Lady Dedlock Research Articles

The Privilege of Art

The Privilege of Art

The Lawyer in Dickens by Franziska Quabeck

Reviewed by: The Lawyer in Dickens by Franziska Quabeck Robert Sirabian (bio) Franziska Quabeck. The Lawyer in Dickens. Walter de Gruyter, 2021. Pp. 145. $107.99. ISBN 978-3-11-075270-0 (hb). Explaining in the Afterword that she is not writing a history of prejudice against lawyers or a cultural history of lawyers and the law, Franziska Quabeck explores lawyer characters in later Dickens novels from David Copperfield to Our Mutual Friend while speculating about the lawyer in Dickens himself. Although lawyer characters may seem minor, and therefore flat, "representatives of an evil system" (12), Quabeck argues they are more than symbolic representations motivated by greed. They reveal complex human desires that the legal system fosters, specifically an interest in fabricating plots and asserting masculine power through surveillance, particularly over women. These desires become manifest as they break away from Dickens's authorial control, revealing his complex, ambiguous relationship to the law. Although additional context concerning legal history and Victorian culture would be helpful, and an extended discussion of some Dickensian literary criticism would situate the argument more poignantly, The Lawyer in Dickens offers interesting, relevant insights and conclusions. Quabeck's analysis helps readers think further about the important relationship between Dickens and his lawyer characters, and that although rooted in cultural prejudice, Victorian antipathy towards the law reflects the tension between "English law as a set of cultural and linguistic practices" and natural law–an individual, intuitive sense of what is morally and ethically right and wrong (Petch 155). The introductory chapter on the law highlights Dickens's interest in the lawyer as an individual, not just a member of the legal system. According to Quabeck, Dickens offers a "possibly idiosyncratic preference for the solicitor over the barrister" (5), rooted in issues of social class (e.g., being a gentleman) and money, since solicitors were viewed as having a higher social rank. Furthermore, because Dickens has a mixed, conflicted appraisal of lawyers, his lawyer characters can elude the author's conscious control. Lawyers in later novels depart from those in early novels by revealing motivations transcending the law as simply an oppressive system. However, it should be noted that even in The Pickwick Papers, which Quabeck briefly discusses, Dickens presents a complex understanding of the law, specifically the tedium of its daily business transactions and most significantly its [End Page 108] adversarial nature, outlined in Thomas Langbein's The Origins of Adversary Criminal Trial, a source that could be included here. He traces the route, stemming from civil trials, that allowed "lawyer-partisans" to run criminal trials, turning them into competitive contests with lawyers speaking for defendants rather than juries hearing directly from them (1). In Pickwick, minor lawyer characters show an acute understanding of the legal system's customs and written rules as well as an awareness of juries as spectators, which shapes Dickens's depiction of lawyers and judges as actors. This context frames Quabeck's numerous passing references to competition and contests: between Uriah and David, Stryver and Carton, Pip and Jaggers, as well as Tulkinghorn's game with Lady Dedlock. Lawyers in Dickens's novels understand the adversarial nature of the legal system, structured on the cultural ideology of game playing as morality and ethics are framed by the ideology of competition beyond the courtroom into domestic spaces and daily business encounters. Chapter 2 makes the engaging claim that Uriah Heep is a prototype of other Dickens lawyers. Quabeck posits that "[o]n the grounds of David Copperfield, it is […] not unequivocally possible to attest that Dickens 'detests' lawyers–in fact, there seems to be a great degree of that often mentioned attraction of repulsion, a covert admiration for the profession and a strong awareness for the social implications of what it means to be a lawyer" (37). Because Heep is David's rival, the law is also David's "nemesis" (from the chapter title), although David does not realize it. The law is the source of Heep's status and power, particularly his surveillance of and (sexual) desire to control and possess Agnes, which allows his character to transcend its seeming flatness. Readers might be reminded, however, that Heep's charity school education...

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

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...

Anxiety in Bleak House: From Lacanian Perspective

This article explores some characters’ anxiety in Dickens’s Bleak House with Lacan’s anxiety theory. According to Lacan, human beings do not pursue their own desire, but the desire of the Other. However, humans do not know exactly what the Other wants from them. So, even though he or she tries to be satisfied with the object a, replacing a lack, there is a time to sense the rest of the Other’s desire, that is ‘lack of lack’, which causes anxiety. This anxiety is not from the absence, but from ‘without not having it’. In this novel, Sir Leicester Dedlock’s anxiety is that of castration that he might lose his authority and fame. Lady Dedlock feels guilty and anxious about her past behavior inconsistent with an asexual woman required of women in British society at that time. And Esther Summerson desires to be recognized for her existence and to be a necessary person as the desire of the Other. However, she feels anxiety by experiencing the cycle of desire. Anxiety is an ontological reason because it opens the way to the real world, allows us to capture reality for a moment, and drives us closer to the truth. The goal of human desire is not anxiety, but jouissance. The subject with anxiety will have a chance to be aware of the inconsistency between the Other’s desire and the object a and reach toward jouissance.

“Looking Two Ways”: A Pivotal Paragraph in Bleak House and Esther's Missing Self-Reflection

Abstract This article initially argues that Dickens's pivotal paragraph uniquely requires and inspires 24 pages of text to explore its 158 words in the novel. Esther's “looking two ways” paragraph describes, often through ironic forms of comparison and contrast, her twilight perspectives and projections as she looks through an inn window (or windows) during her and Bucket's search for her mother, Lady Dedlock. The paragraph remarkably looks before and after in the text as it contextually explores the “middle way” dynamics of four major clarifying approaches to Esther's self-development: the via negativa, Holy Grail myths, liminal motifs, and the Freudian uncanny. These four approaches sometimes support one another and sometimes conflict with, if not challenge, one another. Throughout, the article not only discusses and documents Esther's problematic self-development and Dickens's profound artistry in detailing that development, but it also examines the extent of reader involvement in evaluating both Esther and Dickens.

