Anyway, I realized I should record some thoughts before I finish reading it, since it is very long. I'm like 60% finished. As with David Copperfield, I feel like I don't have much to say about Bleak House. Dickens is just entertaining: you get caught up in the story, you chuckle at the wacky characters, you imagine Victorian audiences chuckling away and getting spooked and weeping at all the melodramatic stuff: "My child! My child! I thought you were dead!" and "I could not see it. For I was blind!" That type of stuff. But what smart stuff can I say about it? Becca and I were talking today about how it's hard to remember that so much of this orals reading, especially the major lists (the ones that are a kind of survey of a major historical period or field of interest) are to give you background information that will be useful when teaching survey courses, or for teaching in general. And of course to give you a broad general understanding of your field, against which you can understand whatever specific writing you're doing. So it's OK for me to be noticing obvious stuff about Dickens. There are a lot of characters! There are a lot of details! It's funny and sentimental! Everyone knows these things about Dickens already but it's good to see it for yourself. Also everyone is always making references to Dickens. Also I will never read all of Dickens so I will never get all the references.
On to the bullet points:
- Omniscient Narrator Vs Esther: Style. I found this less jarring this time than last time, but only because I'd read it before! It really is quite jarring to go from this kind of jaded, pseudo-journalistic style to Esther's cheerful, innocent, conversational voice. I guess the omniscient narrator's voice changes depending on where he is and who he's talking about, which also happened in Our Mutual Friend (where the Veneerings' party was narrated in this insanely amped-up, lightning-fast, slangy voice that completely freaked me out! while other chapters were, um, not like that!). The voice associated with Chancery is very choppy, for example: all the sentences are in fragments, almost like the court proceedings are being reported in shorthand by David Copperfield, or as if the street scenes are being "sketched" by the same lively, observant, quick-scribbling young journalist who wrote "Sketches by Boz" (which, of course, they are). The voice associated with the Dedlocks is similar--they're both pretty sarcastic--but it's slower, more ponderous, to go along with "my Lady" being "bored to death" and with Sir Leicester's ponderous family pride and responsibility.
- Omniscient Narrator vs. Esther: Plot. It's really interesting to follow the different characters from the Esther sections to the non-Esther sections: the reader often knows information Esther doesn't (from the omniscient narrator) or recognizes a character from Esther's narrative (Mr Guppy, for example) who's unknown to another character. So this weird doubled narration allows for a lot of dramatic irony, and for the reader to do a lot of the fun guessing I mentioned in my last Villette entry: which character we've already met is this guy going to turn out to be? Oh he has a fur cap in his hands; it must be Jo!
- Intrigue! and Serpentine Plots. and the Trickiness of the Serial Mystery. But the double narrative also gets pretty confusing: sometimes you think you should know how some particular bit of intrigue happens, that you must have seen it happen in one of the nine million chapters you've already read, but you realize that you in fact have no idea, and don’t remember Guppy finding out that Nemo’s name was Captain Hawdon at all, or how Guppy got in touch with Mr Tulkinghorn, or how anyone got in touch with Smallweed. Probably some of that stuff was explained in the chapter where we met the Smallweed family, but also little bits of information trickle in after the fact, and you realize you hadn’t been told how Guppy found out about Hawdon, or about Krook’s letters, or anything. The narrator’s omniscient, but we aren’t—and in fact even Esther deliberately withholds information to increase suspense, which I will discuss more two bullets down! Dickens is definitely doing that thing that (I think) Paul finds contemptible in mystery novelists, where the mystery for the reader is based on some fact that the detective sees but does not reveal to the reader until later. I think Dan Brown does this? This is mostly contemptible in a third-person-limited or first-person narrator, because you’re like, “She’s telling us everything she sees and says and does; why is she leaving out this one detail?” The illusion of complicity or identity with the narrator is shattered!
- Plot and the Serial Form: There’s also something weird going on with Dickens’s manipulation of the serial form: in the introduction to Our Mutual Friend he says something like, “You were probably surprised by the solution to the mystery, but that’s because this is a serial and every week you kind of forget what happened a couple of weeks ago.” I should get the exact quote because it was very confusing to me, who had read the novel in two or three sittings over about a week, so all the events were fresh in my mind, but I still found the mystery to be kind of . . . silly? I guess I solved it earlier than a serial reader would have. Anyway, it raises all these questions about the serial form, which I think I’ve touched upon when discussing David Copperfield on this blog. Is Dickens trying to make use of the long gaps between episodes to make his readers forget about clues he’s planted earlier in the story? If so, what’s the point of planting those clues? Is he counting on those clues being kind of buried in the reader’s subconscious (to paraphrase Becca paraphrasing Jameson, did the Victorians even have a subconscious?) so that when the mystery unfurls it will seem kind of right to the reader, even if she hasn’t solved it herself? Is he counting on the serial being long and drawn-out enough that we won’t remember that we haven’t gotten certain clues, and so we’ll totally accept that Guppy somehow figured something out about Nemo’s identity? In that case, is the omission of Guppy’s discovery a narrative flaw rather than an intentionally jerky, tricky, bait-and-switch narrative strategy?
