1

VOICE

I TOO HAVE A GREAT DEAL OF DIFFICULTY IN BEGINNING TO write my portion of these pages. I know that I find Bleak House to be the most powerful of all of Dickens's novels, and yet I fear that I will never be able to explain adequately to anyone else or to myself why it exerts such a strong hold over me. I know that I have been reading Bleak House for nearly forty years and that each time I reach the point where Esther discovers what she has not quite yet allowed herself to realize is her mother's body lying outside the miserable graveyard, each time she lifts the heavy head, puts the long dank hair aside, turns the face, and recognizes that “it was my mother, cold and dead,” I weep. I weep in part because this scene vividly evokes the memory of my own mother's death. I weep also because the words of disavowal that Esther uses to fend off the terrible knowledge—calling the female figure before her “the mother of the dead child,” words at once mistaken and yet truer than she knows—these words resonate closely with certain crucial facts of my mother's life (and hence of my own), the loss of her first-born child (my older brother) at the age of two and a half, and her death thirty-six years later only one day before the anniversary of that great sadness.

I weep in addition, of course, because the simple and yet chilling words with which chapter 59 comes to a close are so magnificently orchestrated, the narrative voice so powerful and pure. Dickens, or rather Esther—for it is to her that I wish to credit the writing in this and the other chapters that she narrates—slows down the action of discovery into its component parts, each within a separate clause, forcing the reader to experience syntactically the recognition that she at once resists and, unconsciously and in retrospect, knows to be inevitable. After so many chapters, and so many words, the stark monosyllables—“long dank hair,” “turned the face,” “cold and dead”—strike with unusual force. One of the finest things in all of Dickens, this chapter ending (which also ends the penultimate monthly number) is the thematic and emotional climax of the novel. It not only brings to an end the hallucinatory chase sequence involving Esther and Detective Bucket that occupies most of monthly numbers 17 and 18; it also provides closure of a sort to three important and related strands in Esther's inner journey: her quest for a stable, coherent self, for reunion with her mother, and for understanding of the mystery of her origins. What it does for her as narrator, what it omits and leaves unresolved, I shall have more to say about later in this essay.

The difficulty I experience in writing about Bleak House derives not only from my personal associations to the novel or from the worry that I will be unable to convey the special feelings that reading it awakens in me. The difficulty derives equally from my awareness of the novel's critical history and my concern, after so many other critics have written so well about it, that I have little new to add. The novel's critical history weighs all the more heavily upon me when I recall the leading role that friends and colleagues in the University of California Dickens Project have played in contributing to it, from Robert Newsom's pathbreaking 1977 monograph to the excellent subsequent discussions by Lawrence Frank, Albert D. Hutter, Fred Kaplan, Helena Michie, Hilary Schor, Audrey Jaffe, Barbara Gottfried, Marcia Goodman, John Glavin, Garrett Stewart, Gordon Bigelow, James Buzard, Richard L. Stein, Robert Patten, Robert Tracy, Sally Ledger, and many others.1

The reading of Bleak House that most closely parallels my own and that I currently hold in highest esteem is the chapter that another friend, Carolyn Dever, devotes to the novel in her excellent study Death and the Mother from Dickens to Freud. Like Dever, my interest in the novel focuses chiefly on the Esther narrative and on the melancholy fascination with the mother that lies at the heart of Esther's autobiographical account. Like Dever, I find that in many ways the novel anticipates psychoanalytic explanations of the formation of subjectivity and that it is usefully read alongside and through the lens of psychoanalytic theory.² Dever writes eloquently of the ways in which Esther's ambivalent search for the mother structures her autobiography and produces uncanny displacements and repetitions in her narrative. She tracks with exceptional acuteness the recurring fantasies of dead mother and dead child that haunt Esther's imagination and that establish her as “a ghostly presence, a living absence, within her own autobiography.”³ She gives particularly fine readings of Esther's relationship with her doll and of the painful reunion scene between Esther and Lady Dedlock in chapter 36, showing how Esther in this scene is forced to acquiesce in her own abandonment by a mother who no sooner reveals herself as living than she commands her daughter to “evermore consider her as dead.”⁴ Although “not technically rejected here,” Dever writes, “[Esther] has had rejection dictated to her.”⁵ In effect, the scene of reunion reenacts the original trauma of birth and maternal abandonment, once again leaving mother and daughter symbolically dead to each other and yet condemned to remain alive, only this time with more certain evidence of the mother's now conscious and deliberate betrayal.

My reading of the novel differs from that of Dever not so much in the way we view Esther's character and psychology as in the greater emphasis I give to questions of voice and temporality in her narrative. My focus is on Esther as narrator and what it means for her to tell the story of her life, looking back on it as a married woman from the perspective of seven years. At the risk of oversimplifying, I might say that I am more interested in Esther Woodcourt than in Esther Summerson, although this distinction overlooks the confusion of subject positions that results from her use of the first-person pronoun together with past-tense verbs that lack temporal specificity. The pronoun “I” and even the proper name “Esther” are ambiguous. They can refer either to Esther the character at different points in her life or to the Esther who writes her “portion of these pages”—or sometimes to all of these. The signifiers slide; utterance and enunciation blur, merging past and present selves in ways that often render the distinction impossible.⁶

Esther's account in chapter 18 of seeing Lady Dedlock in the church is a good example of how this blurring occurs. It is an uncanny moment—not the first that Esther records, but one of the most important. After describing the unsettling effect that the sight of Lady Dedlock's face had upon her, she writes, “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” (292). What bears emphasizing here is the way in which three distinct times and three separate selves converge in the space of only a few words: the Esther who saw Lady Dedlock in the church, the memory of a younger self that emerged spontaneously at that time, but also the Esther who, in writing about this moment, reexperiences it in the present. The double (and italicized) pronouns, together with the proper name, delineate, at the same time that they conflate, these three identities, anticipating Jo's astonished question in chapter 31 (in a very different context): “Is there three of ’em then?” (493).

