Bleak House at Four in the Morning

I finished Bleak House in the wee hours of the morning after Rory came to visit, in a fit of guilt that I had taken the whole weekend off from reading (which I have done every subsequent weekend, incidentally.) Here are some thoughts--since I finished two weeks ago, my thoughts aren't as fresh as they were, so I'm often just referring to passages I underlined or cryptic notes I made on the Kindle, just in case any of that is worth remembering when I return to these notes before my exam:

• Career Counseling. The question of what people should do with their time is kind of a big one in Bleak House: Rick tries out all the professions and likes them all "well enough"; Horace Skimpole is a non-practicing doctor who expects the world to allow him the luxuries he requires to enjoy life ("He said to the world, 'Go your several ways in peace! Wear red coats, blue coats, lawn sleeves; put pens behind your ears, wear aprons; go after glory, holiness, commerce, trade, any object you prefer; only--let Harold Skimpole live!"); lots of characters live off the Chancery suit in different ways, either profiting by the business it creates, as Krook and Nemo and Mrs Snagsby and Tulkinghorn and Vholes and various other characters central or peripheral to the legal profession do, or by going to court every day like it's a job, but not profiting at all by it, as Miss Flite and Rick and (less patiently) Mr Gridley do. The Chancery suitors & legal types, of course, illustrate how parasitic Chancery is, and maybe how parasitic the law profession is in general--in chapter 39, "Attorney and Client," Dickens says "The one great principle of the English law is to make business for itself" and talks about how the main argument against legal reform is that it would ruin respectable men like Mr Vholes, who make their money from the inefficiencies of the legal system. Dickens is being highly satirical here, and his message throughout Bleak House is unmistakably that the legal system is a disaster, and that innocent people are continually crushed by it. But I wonder how these issues about work and efficiency and social welfare--Vholes's parasitism supporting his daughters and his aging father, Guppy's and Uriah Heep's weirdly humble but ruthless ambition, Skimpole's claim that he deserves compensation for being alive--connect to ideas about job creation as an economic and social strategy. We do it now in different ways, but when did the ideas that led to the WPA & so on originate? Are these Victorian ideas? Can you relate them to the concept of workhouses, etc? When is making work an instrument of social welfare, and when is it a waste of everyone's time, or a criminal act?
• Marriage as a Career Choice. In one of my entries on The Way We Live Now I mentioned being really struck in another Trollope novel, Can You Forgive Her?, by the revelation that marriage for C19 women didn't just mean choosing the career of wife and mother (a role that feminism and post-feminism and anti-feminism has legitimated as a choice for twentieth- and twenty-first-century women, an alternative career to doctor or lawyer or whatever) but also choosing to be part of your husband's "real" career out in the world. I really don't think we take the importance of this factor into account when we imagine being C19 women choosing husbands: we think about the economic impact a husband's career might have, but not the specific skills a wife would need to be married to an MP or a doctor or a lawyer or, in Caddy Jellyby's case, a dancing master. I was really interested in the fact that Caddy, who has served as her mother's amanuensis basically all her life and therefore is well prepared to be a great wife to, like, Tommy Traddles in David Copperfield ("you wouldn't call that a woman's hand, would you?" Tommy says to David, showing him how his wife has been working as his clerk--as usual I paraphrase), takes it upon herself to learn in a few weeks all the dancing and music skills her husband has presumably taken years to learn, and then basically takes over the business:
  
  You see, my dear, to save expense I ought to know something of the piano, and I ought to know something of the kit too, and consequently I have to practise those two instruments as well as the details of our profession.  If Ma had been like anybody else, I might have had some little musical knowledge to begin upon. However, I hadn't any; and that part of the work is, at first, a little discouraging, I must allow.  But I have a very good ear, and I am used to drudgery--I have to thank Ma for that, at all events--and where there's a will there's a way, you know, Esther, the world over.
  
