narrative represents an absence, a blank, a voice for death. Knowing her true origin, she chooses to hide her real name and parentage from the reader, partially deferring the revelation of her story. Indeed, her narrative embodies real and literal murders, and fetishizes graves as she repeatedly exhumes and inters empty tombs.KeywordsSpontaneous CombustionDead ChildDeath SceneAncient PharaohDead LetterThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.