The Doll’s Gift

Brianna Beehler, “The Doll’s Gift: Ventriloquizing Bleak House” (pp. 24–49) This essay offers a new reading of the split narrative in Charles Dickens’s Bleak House (1852–53). Previous critics of the novel’s split narrative have primarily focused on the unequal knowledge and authority positions of the all-knowing third-person narrator and the unknowing first-person narrator, Esther Summerson. This division, however, does not fully account for the apparent slips and narrative exchanges between the two narrators, in which one narrator takes on the voice or knowledge position of the other. This essay takes up Robert Newsom’s suggestion that the only way to explain these “slips” is to conclude that Esther Summerson writes not only her own narration, but also that of the third-person narrator. However, the essay further argues that Esther uses the third-person narration to ventriloquize the voice of her mother, Lady Dedlock, in an effort to provide herself with the emotional support otherwise denied her. Readers may better understand Esther’s ventriloquism of the third-person narration by tracing how it mirrors her early daily ritual with her doll, in which she assumed both narrative positions at once. Object relations and gift theory further show how this dialogue creates a bond between the two narrations. Thus, characters and family structures that appear in the third-person narration and that may appear distant from Esther are actually her meditations on alternative maternal and familial relationships.

Menials: Domestic Service and the Cultural Transformation of British Society, 1650–1850 by Kristina Booker

Reviewed by: Menials: Domestic Service and the Cultural Transformation of British Society, 1650–1850 by Kristina Booker Ingrid Tague Kristina Booker. Menials: Domestic Service and the Cultural Transformation of British Society, 1650–1850. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell, 2018. Pp. xi + 195. $95. Debuting just a few years after the Great Recession, the British television series Down-ton Abbey was a huge hit in the U.S. as well as the U.K. Despite our national myth of having escaped from the stifling restrictions of a class-based society, American audiences breathlessly followed the travails of the Granthams and their servants. Part of the appeal of the series was doubtless the way it invited viewers to contrast their enlightened, modern views with those of characters like Maggie Smith’s Dowager Countess, who is so out of touch with working life that she does not understand the concept of a weekend. Yet, as Booker notes in a “Coda” to Menials, for all its apparent sympathy for those “downstairs,” the series nonetheless consistently presents the Granthams as enlightened and sympathetic, and punishes servants who resist their place in the social order. Downton Abbey, she suggests, is the heir to a body of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature that portrayed servants for ideological purposes. The “master classes” who produced this literature exploited the figure of the servant to present economic relations in ways that would enable them to retain their position at the top of the social hierarchy. In particular, Booker focuses on three key concepts: self-interest, emulation, and luxury. All three areas have been widely explored by economic and social historians, but Booker argues that fictional representations of servants are particularly useful for understanding what these concepts meant and how attitudes toward them changed over time. The first two chapters, which comprise roughly half the book, deal with self-interest. Booker outlines economic debates about self-interest from the cautious advocacy of seventeenth-century merchants like Edward Misselden and Thomas Mun, through Adam Smith’s celebration of self-interest as a force for economic and social benefit, to the nineteenth-century critiques of it in the works of Thomas Carlyle and John Ruskin. She then traces these ideas in key literary works, with a particular focus on the ways authors used servants to engage with the potential problems of a world governed by self-interest. Thus, in William Godwin’s Caleb Williams, for instance, the titular character provides the opportunity to explore “the tension between one’s own interests and one’s duty to the general good.” Caleb believes that he can serve the greater social good by pursuing his self-interest, but he consistently finds himself oppressed by Falkland, his tyrannical master, who uses his social power to promote only his own interests. In chapter 2, Booker turns to a criticism of self-interest that emerged at the turn of the nineteenth century: the idea that Smithian economic theory was too abstract and failed to account for “the real lives of English men and women, particularly the working classes.” Her example is Dickens’s Bleak House (1852–53), which demonstrates the impact of such criticism as Hortense, Lady Dedlock’s maid, suffers from her masters’ treatment of her [End Page 59] as a disposable commodity. While quite beyond Scriblerian’s chronological remit, the discussion is interesting, since what Dickens demonstrates with Hortense’s failed attempt at revenge “is that under the reign of [Smith’s] political economy, a maid with subjectivity is considered dangerous, even less than human.” The Rouncewells are offered as an alternative model where affection and mutual devotion provide both master and servant an opportunity to thrive. Chapter 3, on emulation, traces anxieties about servants’ perceived tendency to emulate their betters. Thus, Richardson’s Pamela is held up as a paragon of virtue because she consistently rejects opportunities to rise above her station, while her virtues themselves are the gift of the mistress who raised and educated her. B’s offers of fine clothes and jewelry are elements of seduction and sin; by rejecting them, Pamela maintains “her adherence to social dictates which she believes are natural and even divinely sanctioned.” In contrast, the character of the...

