Читать книгу Charles Dickens and the Image of Women - David K. Holbrook - Страница 13

And yet I—I, little Esther Summerson, the child who lived a life apart, and on whose birthday there was no rejoicing—seemed to arise before my own eyes, evoked out of the past by some power in this fashionable lady, whom ... I perfectly well knew I had never seen until that hour. (250)

What Esther is yearning for is that unique recognition of the existential being that only the mother can give, as she reflects and draws out the potentialities of the self. The need is beautifully expressed by George MacDonald in his fantasy At the Back of the Worth Wind: Diamond tells the North Wind (a kind of fantasy mother) that he does not like the nursery rhyme Little Bopeep:

Because it seems to say one’s as good as another, or two new ones are better than one that’s lost. I've been thinking about it a good deal, and it seems to me that although any one sixpence is as good as any other sixpence, not twenty lambs would do instead of one sheep whose face you knew. Somehow, when once you've looked into anybody’s eyes, right deep down into them, I mean, nobody will do for that one any more. Nobody, ever so beautiful or so good, will make up for that one going out of sight. (263-64, Nonesuch Edition)³

If we take Dicken’s novel at the phenomenological level, then we may see that it is, of course, a terrible thing to deny this reflecting “natural love” to any child. However, Esther seems to have a substantial sense of identity and a rich emotional life and sympathy (compared, say, with Estella in Great Expectations); so we may suppose her upbringing has been sufficiently achieved by someone taking the place of a “good mother,” however punitive.

This problem is not unconnected with that of the punitive attitude to sexual passion. Esther, we remember, has been told,

“Your mother, Esther, is your disgrace, and you were hers Unfortunate girl, orphaned and degraded from the first of these evil anniversaries, pray daily that the sins of others be not visited upon your head, according to what is written. Forget your mother, and leave all other people to forget her who will do her unhappy child that greatest kindness

Submission, self-denial, diligent work, are the preparations 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.” (17)

There are some important points to note here. Dickens intended implicitly to criticize this punitive view; yet odd emphases creep into his way of putting it. The last sentence is revealing: marriage, ordinary wedlock, is, it seems, “common sinfulness and wrath,” since that is how other legal children are conceived! Esther’s dreadful fault would then seem to be that she was born of joyful sexual passion! And, by implication, all of us are born from sinful passion, which is like wrath. “Wrath” presumably refers to the doom cast on Eve when she was cast out from Eden, but its menacing implication also distantly evokes the primal scene—that is, parental sex conceived of as voracious and dangerous, which is how the child conceives of it, from an infantile logic that supposes sex is a kind of eating and, in fantasy, suspects that it is threatening.

Now to return to the symbolism of mother and baby. At the end of Bleak House Lady Dedlock changes clothes with Jenny, who is the mother of the dead child. Lady Dedlock has taken possession of Esther’s handkerchief, which she used to cover the face of this dead baby. When Captain Woodcourt, Mr. Bucket, and Esther eventually find the fugitive Lady Dedlock, she looks like Jenny, because she is dressed in Jenny’s clothes (but Jenny, of course, has gone up north in Lady Dedlock’s clothes, to put everyone off the scent).

I saw before me, lying on the step, the mother of the dead child ... she lay there, who had so lately spoken of my mother. She lay there, a distressed, unsheltered, senseless creature. (811)

This is a very moving moment. But what it brings home to us is the fact that, at the level of unconscious themes, a dead baby is at the heart of the novel Bleak House: that is, the baby Esther, who should have had her birthright but who was presumed dead by Lady Dedlock and who, without a mother’s care, would be psychically dead. Lady Dedlock’s life is dead, because of the love that is locked in her secret heart. Esther is not psychically dead, because she has been brought up (albeit punitively) by her aunt: that care at least has been a form of love. Yet of course, right to the end, there is a powerful need for love in Esther; and (we may say) she is a projection of Dickens’s own need for love. But there is also a sense in which she needs (and experiences) massive fathering love from her guardian, in order to bring her fully to life, in the realm of being.

So this novel, like so many of Dickens’s novels, is about the need to be loved, about being orphaned or deprived of love: David Copperfield, Pip, Oliver Twist, Esther, Clennam, Paul Dombey, Louisa Gradgrind—all these are brought up in some condition of deprivation, seeking to be fulfilled in the context of love (and often learning through love how to find and how to realize the good and integrity within themselves). This is, we may say, Dickens’s “problem,” which he turns to good artistic purpose.

