Narrative Bonds: Multiple Narrators in the Victorian Novel by Alexandra Valint

Abstract

Reviewed by: Narrative Bonds: Multiple Narrators in the Victorian Novel by Alexandra Valint Kathy Rees (bio) Alexandra Valint. Narrative Bonds: Multiple Narrators in the Victorian Novel. Ohio State UP, 2021. Pp. viii + 208. $79.95. ISBN 9780814214633 (hb). Any reference to "Multiple Narrators" will put seasoned Dickensians on the alert for a discussion of Bleak House (1853), the dual narrative of which has probably provoked more critical debate than that of any other Victorian novel. Indeed, the debate about the dual point-of-view feels almost as protracted and convoluted as Jarndyce v Jarndyce itself. Early on, there was much talk of aesthetic error: John Forster's verdict that the "difficult enterprise" was "certainly not successful" contributed to this (559). Even as late as 1980, Vladimir Nabokov was declaring that Dickens's "main mistake" in Bleak House was "to let Esther tell part of the story. I would not have let the girl near!" (102). Certainly, many commentators became engrossed with positioning Esther Summerson: should she occupy a subordinate or [End Page 541] a dominant place vis-à-vis the so-called "omniscient" narrator? Alexandra Valint deftly curates both the debate and the text, offering a thesis that resists this "versus" approach (50). Her refreshing reading characterizes the two narrators as collaborators, "working together–not against each other in a battle for supremacy" (54). It is a reading, she asserts, that "contrasts with the majority of criticism on Bleak House's dual narrative" (50). As part of her study, she analyses Bleak House alongside works by Robert Louis Stevenson, Wilkie Collins, Emily Brontë, and Bram Stoker, to illustrate the complementarity of multinarrator structures, and to challenge the long-held notion that omniscient narrators are paradigmatic in Victorian fiction. For Valint, such structures reflect the developing egalitarianism of the period, which gave a voice to marginalized figures such as the child in Treasure Island (1883), the disabled narrators in The Woman in White (1859) and, of course, the allegedly illegitimate Esther in Bleak House. Valint integrates narratological theory and terminology with a light touch, and writes with wit and elegance. She offers a memorable tag for each type of multinarrator structure in her study, for example, Treasure Island employs the "quick switch" type, indicating Dr. Livesey's handover to Jim Hawkins midway through the text, while Wuthering Heights uses the "permeable frame" evincing subtle, quick, and fluid switches between Nelly Dean and Lockwood (79, 144). She characterizes Bleak House as a "back-and-forth" structure, a "steady interlacing [that] unites and equalizes the two narrators and narratives" (8). This idea of alternation is reminiscent of W. J. Harvey's conception of the dual narrative as "the systole and diastole of the novel," suggested over half a century ago (150). But Valint goes much further, using this framework to explore Bleak House through its thematic and figurative evocation of the relationship between "Depth and Surface" (the title of her chapter on Dickens), an approach that produces some notable re-readings of this complex text. Esther, the homodiegetic narrator, "creates herself as a woman of depth by confessing her unspoken thoughts, eschewing her personal appearance, and discouraging other characters and the reader from locating her identity in her corporeal figure" (48). Citing Nancy Armstrong's Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel (1987) as her model, Valint reads Esther as the incarnation of the domestic ideal, the trusted, responsible, and frugal homemaker who contrasts so dramatically with her natural mother, Lady Dedlock, who is defined by showiness, materiality, and status (58–59). Esther is suspicious of image, of beauty, of mirrors, and of portraits, all vehicles of surface and superficiality (69). Rather, she directs readers to the depths of her private feelings, evident particularly during her sickbed experience when, prevented by blindness from describing her normal life, Esther takes the reader into "the hellish depths of her psyche" (72). Valint [End Page 542] also demonstrates how the illustrations by Hablot Knight Browne ("Phiz") harmonize with Esther's depth-creating figure. Of the eighteen illustrations in Bleak House that feature Esther, only two display her whole face, a consistent self-screening that coheres with Esther's mistrust of surfaces. By contrast, the...