Abstract
Miss Flite lives on the top floor of a building at or near the center of a “monstrous maze” (482)1 into which human sacrifices, especially of the young, are fed. Also swallowed up are sheep (parchment, tallow candles) and trees: fiber for paper, oak galls for ink. The oaks and elms of Chesney Wold, a hundred miles away, are right to wring their hands (766) and feel “sullen” (347) at the programmed extinction of their kind, as Lady Dedlock is more right than she knows when the prospect from that estate seems to her “a view in Indian Ink” (11). They are alike sensing from how far afield what Miss Flite describes as the magnetizing “Monster” of Chancery can “draw” its prey (441), how readily Lincolnshire may be made over into raw material for Lincoln’s Inn Fields. Miss Flite’s own mind has become “crazy” (126; cf. 197) in the preclinical sense of off-kilter—her version of things is more bent than bonkers—as if deflected by proximity to the same force at work on even the most rurally remote: the “sheep … all made into parchment, the goats into wigs, and the pasture into chaff” (514).
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Notes
Unless otherwise specified, all parenthetical references are to Charles Dickens, Bleak House, ed. George Ford and Sylvère Monod (New York: Norton), 1977.
P. 413. See Susan Shatto, The Companion to Bleak House, London: Unwin Hyman, 1988, 216), for the words to the song “King Death.”
Janet L. Larson, “The Battle of Biblical Books in Esther’s Narrative,” Nineteenth-Century Fiction. 38 (1983), 131–60.
See Eric G. Lorentzen, “‘Obligations of Home:’ Colonialism, Contamination, and Revolt in Bleak House,” Dickens Studies Annual. 34 (2004), 155–84, p. 175.
The most infamous of the names assigned to Esther is probably “Dame Durden.” William Axton has found that Dame Durden was “the butt of a comic street song popular in Dickens’s time which ridiculed the title character’s over-anxious desire for a husband while those about her are busily finding mates and lovers.” He notes that Esther is similarly “unloved … among a host of young people … who are falling in love and marrying all around her.” (William Axton, “Esther’s Nicknames: A Study in Relevance,” Dickensian. 62 (1966), 158–63, p. 160). See also Alex Zwerdling, “Esther Summerson Rehabilitated,” Harold Bloom, ed. Charles Dickens’s Bleak House. (Chelsea House: New York: 1987), 37–56, p. 41. Esther is, after all, close to Ada’s age—in fact a little older, therefore entitled to first dibs, according to marriage-market protocols. She finds Richard attractive, and, unlike Ada, is neither his cousin nor a party in Jarndyce and Jarndyce. This last point matters, as John Jarndyce of all people should know.
Nathaniel Hawthorne, “Rappaccini’s Daughter,” Mosses from an Old Manse. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1900), 161–72.
Compare George Eliot, in a well-known passage written about seven years after Bleak House: “ The highest ‘calling and election’ is to do without opium. and live through all out pain with conscious, clear-eyed endurance.” (Quoted in Bert G. Hornback, ed., Middlemarch: An Authoritative Text, Backgrounds, Reviews and Criticism. [New York: Norton, 1977], 43).
On this, see Timothy Peltason, “Esther’s Will,” in Jeremy Tambling, ed., New Casebooks: Bleak House. (New York: St. Martin’s: 1998, 205–27.
Patricia Ingham, Invisible Writing and the Victorian Novel: Readings in Language and Ideology. (Manchester, England: Manchester University Press 2000), 104.
See Grahame Smith, “Dickens and the City of Light,” Dickens Quarterly. 16 (1999) 178–90.
About this same “multiply liminal moment after the fact,” Carolyn Dever proposes that Esther “is struck with the perception of her own difference” and begins an “attempt to master her own … discourse.” Not exactly my reading, but we agree that Esther-as-narrator and Esther-as-character seem oddly and exceptionally close here. (Carolyn Dever, Death and the Mother from Dickens to Freud. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 99.
On this subject, see Emily Heady, “The Polis’s Different Voices: Narrating England’s Progress in Dickens’s Bleak House,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language. 48 (2006), 312–39, especially pp. 333–35.
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© 2011 John Gordon
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Gordon, J. (2011). “In a Thick Crowd of Sounds, But Still Intelligibly Enough to Be Understood”. In: Sensation and Sublimation in Charles Dickens. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230119697_4
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