3
PSYCHOANALYSIS
THE APPROACH THAT I HAVE ADOPTED THUS FAR TO READING Esther Woodcourt's narrative and to understanding some of the illustrations that I take to be focalized by her relies to a great extent implicitly on terms and concepts derived from psychoanalysis. It is time to make some of these concepts more explicit and to explore what I regard as the proto-psychoanalytic mythic structure that underlies the stories of Esther and her mother.
One important set of psychoanalytic ideas that informs my reading of Esther comes from trauma studies. The study of trauma and its effects on individual and collective memory has been a rich field of investigation since Freud and especially since his case study of the Wolf Man (written originally in 1914–15 and published in 1918) and his meta-psychological paper Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920). Freud's interest in trauma dates from his earliest papers on hysteria, jointly authored with Breuer. One direction of his thinking, much debated by later critics, concerns the so-called seduction theory and the question of whether patients' reports of early sexual abuse by parents or other adults were in fact real or merely fantasies. Freud's most important contributions to trauma theory, however, date from after World War I and grow largely out of his awareness of the problems experienced by soldiers suffering from war neuroses or shell shock. From these studies, and in papers such as “The Uncanny” (1919), he developed his important ideas about repetition compulsion and the return of the repressed. In footnotes added later to his Wolf Man case history, moreover, he returned to the question of whether traumatic memories (so-called primal scenes) were real or imagined. Unable finally to decide this question, he offered the concept of Nachträglichkeit, translated into English as “deferred action” and into French as “après-coup,” in order to deal with the hermeneutic undecidability posed by his analysis of the Wolf Man's famous dream. It does not matter, he concluded, whether the patient's observation of parental intercourse was the source of his neurosis or whether his later observation of animal copulation, projected retroactively upon the parents, served as the basis for a fantasy about them that subsequently appeared in the dream and functioned as an event. In either case, the result, the analysand's neurotic structure, is the same. In the latter case, however, normal temporal order would be reversed (the Nachträglichkeit effect), and a subsequent event could then be understood as the cause of a prior one. The concept of “deferred action” and of belatedness or “afterwardsness” more generally has greatly interested subsequent theorists in the fields of psychoanalysis, narratology, and epistemology.1
Important contributions to trauma studies have developed in the wake of other major historical catastrophes, notably the Holocaust, Hiroshima, and Vietnam, as well as in clinical treatment of patients suffering from the effects of childhood sexual abuse and other early emotional injuries. Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) has become a widely recognized (and some would say overused) diagnostic category in the treatment of such individuals. The hypothesis of cross-generational transmission of trauma has also been proposed, especially in regard to the children of Holocaust survivors, but for other populations as well.2
Another influential model for understanding trauma, one that offers an interesting parallel to Freud's notion of Nachträglichkeit, has been developed by Robert Stolorow and his colleagues. Stolorow proposes a biphasic, relational model of trauma. According to this model, the original “traumatogenic” event is insufficient by itself to produce neurosis. “Pain is not pathology,” Stolorow writes.3 What produces pathology, he argues, is the lack of attuned responsiveness on the part of parents or other caregivers toward the child who suffers an unbearable affective injury. It is this later failure of response that “seals” the original injury and confers upon it a pathogenic power over the afflicted subject. In a sense, then, Stolorow's biphasic model, like Nachträglichkeit, attributes causal force to a subsequent experience that activates pathological power latent in the original wound. Unlike Freud, however, Stolorow does not question the reality of the original event.
Especially valuable for me in thinking about trauma in relation to Bleak House has been the work of Cathy Caruth. In Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History, Caruth explores ways in which the texts of psychoanalysis, literature, and literary theory “both speak about and speak through the profound story of traumatic experience.”4 Drawing on Lacanian and post-Lacanian psychoanalysis and on deconstructive literary theory, especially the work of Derrida and Paul de Man, Caruth develops powerful readings of literary, filmic, and other texts that deal in one way or another with trauma. Her extensive footnotes provide a useful summary of prior work, sociological as well as psychoanalytic, in the field of trauma studies. Her concise accounts of trauma and its belated effects have direct relevance for understanding the predicament of Esther Summerson and the strange temporality of Esther Woodcourt's narrative. In language readily applicable to Bleak House as I have discussed it thus far, Caruth describes trauma as “an event that…is experienced too soon, too unexpectedly, to be fully known and is therefore not available to consciousness until it imposes itself again, repeatedly, in the nightmares and repetitive actions of the survivor” (4).