Dickens’s Tableaux

Victoria Wiet, “Dickens’s Tableaux: Melodrama and Sexual Opacity in David Copperfield and Bleak House” (pp. 167–198) This essay examines the features and function of tableaux in two novels by Charles Dickens, David Copperfield (1850) and Bleak House (1853), in order to rethink the influence of melodramatic conventions on the form of narrative fiction, particularly the understanding of female sexuality that melodrama afforded novelists. Taking Dickens as an important example, literary critics have typically associated melodrama with ostentatious legibility, but recent scholarship on the theatrical tableau has illuminated the complex ways the melodramatic stage both produced and occluded revelation. Drawing on this work, I demonstrate that the adaptation of the tableau into the novel form increases the possibility of illegibility because readers necessarily rely on the narrator’s description and interpretation of the material world. In David Copperfield and Bleak House, this remediation has particularly significant consequences for the representation of sexually compromised women. By inadequately revealing the sexual histories of suspected “fallen women,” densely visual but opaque scenes featuring Annie Strong, Martha Endell, and Honoria Dedlock defer judgment on their characters, with Lady Dedlock’s protracted illegibility preventing her plot from culminating in a decisive narrative or moral conclusion. Because the narrators of both novels depict these female characters as deliberately making themselves illegible, the novel tableau becomes an important way for Dickens to dramatize the fallibility of the omniscient and quasi-omniscient narrators of realist fiction.

Dickens Quarterly Checklist

Dickens Quarterly Checklist Kim Edwards Keats Secondary Sources Auyoung, Elaine. When Fiction Feels Reel: Representation and the Reading Mind. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2018. ISBN: 978-0190845476. [BH] Bowles, Hugo. Dickens and the Stenographic Mind. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2019. ISBN: 978-0198829078. Colman, Adam. Drugs and the Addiction Aesthetic in Nineteenth-Century Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, 2019. ISBN: 978-303015893. [BH] Dickens Quarterly 35.4 (December 2018). [Contents: William F. Long, "Radicals in 'The Parlour': John Arthur Roebuck and the Politics of an 1835 Sketch": 285–302; Leon Litvack and Hugh Craig, "Charles Dickens and Joseph Parkinson: Disentangling Composite Authorship in All the Year Round": 303–49; Graham Wolfe, "Theatrical Extraneity: John Irving's A Prayer for Owen Meany and Dickensian Theater-Fiction": 350–72; Joel J. Brattin (Rev. Jacky Bratton, Ed. Dickensian Dramas: Plays from Charles Dickens, and Jim Davis, Ed. Dickensian Dramas: Plays from Charles Dickens): 373–79; Dominic Rainsford (Rev. Isobel Armstrong, Novel Politics: Democratic Imaginations in Nineteenth-Century Fiction): 379–82; Constance D. Harsh (Rev. Heidi Pennington, Creating Identity in the Victorian Fictional Autobiography): 382–84; Kathy Rees (Rev. Heather Tilley, Blindness and Writing: From Wordsworth to Gissing): 385–88; Joanna Hofer-Robinson (Rev. Emily Steinlight, Populating the Novel: Literary Form and the Politics of Surplus Life): 388–90; "The Forty-Ninth Annual Dickens Society Meeting: Tübungen, Germany": 391–95; Kim Edwards Keates and Clare Horrocks, "Dickens Quarterly Checklist": 401–404.] The Dickensian 114.3 (2018). [Contents: Emma Rutherford, "The Lost Portrait: Charles Dickens by Margaret Gillies": 227–35; William F. Long, "Charles Dickens and Mr Lyne's Academy": 236–46; David Edgar, "Dickens in My Life": 247–51; Taeko Sakai, "The 'Dolly Varden' Polonaise at the Seaside: A Fashion Revival in the Early 1870s": 262–77; Robert C. Hanna, "Frances Maria Kelly, Dickens and Miss Kelly's Theatre and Drama School": 278–93; Letters to the Editor, 294–96; Don Richard Cox (Rev. Pete Orford, The Mystery of Edwin Drood: Charles Dickens' Unfinished Novel and Other Endless Attempts to End It, 297–300); Paul Graham (Rev. Sketching at Wilton's Musical Hall, 302–04); Valerie Purton (Report, "Dickens, Families and Communities': Dickens Day, Senate House, 20 October 2018," 305–07); Alicia Mireles Christoff (Report, The Dickens Universe – "Little Dorrit," U of California, Santa Cruz, 15–21 July 2018: 308–09).] Donovan, Sarah J. "Welcoming Ghosts into Our Classroom with Long Way Down." Contending with Gun Violence in the English Language Classroom. Eds. Shelly Shaffer, Gretchen Rumohr-Voskuil, and Steven T. Bickmore. London and New York: Routledge, 2019. 67–72. ISBN: 978-1138354517. [CC] Howell, Jessica. Malaria and Victorian Fictions of Empire. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2019. ISBN: 978-1108484688. [MC, AN] Hughes, William Lee. "Impersonal Grief: Charles Dickens and Serial Forms of Affect." differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 29.3 (2018): 86–106. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1215/10407391-7266480 [OCS, MHC]. Metz, Nancy Aycock. "Dickens Changes Course: Pickwick's Revisionist 'Stroller's Tale'." English: Journal of the English Association [Advance Article 4 Dec 2018]. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/english/efy045 Little Doric 5.2 (Christmas 2018) [Contents: Michael Steele, "The World of the Illustrated London News": 2–7; Eric Summers, "The Heart of Midlothian": 8–11; Paul Schlicke, "An Introduction to Barnaby Rudge": 12–14; Edgar Allan Poe's "The Raven": 15–16; Paul Schlicke, "The Oz Report": 17–20; Alan Jackson, "Northanger Abbey": 21–24; Sandra Faulkner, "The Mystery of the Missing Statue": 25–30; "Christmas Readings Evening": 31–32; Adam Cuthbert, "Dickens the Flâneur": 33; Alison Summers, "Fiona Sampson: In Search of Mary Shelley": 34–38.] McKernan, Luke. "The Lives of the Characters in Dickensian." Stories: Screen Narrative in the Digital Era. Eds. Ian Christie and Annie van den Oever. Amsterdam: Amsterdam UP, 2018. 183–192. ISBN: 978-9462985841. Moja, Beatrice. "Charles Dickens and the Child Narrator: Literary and Sociolinguistic Reflections on A Holiday Romance (1868)." Bookbird: A Journal of International Children's Literature 56.4 (2018): 38–45. DOI: 10.1353/bkb.2018.0064 Prest, Céline. "Echo as Writing in Bleak House by Charles Dickens: Lady Dedlock's Testament." Polysèmes: Revue d'études intertextuelles et intermédiales 20 (2018). [Online journal: http://journals.openedition.org...