  Also, the dancing apprentices are hilarious. They just dance around all day! I can't tell if Dickens is just being hilarious, or if there's some confusion going on during this period about who counts as apprentices learning a trade, and who counts as students learning a skill? Maybe the performing arts have always been a little ambiguous in this sense, since they are a super lower-class job you can get, so you can't go to college to learn them, but on the other hand it seems very strange to group them with trades like blacksmithing or stonemasonry, or professions like medicine or law.
•  The Exceptional vs the Representative. I read this line--"Chancery, which knows no wisdom but in precedent, is very rich in such precedents; and why should one be different from ten thousand?"--and I wondered whether Dickens really believes this. A Dickensian character is hilarious and delightful because it's so quirky, and yet these characters also strike us, despite their obvious eccentricity, as types. He's constantly showing us people who are different from ten thousand--people who are unusually kind, unusually strange, unusually cruel; people who spontaneously combust; people who are connected to one another through the most unlikely and miraculous strings of coincidences. And yet he also seems to be telling us that this is a slice of typical English life, that the world is full of dangerously 'umble law clerks and noble old soldiers and pathetic, good-hearted urchins, and that people die tragically and pathetically every day in the streets of London, and that spontaneous combustion really does happen, and that the reason you should read this novel is not that everything in here is so surprising but that this is the real world. I think it's a real tension that runs through Dickens, and maybe through all art that seeks to entertain and educate at the same time. You should care about this because it's real life--but it's also much funnier and sadder and sillier than real life, and that's why you should care about it too?
• More POV stuff. I want to think more about how POV works in Bleak House. This is just a note to self to do it. In the non-Esther sections, where does the narration focus in on a character's particular thoughts, and how long does it do that? When does it move from omniscience to free indirect discourse? Is the definition of omniscience that sometimes you go into a character's voice? I'm thinking of a particular passage where Tulkinghorn is looking at Lady Dedlock:
  
  So!  Anger, and fear, and shame.  All three contending.  What power this woman has to keep these raging passions down!  Mr. Tulkinghorn's thoughts take such form as he looks at her, with his ragged grey eyebrows a hair's breadth more contracted than usual under her gaze.
  
  It seems that here we get Tulkinghorn's voice as well as his thoughts, which is maybe unusual for this novel?
•  More Creepily Deceiving Girls for Their Own Good. (SPOILERS, but I will try to keep 'em vague) Come on, Mssrs Jarndyce and Woodcourt! That was creepy. Possibly worse than that business with Boffin the Golden Dustman and Bella in Our Mutual Friend, and that was HORRIBLE. Also, when Esther first gets the letter that is asking her to be the mistress of Bleak House, does John Jarndyce already mean fake Bleak House?
  
  Also related to this is Esther's own bizarre self-deception throughout the novel (also related to the weird first-person retrospection issues I mentioned in my last entry.) She's always crying for reasons she can't understand, but which are painfully obvious to the reader: "Still I cried very much, not only in the fullness of my heart after reading the letter, not only in the strangeness of the prospect--for it was strange though I had expected the contents--but as if something for which there was no name or distinct idea were indefinitely lost to me. "
• Fake Bleak House. Related to the above: so weird to make a fake Bleak House! I guess it's cute that they decorated it how Esther would have wanted it, and the fact that Jarndyce was able to imitate her decorating style means that he knows her really well, and that the work she's done in Real Bleak House is so exemplary it can be easily copied--she's like an Old Master of household management, whose style can be imitated by a school:
  
  And still, as we went through the pretty rooms, out at the little rustic verandah doors, and underneath the tiny wooden colonnades garlanded with woodbine, jasmine, and honey-suckle, I saw in the papering on the walls, in the colours of the furniture, in the arrangement of all the pretty objects, MY little tastes and fancies, MY little methods and inventions which they used to laugh at while they praised them, my odd ways everywhere.
  
  but it is also weird. Right?
• Esther's Old Face. It's hard to tell how ugly Esther is after she gets smallpox. In the movie she looks like this but I guess you can also end up looking like this (be careful; that link is pretty upsetting; also maybe this is a photo of active smallpox and not scars.) Here's a clue:
  And that young lady that was such a pretty dear caught his illness, lost her beautiful looks, and wouldn't hardly be known for the same young lady now if it wasn't for her angel temper, and her pretty shape, and her sweet voice.
  
  I guess she was pretty, and now she's not; Guppy's behavior is also evidence of this.  Her attitude toward her own face is characteristically Estherian--sympathetic toward her old self as if she was a different person, the least selfish possible kind of self-sympathy:
  
   I felt for my old self as the dead may feel if they ever revisit these scenes.  I was glad to be tenderly remembered, to be gently pitied, not to be quite forgotten.
  
  I don't know. I think Esther's feelings about her old face and her old self might be worth revisiting if I'm thinking about doubles & weird forms of doppelganger-love in the future, but I don't feel like thinking about it now!
• Mr Tulkinghorn: The Anti-Scrooge! Something in the description of Mr Tulkinghorn walking home to his doom reminded me of Scrooge going home before the advent of the three spirits: while Scrooge gets a ton of warnings, which he ignores, Dickens stresses all the supernatural warnings Tulkinghorn could have received but doesn't. I don't really know what to do with this, except that A Christmas Carol is a ghost story where things like that happen, and Bleak House is, uh, extremely realistic (see bullet point on representativeness & realism above?)
  
