Does the narrative style of Bleak House estrange the reader from the world of the novel more

than it persuades the reader to accept the world as natural? The world of Bleak House has many dimensions. It is seemingly controlled by Chancery, the institution that overshadows the lives of John Jarndyce, Esther, and Jarndyce's wards, Richard and Ada and every character that appears in the novel, central or incidental, and chases down Lady Dedlock to reveal her secret. The institutions seem natural enough, but the characters are often either underdeveloped or caricature. The narrative voices function as the eyes and ears of the reader in this world, which the narrator has created from nothing. This means that in order to convince the reader that the novel's world is natural, the narrative style needs consistency and needs to recall to the reader his or her own world, or a world he can believe in. If the reader is estranged from the world of the novel, it means that he cannot find any intellectual or emotional connection with it. Bleak House is written in two distinct narrative voices, one the voice of a third-person, anonymous narrator, and one the voice of Esther Summerson, serious, mimetic and sincere1, who is emotionally involved with many of the characters of the story. The third-person narrator deals more with the mechanisms of Chancery and scenes of Victorian London and Chesney Wold, the home of Lord and Lady Dedlock. This narrator, whose social preoccupations and experimentation with writing style lead us to sense that this is the voice of the omniscient author, Dickens himself2, self-consciously creates the world of the novel from foggy chaos in the opening page. His first sentence, London.3, shows in its verblessness4 a city emerging from nothing, and being created before the reader's eyes. There are indeed no main verbs for the whole of the first page, until Dickens focuses on Chancery, where he introduces the case of Jarndyce and Jarndyce. The narrator's preoccupation with Chancery as a symbol for the condition of man5 is evident when the time-scale he uses for his newly-created world in the second sentence is Michaelmas term lately over, rather than a calendrical date. This offers to the reader a world ruled by alternative forces to his own. Dickens has been accused of creating an unrealistic character, and therefore an unreliable narrator, in Esther, because of her constant self-effacement6 and unconscious ability to make every character fall for her while calling herself a tiresome little creature7. Her motif of jingling her house-keys if she starts to pity herself, or think of herself at all, is symbolic of how noisy her self-effacement is. She prefaces Chapter IX with I don't know how it is, I seem always to be writing about myself. Dickens takes the trouble to exaggerate in Esther the ideal attributes of a young Victorian woman modest, undemanding, diplomatic and placid making her often irritating to the reader and somehow irresistible to the characters he creates8. This is possibly because he wanted a virtuous and loving narrator as relief from the world of Chancery to create a balance between darkness and light, so that the reader would not lose interest in the story. He still needs a fault in his narrator to make her convincingly human, and so he makes her too saintly. She may be unnatural, especially when set against the dark world of chancery, but her presence engages the reader with the world of the novel. The idea of a novel's world being natural may depend on its reflecting the world that is known to
1 Sandra Young, Uneasy Relations: Possibility for Eloquence in Bleak House. Dickens Studies Annual (1980) 77 2 W.J. Harvey, Bleak House: The Double Narrative, Bleak House: A Selection of Critical Essays, ed. A.E. Dyson, Hong Kong: Macmillan (1977) 225 3 Charles Dickens, Bleak House, Oxford: Oxford World's Classics, 2008 11 4 Barbara Hardy, Dickens and Creativity London: Continuum (2008) 56 5 J Hillis Miller, Bleak House and the Moral Life, Bleak House: A Selection of Critical Essays, ed. A.E. Dyson, Hong Kong: Macmillan (1977) 162-163 6 Dickens and Creativity, 55 7 Charles Dickens, Bleak House, Oxford: Oxford World's Classics, 2008 125 8 Dickens and Creativity, 55