Semi-Detached: The Aesthetics of Virtual Experience since Dickens by John Plotz

Reviewed by: Semi-Detached: The Aesthetics of Virtual Experience since Dickens by John Plotz Jonathan Buckmaster John Plotz. Semi-Detached: The Aesthetics of Virtual Experience since Dickens. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton UP, 2018. Pp. xiii + 329. $35.00. ISBN 9781400887850 In this enjoyable and expansive study John Plotz traces the artistic heritage of "semi-detachedness," a condition he characterizes as the "dual experience" (2) of inhabiting both the world of an artwork and the world in which the artwork exists. In his introduction, he offers two illustrative motifs: first, the moment in The Mill on the Floss when the narrator interrupts our observation of Maggie Tulliver to complain about their numb arms leaning on both Dolcote bridge (in the story) and the arms of a chair (from where they narrate the story). Second, we have Ford Madox Ford's description of Impressionism as "real life […] seen through bright glass" (3), whereby one apprehends the world of the painting as if it were real but simultaneously retains an awareness of the distance between [End Page 179] that world and our immediate surroundings. Plotz's primary focus is the novel, and how novelists use the state of semi-detachedness "to make sense of how consciousness, in life as in fiction, can be located in more than one place simultaneously" (13). Drawing on Franco Moretti's description of the "episodic" nature of fiction and Catherine Gallagher's notion of novels as "believable stories that do not solicit belief," Plotz feels that novels not only encourage escapism and "a release into the pleasures of an invented world," but also solicit from their readers "experiential attentiveness to the way the world is" (12). In chapter 1, Plotz reappraises the disregarded form of the mid-Victorian short story as one which "represents and reflects on readerly semi-detachment" (20). He traces short fiction through early experiments in the late Romantic period (such as those of James Hogg and John Galt) and demonstrates how such works were particularly amenable to articulating an experience of semi-detachedness, concerned as they are with "polydoxy" and "shifting frames of believability" (24). Dickens's early sketches build on this "inbetweenness," and counterpoise "detached empirical knowledge of city life" with "the shadowy spaces of individual feeling" (35): for example "Our Next-Door Neighbour" (1836) "toggl[es] between scientific and sentimental forms of knowledge" (36) in a narrative that develops from a comic taxonomy of door knockers and their owners through a world where such facile classifications are exposed as naïve, to end with a narrative of untimely bereavement. For Plotz, the Jamesian "loose, baggy monster" of the novel then began to digest the short story/sketch, first as an interpolated tale (which is digressive, disruptive and disjointed) and later fully integrated as the "pseudo interpolated" tale (which is unifying and complementary). Thus after Pickwick's standalone inset tales Plotz feels that all subsequent tales became absorbed into their "host" novel: Oliver Twist contains stories which initially appear to describe somewhere else, but ultimately "appertain" to the characters of the novel. Monks's narrative of Oliver's genealogy begins as the tale of an unnamed child in a remote place and time, but by the end, his auditor Rose has identified herself as one of its protagonists and Monks's place in the main narrative has been explained. However, Nicholas Nickleby contains both forms of interpolated tale, and one wonders how it might fit Plotz's theory–do they work as unrelated experiences, complement each other, or work against each other? And does the reader's awareness of the difference precipitate a different experience? Post Oliver, tales of family lineage become a popular variant of the pseudo interpolated tale for Dickens; Tulkinghorn relates to Lady Dedlock a thinly-veiled version of her own life story, and Pip becomes the audience for several similar familial narratives. Moreover, Pip himself uses such framing stories [End Page 180] to make (erroneous) sense of the events that shape his life, constructing fantasies around Miss Havisham's plans for him. Dickens reappears in Plotz's first "visual interlude," courtesy of his impassioned polemic against Millais's visual realism, which Plotz calls "a revealing moment" (75) and a...

Echo as Writing in Bleak House by Charles Dickens: Lady Dedlock’s Testament

L’environnement dickensien est une caisse de résonance qui conserve la trace sonore du passé par le biais de l’écho. Dans Bleak House, les échos retentissent dans le domaine de Chesney Wold pour raconter les histoires du passé. Tout au long du roman, un son en particulier résonne dans l’air tel un message d’outre-tombe séculaire qui vient hanter les vivants, le bruit de pas de la précédente Lady Dedlock sur la promenade hantée. L’air agit ainsi comme un substrat qui enregistre, préserve et reproduit ces signaux sonores : en y laissant sa trace, l’ancienne maîtresse des lieux fait de son écho un testament. L’écho dans Bleak House constitue ainsi une forme de communication entre les personnages, par-delà les frontières humaines de l’espace, du temps et du sensible. Nous nous appuierons sur les théories du mathématicien britannique Charles Babbage sur la possibilité de préservation du son, pour lesquelles Dickens manifeste un intérêt dès le début de sa carrière dans le cadre de sa réflexion sur la persistance du document. Pour Babbage, le son agit comme une écriture sur son environnement et le marque durablement ; le mathématicien affirme que l’air peut être défini comme une bibliothèque éternelle et incorruptible, qui enregistre et conserve les paroles des hommes comme autant de documents archivés. Cet article vise donc à montrer la manière dont Dickens explore un autre support pour l’inscription de l’écriture que la feuille de papier, trouvant une voie dans la page immense qu’est l’atmosphère.