Particularly interesting for my purposes is Caruth's emphasis on voice and on the ways in which trauma speaks belatedly and from displaced sites of articulation. After citing an exemplary passage from Tasso's Gerusalemme Liberata, she writes, “What seems to me particularly striking in the example of Tasso is not just the unconscious act of the infliction of the injury and its inadvertent and unwished-for repetition, but the moving and sorrowful voice that cries out, a voice that is paradoxically released through the wound” (2; emphasis in the original). And again: “Trauma seems to be much more than a pathology, or the simple illness of a wounded psyche: it is always the story of a wound that cries out, that addresses us in the attempt to tell us of a reality or truth that is not otherwise available. This truth, in its delayed appearance and its belated address, cannot be linked only to what is known, but also to what remains unknown in our very actions and our language” (4). The uncanny repetitions, vocal displacement, belated address, and fugitive temporality that characterize Esther's retrospective narration are nicely summed up in this statement.
Both Freud's concept of Nachträglichkeit and Stolorow's biphasic model of trauma are relevant to Esther's situation. In Stolorow's terms, the traumatogenic event would be not so much Esther's birth itself as her sudden, violent separation from her mother, however this occurred. What seals the originary wound and gives it pathogenic force would be the godmother's lack of responsive attunement, her stern, unforgiving treatment of Esther throughout her infancy and early childhood. For Stolorow, it would be Miss Barbary's failure to respond, more than any action of Honoria's, that activates the trauma of Esther's birth and is chiefly responsible for her neurosis. Stolorow would thus presumably consider Esther's feelings toward her mother to be largely a transference from the godmother, though Lady Dedlock's subsequent lack of responsiveness, once her relationship to Esther becomes clear, would play a secondary role.
This Stolorovian account of Esther's neurosis can be supplemented by one that includes both a Freudian and a Lacanian and post-Lacanian emphasis on belatedness. The persistence in Esther's narrative of both verbal and visual fantasies of burial scenes argues for the relevance of Freud's Nachträglichkeit effect and particularly for the importance of the crucial scene in chapter 36 of Esther's reunion with her mother and her reaction to the letter that Lady Dedlock gives her. Of this letter Esther writes, once again putting Lady Dedlock's account into words of her own, “So strangely did I hold my place in this world, that, until within a short time back, I had never, to my own mother's knowledge, breathed—had been buried—had never been endowed with life—had never borne a name” (583). Esther's experience and recollection of her mother in this scene (and elsewhere) as cold and rejecting and as wishing Esther dead, reinforced by her earlier experience of her mother's sister, works retroactively to produce the powerful fantasy of infant burial, the novel's primal scene, which can in turn be read as Esther's point of origin and as the origin of her entire narrative. Whether this scene is “real” or merely imagined remains undecidable; the result, for Esther, is the same. For Esther Woodcourt, however, the experience and subsequent realization of her mother's “betrayal” of her in the reunion scene, reinforced by her later reading of the letter, color her narrative accounts of every interaction with Lady Dedlock and contribute to the complex temporality of these accounts, which are always overlaid with memories and fantasies of other “times and places.”