- The Problem of First Person & Retrospect. We had this problem with Woman in White and with David Copperfield and with Villette: how can you write a suspenseful narrative from the perspective of a character who’s obviously still alive, who has a powerful emotional relationship to all these other characters she’s describing, and who knows what happens? An omniscient narrator seems closer to the Author, and so we buy that he or she just wants to tell us an entertaining tale, moving from start to finish, just as it happened. But a character—a Walter or a David or a Lucy or an Esther—has a personal interest in what’s happening; is talking about the first time he or she fell in love with a person to whom he or she is now married, or who is now dead; is often preoccupied with the effects of memory, the difficulties inherent in the act of remembering; is often in a specific place, at a specific time, physically writing out the pages you’re now reading. How does that person justify not saying, “Well, now she’s dead, so I’m sad about that”? They all do a lot of “Had I known then what I know now, I would have wished her dead rather than let her live out what life had in store for her” or “Even now, after what has passed, I feel that I would have acted in the same way,” which is much more exciting and suspenseful than if an omniscient narrator said it. But why not just tell us? Collins has the best solution, which is the conceit that the novel is a pseudo-legal document, compounded of all these semi-official “narratives” which have been commissioned by a character trying to get the real truth. So all the writers of the narratives are like, “I want to tell you more, but I have been asked to just describe what I observed at the time, and not to cloud this narrative with any information I have received since that may cloud my opinion of blah blah blah.” This seems mechanical but also elegant! “Esther’s Narrative” seems to be operating on a similar system—maybe Dickens gave his friend this idea? Maybe he does it more in another book?—because she keeps saying “Oh I feel weird writing about myself,” and it seems like someone’s asked her to write an account of her experiences for some reason. But it still feels really awkward when she’s like, “I read this letter, and you’ll find out what it said later on in this book.” You’re like, “Really? When am I going to find out? Why can’t I find out when you find out? Since when is the narrative convention of Bleak House that I find stuff out when John Jarndyce finds it out? Or, like, when Ada finds it out? Now are you going to make a rule that I can’t find anything out until effing Horace Skimpole finds out? For the rest of the novel I have to pretend I don’t know pounds from shillings and stuff like that? This is bullshit, Esther.” If she means I’m going to find out from Omniscient Narrator in some big scene with like Guppy and Gillian Anderson and like Mr Bucket and stuff, that is REALLY crazy. Does she know the Omniscient Narrator? He is a crazy sardonic God figure who can see into the heads of, like, the dogs in the stables at Chesney Wold. And into the contagion in the graveyard. And into Mrs Snagsby’s head. And into the head of the mom who cradled Nemo to her breast when he was a baby. OK, he doesn’t see into most of these people’s heads—he speculates—but still. I don’t believe for a second that that guy is friends with you, Esther, and told you to write this narrative. Not for a second!
- Everybody Loves Esther! Esther is a pretty likable narrator, except when she goes on and on about how great everyone thinks she is and how embarrassing and untrue this is. Annoying! A classic problem when you have a first-person narrator and want to show she’s so loveable. Also, so pretty! Esther is like “I was never a beauty,” but everyone keeps mistaking her for Lady Dedlock and Lady Dedlock is an OFFICIAL BEAUTY. Like she’s in the Galaxy Gallery of British Beauty, you guys (even though Mrs Rouncewell tells Guppy that Sir Leicester has never allowed Lady D’s portrait to be copied by an engraver, which is a key plot point, because that means Guppy has never seen a reproduced image of her face, so why does he recognize it? Incidentally—this should get its own bullet point, but whatever—it might be interesting to think about the private/public status of official portraits and country houses—they’re private residences and personal possessions, created through private commissions (and in the case of Lady Audley and Lady Dedlock, commissions made to represent women who are both private property of their husbands but also I guess public figures in the community) but they also have this weird public/commercial role in tourism and in the popular press. Like you can have a Lady Dedlock trading card, basically, and you can go take a tour of her house. The Lady Audley portrait is in a hidden part of the house, so it’s not part of the official tour, and the Lady Dedlock portrait is part of the official tour, but they both get the original ladies into trouble.) I am most creeped out by how all the couples love Esther, and can’t feel properly in love unless Esther is there. Why have all these couples internalized the idea of a chaperone so thoroughly? Those Woman in White guys totally could not have spent like ten minutes together without the sister-in-law. I guess you just brought your sister or your female companion everywhere! And that’s why it’s weird that Dorothea doesn’t want to bring her sister on her honeymoon (but Laura isn’t allowed to bring her sister on her honeymoon in WiW, even though she wants to. I wonder if the tradition hadn’t started then? Or maybe her husband was just a jerk. I mean we know he was a jerk.) Maybe also that’s why the Deceased Wife’s Sister Marriage Act or whatever was such a big controversy: you were already like 33% in love with your wife’s sister before you even married your wife, so it made a lot of sense to marry her when your wife died; but the idea that you could marry your chaperone really messes with the sanctity of the idea of the totally sexless, nice, morally-encouraging chaperone, so, yikes. Also, incest. Of course, regular old real-life Victorians may not have been as into their chaperones as these squeaky-clean fictional lovers are, but the novels are at least trying to promote some ideal that somebody somewhere must have had, and I think that must have fed into this Deceased Wife’s Sister nonsense. The silliest-sounding reform in all of Victorian history, right? Matthew Arnold says funny (but maybe weirdly conservative?) things about it. (You guys I am not sure I really understand Matthew Arnold’s politics even though I read Culture and Anarchy. But also Victorian politics do not always map onto our politics that well. Their liberals were possibly slightly more liberal than our liberals. Like oh man universal healthcare ouch ouch)