Dickens’s Perception of Female Personality: Representation of Lady Dedlock and Esther Summerson in Bleak House

Dickens’s concept of female personality shown in Bleak House (1852-53) is one of his most sensitive as well as complex representations of womanhood. Lady Dedlock and Esther Summerson, the two female protagonists of the novel are the best examples. Therefore, this essay will display the character of Lady Dedlock and Esther with multiple points of views to illustrate Dickens’s notions regarding women. The study will evaluate the psychological turmoil of the two characters, as well as their ways of survival in the male centric society of the then England. It will also focus on Dickens’s concept of home and the contribution as well as the role of women in such situations. Moreover, comparative study between characters will be shown to throw more light on the argument and Dickens’s intention for such character sketches of women will be explained. Additionally, comparisons between Dickens’s female characters and other characters from literature will be presented to clarify his views.

Truth in Fiction

AbstractWhen we engage with a work of fiction we gain knowledge about what is fictionally true in that work. Our grasp of what is true in a fiction is central to our engagement with representational works of art, and to our assessments of their merits. Of course, it is sometimes difficult to determine what is fictional – it is a good question whether the main character of American Psycho is genuinely psychotic or merely delusional, for instance. (And even in this case, our ignorance itself is crucial to how we engage with the story and assess its qualities.) But in the vast majority of cases, we have no difficulty distinguishing what is fictionally true from what is not. Every attentive reader of Bleak House knows that it is fictional that Esther is Lady Dedlock’s daughter, but not fictional that Ada is the daughter of John Jarndyce. Moreover, we do not think that our judgements about what is fictional are based on guesswork. We have a folk theory of fictional truth, in the sense that we have a relatively stable framework upon which we rely when we engage with fiction, and we face the challenge of characterizing that theory systematically.

JASPER PACKLEMERTON, VICTORIAN FREAK

ONE OF THEOED'S DEFINITIONSof the word “freak” is that of a freak of nature, “a monstrosity, an abnormally developed individual of any species; a living curiosity exhibited in a show.” The freak of nature I wish to focus on in this essay is marriage, and specifically, marriage as it is “exhibited” in Dickens's novelThe Old Curiosity Shop(1840–41). To refer to marriage in a Victorian novel as a freak of nature is perhaps surprising. To refer to the sacred institution as freakish in a Dickens novel may seem to border on heresy. After all, Dickens is the self-appointed novelist of hearth and home, the creator of conservative domestic plots that celebrate marriage as the institution that establishes closure for the novel and for the society it represents. Despite this apparent conservatism and despite our vague sense that most marriages in Dickens are as happy as David and Agnes's, Esther and Allen Woodcourt's, Biddy and Joe's, it is in fact the case that in all his novels, fromThe Pickwick PaperstoOur Mutual Friend, Dickens is fascinated–in a multiplicity of ways both large and small, in a manner that is alternately comic, tragic, melodramatic, ironic–with marriage's discontents. In fact, the disintegration of the institution is one of the things that Dickens makes fictions from, giving the failure of marriage a surprisingly high degree of visibility and presenting the breaking of the matrimonial bond with remarkable clarity and persistence. Dickens novels are full of wives who leave their husbands (Edith Dombey, Lady Dedlock, Louisa Gradgrind), breach of promise suits (inPickwickandOur Mutual Friendmost famously) and characters who try to find legal ways of escaping their marriages (Stephen Blackpool, Betsey Trotwood,Nickleby's Madame Mantalini). This essay, then, is an analysis of how Dickens undermines the institution early in his career, and of how the comic and grotesque display of the body, the sprawling, teeming physical surfaces ofThe Old Curiosity Shop, both conceal and reveal a story of marital skepticism.

Dickens's Fiction: Tapestries of Conscience (review)

Reviewed by: Dickens's Fiction: Tapestries of Conscience Vineta Colby (bio) Stanley Friedman , Dickens's Fiction: Tapestries of Conscience (New York: AMS Press, 2003), pp. xii+195, $72.50 cloth. More than thirty-five years' experience in teaching Dickens to undergraduates has given Stanley Friedman a mastery of a novelist whose genius, in the end, like Matthew Arnold's Shakespeare, we can never explain. Professor Friedman is not solving mysteries. In his selection of eight of the major novels – Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickleby, A Christmas Carol, David Copperfield, Bleak House, Hard Times, Great Expectations, and Our Mutual Friend – he examines devices of structure and rhetoric by which Dickens achieved his artistic effects and presents lucid readings of these familiar but critically challenging texts. The "special design" of his novels was to meet the demands of weekly or monthly serialization in periodicals or in separate monthly parts. This meant careful balancing of hosts of characters and intricate but always interrelated lines of plot into a single novel that would hold even the most impatient reader in suspense for months before it all came together. It is the measure of his creative genius that out of this whirling mass of characters and incidents there emerges, in Friedman's words, "a synthesis of many perspectives" (174). Within each of the novels in this study, Friedman notes the weaving together of often disparate-seeming themes and characters. It is the old storyteller's art, enchanting the reader with his power to make the unbelievable believable: that long and deeply buried secrets of identity are discovered in the crowded streets of London, in the accidental meeting of strangers, in the sudden appearance of long-lost documents. Abused and abandoned orphans find identities and families. Oliver Twist finds a loving patron in a stranger he is being forced to rob. Starved and loveless Smike finds a father in the cold-blooded Ralph Nickleby and a valiant champion in Ralph's nephew Nicholas. Modest and plain Esther Summerson finds a penitent mother in the proud and beautiful Lady Dedlock. The prudent spinster Betsy Trotwood finds a long and well-lost husband. Pip uncovers the sordid background of his mysteriously acquired fortune. And the wealthy dustman Boffin and poor Jew Riah both find surrogate daughters. However uneven the weights that fate imposes on Dickens's characters, the scales always balance in the end. The symmetry of plots and subplots, Friedman argues, is not based on repetition but on reiteration. Nicholas Nickleby "in many respects retells [End Page 417] the story presented in Oliver Twist ... in both books we find not only the motifs of neglected, abused children and guilty parents, but also the comforting figures of altruistic and benevolent parental surrogates who help to guide events to pleasing outcomes" (42–43). Bleak House not only reiterates themes of Oliver Twist (Esther's and Oliver's discovery of the dark secrets of their births), but both novels also indict powerful social institutions like the workhouse and the Court of Chancery. Evil characters are punished or reborn and redeemed, like Scrooge; the good are rewarded, and justice, if not even-handed, is always fair and balanced. Equally fair and balanced, Friedman's book is a useful contribution to Dickens studies. Vineta Colby Emerita Queens College, City University of New York Vineta Colby Vineta Colby is Professor Emerita, Queens College, City University of New York. Her special scholarly interests have been the nineteenth-century English novel, and nineteenth-century women novelists. Publications include several articles on nineteenth-century English women novelists and the following books: The Singular Anomaly: Nineteenth-Century English Women Novelists; Yesterday's Woman: English Domestic Novel; Vernon Lee: A Literary Biography. Copyright © 2005 Victorian Periodicals Review

