Charles Dickens and the Image of Women. David K. Holbrook
A close examination of the plot of Bleak House reveals many oddities that are not altogether consistent.* What is consistent is the central inheritance theme. We have to take John Jarndyce, of course, as a donnee, as a given part of the drama. He has the money, as Prospero had his magic, and he manipulates the action to make Dickens’s point, which is that the money alone does not yield satisfaction; what creates goodness, and establishes meaning, is love. Perhaps behind his social attitudes are those of Jonson and Pope, urging the proper use of riches. In Mrs. Gaskell there is more realism because there is more financial hardship and no benign sponsor in sight; in her more democratic perspective there can be no patronage to solve humanity’s social problems. But Dickens’s purpose is perhaps different—belonging to an existentialist preoccupation with the uniqueness of existence.
There is an odd symbolic paradox about Bleak House: when we open our edition there is a gloomy engraving of a house with somber trees as frontispiece. It seems this must be Bleak House, but it is not; it is Chesney Wold. Chesney Wold turns out to be bleak, with its rainy weather, its Ghost’s Walk, its state rooms and galleries mostly shut up and sheeted up and, of course, the blight of Lady Dedlock’s dishonorable secret—her love affair in youth with Captain Hawdon and her illegitimate child, which at first is dead to her.
Bleak House, by contrast, is an establishment that has been redeemed. Tom Jarndyce, before John, let Bleak House fall into rack and ruin because he became involved in the suit with John Jarndyce. Now, however, Bleak House is not bleak at all, for in it lives John Jarndyce, who is the epitome of selfless love and charity. Moreover, Bleak House multiplies: Jarndyce sets up a second Bleak House for Esther and Woodcourt when he renounces the idea of marrying Esther, seeming to realize that his role toward her is that of a father, and that she might transfer her allegiance as housekeeper from him to Alan Woodcourt, who loves her as a potential husband.
Whenever he is reminded of painful suffering, or whenever he is reminded of his own generosity, John Jarndyce speaks of the wind being in the East. Bleak House is thus the place where the winds of human suffering and need blow, but where the dangers also lie of being charitable for the wrong reason.
I believe we may say that Bleak House is a focus of true reparation. False reparation is manifest in a number of themes in the book. Harold Skimpole is someone to whom give and take have no meaning, and in consequence he turns out to be treacherous—to Jo, to Esther, and, in the end, to John Jarndyce, whom he finally accuses of selfishness after so many years of living on Jarndyce’s charity. Harold Skimpole embodies the failure of all reparative processes, and so, beneath the surface of his charming childishness, he is less than human—at times, indeed, dangerously not human at all. He is all manic denial, and since he is incapable of reparation, he is not in the real world at all—almost a kind of psychopath.
Mrs. Jellyby represents manic reparation in a way, too, since her reparation is totally misdirected: for hers is “telescopic charity,” capable only of engaging with distant objects, while at home all is neglect. Mrs. Jellyby neglects her husband, her household, and her children, and gives everything to “Africa” (where, in the end, the king of the Borrioboola-Ghanians sells his own people into slavery to buy rum!); and she is associated with Mrs. Pardiggle, whose attempts at reparation are attempts to control others for their own good while remaining indifferent to their true needs and human qualities. This is minatory and authoritarian “charity” (“cringe-or-starve” charity, as today’s poor call it), and these characters belong to hate rather than to love.
We may see, I believe, at the center of Dickens’s novel the image of the household (his journal was called Household Words): the household as the community soul of humanity. The health of this household depends upon the existentialist solution being realized in each unique individual soul, which must grow, must not be falsified, must have its needs to love and be loved met, and must find meaning in life. It must establish being in the face of life’s bleakness: this quest is integral with the health of the household in which it is reared and in which it exists. In contrast, here are the roaming people of the brick works, the inhabitants of Chesney Wold, the people of Bleak House, the inhabitants of Tom All Alone's, and the wanderers about the globe, like Alan Woodcourt and Jo: all these are households or people roaming between households—and the question is whether within the house, and within the house of the soul, things are bleak or not.4
The existential question focuses on the inheritance: what do we make of our inheritance? If the answer is “Jarndyce and Jarndyce,” then we embrace falsification—dust and death. The true process of coming into one’s own is by reparation, by giving to others. This is the didactic message of the novel.
Mr. Jarndyce is a father figure, but also a Prospero figure—a figure with whose creative influence Dickens powerfully identifies. We should take his proposal to Esther in this fantasy mode. At the beginning of the book he is nearly sixty, in Esther’s estimation, and she is twenty: it is surely inconceivable that they could really marry? His role is to father Esther by his love and help her to fulfillment, as a father does. That he does so, in an age when there was such an animosity toward the illegitimate child, is an assertion of faith in human nature.
Jarndyce says that the east wind blows “When I am deceived or disappointed in ...” and then stops: he was going to say “human nature.” Jarndyce is the embodiment of Dickens’s exploration of the problem (which was Shakespeare's) of whether it is possible to have faith in human nature, which is much the same as saying, whether it is possible to have faith in love and its reparative powers.
Jarndyce’s mode of acting on the basis of love is continually offset against contrasting modes of false charity, the tyrannical Pardiggle semblance of charity that is really narcissistic and harmful, wherein
charity was assumed, as a regular uniform, by loud professors and speculators in cheap notoriety, vehement in profession, restless and vain in action, servile in the last degree of meanness to the great, adulatory of one another, and intolerable to those who were anxious quietly to help the weak from falling. (204)
The episode where John Jarndyce pursues the fate of Coavinses' man’s children—one of the most moving in Dickens—is offered in supreme contrast.
As we have noted, the orphan theme is a central one in Dickens. One of the most touching series of passages in Dickens is between orphan and orphan in Bleak House—between Esther and Charley. Charley Neckett is the little daughter of the debt collector who works for Coavinses, and who comes to deal with Harold Skimpole. Skimpole is a deadly caricature of the egoist who asserts his childishness as a means to sustain his infant monism: the world, in Skimpole’s fantasy, exists for him, and he pretends to a total failure to understand his obligations to the world and money—even as he takes bribes for betrayal.
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