In addition to ideas drawn from trauma studies, a second, perhaps less obvious, set of psychoanalytic concepts that undergirds my reading of Esther and Lady Dedlock derives from an important essay by psychoanalyst André Green entitled “The Dead Mother.” The essay does not attempt to give a generalized account of the etiology and symptoms of traumatic neurosis. Instead, it describes a particular syndrome or complex, based on clinical observation, that originates, according to Green, in the infant's earliest affective relationship with the mother. The “dead mother” in Green's analysis is not literally dead. Rather, for a variety of reasons, such as bereavement or other significant loss, she is emotionally dead and thus not available to nurture and sustain her child. According to Green, the dead mother is a concept that refers to
an imago which has been constituted in the child's mind, following maternal depression, brutally transforming a living object, which was a source of vitality for the child, into a distant figure, toneless, practically inanimate, deeply impregnating the cathexes of certain patients whom we have in analysis, and weighing on the destiny of their object-libidinal and narcissistic future. Thus, the dead mother, contrary to what one might think, is a mother who remains alive but who is, so to speak, psychically dead in the eyes of the young child in her care.5
For Green, the problem at the core of the dead mother complex is depression, but depression, he says, comes in two colors: black and white. The black depression belongs to the mother, whose incomplete mourning over her loss results in an extended form of melancholy. For the infant, and for the child and adult that it becomes, depression takes the form of blankness. (Writing in French, Green puns on the word blanc, which means “blank” as well as “white.”) The category of “blankness” for Green manifests itself in a variety of ways: “negative hallucination, blank psychosis, blank mourning, all connected to what one might call the problem of emptiness, or of the negative” (146). Blankness also leaves traces in the unconscious in the form of what he calls “psychical holes” (146). “The essential character of this depression,” he writes, “is that it takes place in the presence of the object, which is itself depressed. The mother, for one reason or another, is depressed” (149; emphasis in the original).
Green suggests several possible reasons for the mother's depression: “the loss of a person dear to her…, a deception which inflicts a narcissistic wound: a change of fortune in the nuclear family or family of origin,” and so on. “In any event the mother's sorrow and lessening of interest in her infant are in the foreground…. It should be noted,” he continues, “that the most serious instance [of maternal depression] is the death of a child at an early age” (149). In response to the mother's depression or “death,” the infant first tries in vain to repair the mother and bring her back to life again. Failing in this attempt, the infant adopts a series of defensive strategies for dealing with what it experiences as a catastrophic loss of love. One defense is a “unique movement with two aspects: the decathexis of the maternal object and the unconscious identification with the dead mother. The decathexis,” Green continues, “which is principally affective, but also representative, constitutes a psychical murder of the object, accomplished without hatred” (151–52; emphasis in the original).
The second aspect of this defense, according to Green, is a “mirror-identification” with the mother. “This reactive symmetry is the only means by which to establish a reunion with the mother—perhaps by way of sympathy. In fact there is no real reparation, but a mimicry, with the aim of continuing to possess the object (who[m] one can no longer have) by becoming, not like it but, the object itself” (151). In addition to identification with the dead mother, a second defensive reaction to the loss of maternal love, Green says, is “the loss of meaning” (151; emphasis in the original). The infant blames itself for the mother's “death” and comes to “imagine this fault to be linked to [its] manner of being rather than with some forbidden wish; in fact, it becomes forbidden for [it] to be” (151–52). This position, Green concludes, “could induce the child to let [itself] die” (152).6
As is no doubt already apparent, Green's formulation of the dead mother complex has remarkable affinities to the situation we find in Bleak House. The uncaring, unresponsive, “dead mother” imago is spread across several maternal figures in the book, including Mrs. Rachael, Mrs. Jellyby, and Mrs. Pardiggle, as well as of course Miss Barbary. For Esther, however, as well as for the other narrator, the dead mother imago settles primarily on Lady Dedlock. From the outset, we learn that Lady Dedlock is, in her own words, “bored to death” (21) and that, like Alexander, who “wept when he had no more worlds to conquer,…my Lady Dedlock, having conquered her world, fell, not into the melting but rather into the freezing mood” (22). It is worth noting in passing that the other narrator's repeated and ironic use of the first-person possessive pronoun “my” when referring to Lady Dedlock is an instance of free indirect discourse. In addition to the narrator's own ironic usage, the phrase “my lady” is the mocking quotation of an expression, at once deferential and at times overly familiar, adopted by servants and shopkeepers, indeed by everyone who knows her and seeks favor in her eyes or who wishes to slyly denigrate her arrogant demeanor. In its first-person address, moreover, it is also a faint reminder of Esther's own first-person narrative and of her ardent but impossible wish also to claim Lady Dedlock as “my lady.”