The Marginal, the Equitable, and the Unparalleled: Lady Dedlock's Case in Dickens's Bleak House

The Marginal, the Equitable, and the Unparalleled: Lady Dedlock’s Case in Dickens’s Bleak House Dieter Paul Polloczek (bio) I Art about ethnicity or race, about class, about gender and sexuality—in short, art that reflects, transforms, or engenders the shifting phantom of human identity—has been advanced by many as the crucial work for our time. In the sixties and seventies, historicism that embodied the contradictions of its culture was collapsing. During the eighties, the “theory canon” in humanities and art departments was in decline because it failed to construct a rationale especially for literary curricula. Contemporary criticism in the nineties has so far focused on the various relations between components of cultures. Among those components, literature and art are considered to play an even more marginal role than they used to. Critics have shifted their attention toward the phenomenon of marginalization as such, for never have so many assumed that the hegemonic “othering” of minorities is an important factor in fashioning dominant or mainstream modes of culture. An increased degree of inclusivity has paradoxically made it even harder for minority groups to articulate their unconstitutional and unethical disadvantages by means of complaint, appeal, or resistance. 1 For almost a decade, the most committed proponents of cultural criticism in advanced industrial societies have been investigating the links between inclusivity and marginalization. These links often serve as ambiguous signs and symptoms of the networking structures of global communication links. In The Mode of Information and The Second Media Age, Mark Poster has explained the contradictory nature of interactivity in these structures. 2 Sometimes it speaks through a radically participatory democracy, sometimes through a covertly neocolonialist buyout of environmental globalism. As a result, criticism in the nineties has predominantly attempted to illuminate and articulate possibilities for the notion of the marginal. However, some critics tend to overestimate the impact of minority [End Page 453] literature on the culture of which it is a part. While it is certainly both possible and desirable to specify the differences such texts are making in terms of crossing and shifting cultural boundaries, these differences must constantly be defined in contradistinction to established literary crossovers. Critics pleading for the cultural relevance of minority texts are thus pressured to reduce the established to the hegemonic. In On the Margins of Modernism, Chana Kronfield has persuasively argued, with an emphasis on Hebrew modernism, that minority literature competes with more established (but perhaps nowadays equally unread) texts for the very acknowledgment of marginalization. 3 Moreover, minority literature has to contend with nonminority forms of making differences. 4 Essentially, minority literature competes for better ways to expose, if not prevent, the damages that this very type of competition generally inflicts on the marginalized. Consider for example some of Toni Morrison’s novels, described by many as a supreme illustration and critique of consumer capitalism’s hegemonic construction of subjectivity. Since the “culture wars” of the late eighties and early nineties, these novels have been making their way from the margins of culture both into our curricula and onto the best-sellers’ bookshelves. Thus, the “minority” aspect of literature—as opposed to its articulation of the marginal—is often overrated, particularly with regard to the transformative impact it may have on the hegemonic features of cultures to which it relates. In cases where that aspect is in fact overrated, a danger arises lest the notion of minorities becomes reified as representative of the contradictions endemic to advanced industrial societies, that is to say, at exactly the point where inclusivity and marginalization connect. This is a danger because then minority literature would assume a role similar to the one established literature was said to play in times of organic historicism: it would be expected to encompass cultural contradictions while participating in them. More important, minority literature is only one single instance of what the constraints and possibilities of marginality can mean for literature. The marginality of modern literature in general emerges from its relation to more socially relevant ways of organizing and transforming knowledge. As I indicated before, this particular type of marginality can be said to derive from the fast-changing conditions of literature’s inclusion in modern cultural processes...