the reader, or its reflecting the literary conventions the reader has come to expect, so that they can accept the novel as a set of characters and events rather than as a construction of words. It could be said that the world that Dickens writes about does not conform to reality or Realism: relationships are presented with caricaturish symbiosis, such as that of Mr. and Mrs. Bagnet (Old girl, murmurs Mr. Bagnet, Give her another bit of my mind.9) Almost everyone not in a comical relationship has a monomania, such as Mr. Turveydrop and his Deportment10, whereas in real life, people's thoughts tend to be balanced between work, leisure, ideals and relationships. However, if this variety of extreme characters were presented in a style that did not acknowledge or complement their unreality, then the reader would be unable to identify with the narrator and would not believe in the moral world of the novel as a creation. Thus it may make sense to make Esther overly-modest and self-effacing (in her first chapter she describes herself as not clever11, which is belied by her humour and perceptiveness in the rest of the novel), so that she has her own monomania. Another function of the eccentricity of the characters, especially as portrayed by Esther, is that it shows the power of Chancery to draw such a variety of human life into its psychological orbit. Esther's caring nature leads her to be befriended by almost all of the characters she meets in the novel, which allows her the emotional insight into their lives not afforded to the third-person narrator. She incites pity for individuals in situations of individual distress, such as the broken Mr. Jellyby who likes to sit with his head against the wall. Her understated style is suited to this form of expression, because she can identify deep emotional meaning in small gestures: I hope he found some consolation in walls. I almost think he did.12 This does indeed engage the audience and persuade the reader to share in the sufferings of the characters she describes. Esther is contrasted with Mrs. Jellyby and Mrs. Pardiggle, who are obsessed with charity but lack the subtlety to be of any help. Dickens refers to this as telescopic philanthropy13. For example, the Jellyby household has no conception of the reality of Africa. Caddy Jellyby exclaims I wish Africa was dead!, showing that she sees it as even less than a geographical entity, and certainly not a place occupied by people for her it is just an odious fact of life. This contrasts Esther's success in rendering the Jellyby family, with Mrs. Jellyby's failure to see Africa as a real place or to impart its reality to her children. The third-person narrator is also compassionate, but his concern is with the poor, as embodied by Jo, the chimney sweep. His style is grand, and changes in addressee. To Jo, From the sole of thy foot to the crown of thy head, there is nothing interesting about thee.14 He apostrophises to the reader when he announces Jo's death: Dead, your Majesty. Dead, my lords and gentlemen. Dead, right reverends and wrong reverends of every order.15 His changes in addressee and tone show that he is struggling for a way to express the extent of the suffering of, and injustice towards, the poor. The claustrophobia of the inability to express the fact of being poor and oppressed is in parallel to the inescapability of extreme poverty when it goes hand-in-hand with illiteracy. In one passage about Jo, the narrator repeatedly uses the first person Everyone overlooked me until I became the creature that I am!16 - half-encouraging the reader to imagine himself as Jo, but at the same time emphasising Jo's distance from any reader of the book by using long words and complex theory and paradox. This engages the reader in the sufferings of the poor in the real world, and creates a convincing underclass in Bleak House's London that adds to the depth and naturalness of the world presented in the novel.
9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 Bleak House, 500 Bleak House, 293 Bleak House, 24 Bleak House, 446 Bleak House, 44 Bleak House, 669 Bleak House, 677 Bleak House, 237