Frozen, bored to death, hiding behind a mask of “careless” aristocratic hauteur, Lady Dedlock is emotionally dead from the first scene in which she appears. On closer examination, it is easy to recognize her condition as one of protracted melancholy. Although married to one of the most exalted members of the aristocracy, she suffers from depression, depression over the double loss of her lover (Captain Hawdon) and of the child she conceived by him. Although sealed off from her present existence and hidden from the view of others, the secret of her past and of this double bereavement remains acutely alive within her, ready to be activated by the smallest reminder. When she sees the evidence of Hawdon's handwriting in chapter 2, she is suddenly shaken. Tulkinghorn, always quick to notice, remarks that Lady Dedlock is ill. “‘Faint,’ my Lady murmurs, with white lips, ‘only that; but it is like the faintness of death’” (27).
Guarded, emotionally distant except in her relationship with the daughter surrogate Rosa, Lady Dedlock shades her face from view. The shadow that falls upon her, however, and that we see most clearly in the illustration of “The Young Man of the name of Guppy” (fig. 8), is the same shadow of which Freud speaks in his famous characterization of melancholy: “The shadow of the object fell upon the ego.”7 Once Lady Dedlock reappears in Esther's life and announces herself as Esther's mother, her frozen, haughty demeanor recapitulates Esther's early experience of the godmother and becomes the focus of her fantasies as well as of her actual experience and retrospective accounts of Lady Dedlock.
FIG. 8. “The Young Man of the name of Guppy.”
If Lady Dedlock is the “dead mother” of Green's formulation, Esther is the daughter who tries in vain to revive the frozen mother, to warm her heart and restore her to vitality so that she can in turn nurture and sustain the daughter who has pined so long for her affection. Failing in this effort, Esther takes the blame upon herself and vows, as she tells her doll in chapter 3, “to repair the fault I had been born with (of which I confusedly felt guilty and yet innocent), and…[to] strive as I grew up to be industrious, contented and kind-hearted, and to do some good to some one, and win some love to myself if I could” (31). Thus is born Esther's second self, the inauthentic identity I have called “Good Esther.” Hidden beneath this dutiful persona are two other Esthers. One is the daughter who suffers from what Green calls a “blank depression,” who experiences a loss of meaning in her life and “psychical holes” in her unconscious, and for whom it is forbidden to be. The other Esther is a darker, ghostly self that emerges often in the night and who, in her role as narrator, is endowed with a powerful, resonant voice that often breaks out whenever thoughts of her mother are nearby.
Blankness, however, is the condition that most commonly afflicts Esther, especially when she looks in the mirror or in the mirror of another face. In the opening paragraph of her first chapter, Esther describes her doll, who “used to sit propped up in a great arm-chair, with her beautiful complexion and rosy lips, staring at me—or not so much at me, I think, as at nothing,—while I busily stitched away, and told her every one of my secrets” (27–28). The doll stares at “nothing” because the doll is inanimate; its eyes are incapable of focus. In this respect it is a version of the dead mother, also inanimate, also incapable of seeing or responding to the needful child. The doll is beautiful, like the mother, like Esther herself, and like Ada, that other doll-like beauty whose “darling” face Esther cherishes so fondly; but when Esther remembers the doll looking at her, she recalls it staring at “nothing”—that is, not at Esther's beautiful face, but at the “psychical hole” where Esther's self should be.
