Visual Exploration of Various Themes through Images

Bleak House

Lecture 2

1.Disciplining

Gender

•

Submission, self-denial, diligent work, are the

preparation for a life begun with such a shadow on

it. You are different from other children, Esther,

because you were not born, like them, in common

sinfulness and wrath.  You are set apart. (Bleak

House, Chapter 3.)

•

I looked at her; but I could not see her, I could not

hear her, I could not draw my breath.  The beating

of my heart was so violent and wild, that I felt as

if my life were breaking from me.  But when she

caught me to her breast [….] a burst of gratitude

to the providence of God that I was so changed as

that I never could disgrace her by any trace of

likeness;; as nobody could ever now look at me,

and look at her, and remotely think of any near tie

between us. (Bleak House, Chapter 36)

1.Disciplining

Gender

•

The novelist or investigator of these decades

registered the anxiety of the middle classes

about the incursion of urban blight and disease

into the preserves of their rank and fostered the

notion that maintaining distance between

classes in the city was neither wholly possible

nor even desirable. The promotion of reform

indeed depended on the threat of contagion,

and the woman of the streets became the

symbolic nexus of a variety of social and

physical contaminants. She was allied

metaphorically with the unsanitary conditions

of urban life, with the refuse of the streets, with

diseases such as cholera and typhus, with

destitution and vagrancy, with the spread of

vice and corruption of all kinds. (Deborah

Epstein Nord, 

Walking the Victorian Streets

)

1.Disciplining

Gender

•

To obviate the possibility of misapprehension, I remind the reader

that I regard prostitution as an inevitable attendant upon civilized,

and especially closely-packed, population. When all is said and

done, it is, and I believe ever will be, ineradicable. (William Acton,

Prostitution Considered in its Moral, Social, and Sanitary Aspects,

 1870)

1. Disciplining

Gender

•

We frequently hear of deserted infants being

found on door-steps or exposed to disease and

death, from which they are sometimes saved by

being taken by the police to the nearest union

workhouse, where the officials will endevour to

discover and punish the mother [….] The law,

in its terrible determination to discountenance

immorality, does nothing whatever to mitigate

the misery of the mother of an ‘illegitimate’

child [….] We demand everything from the

woman, nothing from the man. She has either

to resist with unassailable virtue all the

temptations to which she may be exposed, or

give up everything; forfeit all her claims upon

society, as well as all means of redress, and

become outcast from the presence even of

Justice itself. (Thomas Archer, 

The Terrible Sights

of London

, 1870)

1.Disciplining

Gender

•

What begins in 

Dombey

 as a tenuous link between

the conditions of poverty and prostituted sexuality

becomes in 

Bleak House 

a tight interweaving of

slum-bred pestilence and the inherited taint of illicit

sexuality. Florence Dombey, who rescues the

"house" of Dombey by ensuring a healthy and

reinvigorated family line, serves as a rehearsal for

Esther Summerson, whose centrality to the

personal and social redemption even tentatively

envisioned in 

Bleak House 

is signaled by her role as

one of its narrators. Esther's powerful

transcendence of the taint of inherited sin makes

her the ideal female exemplar. To begin in sexual

transgression and end by representing what Ellen

Moers calls "Right Woman" is not just to enact the

redemption of female sexuality but to offer a model

for the salvation of society. (Deborah Epstein Nord,

Walking the Victorian Streets

)

2. Deathscapes

•

‘They dies everywheres,’ said the

boy. ‘They dies in their lodgings –

she knows where; I showed her; I

showed her – and they dies down

in Tom-All-Alone’s in heaps. They

dies more than they lives,

according to what I see.’ Then he

hoarsely whispered to Charley. ‘If

she ain’t the t’other one, she ain’t

the forerunner. Is there three of

‘em then?’ (Bleak House, Chapter

31)

2. Deathscapes

•

But he has his revenge. Even the winds are his messengers, and they serve him in these

hours of darkness. There is not a drop of Tom’s corrupted blood but propagates

infection and contagion somewhere. It shall pollute, this very night, the choice stream

(in which chemists on analysis would fine the genuine nobility) of a Norman house, and

his Grace shall not be able to say Nay to the infamous alliance. There is not an atom of

Tom’s slime, not a cubic inch of any pestilential gas in which he lives, not one obscenity

or degradation about him, not an ignorance, not a wickedness, not a brutality of his

committing, but shall work its retribution, through every order of society, up to the

proudest of the proud […..] Tom has his revenge. (

Bleak House

, Chapter 46)

2. Deathscapes

•

The outbreak narrative—in its scientific, journalistic, and fictional incarnations—follows a

formulaic plot that begins with the identification of an emerging infection, includes discussion of

the global networks throughout which it travels, and chronicles the epidemiological work that

ends with its containment. As epidemiologists trace the routes of the microbes, they catalog the

spaces and interactions of global modernity. Microbes, spaces, and interactions blend together

as they animate the landscape and motivate the plot of the outbreak narrative: a contradictory

but compelling story of the perils of human interdependence and the triumph of human

connection and cooperation, scientific authority and the evolutionary advantages of the

microbe, ecological balance and impending disaster. (Priscilla Wald, 

Contagious: Cultures, Carriers

and the Outbreak Narrative

)

2. Deathscapes

•

If some slum-dwellers commit the “crime” of being in the path of

progress, others err by daring to practice democracy. (Mike Davis,

Planet of Slums

, 2006)

3. Fatal Attraction

•

Mr Snagsby is dismayed to see, standing with an attentive face between himself and the lawyer, at a little

distance from the table, a person with a hat and stick in his hand who was not there when he himself

came in, and has not since entered by the door or by either of the windows.  There is a press in the

room, but its hinges have not creaked, nor has a step been audible upon the floor. Yet this third person

stands there, with his attentive face [….] there is nothing remarkable about him at first sight but his

ghostly manner of appearing. (

Bleak House

, Chapter 22)

His first step is to take himself to Lady Dedlock’s rooms, and look all over them for any trifling indication

that may help him. The rooms are in darkness now; and to see Mr Bucket with a wax-light in his hand,

holding it above his head, and taking a sharp mental inventory of the many delicate objects so curiously at

variance with himself, would be to see a sight – which nobody does see, as he is particular to lock himself in

[….] ‘One might suppose I was moving in the fashionable circles, and getting myself up for the Almack’s,’ says

Mr Bucket. ‘I begin to think I must be a swell in the Guards, without knowing it.’ (Charles Dickens, Bleak

House, Chapter 56)

3. Fatal Attraction

•

Despite this groundswell of admiration [for the detective] there remained problems for writers seeking

to present to the middle-class reading public a coherent image of the police as both resourceful and

amenable.  One problem lay in the working-class origins of the members of the force.  Another lay in

their continued availability for public hire. (Anthea Trodd, ‘The Policeman and the Lady: Significant

Encounters in Mid-Victorian Fiction’, 1984)

•

By the 1860s it is a common complaint that public interest in police matters, whether in reality or in

fiction, is encouraging a habit of mind which rejects the outward appearance of society,  and prefers to

construct hypotheses about a subterranean world of passion and crime concealed just below the surface

[….] To [Margaret] Oliphant it is the young lady who guarantees the truth of social appearances. Crime

exists […] but what the narrative principally asserts is the existence of a real world of nice English girls

who can make the transition, admittedly dramatic, to maturity, without demonstrating any hitherto

unsuspected capacities for passion or vice. (Anthea Trodd, ‘The Policeman and the Lady: Significant

Encounters in Mid-Victorian Fiction’, 1984)

3. Fatal

Attraction