The structure of repetition that characterizes Esther's narrative and that produces so many uncanny moments in her text derives from two main sources. In its simplest form it is a result of the fact that she writes in the past tense. “Narrative,” writes Peter Brooks, “always makes the implicit claim to be in a state of repetition, as a going over again of a ground already covered: a sjuet repeating the fabula, as the detective retraces the tracks of the criminal.”⁷ Retrospective narration necessarily involves discursive repetition, but retrospection also has other potentially interesting consequences. Most notably, for my purposes, it entails foreknowledge on the part of the retrospective narrator of as yet unnarrated events. In Bleak House, this means that Esther Woodcourt knows from the beginning everything that will happen to Esther Summerson. It means that she knows and remembers the reunion scene narrated in chapter 36, even as she begins to write, and it means that she always sees the corpse of the dead mother waiting for her at the end of her journey through the stormy night. The foreknowledge that results from narrative hindsight at times disrupts Esther's linear presentation of her story, producing detemporalized, associative connections in which the memory of events that remain to be told impinges on the present moment of her narrating. The result is a complex layering of temporalities that adds to the uncanny effect of the narrative as a whole.⁸

To say that Esther already knows the story of her past and repeats it discursively in her narrative, while accurate, does not give a complete picture of her role as narrator. There are things about her past that Esther knows but does not understand; there are things she is unaware that she knows and that she is therefore incapable of telling; and there are things that she knows but does not want to know. In a sense, then, we can say that her story is still to a great extent unknown to her. In retelling it, she is in effect reexperiencing it as she writes, and this reexperience has the potential to shed new light, for her as well as for the reader, on events that have already happened. Part of Esther's goal in writing is thus to understand not the facts of her life but their meaning. To adopt Brooks's metaphor, we might say that Esther here is the detective of her own life, sifting and interpreting her past for clues that will help her better to understand and come to terms with it in the present. At the same time, some of the knowledge that she acquires by writing about herself and some of the memories that she reawakens in going back over the past are painful to her, and she often tries to avoid thinking about them, shaking her mental keys and taking herself dutifully to task with the familiar refrain “Esther, Esther, Esther.”⁹ If Esther is a detective, she is often a reluctant one.

Esther's efforts to resist painful knowledge about herself do not always succeed, however, and it is the return of these thoughts, often against her will, that is the second main source of repetition in her narrative. Many of the uncanny repetitions in Esther's narrative arise out of her unconscious mind and derive from the pressure of forgotten or half-remembered events on her present awareness. As both character and narrator, she is haunted by an upsurge of strange, unbidden memories that take her back again and again to the earliest moments of her life. Associated with her doll, her godmother, and especially her mother's face (all versions perhaps of the same lost original), these memory fragments cluster around an experience that she can never consciously recall but about which she has many fears, doubts, and fantasies: the moment of her birth. Esther reports that she first began to wonder about the circumstances of her birth when, as a young girl, she realized that there was no rejoicing at home and no holiday at school on her birthday. She writes that on one particularly melancholy recurrence of that day she broke down in tears and asked her godmother, “Did mama die on my birthday?” (30). Thus, from early on, Esther imagines her birthday as a death-day. She fears that the mother whom she never knew as a child died in giving birth to her and that she may therefore somehow be responsible for the mother's death. Much later, in chapter 36, she reports having learned from Lady Dedlock's letter the “true” story of her birth: that she had “not been abandoned by my mother,” that the godmother of her childhood, “discovering signs of life in me when I had been laid aside as dead,” had reared her in rigid secrecy and concealed her existence from the baby's mother, who began to suspect that her daughter was still alive only after their unexpected encounter in the church (583).

The story is plausible enough. Moreover, it finds corroboration (in chapters told by the other narrator) in the evidence that Mrs. Chadband, the former “Mrs. Rachael” of the godmother's household, gives to Inspector Bucket in chapter 54, as well as in Lady Dedlock's melodramatic soliloquy at the end of chapter 29: “O my child, my child! Not dead in the first hours of her life, as my cruel sister told me; but sternly nurtured by her, after she had renounced me and my name! O my child, O my child!” (469). Alongside and in competition with this account, however, Esther retains the fantasy not only that her mother died in giving birth to her but also that she herself died and, more horribly yet, that her mother wished her dead, deliberately abandoned her, may even have buried her body within hours after she was born. Although contradicted by the evidence of her senses (since both she and her mother are manifestly alive), this phantasmatic, nightmarish counternarrative nevertheless persists in Esther's unconscious, rising sometimes almost to the level of conscious memory and producing strange narrative effects, including the impression that she and her mother are ghosts haunting each other, both of them alive and at the same time dead.

Horrifying as well as fascinating, these thoughts alternately repel and attract her. She is drawn irresistibly toward them, but also does her best to avoid them. The alternation between these contradictory feeling states, what Dickens elsewhere famously called “the attraction of repulsion,”¹⁰ results in a curious syncopation in Esther's narrative, a zigzag rhythm in her prose that she repeats literally on the occasion of her reunion with Ada after recovering from the illness that scars her face. Just as, on that occasion, she first runs eagerly down the road to greet her friend and then retreats shyly to the safety of her room, so in her narrative she vacillates awkwardly between passages of direct, sometimes powerful openness and moments of coy reticence and evasion.