Esther always has trouble with mirrors. They are an invitation to vanity, which she modestly avoids, but they are also dangerous, because they remind her that she is beautiful and thus sexually attractive and not just a little old lady whom no one need regard. Mirrors are also dangerous because they potentially threaten to confirm her deepest fear—that she does not exist, that in the place of her face there is “nothing.” When she first visits Kenge and Carboy's prior to going before the Lord Chancellor, for example, Guppy, who has already spotted her as a beautiful young thing, calls her attention to a little looking-glass, “In case you should wish to look at yourself, miss, after the journey.” Esther picks up a newspaper and begins to read, but, after a brief moment of dissociation, in which “I…found myself reading the same words repeatedly” (notice Esther's use of the reflexive verb here, often a sign of psychic splitting), “I put the paper down, took a peep at my bonnet in the glass to see if it was neat, and looked at the room” (43). Esther looks at her bonnet, but not at her face, worried perhaps that she may find nothing there.
Among the novel's many other scenes of mirroring, the most memorable is the one from the crucial chapter 36 in which Esther first looks at her face in the glass following the illness that leaves her scarred beyond recognition. After Charley brings her the mirror, she first veils herself with her long, thick hair, then slowly lifts a muslin curtain drawn across the glass, before parting her hair and looking at her face. “I drew [the curtain] back; and stood for a moment looking through such a veil of my own hair, that I could see nothing else” (572). She sees her hair, but she also sees “nothing else”—a blankness that is unsettling because strange, but that she somehow finds reassuring since it means that she may no longer pose the danger of exposure to her mother.8 Putting her hair aside, she contemplates her face, but, as in the early scene at Kenge and Carboy's, she gives us no details, only the sense of strangeness and then gradual familiarity that takes its place as she grows accustomed to the alteration in her looks and comes to “know” it (I suspect that the verb she means is “like”) “better than I had done at first.” “It was not like what I had expected,” she writes, “but I had expected nothing definite, and I dare say anything definite would have surprised me” (572). The willed operation of self-disfigurement has been successful, and Esther's face has been replaced by “nothing definite.”
By destroying her face, Esther in effect destroys her self, or rather, restores it to an already familiar and desired blankness—the blank look of the doll, but without its beauty. In so doing, she not only complies with what she imagines to be her mother's unspoken wish; she also identifies with her mother—adopting, like Lady Dedlock, a mask of impassivity, a mask of death, in order to protect the secret of their common past. While there may be something reassuring for her about this “reactive symmetry,” as Green calls it, identification with the dead mother is also a deeply terrifying experience, as the dreams Esther reports having had during her illness make abundantly clear. These dreams—of “labouring” up endless stairs like a worm, only to be turned back and forced to repeat the task again, and of being a bead on a flaming necklace and praying only to be taken off from the rest (555–56)—lend themselves to multiple interpretations: the labor of birth, the labor of repeatedly performing the abject role of “Good Esther,” but also suicide and self-annihilation. However we interpret them, they are evidence of what Green calls the “loss of meaning” whose manifestations include “negative hallucination, blank psychosis, blank mourning, all connected to what one might call the problem of emptiness, or of the negative.”
Esther's reunion with her mother in chapter 36 briefly offers the hope of a possible escape from the agony of the “negative,” but, as we have seen, Lady Dedlock's ambivalent response in this scene and her equally ambiguous letter leave Esther uncertain at best about what her future holds. Instead, she turns, as she has done before, to another source of comfort, her “darling” Ada. The scene of her reunion with Ada functions as an opportunity both for Esther Summerson to replay the unsatisfactory reunion scene with her mother experienced only the previous day, and for Esther Woodcourt to reexperience and rework both scenes in retrospect. I have already discussed the way in which Esther's anticipation of seeing Ada for the first time after her illness, running down the road toward her and then dashing back to hide in her room, repeats larger rhythms and patterns of movement in her narrative as a whole. What remains to be analyzed is the Ada reunion scene itself, especially the strange way in which it ends—with Ada and Esther embracing each other passionately on the floor.