Dickens uses Esther to tell the story of Richard Carstone, and simultaneously makes her the centre of Lady Dedlock's story. Esther's own relationships are underdeveloped: she seems to fall instantly for Ada Clare, calling her my pet17 on the first day of meeting her, and her union with Alan Woodcourt is not dwelt on enough to convince the reader of its importance. This is perhaps another aspect where the plot's divergence from the convention of realism is reflected in the narration: where realism often had a central romantic plot-line, even if it did not end happily, the two main narratives in the novel are about Esther as the product of a failed romance before the plot began, and its consequences for Lady Dedlock, and about Richard Carstone's becoming a casualty of Chancery, while his wife can only look on. The character of Richard Carstone is more powerful as a psychological portrayal of addiction, than as one of a husband or a friend. The nature of addiction is that it its effects are uniform in every sufferer, so that it is one of the paradoxes of Bleak House that despite all of the attempts at portraying different forms of human life, the central story is of slavery to the ruling force of the novel's world. Similarly, Lady Dedlock is doomed because of her connections to characters in Chancery such as Captain Hawdon and Guppy, and her own death is always at her side in the form of the sinister lawyer Tulkinghorn. The narrator's first description of Tulkinghorn loads him with deathly symbolism: in his office are many cast-iron boxes with (the name of Dedlock) outside18. This reinforces the idea of Chancery as representing the human prison of mortality, so that the world of the novel is symbolic rather than literal, but lives by the same gravity that brings humanity towards the subjugation of death. Esther's narration focuses not on the imminence of Richard's doom but on the tragic contrast between his sincere desire to do right by his wife Ada and the seeds of his own destruction within him from the start: He was ardent and brave, and, in the midst of his wild restlessness, was so gentle19 that, like Esther, the reader does not want to believe in his eventual downfall. The two different ways in which Chancery (or death) is depicted, do not persuade the reader to accept the world as natural, because they adopt two different genres to express the same situation, reinforcing the subjectivity and insubstantiality of the created world. Bleak House has been described as one of the first Modernist novels, because it experiments with narrative voice, and questions the nature of story-telling20. This allows Dickens to present different elements of his society with different degrees of realisticness or Realism: the lazy contempt with which he names the members of the Houses of Lords and Commons in alphabetical order (Lords Boodle to Noodle and Buffy to Puffy21) invites the reader to identify with his (or the narrator's) lack of belief in the incestuous politics of the day. The third-person narrator also addresses the audience playfully with your highness and lords, ladies and gentlemen, which draws attention to the relationship between reader and narrator, and the fact that it will colour the reader's impression of the world of the novel22. That the novel is undeniably self-aware may lead some critics to think that Dickens alienates his readers; the Modernist style is famous for its fluid depictions of time, space and character, which actively discourage readers from accepting the world presented as more than a flimsy construction: this was taken to extremes in the London of Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway and the Dublin of James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. The word Dickensian applied to his depictions of 19th century london and its characters shows that people associate what he writes more with his style of writing than with what he is trying to present. Dickens alternates between a desire to convince the reader of the parallels especially concerning the social and economic injustices between his own world and that of Bleak House, and the desire to make a deeper commentary on the human condition and the nature of art, that forces him to write outside of what is probable in contemporary society. Similarly, the narrative style alternates
17 18 19 20 21 22 Bleak House, 40 Bleak House, 20 Bleak House, 128 Andrew Sanders, Dickens and the Spirit of the Age, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999 73 Bleak House, 173-174 Bleak House, 677

between the naturalistic and the experimental as he attempts to convey all of his ideas. The reader is not alienated but engaged by the ambition of the novel and the energetic world it presents, although he cannot perhaps accept such a concentration of improbable characters and events as natural. As Dickens himself says in his preface to Bleak House, his aim is to dwell on the romantic side of familiar things23.

23 Bleak House, 6

Bibliography Dickens, Charles. Bleak House. Oxford: Oxford World's Classics (2008) Hardy, Barbara. Dickens and Creativity London: Continuum (2008) 56 Harvey, WJ. Bleak House: The Double Narrative. From Bleak House: A Selection of Critical Essays, ed. A.E. Dyson, Hong Kong: Macmillan (1977) 225 Hillis Miller, J. Bleak House and the Moral Life. From Bleak House: A Selection of Critical Essays. Ed. A.E. Dyson. Hong Kong: Macmillan (1977) Sanders, Andrew. Dickens and the Spirit of the Age. Oxford: Oxford University Press (1999) Young, Sandra. Uneasy Relations: Possibility for Eloquence in Bleak House. Dickens Studies Annual (1980)