At times, Esther seems to be a much more knowing and self-aware narrator than critics generally give her credit for being, although one must read carefully in order to pick up the subtle, often oblique signs of this awareness. Consider, for example, her report in chapter 36 of reading the letter from Lady Dedlock that purports to tell the truth about Esther's origins. Dever correctly emphasizes the devastating implications that these revelations have for Esther at the time, but she does not point out some of the small lexical and rhetorical cues that indicate Esther's subsequent and, I think, more critical response. “Safe in my own room,” Esther writes, “I read the letter. I clearly derived from it—and that was much then—that I had not been abandoned by my mother” (583). Whenever Esther interrupts herself, as she does here with the clause set off by dashes, we need to pay close attention. The sentence juxtaposes two distinct temporalities and two slightly different responses. In one, Esther “clearly” derives that her mother did not abandon her; in the other, she states that this information was consoling to her “then.” Without stating exactly what her response is “now” in the time of writing, she implies that it differs from what it was initially. The alert or perhaps suspicious reader may conclude that Esther Woodcourt has revised her opinion about what once was “clear” to her younger self.

Consider also the strange comment that Esther adds after she finishes summarizing the contents of the letter. “What more the letter told me, needs not to be repeated here. It has its own times and places in my story” (583). Readers of this passage, whose importance is suggested by its being set off in a paragraph of its own, have sometimes been puzzled by Esther's failure to make good on her apparent promise to say more about the letter at a later point in her narrative. Instead, these readers note, Esther burns the letter and never mentions it again. Such readings of the paragraph are mistaken, I believe. Here, perhaps more directly than anywhere else in her narrative, Esther reveals not so much the content of her revised understanding of her mother's letter as the process by which that revised understanding makes itself known both to her and to the reader.

Notice Esther's use of the trope of prosopopoeia. It is not Lady Dedlock who tells Esther “more,” but the letter itself that speaks and that presumably tells a different story from the one that Lady Dedlock wants Esther to believe. Notice also Esther's emphasis on repetition as well as her use of the small spatiotemporal adverb “here.” What “more” the letter “told” her may indeed “need” to be “repeated,” but not “here,” not at this point in her narrative. Instead, “it has its own times and places in my story.” The times and places where the unspecified “more” is repeated are scattered across the entire narrative. They speak through Esther in the form of flashbacks, unbidden recurring memories, and other uncanny repetitions. They emanate largely from Esther's unconscious, and they are the signs, the symptoms, of the unclaimed experience that shapes so much of her narrative.¹¹ What stands out in this passage is Esther's greater than usual awareness that there are things she somehow “knows” but cannot say and that these things have a life and temporality not entirely under her control, their “own times and places in my story.”

One further example—perhaps conscious, perhaps not—of the intrusion of a memory from her earliest infancy into Esther's account of her mother's letter deserves mention. Esther summarizes the central message of Lady Dedlock's letter thus: “Her elder and only sister, the godmother of my childhood, discovering signs of life in me when I had been laid aside as dead, had, in her stern sense of duty, with no desire or willingness that I should live, reared me in rigid secrecy, and had never again beheld my mother's face from within a few hours of my birth” (583). Although perfectly grammatical, this rather lengthy complex sentence contains an odd shift in focalization toward the end that betrays its narrator's special preoccupation. The sentence has one grammatical subject, “Her…sister,” that governs two past-perfect verbs: “had…reared” and “had never again beheld.” The two verbs, however, are separated by intervening prepositional phrases and distanced from their grammatical subject by an apposition and a participial clause, with the result that the connection between the subject and especially the second of the two verbs is attenuated. The weakening of this connection, combined with the substitution of “my mother's face” for the expected and more consistent “her sister's face,” locates this perception, not within Lady Dedlock's discourse, but within Esther's. There is no particular reason for Lady Dedlock to emphasize the fact that the godmother had not seen her sister's face “from within a few hours of [Esther's] birth,” but there is every reason for Esther to do so. The shift in focalization revises Lady Dedlock's explanation and turns it into an oblique observation by Esther on her loss of connection to her mother's face while still a newborn infant. By the end of the sentence, we are no longer with the godmother, but at the scene of “my birth.” Once again, the trauma of early maternal loss insists on speaking, perhaps unconsciously, through the language of Esther Woodcourt.

In focusing on the conflicted subjectivity of Esther's narrative, I do not mean to disregard entirely the ways in which she functions objectively as a force for good in the social world of the novel. Many critics have found in her a principle of coherence sufficient to offset the tendency toward drift and anomie depicted in the other narrative.¹² With her commitments to duty and responsibility and her belief in a beneficent providence, she embodies the conservative Victorian values that derive from and exert their authority over the domestic sphere. Moreover, through her actions she represents a force of charity that is conspicuously missing elsewhere in the world of the novel. Certainly, wherever she goes, she displays remarkable managerial abilities. Restoring order to broken or chaotic households is one of her chief roles in the book, and to a considerable extent she manages the task of narrator in a similarly quiet and orderly fashion.

For the most part, however, I tend to view this “Good Esther,” as Dever calls her, as a defensive mask, a false self constructed in order to make up for the early deficits in her life. “I often thought,” Esther writes of her experience at Greenleaf school, “of the resolution I had made on my birthday, to try to be industrious, contented, and true-hearted, and to do some good to some one, and win some love if I could” (39). The fact that Esther made this resolution on her birthday links it directly to the events surrounding her birth. Her resolution is meant as an act of reparation. Abandoned almost immediately by her biological mother (however we understand the circumstances of this action) and blighted by an emotionally punitive godmother (secretly her aunt), Esther compensates for these early injuries by becoming a mother to every abandoned or neglected child she meets, doing for them what she wishes a mother had done for her. Caddy, Ada, Richard, Charley, Jo, the little Jellybys and Pardiggles, all at some time or another come under her maternal care. It is no accident, I would suggest, that practically the first good deed she performs after arriving in London is to help release a child named Peepy by pulling his head forward through the area railing in a comic reenactment of successful parturition. Here and throughout the novel, Dickens carefully orchestrates Esther's actions and language in ways that allow her to reveal, and us to see, unconscious dimensions of her character.