The reunion scene with Ada is multivalent and lends itself to a range of interpretations. For my purposes, the main significance of the scene lies in its juxtaposition to the preceding scene of failed reunion between Esther and her mother. As Dever convincingly shows, the scene between Esther and Lady Dedlock is a farewell scene rather than one of reconnection. Lady Dedlock tells Esther to consider her “evermore…as dead” (580; note that these are Esther's words, not direct speech by Lady Dedlock). The supposed reunion scene with the mother and the letter that follows it are in fact a betrayal of the mother-daughter bond, and it is this sense of betrayal that governs Esther Woodcourt's retrospective account of the event.
Having failed to achieve a satisfactory reunion with her mother, Esther understandably looks to her dearest friend for support and consolation, but here too she has doubts and fears. If complying with her imagined idea of the mother's wish that she destroy the facial resemblance between them has not succeeded in winning the mother's love, how will her friend Ada respond to the scarred face that she now presents? Her uncertainty is understandable and becomes palpable in her erratic movements back and forth along the lane where Ada is expected. When she does arrive, however, Ada's reaction to seeing her friend again appears to be everything, and more, that Esther could have hoped for. Here is Esther's account of the scene:
She ran in, and was running out again when she saw me. Ah, my angel girl! the old dear look, all love, all fondness, all affection. Nothing else in it—no, nothing, nothing!
O how happy I was, down upon the floor, with my sweet beautiful girl down upon the floor too, holding my scarred face to her lovely cheek, bathing it with tears and kisses, rocking me to and fro like a child, calling me by every tender name that she could think of, and pressing me to her faithful heart. (588)
Three points about this scene are worth noting. First is the way in which it allows Esther to replay in a different key the failed reunion scene with her mother. Ada here takes the part of Lady Dedlock, providing Esther with the unconditional acceptance and love that her mother has been unable or unwilling to give. She holds Esther in her arms, bathes her scarred face with kisses and tears, and rocks her to and fro “like a child.” (Dickens originally wrote “infant” here, but replaced it with the word “child.”9) Secondly, the scene allows Esther as narrator both to reexperience the comforting reaction of her friend and at the same time to express indirectly her anger at Lady Dedlock for her betrayal in the scene that Esther has narrated only a few pages before. The key word here is “faithful.” We may recall that among the first words that Esther reports herself as having said, long ago at the beginning of chapter 3, were “O you dear faithful Dolly, I knew you would be expecting me!” (28). In her childish play, Esther uses Dolly as a mother substitute, a mother who expects her child home after school, who wants to listen to “every one of my secrets,” a mother who is “faithful.” The mother who finally reveals herself to Esther in chapter 36, and whom Esther Woodcourt has more critically observed during the course of her entire narrative, has certainly not been “expecting” Esther to reappear in her life, however, and is anything but “faithful.” When Esther writes that Ada presses her “to her faithful heart,” she is commenting obliquely on her mother's lack of faithfulness, both in the earlier reunion scene and throughout Esther's entire life.
Faithfulness and its opposite, betrayal, are a major theme that runs through the whole of Bleak House, from the failure of Chancery to administer justice under the law and in particular to exercise responsibility toward the orphans in its charge, to Skimpole's and Turveydrop's irresponsible paternity, to the various bad mothers sprinkled throughout the book, to society's betrayal of Jo and the likes of Jo who hover, neglected, on its margins. Pervasive as its indictment of both individual and social betrayal may be, the novel is not entirely pessimistic on this score. It does contain several notable counterexamples of faithfulness that, while they do not offset the larger patterns of betrayal in the book, nevertheless offer some limited reason for hope. In this connection, we may recall Mrs. Rouncewell's long history of faithful service to the Dedlock family as well as her loyalty to and willingness to forgive her prodigal son George; the Bagnets, both in their strong family bonds (the only intact, loving family in the book) and in their willingness to stand surety for George's loan; George's soldierly loyalty to Sir Leicester at the end of the book; Sir Leicester's surprising and touching formal declaration of fidelity to Lady Dedlock, even after Bucket has provided him with the information about her past; Mr. Snagsby's willingness to continue shedding half-crowns to Jo, despite his wife's suspicious disapproval; Guster's simple kindness to Jo; and, perhaps most touching of all, Nemo's charity to Jo and Jo's reciprocal gift to him of the only things he has to offer: his labor—sweeping the graveyard step—and his words—“He was wery good to me, he wos.”