- Oh Man Confusing British Court System. OK, so Bleak House is probably THE Dickens novel about confusing British court systems. But he really has it in for them. What was that job David Copperfield got? He was a proctor? That meant he was a kind of lawyer or something in some court that dealt with ecclesiastical law + ships? In David Copperfield it was funny because David had never heard of this crazy court and was like, “uh, what? Ecclesiastical law + ships? But they’re kind of classy? Okay, sure.” Incidentally, that’s Richard Carstone’s attitude towards every job he tries out in Bleak House, but I guess the difference is that David works super hard at his bullshit proctor job to make a lot of unnecessary money for his family, and doesn’t stop doing it until he’s making a great income from his part-time job of being Charles Dickens, whereas Rick is a big disaster who gets obsessed with Chancery even though it’s super obvious getting obsessed with Chancery is a bad idea. But anyway, there appear to have been a lot of crazy different kinds of courts in Victorian England! And I thought I was doing pretty good by knowing the difference between an attorney and a solicitor. Also, what is with Ada and Rick being wards of Chancery? I mean, I know you can be a ward of the court if you’re an orphan, but how does that happen? Like, why wouldn’t you just get left to an aunt or something? I guess the deal is that everyone knows they’re supposed to inherit some money from Jarndyce and Jarndyce, so they can’t be sent to orphanages like paupers, but they can’t be given the money because of how stupid Chancery is, so maybe the court is paying for them to be brought up until the case is decided?
- Bad Lawyers. Especially lower-class guys who can’t afford to be articled clerks (I still do not understand the difference between an articled clerk and a stipendiary clerk—why would you want to pay a bunch of money instead of getting a salary? Maybe it’s like being an officer vs an enlisted guy in the army—you pay a lot of money at first, but in the end you get a better career and are a gentleman? I think that’s what it is: articled clerks can become lawyers or whatever, but stipendiary clerks just stay clerks) but who are super ambitious and are trying to make their way in the world by elbow grease. And, um, trickery and white-collar crime! Also both Guppy and Uriah Heep have weird moms. Stop being so rough on ambitious lower-class guys with moms, Dickens! He makes fun of Sir Leicester for thinking every manufacturing guy is a Wat Tyler, and worrying about social change, but he seems kind of uncomfortable with too much social mobility himself. Like David Copperfield can go from being a kind of abused middle-class guy who is being kept from his proper position in life by his terrible stepfather to a pretty well-off middle-class guy, and his friend Tommy Traddles can go from being a downtrodden but well-educated clerk to being a fancy judge, but you can’t go from being an uneducated ambitious guy to a fancy judge. Maybe with the mom stuff he is teasing us about the Victorian cult of the mom: maybe it seems like a convenient mask for hypocrisy to him? Which brings us to
- Moms! Actually moms have it pretty rough in Victorian fiction in general: where did all this famed Victorian sentimentality about mothers come from, anyway? Not from classic Victorian novels! Maybe all the mom-worship is in popular sentimental poetry and novels that we all think is trashy and unreadable now. Well, and dead moms are fine. But so much of what I’ve read over the past year seems to be an intentional parody/explosion of the sentimental idea of motherhood. Becky Sharp is like the worst mom ever, but uses her motherhood to get sympathy; Amelia is a loving mom, but her self-immolating dedication to her kid and his terrible dead dad also spoils him and blinds her to Dobbin’s love and her own happiness; Anne Catherick’s mom is the worst; David Copperfield’s mom is pretty nice and pathetic, I guess, but makes terrible decisions that ruin David’s life; the godmother in Villette is fine; Lady Carbury is totally misguided in her mothering of Felix and is just lousy to Hetta; Lady Dedlock is, uh, I guess a loving and penitent mom, at least so far, but kinda cowardly; Mrs Jellyby is a model terrible mom. One of my teachers last semester was saying how the only thing the Victorians really couldn’t forgive was being a bad mom: that’s why Lady Audley is so repellent, for example. I think that might be true (I also think we can’t really forgive it; we forgive bad dads much more easily—oh I should link to that article about how we’re all really Victorians at heart. Here you go!) but I’m also interested in how many bad moms there are. Is it just truth-tellin’ male realist authors trying to take these sentimentalized women down a peg? Is it just that stories with good moms aren’t as interesting, because people with good moms have great lives? (Ooh interesting counterpoint: Steerforth in DC saying that if only he had had a dad to teach him to be a stand-up guy everything would have been different—you need a good dad, too, I guess.) Is it just that, as my teacher suggests, a bad mom is the most thrillingly awful villain the Victorians can imagine?
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