Although she successfully mothers many of the other characters in the book, Esther can never make up for the absence of attentive mothering in her own life. She can never be a mother to herself. The false, dutiful, accommodating identity that she develops in order to win approval from others can be detected in the voice of self-abasement that she often adopts both as character and as narrator and that many readers have found irritatingly coy and insincere. With its frequent use of dashes, parenthetical remarks, broken syntax, reflexive verbs, and third-person self-address, Esther's rhetoric of “confusion” mirrors her frequent inner state of abjection.¹³ In addition, such language often serves strategically to keep her ignorant of things she prefers not to know. At other times, her rhetoric of confusion appears to solicit contradiction. When she says that she is “not clever” or “not good” or “do[es] not know” something, not only is the reverse often objectively the case, but the form and context of her statement seem to demand disconfirmation. Whatever its motives, and they are complex, Esther's voice of confusion contrasts sharply with the powerful voice she commands at moments like the end of chapter 59. To understand Esther in the full complexity of her being requires a careful tracking of the modulations in her voice, both what she reports herself and other characters as saying and the ways in which she conducts her retrospective narration.

In addition to a false voice, Esther hides behind a set of false names: Old Woman, Cobweb, Mother Hubbard, Dame Durden, and the rest. As critics have long since pointed out, these fairytale names with their associations of old age and dirt (but also of maternity) transform Esther prematurely into an aged crone or little old woman, concealing the youth, beauty, and sexuality she is hesitant to claim—attributes suggestive of the biblical beauty queen whose name she shares. Her readiness to accept these derogatory nicknames and to allow her own name to be lost among them signals the instability of her identity and her complicity with the well-intentioned but demeaning constructions of her friends.

A name that needs to be added to this list of false identities but that has received less attention than the others is Summerson. This is the name presumably given to her by the godmother soon after Esther's birth as a means of concealing her origins and avoiding any incriminating connection to her parents. Like “Nemo,” it is a name that obscures paternity, but one whose final syllable retains the trace of filiation. Viewed from a different angle, however, and with an eye alert to the complexity of Dickens's naming practices, the false name chosen by the godmother points to a deeper truth about Esther's parentage. Instead of “Summer's son,” suggesting a preferred child warmed by parental love, an antithetical reading of her name gives us “Winter's daughter.” Esther is and always has been the daughter of the frozen mother: “It was my mother cold and dead.”¹⁴

As narrator, Esther would rather tell the story of other people than think or talk about herself. Eventually, and with considerable reluctance, she acknowledges that “if these pages contain a great deal about me, I can only suppose it must be because I have really something to do with them, and can't be kept out” (137). Nevertheless, she remains most comfortable when she can allow “my little body…[to] fall into the back-ground” (40) so that the focus falls on someone else. Falling, or pushing herself, into the background is her favorite means of narrative concealment, the textual equivalent of the burial that she gives her doll. Yet, despite her efforts to remain hidden from the reader and from herself, Esther cannot keep her unconscious from speaking. She becomes so caught up at times in the story she is telling that she allows her “body” to speak for her. It is in these moments of bodily excess, registered in different ways within the text but primarily through shifts in voice, that we can glimpse or overhear aspects of Esther—desire, anger, despair—that otherwise lie out of sight. The key to reading Esther Woodcourt, then, is her voice, and the key to understanding her voice is to trace its relation to the figure of the absent mother that she relentlessly pursues through the pages of her text, only to find her again and again “cold and dead.”¹⁵

As an example of how such a voice-oriented reading might proceed, the passage describing Esther's departure from Windsor in chapter 3 is worth considering in some detail, for it displays many of the stylistic features that characterize her narrative discourse.

Mrs. Rachael was too good to feel any emotion at parting, but I was not so good, and wept bitterly. I thought that I ought to have known her better after so many years, and ought to have made myself enough of a favorite with her to make her sorry then. When she gave me one cold parting kiss upon my forehead, like a thaw-drop from the stone porch—it was a very frosty day—I felt so miserable and self-reproachful, that I clung to her and told her it was my fault, I knew, that she could say good-bye so easily!

“No, Esther!” she returned. “It is your misfortune!” (35–36)

What strikes most readers immediately as odd about this passage is its misalignment of affect and judgment. Esther praises Mrs. Rachael for her lack of emotion at the moment of parting and blames herself for not having done more to earn the older woman's affection. In this bizarre reversal of attributions, we recognize Esther's all too familiar tendency toward self-abasement along with an implicit and perhaps irritatingly manipulative—because indirect—demand for reassurance. “No, Esther, it's not your fault,” we are tempted to say, “but I wish you didn't always put me in the position of having to say so.”¹⁶

A voice-oriented reading of this exchange, one that focuses on what Esther is doing as narrator, would view it somewhat differently. In addition to acknowledging the symptomatic and manipulative qualities of her language, such a reading would give the adult Esther more credit for understanding both Mrs. Rachael's cruel withholding of affection and her own excessive (and neurotic) self-reproach. Narrating the episode of departure allows the older Esther to reexperience the feelings she had as a girl, and to begin putting them behind her. It also allows her to represent the experience in such a way as to leave the reader in no doubt about where praise and blame properly belong. Both a manipulative plea for reassurance and a tentative step toward self-understanding, the passage is at the same time a clear-sighted if oblique criticism directed at an older woman who caused Esther needless emotional pain.