There are those who can give love and those who cannot. The worst thing is to deny the capacity for love in oneself: this is Mr. Dombey’s sin, Miss Havisham’s error, Estella’s predicament, Mr. Murdstone’s offense, and the social and philosophical failure of Bounderby and Gradgrind. Little Dorrit pours out love to her father, ruined by the system that incarcerates him in the Marshalsea as a victim of the system. Dickens saw his society as one that generated, encouraged, and falsified those who could not give love as it should be given or who denied love or offended against it, and in this he saw a failure to follow Christ’s example and principles. He found here, as Leavis has made plain, a fundamental moral failure, for our moral capacities, as he tries to show in the fable Hard Times, depend upon love and upon the experience of those powers that are exercised for love and for nothing else, like play, imagination, and the provision for the “childhood of the mind.” In these themes of Dickens there is a powerful and fine moral message: an injunction to the reader to pay attention to the needs of being—to love and imagination and sympathy—rather than to power or possessions.

Lady Dedlock has suffered from the blight of the emotions consequent upon the denial of love:

In truth she is not a hard lady naturally; and the time has been when the sight of the venerable figure suing to her with such strong earnestness would have moved her to great compassion. But so long accustomed to suppress emotion, and keep down reality; so long schooled for her own purposes, in that destructive school which shuts up the natural feelings of the heart, like flies in amber, and spreads one uniform and dreary gloss over the good and the bad, the feeling and the unfeeling, the sensible and the senseless; she had subdued even her wonder until now. (755)

It is an important theme of Dickens's, then, that one should not allow one’s feelings to become petrified, since this sphere of the richness of being is the source of one’s moral capacities; by inference a society that drew on this richness would be a better one. So, he becomes a true champion of being and makes a radical criticism of bourgeois society.

The themes of deprivation of being because of the failure of inheritance is at the heart of many of Dickens’s criticisms of society. This question is dealt with more realistically in another novel about illegitimacy: Ruth, by Mrs. Gaskell. It is no wonder, by the way, that Dickens found Mrs. Gaskell sympathetic: her mother died when she was one year old and her novels are about inheritance, too—not least about the heroine who has to draw upon and develop her deepest resources of being in order to cope with a difficult and often menacing world and to realize her integrity. Mrs. Gaskell is more realistic than Dickens about sickness and death, and more painful; in her work bereavement is a truly terrible if positive experience, and she is not afraid to tackle it often, and openly.

But Dickens is realistic enough about society’s evils. Our inheritance is often blighted by the chance circumstances of life (what Americans call “happenstance”). But sometimes it is blighted by wilfulness or by being corrupted by ambition, pride, lust, cupidity, avarice, hate; in this we find the Jonsonian quality in the Dickens who gave us Mr. Dombey, William Dorrit, Uriah Heep, Fagin, Mr. Merdle, Mr. Murdstone, Mr. Vholes, Mrs. Clennam In Bleak House the great corrupting external influence is the law and its “wiglomeration”: a system that is the servant of property becomes its own justification, and comes to make more and more business for itself until it eats up the great cause in its own costs, thus destroying those who took recourse to it in the first place. The instrument of the individual’s quest for his rights may even rob him of his birthright—his freedom, his hope, and eventually his life, as with Richard. This process is also symbolized by the names of Miss Flyte’s birds, which are imprisoned all through the progress of the Jarndyce suit, and are only freed when it disintegrates into nothing. The “wiglomeration” represents a great falsification of what is important in life: doing and getting, rather than being. The law seduces people into false egoism rather than selfless love.

All this is fine—and it is written, we may note, in the Christian New Testament: “lay up not for yourself treasure upon earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt.” Just as the dead baby’s angel was aware of the service done to it by Ada, so there is a heavenly record of devotion to selfless love and duty, in another realm; and in such giving, Christianity tells us, there is meaning (or “salvation”).

But yet Dickens cannot do without actual earthly riches. This seems often the manic fly in the pure ointment of his preoccupation with love. “Give up all that thou hast and follow me”—this is often his message for a time, but we know it will not be long before Aunt Trotwood recovers her fortune, or the Cheeryble brothers turn up—or John Jarndyce dips into what appears to be a fathomless pocket. Does this matter? Could there be love, devotion, duty, selflessness—without the money? And the magic?

Later, we shall see why Dickens was obliged, in writing from his own experience, to link the problem of money with self-fulfillment. What Dickens seeks, I believe, may be called real reparation. To explain more what this means I shall turn again to Kleinian psychoanalysis. First, however, I want to look over the plot of the novel under discussion.

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.