These acts of common decency and basic human solidarity, performed mostly by and between members of the lower classes (with the wonderful exception of Sir Leicester), stand in striking contrast to the negligence and disloyalty of most members of the middle and upper classes, who practice only “telescopic philanthropy” if any philanthropy at all. They contrast particularly with the actions of Chadband, who masquerades as a spokesman for Christian brotherhood, but serves only himself, as well as those of Tulkinghorn, who masquerades as the aristocracy's faithful retainer, but actually holds them in sinister contempt. They contrast also with the actions of Lady Dedlock, whose “betrayal” of Esther, not so much at the time of giving birth as in her refusal to recognize, accept, and embrace her daughter once her existence has been revealed, stands as the chief individual “crime” in this novel of pervasive social criminality.
A third and final point to note about the scene of Esther's reunion with Ada is a troubling undercurrent that runs counter to the reassurance offered by Ada's comforting response. Ada starts to run out of the room, but sees Esther and turns back. Recalling this precious moment in her narrative, Esther writes, in exclamatory verbless phrases that have no temporality, “Ah, my angel girl! the old dear look, all love, all fondness, all affection. Nothing else in it—no, nothing, nothing!” What troubles a reader attentive to Esther's voice in this passage is the persistence, alongside the indications of love, fondness, and affection, of the repeated negative term “nothing.” What Esther sees in the mirror of Ada's face is “the old dear look”—a look that is “old” and whose location is impossible to fix, since it is a look exchanged and shared between them, a mirror image. At the same time that the look offers reassurance and love, it also summons up, probably unconsciously for Esther as narrator, memories of blankness, of her doll, of the dead mother. Even in the time of writing, Esther remains haunted by the fear that her face and her personhood have “nothing else in it—no, nothing, nothing!”
At the beginning of this chapter I alluded to the presence of “a proto-psychoanalytic mythic structure” in Bleak House, and it is to this topic that I now want to turn as a way of concluding my discussion of “psychoanalysis” in the novel. I use the terms “myth” and “mythic structure” advisedly, for I want to argue that the novel explicitly invokes a well-known classical myth and uses it, in two slightly different versions, in order to explore intersubjective and intrapsychic phenomena that have a remarkable similarity to the process of psychoanalysis. The myth I have in mind is the story of Proserpine or, in Greek, Persephone.
The closest the novel comes to a direct allusion to this myth occurs near the beginning of chapter 22 in a remarkable passage describing the solitary pleasure that Mr. Tulkinghorn, at home in Lincoln's Inn Fields, takes in the consumption of port. I quote the paragraph in its entirety.
In his lowering magazine of dust, the universal article into which his paper and himself, and all his clients, and all things of earth, animate and inanimate, are resolving, Mr. Tulkinghorn sits at one of the open windows, enjoying a bottle of old port. Though a hard-grained man, close, dry, and silent, he can enjoy old wine with the best. He has a priceless binn of port in some artful cellar under the Fields, which is one of his many secrets. When he dines alone in chambers, as he has dined today, and has his bit of fish and his steak or chicken brought in from the coffee-house, he descends with a candle to the echoing regions below the deserted mansion, and, heralded by a remote reverberation of thundering doors, comes gravely back, encircled by an earthy atmosphere, and carrying a bottle from which he pours a radiant nectar, two score and ten years old, that blushes in the glass to find itself so famous, and fills the whole room with the fragrance of southern grapes. (352)
As this passage clearly suggests, Tulkinghorn is a figure of death or, to be more specific, of Hades or Pluto. The kingdom over which he rules is the underworld, to which he descends periodically in search of the blushing bottle of port, and from which he comes “gravely” back, bearing the sweet wine that he then sips with the pleasure of a connoisseur. The blushing bottle is Proserpine, his queen, whose cyclical ascent and return down beneath “the Fields” repeats the seasonal cycle of fertility and cold. The presence of the Roman figure of Allegory painted on the ceiling of his chambers and pointing down at him is one clue to the possibility that Tulkinghorn himself may be a figure of allegorical or mythic dimensions.