But it is much else besides. Esther's comparison of Mrs. Rachael's parting kiss to “a thaw-drop from the stone porch” links this moment in the text to the Ghost's Walk refrain, “drip, drip, drip,” already sounded by the other narrator in chapter 2. Figurative language is relatively infrequent in Esther's discourse, and when a striking example such as this one appears, some readers have seen it as evidence that Dickens, not Esther, is doing the writing. Rather than take Esther's striking simile as conventional foreshadowing, however, or as an intrusion by Dickens into Esther's text, a voice-oriented reading would consider it a retroactive trace—literally an echo—of Esther's own ghostwalking experience in chapter 36, after the failed reunion scene, and of her association of the Ghost's Walk with the submerged story of her origins that she repeatedly attempts to recover in writing about other moments in her life.

The grief and loss that she reports experiencing upon leaving Windsor seem vastly out of proportion to what we know about her relationship with Mrs. Rachael. The godmother's only servant, Mrs. Rachael is described by Esther as “another very good woman, but austere to me” (29). A few pages later, Esther reports feeling grateful “towards Mrs. Rachael, who was a widow; and O, towards her daughter, of whom she was proud, who came to see her once a fortnight!” (31). The “O” interjected prior to mentioning the daughter is our clue to the residue of pain that Esther feels, even in the time of writing, at the thought of a cherished mother-daughter bond of the kind she can never have.

In writing the scene of separation from Mrs. Rachael, Esther as narrator is thus reworking a series of other cold farewell scenes from her past that stretch back to the unnarrated moment of her birth and forward, narratively speaking, to the discovery of her mother's body. The echoes in this passage of the scene of Lady Dedlock's death are especially strong. Esther begins her description of the departure from Windsor by announcing the arrival of the coach that will carry her to Greenleaf school:

The coach was at the little lawn gate—we had not come out until we heard the wheels—and thus I left her, with a sorrowful heart. She went in before my boxes were lifted to the coach-roof, and shut the door. As long as I could see the house, I looked back at it from the window, through my tears. My godmother had left Mrs. Rachael all the little property she possessed; and there was to be a sale; and an old hearth-rug with roses on it, which always seemed to me the first thing in the world I had ever seen, was hanging outside in the frost and snow. (36)

Among the many associations to the scene of Lady Dedlock's death are details like the “little lawn-gate,” which recalls the “iron gate” of the graveyard in which Hawdon/Nemo is buried and where Lady Dedlock dies. Likewise, the sound of the wheels that brings Esther out of the house is an auditory memory of the churning wheels of Bucket's coach during the chase sequence. (Notice, again, the importance of Esther's self-interruptions and of information contained in statements set off by dashes.) Most powerful of all, however, is the description of the hearth rug hanging outside in the frost and snow, a memory trace of the mother's dead body—and specifically of her face—as it is revealed at the end of chapter 59; but also the trace of Esther's earliest childhood memory, an image of the mother's face (or perhaps her breast) recalled from infancy: “the first thing in the world I had ever seen.” The roses on the hearth rug are like the “beautiful complexion and rosy lips” (27) of Esther's doll, the doll that she describes burying before she leaves Windsor for the school, and which in turn are a reflection of Esther's own features. The hearth rug is thus one of Esther's many mirrors in the book, one connected both with death and with the mother's face. In leaving the hearth rug behind and in writing about it as she does, Esther thus repeats her mother's abandonment of her as well as her own experience of leaving behind the dead body of her mother.

The most difficult and painful part of these condensed and displaced memory fragments for Esther is the fear, even as she writes about them in the present, that somehow she was and is responsible for her mother's rejection of her. Daughterly desire for the mother's love, daughterly anger at the mother's abandonment—both give way to the nagging question, is it my fault that she could say goodbye so easily? The profound and undeniable truth that comes back to her in the voice of Mrs. Rachael is “No, Esther!…It is your misfortune.” Whether these are words actually spoken by Mrs. Rachael, or whether these are Esther's own words projected and received back by her, is a question that even a voice-oriented reading cannot presume to resolve.

In a voice-oriented reading, every voice belongs potentially to the narrator. The question, who speaks? becomes impossible to answer with certainty, since in the discourse every character speaks only at the pleasure and direction of the one who controls that discourse. Every character is thus potentially a ventriloquist's dummy (or doll), and every narrator potentially a Little Swills, the comic vocalist who re-creates the inquest for customers at the Sol's Arms by taking every part and performing each in turn.

To imagine Esther as a comic vocalist, projecting voices onto other characters, may take some adjustment in our thinking, but it proves a useful way of understanding certain passages in the novel where speech attribution and address remain ambiguous. Consider, for example, the crucial scene in chapter 8 where Esther reports observing the death of the brickmaker's baby. Dever is correct in calling this a “primal scene” in which Esther phantasmatically witnesses the moment of her death in infancy.¹⁷ Not surprisingly, Esther is the first to notice what happens, and she reports what she sees with a simple, unadorned statement—“The child died” (134)—whose very brevity betrays the emotional impact we presume this scene to have had upon her. And yet, while Ada and the other woman in the cottage dissolve in tears, we look in vain for any sign of Esther's reaction, either at the time of the event or in the moment of reexperiencing it. Instead of telling us what she felt then or feels now, Esther describes how she went about her domestic duties, laying the baby's body on a shelf, covering it with her handkerchief, and comforting the mother.