Death and the Mother from Dickens to Freud: Victorian Fiction and the Anxiety of Origins (review)

Reviewed by: Death and the Mother from Dickens to Freud: Victorian Fiction and the Anxiety of Origins Eileen Gillooly (bio) Death and the Mother from Dickens to Freud: Victorian Fiction and the Anxiety of Origins, by Carolyn Dever; pp. xv + 233. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998, £35.00, $49.95. As Carolyn Dever wryly notes in her often brilliantly illuminating, always compelling discussion of the significance of maternal death in Victorian narrative, “it is far more dangerous to give birth in a fictional world than in any region, under any conditions, within any social class in Victorian Britain” (11). Though certainly found occasionally skulking in the background of a Fanny Burney or Jane Austen plot, dead mothers of all sorts abound in both the Bildungsromanes and detective novels of the mid-nineteenth century. Sometimes reported deceased long before expiration (Lady Dedlock of Bleak House [1852–53], for instance) or simply dead to the maternal function (Princess Alcharisi of Daniel Deronda [1876]), mothers tend, even when breathing, to maintain a ghostly presence in the lives of their children. Nor is the maternal survival rate any greater in psychoanalytic narratives, which, as Dever shrewdly observes, betray the “shaping influence of Victorian fiction” and which in turn inform our understanding of “normal” psychological development (xii). For Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, Melanie Klein, and D. W. Winnicott—as for Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, George Eliot, and even Charles Darwin—not only representation, but “subjectivity, domesticity, and desire” all presuppose maternal absence (1). Every child, that is, in order to achieve selfhood and mental health in our culture must in some psychic sense lose its mother. In arguing for the ubiquitousness of this “symptomatic structure,” Dever draws upon a satisfying diversity of texts (1). Along with full-chapter readings of Bleak House, The Woman in White (1860), Daniel Deronda, and Darwin’s Autobiography (1887, 1969) are considerations of a number of other nineteenth-century novels, contemporary medical treatises, and recent critical theory. The whole is threaded with passages from physicians’ narratives of childbed death, forcing us to remember that the dead mother who theoretically haunts the critical discussion here was at one time only too fully and frequently embodied. According to Dever, “dead-mother narrative” takes three discrete—but usually overlapping—forms: the sentimental, the erotic, and the emancipatory. Exemplified by Oliver Twist (1837–38), Emma (1816), and Miss Marjoribanks (1866) respectively, these paradigms together encode the range of customary response to the missing mother. Dever’s meticulous readings consistently reveal that whenever a mother exceeds these categories of containment (whenever she demonstrates agency), she threatens a social order premised upon the disavowal that a woman occupying the maternal position is ever anything other than “mother”: that is, one who sacrifices self to facilitate her child’s developing identity. In the detective plot especially, where maternal agency reaches criminal proportions, its destabilizing effects can be devastating: “An endogamous crisis—If I can’t trust my mother, who can I trust? [. . .]—is turned outward to become the exogamous logic of [End Page 303] social disarray” (109). Rather than struggling, as she ought, to achieve the “ideal of female decorum that operates as the linchpin of world order,” the mother is exposed as “the source of debilitating secrets and transgression” (xiii). Ironically, even transgressive mothers are ultimately self-sacrificing. Lady Dedlock’s forsaking the infant Esther in the Real of the text, enables Esther to “rewrite” her story of psychic loss, thereby “reversing the tale of abandonment”: Esther’s “birth” as “an authorial subject”—her “drama of self-determination”—depends, that is, upon her (twice) killing off Lady Dedlock before her actual, and ultimately less filially significant, demise (83, 81, 87). Dever’s close, theoretically sophisticated, often delightfully witty readings display both her originality and her synthetic skill. Her analysis of the analysts is a tour de force (she is a superb reader of Klein in particular), and her discussion of Victorian narrative as an elaborate fort-da game—where the mother’s absence is controlled and displaced by its representation—is splendid. The chapters on the Autobiography as an ur-text of sorts for The Origin of Species (1859) and on To The Lighthouse (1927) as...

"The Narrow Track of Blood": Detection and Storytelling in Bleak House

Detection in Bleak House is not only a response to actual crime but, more expansively, a way of being-a response to pervasive and ingrained notions of guilt. This habitual detection arised both as an oppressive process of self-scrutiny in which characters police themselves and as a perphas delusory attempt to escape such entrapment by investigating and thus writing others. As the former, detection is internalized so that the individual embodies a system of regulation, being both the oppressive law and the guilty transgressor. At its most destructive, such self-regulation-the attempt to repress or hide one9s criminal self-leads to self-obliteration, as in the examples of Nemo and Lady Dedlock. For the most part, however, the common anxieties of guilt and the desire for concealment are managed more effectively. Characters distance themselves from the fearful and private world of the self by indulging a distracting interest in the world of society and, particularly, by adopting the psychologically disfiguring roles of detectives. Instead of being constructed by their own guilt (and the investigations of others), the detectives assume authoritative and more comfortable positions on the right side of the law. Lacking (and dreading) a defining sense of themselves, these detectives compensate by attempting to read and write the objects of their detection; they attempt to nourish their own spiritual hunger by feeding upon the identities of others.

Dickens and Women by Michael Slater (review)

