Mysteries of the Mind

Abstract

AbstractThis chapter outlines Dickens’s revised thinking in Bleak House about introspection and the potential legibility of the flesh. Esther Summerson’s notoriously coy narration, this chapter argues, works to underscore the fundamental privacy of consciousness, reinforcing the notion that introspection provides the most reliable means by which to know the mind. But even as it insists on the privacy of consciousness, the novel also appears to walk back the skepticism about the legibility of the flesh that Dickens articulates in the last half of Martin Chuzzlewit, instead suggesting anew that the body might serve as a reliable index to the immaterial mind. Both Esther and the third-person narrator thus often describe the physiognomical clues by which readers might discern characters’ thoughts. But while Esther touts her ability to read the minds of those with whom she is most intimate, the third-person narrator tends to withhold what he gleans through his own physiognomical readings. This refusal to narrate the thoughts of the novel’s characters emerges as a strategy: the third-person narrator’s silences mimic the law’s own refusal to move from (bodily) sign to (mental) signified, an interpretive practice that, Bleak House suggests, is equivalent to the scientific naturalism of physicalist psychology. In this way, Bleak House finally positions psycho-physiology as a species of willed illiteracy, a hardheaded refusal to move from the body to that to which it points for conservative physiognomists, the soul.