A reading of the scene that attends more closely to voice and to the possibility of vocal displacement need not look far for Esther's reaction. “‘O Esther!’ cried Ada sinking on her knees beside it. ‘Look here! O Esther, my love, the little thing! The suffering, quiet, pretty little thing! I am so sorry for it. I am so sorry for the mother. I never saw a sight so pitiful as this before! O baby, baby!’” (134). Esther projects her own feelings about the baby's death onto Ada and expresses them through the voice of the Ada character. It is not enough to speak of Ada here as Esther's alter ego or double. While this is certainly true, it elides Esther's agency as narrator in controlling the representation and voicing. A more detailed reading of the entire passage would note how she carefully fuses herself and Ada into the pronoun “we” at the beginning of the scene, then splits the two apart into an “I” and “she” in order to present the unvoiced and voiced portions of her reaction, and then closes the gap again with the undifferentiated pronoun “we.”

A voice-sensitive reading of this passage allows for other possibilities as well. If we accept Dever's contention that in this scene Esther is reexperiencing phantasmatically the trauma of her birth/death, then all four women present in the scene—the two brickmakers' wives, Esther, and Ada—can be seen as aspects of a single mother imago in relation to the dead infant, who occupies the place of Esther. Understood in this fashion, the women's collective response of grief, devotion, and mutual concern stands in sharp contrast to the alternate fantasy of cold rejection that Esther retains and projects on other occasions, for instance in her account of leaving Windsor. In such a reading, Ada's reaction holds special interest, for in it Esther as narrator allows herself to entertain the fantasy of a loving mother overcome with grief at the loss of a cherished newborn child. Ada's grief-s tricken cry, “O Esther!…O Esther, my love, the little thing!” thus resounds with a different meaning and has a different addressee. It is the cry that Esther wishes her mother could have addressed to her on that fateful occasion, instead of the cold rebuff that she imagines in its place and that she has actually experienced under different circumstances in the reunion scene of chapter 36.

Esther's commentary immediately following Ada's reaction exposes another rhetorical layer of this scene and another, again phantasmatic, addressee for Esther's narrative performance. “Such compassion,” she writes, describing Ada, “such gentleness, as that with which she bent down weeping, and put her hand upon the mother's, might have softened any mother's heart that ever beat” (134). The fantasy here is that Ada's gesture of tenderness—and Esther's narrative re-creation of it—might soften the heart not just of “any mother,” but of one mother in particular. If we ask who is the addressee of the entire narrative that Esther writes, who is “the unknown friend to whom I write,” as she puts it in her final chapter, one answer has to be that it is “my mother cold and dead.”

Another important scene to which any voice-oriented reading of Bleak House must pay close attention is Esther's report in chapter 18 of the encounter between Lady Dedlock and herself in the keeper's lodge during a thunderstorm.¹⁸ Esther has already had the experience of seeing Lady Dedlock in church and of finding her face like “a broken glass…, in which I saw scraps of old remembrances” (292). The following Saturday, while walking in the woods near Chesney Wold, she, Ada, and Jarndyce are overtaken by a sudden storm and seek refuge in a little keeper's lodge. As the two young women sit, just within the doorway, to watch the storm, a voice speaks.

“Is it not dangerous to sit in so exposed a place?”

“O no, Esther dear!” said Ada, quietly.

Ada said it to me; but, I had not spoken.

The beating at my heart came back again. I had never heard the voice, as I had never seen the face, but it affected me in the same strange way. Again, in a moment, there arose before my mind innumerable pictures of myself. (296)

The voice is of course Lady Dedlock's, and Esther's response, as in the church, is to be flooded with confused remembrances of herself and her past. It is a voice that she says she had never heard, yet one that sounds strangely familiar, a voice so much like her own that even Ada mistakes the source. What are we to make of this uncanny confusion of tongues, and what is Esther doing with it in her narration?

The first thing to point out is the highly ambiguous nature of Lady Dedlock's question. Dangerous to whom? Ostensibly an innocent and well-meaning expression of concern about the two young women's exposure to the weather, the question also lends itself to a darker interpretation. The danger could be just as much if not more to Lady Dedlock, and the exposure not that of sitting near the door of the lodge, but of Esther's appearing in any public place where her resemblance to her mother could endanger that lady's high social position. “Is it not dangerous [to me] [for you] to sit in so exposed a place?” If this is the meaning that hovers beneath the surface of her courteous concern, then its implications for Esther are dire. It signals, from the moment of their first speaking, Lady Dedlock's barely concealed wish that Esther should not be seen, should disappear, should die. I do not mean to claim that this is what Lady Dedlock actually intends, consciously or unconsciously. We do not have access to her inner thoughts. But I do think it is what Esther hears and remembers her mother saying. At the time, Esther does not appear to recognize this darker meaning in Lady Dedlock's words, but can we be so sure? I am inclined to hypothesize a silent, watchful, and suspicious Esther, a Hortense if you will, who accompanies Lady Dedlock and examines her every word and movement for signs of selfishness and aversion to her daughter. I believe it is this Esther who narrates the scene, who puts the ambiguous question in Lady Dedlock's mouth, and who lets its more sinister implication color her account of the remainder of their meeting.

But what if Ada is correct? What if Esther is the one who said these words? Or what if Esther, in repeating them in her narrative, has allowed the ambiguity of speaker to linger, so that she and we can read them as her own? Reformulated along these lines, the sentence would read: “Is it not dangerous [to my mother] [for me] to sit in so exposed a place?” Such a reading would place the recognition of dangerous exposure within Esther herself and would lead, as I shall argue shortly, to the hypothesis that Esther's illness, and especially her disfigurement, are the result not merely of contact with a contagious disease but also of Esther's unconscious wish to protect her mother by effacing the physical resemblance between them. “Exposure” and “danger” are the terms on which the entire interaction pivots. Esther exposes herself to the danger of disease so that her mother can avoid exposure to danger of a different kind.

