Bleak House and Metaphor
Bleak House, a novel written by Charles Dickens between 1851 and 1853, and serialised in the magazine he edited, All The Year Round is told through metaphor, rather than intellectual analysis or even emotional reaction. The story encompasses a wide sweep of society and brings us through a great variety of buildings. Though he most likely had no formal training in architecture, Dickens was able to metaphorise the inner lives of his subjects through their built surroundings.
The Latticed Window
In the early pages of the novel Lady Dedlock, one of its chief characters, is looking out of the bedroom window of her country house. She sees the keeper's lodge and the light of a fire upon the latticed pane, and smoke rising from the chimney, and a child chased by a woman, running out into the rain, to meet the shining figure of a wrapped-up man coming through the gate. At this, she is quite put out of temper and soon retreates to her town house, which Dickens describes as Fairy-land to visit, but a desert to live in. We soon learn that Lady Dedlock nurses a sad secret, that of having given birth to an illegitimate child, twenty years earlier, and believes the child to be dead.
Rigidity and Feeling
The keeper's lodge, with its latticed windows, is significant in that it embodies the simplicity of the life that Lady Dedlock yearns for, that of living with her lover, Captain Hawdon, and their child. Denied this, she returns to the emotional and physical strictures of her classical town house. In Bleak House, Dickens pursues this metaphor in many ways. Esther Summerson writes of the eponymous house: it was one of those delightfully irregular irregular houses where you go up and down steps out of one room and into another, and where you come upon more rooms when you think you have seen all there are. And, yes, Bleak House has its share of latticed windows.
The Old English Revival
But why build a house that put its young inmates, not to mention older people and invalids, at physical risk? Houses like this were built in the nineteenth century, possibly as a foil against the grandeur and rigidity of classical architecture. Professor Robert Kerr wrote in 1881 of houses with: paltry doorways and incomprehensible little windows....enter their protest against dignity without and 'nooks' and 'ingles', twisted passages, breakneck steps for the questionable pleasure of surprise and tipsy arrangements generally carry out the same scheme of arrangement for artistic merriment within. In the novel, Bleak House represents the feelings of the unformed young people who go to live there; the untamed, the unpredictable, as foiled against the 'fashionable' world of restraint and supressed emotion.
The Doppelganger Theme
Another prevailent theme is that of the doppelganger. At the end of the story, there is a spooky instance when John Jarndyce takes Esther to a newly-built replica of Bleak House, his wedding present to her. In the boarding school that Esther was sent to as a girl, there were two Miss Donnys, twins. When Esther encounters Lady Dedlock - actually her mother - for the first time, she is troubled; but why her face should be, in a confused way, like a broken glass to me, in which I saw scraps of old rememberances. In one incident, Lady Dedlock impersonates Hortense, her serving maid, who later in the story, impersonates Lady Dedlock to try to frame her for murder.
Shadow and Light
Bleak House is also a tale of opposites, none more apparent than Ada Clare, Esther's friend and companion, and Esther herself. Like Artemis and Hecate of Greek mythology, they represent light and shadow. Dark-haired Esther dwells in the shade for much of the novel - she is temporarily blinded by smallpox - as the mystery of her birth is slowly revealed. As a reward for her self-restraint, she marries Allan Woodcourt, her true love. At the outset of the story, blonde Ada is cheerful and self-confident, but she falls in love with Richard Carstone and remains irritatingly oblivious to his true nature. She marries him and moves into his miserable lodgings, a fate she seems almost to deserve.
Riches and Wretchedness
Indeed, many of the more wretched dwellings of Bleak House seem to reflect the warped nature of their occupants, from the decrepit house of Mrs Jellyby who devotes her time to an African charity, to the dull, cracked windows in their heavy frames of Mr Vholes, the predatory lawyer's, chambers. But nothing and no-one in the story is immune to the wider forces of society. The 'drip-drip-drip' of rain upon the Ghost's Walk of Chesney Wold, the grand country seat of the Dedlocks, is metaphorical of its impending fall. There are many more metaphors, twinnings and juxtapositions in this extraordinary book. In Dickens's forthcoming 2012 bicenntenary, Bleak House is well worth reading.
Sources and Further Reading
- Bleak House by Charles Dickens, Penguin Classics, London 1971
- Dictionary of Classical Mythology, edited by Pierre Grimal, Penguin, 1991
- The City as a Work of Art: London, Paris, Vienna by Donald J Olsen, Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 1986
- Victorian Architecture, Roger Dixon and Stefan Muthesius, Thames and Hudson, London, 1978
Mary Phelan - I am an art historian, magazine editor, design philosopher and fiction writer. I am also a sometime artist and photographer.