  Through the stir and motion of the commoner streets; through the roar and jar of many vehicles, many feet, many voices; with the blazing shop-lights lighting him on, the west wind blowing him on, and the crowd pressing him on, he is pitilessly urged upon his way, and nothing meets him murmuring, "Don't go home!"  Arrived at last in his dull room to light his candles, and look round and up, and see the Roman pointing from the ceiling, there is no new significance in the Roman's hand to-night or in the flutter of the attendant groups to give him the late warning, "Don't come here!"
  
  The Roman, who gets mentioned every time we go into Mr Tulkinghorn's house, also kind of reminds me of the Last Supper in Scrooge's room, a strangely detailed figurative representation of something grand and historical and significant, that can be read either as fateful, as metaphorically loaded (that gruel is the bad Scrooge's last supper! the Roman will soon be pointing at something significant on the floor of the room! see this passage: "But a little after the coming of the day come people to clean the rooms.  And either the Roman has some new meaning in him, not expressed before, or the foremost of them goes wild, for looking up at his outstretched hand and looking down at what is below it, that person shrieks and flies") or as an arbitrary signifier, something that once meant something to whoever first designed or decorated the room, but that for the social-climbing-but-solitary man in lodgings, the man who doesn't care to decorate or personalize his living space, means nothing, or maybe has some kind of social or economic value--this is a classy room and I am a classy guy. But these empty signifiers are going to take on meaning later, when something happens, because we want to give things meaning. I think Dickens tends to read these objects kind of prophetically/magically, but he also does want to point out to us how little they mean to the lodgers themselves, how single men living in pre-decorated lodgings are not quite living their own lives, maybe are not quite alive?
• The Bagnets are the best. They're one of those families Dickens puts in to make you feel like things are actually OK with the world. I love Mr Bagnet pretending to have authority but always asking Mrs Bagnet to express his opinion. I love Mrs Bagnet's birthday where she has to eat all this terrible food cooked by her useless family because they want to give her a day off. It reminds me of the Mother's Day where I brought my mom breakfast in bed, and it was, like, raw mushrooms and toast or something.
• Caddy's baby comes out inky. Well, she has dark veins in her face. Dickens is just being silly here, but also it reminds me of that Thomas Hardy story where the baby comes out looking like the poet the mom was obsessed with. Weird ideas about what can happen in the womb.
• The weird lyrical passages about how the railroads are coming, or how quiet the night is before the shot rings out that kills Mr T. I guess these passages actually confirm the thesis of that Sketch to Novel book, which is that the sketch-like passages in Victorian novels--the descriptive or discursive passages that disrupt or slow down the narrative--are often nostalgic, resistant to social and industrial change. In the two passages I'm thinking about, the railroad and the gunshot both serve the same function--to interrupt and destroy the peace of a vanished but reimagined landscape.
• Suddenly it's an adventure novel! There is something a little disorienting about the way both the omniscient narrator's and Esther's narrative become, quite suddenly, a thriller and/or mystery novel, hot on the trail of Lady Dedlock. The scenes at home with Sir Leicester were really touching and sad and slow; the scenes with Mr Bucket and Esther I found kind of hard to follow and a little boring, even though there was a ton of suspense. This might be in part due to Esther's confusion, both about Mr Bucket's reasoning and about what's going on around her, as nicely described in this strange, kind of synesthetic passage:
  
  At the same time I remember that the poor girl seemed to be yet telling her story audibly and plainly in my hearing, that I could feel her resting on my arm, that the stained house-fronts put on human shapes and looked at me, that great water-gates seemed to be opening and closing in my head or in the air, and that the unreal things were more substantial than the real.
•  The Ending. Super weird! Well, not nearly so weird as Villette. But does this sentence strike you as the right ending for Bleak House?
  
   I owe it all to him, my love, my pride!  They like me for his sake, as I do everything I do in life for his sake.
  OK, so it reminds us how selfless Esther is. And we're glad she ended up with the guy she ended up with, who has been mentioned subtly throughout the novel. And we're affirming the theme of domestic happiness that we doubted when we first heard of Bleak House, and that we believed in when we first visited Bleak House. But come on! We're ending with random praise of a totally minor character, and no Chancery business or ANYTHING. I guess it's like, "Look, life is going on, she's totally unaffected by anything that happened in this novel," but that seems boring and weird. Right, guys?