After some further conversation between Lady Dedlock and Jarndyce, during which Esther remains silent but focuses closely on what she describes as Lady Dedlock's “indifferent manner” (297), the scene concludes with Esther's account of the curious episode involving Lady Dedlock and her two attendants. Although Esther does not speak, her narrative reconstruction of the event and of Hortense's strange departure, walking barefoot through the grass, contains more direct traces of the anger she still harbors toward her mother than any other portion of the book.

As Esther presents it, the altercation between Lady Dedlock and Hortense takes the by now familiar form of a mother's rejection of an unwanted daughter. Only this time, the pain of maternal rejection is compounded by the presence of a desired daughter, Rosa.

“I am your maid, my Lady, at the present,” said the Frenchwoman. “The message was for the attendant.”

“I was afraid you might mean me, my Lady,” said the pretty girl.

“I did mean you, child,” replied her mistress, calmly. (299)

Esther then reports Lady Dedlock's polite words of farewell, in which, although they are addressed to Mr. Jarndyce, she clearly infers—as the phrase set off in dashes indicates—the mother's wish never again to see her rejected child.

“I am sorry,” said Lady Dedlock to Mr. Jarndyce, “that we are not likely to resume our former acquaintance. You will allow me to send the carriage back for your two wards. It shall be here directly.”

But, as he would on no account accept this offer, she took a graceful leave of Ada—none of me—and put her hand upon his proffered arm, and got into the carriage; which was a little, low, park carriage, with a hood.

“Come in, child!” she said to the pretty girl, “I shall want you. Go on!”

The carriage rolled away; and the Frenchwoman, with the wrappers she had brought hanging over her arm, remained standing where she had alighted.

I suppose there is nothing Pride can so little bear with, as Pride itself, and that she was punished for her imperious manner. Her retaliation was the most singular I could have imagined. She remained perfectly still until the carriage had turned into the drive, and then, without the least discomposure of countenance, slipped off her shoes, left them on the ground, and walked deliberately in the same direction, through the wettest of the wet grass. (299)

Despite her steadfast silence, we have no difficulty imagining what Esther is feeling here. The Esther who narrates this scene has taken great care to notice and record every imagined slight, every use of the word “child” to someone other than herself, every sign of what she takes as Lady Dedlock's “displeasure or dislike” (298). Rather than acknowledge openly the hurt and anger she then felt, and still feels, at her mother's preference for what she repeatedly calls “the pretty girl,” Esther displaces her own reaction onto Hortense, just as she did onto Ada in the scene with the dead baby.

Whereas in the earlier scene Esther reveals herself by means of a dislocated voice, here displacement takes the form of action. The ventriloquist's doll not only speaks, it moves. It moves, however, only by virtue of and through the language of the narrator who gives it life. Hortense's transgressive action finds expression through Esther's retrospective voice. Consider the extraordinary sentence describing Hortense's return to Chesney Wold with which Esther brings the chapter to a close: “Still, very steadfastly and quietly walking towards it, a peaceful figure too in the landscape, went Mademoiselle Hortense, shoeless, through the wet grass” (300). There is no “confusion” here on Esther's part, only an exquisite and carefully controlled rage. The elegant inversion of subject and verb, the semantic and temporal ambiguity of the initial “Still,” combining motion and stasis and pulling the completed action of the past-tense verb “went” back into the timeless present of writing—all this bespeaks a superb control of language. As this sentence demonstrates, Esther can be a powerful prose stylist when her deepest feelings, in this case anger, are engaged.

The closest Esther comes in this passage to voicing her anger directly is the curious moral speculation she offers as the Dedlock carriage rolls away. “I suppose,” she writes, “there is nothing Pride can so little bear with, as Pride itself, and that she was punished for her imperious manner.” The general context and the sentence that immediately follows restrict this sentiment to Hortense, but the ambiguity of pronoun reference, together with the sentence's position at the beginning of a new paragraph (a change introduced late in Dickens's process of revision), allows the accusation of Pride to apply to Lady Dedlock and the speculation regarding “punishment” to suggest, ever so faintly, Esther's grim satisfaction that in her exposure, and ultimately in her death, the cold mother may receive—indeed has already received (the verb is a simple past tense)—just what she deserves.

Closer attention to questions of voice and temporality may also shed light on one of the most puzzling passages in the book and on an aspect of the mysterious illness that befalls Esther halfway through the novel. Chapter 31, “Nurse and Patient,” is the exact midpoint of the novel, the middle chapter of monthly number 10, itself the middle number of the nineteen-part serialization. The passage from this centrally positioned chapter that I want to analyze in detail is introduced by a paragraph of chiaroscuro landscape description, full of gothic elements and written in a style untypical of Esther—untypical, that is, of the domestic busybody persona that she often adopts, but more typical, I would argue, of the darker, more complex writing self that emerges whenever her narrative approaches the topic of her mother and begins to draw on the resources of her unconscious mind. “Towards London,” she writes, “a lurid glare overhung the whole dark waste; and the contrast between these two lights, and the fancy which the redder light engendered of an unearthly fire, gleaming on all the unseen buildings of the city, and on all the faces of its many thousands of wondering inhabitants, was as solemn as might be” (488). Passages like these, with their darker content, complex syntax, and use of figurative language, often function as preludes to a ghostly encounter of some sort.