86Rocky Mountain Review even more inaccessible" (86). In discussing How It Is, he relies on Paul Ricoeur's tenet that metaphor is in itself a discontinuity and that in its discontinuity lies its productive agency. It becomes really a matter of predication (a favorite Singer word) and production served out of difference rather than resemblance. The binding element to the three chapters devoted to these three novels is that metaphor and catachresis are disruptive, discontinuous, and hence productive of meaning in their own right. They may also symbolize authorial presence and freedom or set their own rules for textual coherence. Two chapters elaborating on these possibilities precede the chapters on the novels. Relying upon the likes of Lacan, Ricoeur, Derrida, and de Man, and sweeping away the likes of Booth, Lodge, and Freedman, Singer makes his allegiances clear. But the jungle of Singer's own verbal exorbitance is a thick one indeed (perhaps in this way he is metatextualizing on his own and thus practicing what he preaches). And, quite frankly, I am not certain if there is a temple of gold to be found at the journey's end. But for those who can appreciate the journey as a worthwhile reward, then Singer's text should work. It is a text which makes a rigorous attempt to muscle for elbow room and to position itself as a progenitive stepchild capable of surviving on its own. JAMES L. MARRA Texas Tech University MICHAEL SLATER. Dickens and Women. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1983. 465 p. For the reader who has usually found greater realism, more psychological depth, and stronger interest in Dorothea Brooke, Gwendolen Harleth, Margaret Hale, Lucy Snowe, and Becky Sharp, and would like to be convinced that such women also exist in Dickens, Michael Slater's book will be a disappointment. Except in the case of David Copperfield's Dora, where Slater points out subtleties often overlooked, this eminent Dickens scholar affirms the often noted limitations in the attitudes of"our Shakespeare of the novel," to use Slater's own introductory phrase (xii). Thus, Dickens, despite his promotion of the domestic ideal, has difficulty depicting strong and positive mother-child relationships (because, Slater says, of his own mother's willingness that he remain in the blacking factory even after it ceased to be necessary to the family fortunes). And, Dickens was especially fond of illustrating the domestic ideal through a brother-sister relationship, preferring the idea of an innocent marriage of children perhaps, Slater suggests, because he had problems accepting the sexual nature of adult relationships (sometimes Dickens mixes the two, however, and Slater comments wryly on the sexual overtones in the Ruth and Tom Pinch relationship). And again, Dickens is apprehensive of strong, passionate women, tending to turn them into comic characters of the Mrs. Jellyby and Mrs. Pardiggle sort, which infuriated feminist thinkers like John Stuart Mill, or to make them victim-villains, like Louisa Gradgrind, Lady Dedlock, or Edith Dombey. These and other clichés about Dickens and his women characters are true. And yet, while affirming their content, Slater's book removes the statements Book Reviews87 from the realm of cliché by providing a context in which the reader comes to understand better both writer and his writings. Likewise, in the section on the actual women in Dickens' life, Slater, in his detached and careful scholarship and his avoidance of sensationalism and vague speculation, leads the reader to an understanding of Dickens rather than a condemnation, even in the case of Dickens' treatment of his wife, which seems to have been rather shabby. The book is divided into three main sections. The first, "Experience and Art," explores Dickens' relationships with women in his life, starting with his mother and ending with Ellen Ternan; this section, which includes salient references to the stories and novels, is the longest, taking up over half the book. The second section, "The Women of the Novels," divided into three chapters, works chronologically through Dickens' fiction. "Dickens and Woman," the third section, consists of a single long chapter titled "The Womanly Ideal." The first and third sections are the most engaging and useful. The first provides an overview of all the...

D. H. Lawrence’s Nightmare: The Writer and His Circle in the Years of the Great War by Paul Delany

was required to make. That spirit of irreverence survived. In Bleak House, to point up errant Lady Dedlock’s fate, Dickens required a gloomy plate of the Dedlock mausoleum to which Lady Dedlock comes at last. It’s a sombre affair. “That Phiz found the subject excessively sombre is indicated by the working drawing. . . in the margin of which he has sketched three mocking devils, one thumbing his nose with both hands, one laughing directly at the mausoleum, and the third peeking around the border of the drawing with a smirk on his face. How Dickens felt if he in fact saw this drawing we cannot know, but his doubts about Browne, expressed at least as long before as Mrs. Pipchin, would not have been lessened by it” (p. 156). To conclude, this is a thorough, innovative, astute and informative book, a scholarly oasis in the desert of readings, rereadings, and rerereadings of Dickens. It is a pity that cost presumably limited the number of illustrations, but the 126 included are well-produced. In addition to restoring for us an artistic tradition, showing us in lively detail how it works, and making a case for the collaborative efforts of Dickens and Phiz as a new kind of art, Steig’s book provides interesting material for anyone puzzling over the question of whether art refers to life or to other art and convention, a question perennial but, in ways Miller’s essay demonstrates, newly alive. r . d. m c m a st e r / University of Alberta Paul Delany, D. H. Lawrence’s Nightmare: The Writer and His Circle in the Years of the Great War (New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1978). xvii, 420. $ 15-95 For all the current interest in literary theory, we still lack even the rudiments of a poetics of biography. Lytton Strachey’s manifesto appeared more than sixty years ago but there is still considerable disagreement among those who write, read, and review biographies over his dictum that “ to preserve a be­ coming brevity — a brevity which excludes everything that is redundant and nothing that is significant — that, surely, is the first duty of the biographer.” Those who bear witness to Strachey’s influence by deploring it think that truth rather than art is the biographer’s first duty; the biographer as artist is a figure of suspicion for them, especially when, as with Strachey, the art is ironic. The state of biographical criticism is so primitive that there is no customary distinction even between biographies whose subjects led lives of action that we cannot directly know, and those whose work we can study independently of their lives. Strachey did not write literary biographies, and he has nothing to say about the dispute over the priority of art or truth that often settles on the biographer’s treatment of the writer’s work. Johnson had no hesitation judging the poetry along with the life of the poet, but his de­ tached criticism has not inspired modern literary biographers. A very few appear to have managed the discussion of the writer’s life and work without losing a becoming brevity, but most recent literary biographies that undertake an analysis of the writing as well as the life, approach, in some degree, the form of Victorian biographies “with their ill-digested masses of material, their slipshod style, their tedious panegyric, their lamentable lack of selection.” This is what happens, Strachey suggests, when the biographer functions as an undertaker rather than an artist, and it still applies — except that after Strachey no serious modem biographer dares to be tediously panegyric. Those literary biographies that leave the work alone achieve their becoming brevity at the cost of leaving out precisely that which explains our interest in the life. The second duty of the biographer, according to Strachey, is “to maintain his own freedom of spirit.” One rather recent kind of literary biography ful­ fills this duty as well as the first one while discussing the writer’s work. In this sub-genre the biographer, typically a literary critic, usually emphasizes the work to the detriment of the life. A pattern derived from the work is often used to order the...