The next paragraph reads as follows:

I had no thought, that night—none, I am quite sure—of what was soon to happen to me. But I have always remembered since, that when we had stopped at the garden gate to look up at the sky, and when we went upon our way, I had for a moment an undefinable impression of myself as being something different from what I then was. I know it was then, and there, that I had it. I have ever since connected the feeling with that spot and time, and with everything associated with that spot and time, to the distant voices in the town, the barking of a dog, and the sound of wheels coming down the miry hill. (489)

Several critics have noticed this passage, but none has been able to identify or explain the strange experience it describes.¹⁹ By now we should be able to recognize this as another of Esther's temporally complex, uncanny moments. Tonally and even in content, it resembles some of Esther's descriptions of visiting Chesney Wold and walking on the Ghost's Walk. The passage mixes verb tenses (simple past, past perfect, present perfect, present), a confusing surplus of temporal markers (that night; soon; always; since then; then, and there; ever since; that spot and time), associated contemporary sounds (voices, a barking dog, the sound of wheels), and vague pronoun reference (who are “I,” “me,” and “myself” ? how do we understand the word “something”? to what does “it” refer?) to describe with vivid particularity an experience identified only as “an undefinable impression of myself as being something different from what I then was.”

Psychoanalyst Christopher Bollas has a useful term for the kind of knowledge Esther describes here. He calls it “the unthought known.”²⁰ Such knowledge, according to Bollas, is preverbal and extra-rational, but it is no less certain or real. It is a knowledge held in the body or in the unconscious or preconscious mind. It resembles the knowledge acquired in infancy, such as the smell or taste of the mother, the sound of her voice, the distant memory of her face—the entire relational matrix between mother and baby. Esther insists that she knew something, but without thinking. She had “no thought, that night—none I am quite sure”—but in that moment, she knew herself to be “different” in some way that defies explanation.

Critics have suggested that “what was soon to happen to me” refers proleptically to the disease that Esther will contract by the end of the chapter, but this explanation, while satisfactory as far as it goes, seems insufficient to me. The clause, with its vague temporal adverb “soon,” can refer equally and more immediately to the uncanny experience described in the rest of the paragraph. My own suggestion is that Esther saw or sensed the presence of a ghost and that in writing about it she re-creates and reenters that disorienting, hallucinatory encounter. I think the ghost is Lady Dedlock and that in this paragraph Esther is describing the moment when she came to the sudden “unthought” realization of who her mother was and is.

What about the auditory memories, the barking dog and other sounds that Esther reports associating with this experience? On the one hand, they help her to pinpoint the exact time and place where she had the undefinable impression of her difference, and as such they add to the particularity and realism of her account. On the other hand, precisely because they are auditory and nonverbal and are filtered through the retrospective, potentially inexact memory of the older Esther, they partake of the “unthought known.” The temporal location of sound is often difficult to specify. It is possible, then, that Esther may be confusing or conflating two different experiences of voices and barking dogs, one from chapter 36, where she reports hearing “deep voices” (584) and “the barking of the dogs” (586) while walking on the grounds of Chesney Wold, and the other in the uncanny passage from chapter 31. Both sets of sounds, of course, recall ghostly near encounters with her mother. Similarly, “the sound of wheels coming down the miry hill” in chapter 31 echoes—at the same time that it anticipates discursively—Esther's recollection of the “miry sleet” (885) through which Bucket's coach “churned—with a sound as if it were a beach of small shells—under the hoofs of the horses, into mire and water” (880)—another passage closely linked to Esther's desire for reconnection with the mother. The fact that these auditory details appear later in Esther's narrative does not prevent them from inflecting her description of the experience in chapter 31, since those events and sounds have already occurred to her in life prior to their narrativization in Esther's written account. Once again, sjuet repeats fabula, creating the potential for “echoes” in the text of as yet unnarrated material.

If I am correct in suggesting that Esther already “knew” who her mother was prior to contracting the disease, this possibility has implications for other parts of the plot. We know that Esther fell ill after being exposed to Charley and that Charley acquired the disease from Jo. An important difference between Esther's and Charley's experience of the disease, however, is that Esther was disfigured, her face scarred beyond recognition, whereas Charley was not. Individuals of course have different immune systems and respond differently to contagious diseases. Notice, however, that the disease is never named. Critics have argued about what the disease might be, with most settling for smallpox, but a few proposing erysipelas.²¹ In the text, the only term used for the disease is “fever.” I believe that it is a mistake to insist on treating Dickens as entirely a realist on this point. The disease is certainly real enough in one sense; Jo dies of it. But it is also a gothic device or, what amounts to the same thing, a psychogenic force.

Lady Dedlock does not reveal herself to be Esther's mother until after Esther has recovered from her illness. But if Esther “knew” in some fashion, before being exposed to Charley, who her mother is and what the social consequences to Lady Dedlock of revealing this information to the world would be, then it is possible that Esther, in some unthinking or unconscious way, purposely exposed herself to the “fever” and then, having contracted it, made use of the disease in order to protect her mother by eliminating the facial resemblance between them. I am suggesting, in other words, that Dickens makes Esther's illness, and specifically her disfigurement, the result of a pathological accommodation on her part to what she takes as her mother's deepest wish—that she should, if not exactly die, at least destroy the incriminating evidence written on her face. Disfigurement and the blank depression that underlies the forced cheer and dutiful obedience of Esther's public persona—and that continue to afflict the older Esther even as she writes her account of these events—are thus the daughter's way of maintaining an unconscious identification with her “dead mother.”²²

It is of course impossible to prove such a hypothesis, but the hypothesis does have the virtue of offering a plausible explanation for Esther's uncanny experience of “difference” from herself in chapter 31. Moreover, it is consistent with the relief that Esther reports having immediately upon learning from Lady Dedlock that she is Esther's mother: the “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 that nobody could ever now look at me, and look at her, and remotely think of any near tie between us” (579). What Esther here calls her “burst” of gratitude I take to be the bursting into consciousness at this later time of the life-altering recognition and experience of difference from herself, resulting ultimately in a wish for self-effacement, that first flashed upon her unconsciously in the scene she describes in chapter 31.²³