The language of the passage is extraordinarily sensuous, Keatsian even, and begs to be read aloud so that the reader can savor, vicariously with Tulkinghorn, the sweetness he imbibes. We do not usually think of Tulkinghorn as a sensualist, but here, observing him alone, the narrator captures something essential in his nature. Readers have often wondered about Tulkinghorn's motives in tracking down Lady Dedlock's secret and threatening her with exposure. What does he hope to gain from his blackmail scheme? Not money or even power, I suspect, unless perhaps over her. The passage from chapter 22 helps to explain what he is after. He does not really want to expose Lady Dedlock's secret, nor even to use his power over her to manipulate Sir Leicester. What he wants is to possess Lady Dedlock, to add her to his store of sweet, blushing secrets and bring her up periodically to sip and torture with vampirish delight. Outwardly a misogynist who shuns and distrusts women, inhabiting a world only of men, Tulkinghorn is also a sadist who takes erotic pleasure in punishing women and keeping them under his control. The game of emotional chess he plays with Lady Dedlock is designed not to end in checkmate but by capturing the queen and holding her in thrall. (In another “allegorical” pattern, Tulkinghorn is the rook, Lady Dedlock the restless queen, always on the move, and Sir Leicester the powerless king, immobilized by gout and later by his stroke.) She remains free to move about the country but always under his sway, allowing the game to continue indefinitely.
What does any of this have to do with psychoanalysis? Very little, or perhaps only this. Tulkinghorn is a lawyer, hired by Sir Leicester to provide professional service to the Dedlock family. In the course of his duties, he inevitably acquires knowledge of the family's secrets. Like the psychoanalyst, who also acquires his client's secrets, the lawyer is presumably bound by a contract of confidentiality and, again like the analyst, uses his professional skills only to further his client's interests and not for any personal gain beyond the monetary reward specified in the terms of their contract. In coveting his employer's wife, Tulkinghorn exceeds the terms of his contract and violates his employer's trust, recalling the Oedipal dynamics of another trusted employee, Carker, in Dombey and Son. The key difference between Tulkinghorn and the psychoanalyst is that Tulkinghorn uses his professional knowledge to torture Lady Dedlock, not to help her.
The mythic structure established in the passage from chapter 22, with Tulkinghorn as Hades or Pluto and Lady Dedlock as Proserpine, is repeated with a difference in the relationship between Bucket and Esther. Like Tulkinghorn, Bucket is a professional in the employ of Sir Leicester, though previously he had worked for Tulkinghorn. Unlike Tulkinghorn, Bucket maintains a properly professional demeanor and does not allow personal motives, other than well-deserved professional pride and the expectation of his fee, to interfere with the execution of his detective duties. In his professional capacity, he performs various tasks, among them solving the murder of Tulkinghorn, arresting the murderess, discovering the whereabouts of Lady Dedlock, and recovering the letters she wrote to Captain Hawdon, thereby neutralizing the threat of blackmail but incidentally exposing her secret and thus precipitating Sir Leicester's stroke. His most important part in the mythic structure of the book, however, is the role of Orpheus that he plays in relation to Esther, who here functions as Eurydice.
The Orpheus-Eurydice story, as classical scholars have long recognized, is a variant of the Proserpine myth. A beautiful young woman dies, bitten by a snake, and descends into the underworld. Her lover, determined to recover her, travels down into the world of death and tries to bring her back. Unlike the lord of the underworld, who wishes to retain his queen forever in thrall and allows her only periodic escapes to the upper world, Orpheus seeks to liberate Eurydice and bring her back permanently to a world where she can flourish and experience love. Unfortunately, he is ultimately unsuccessful in this task.
The role of Orpheus, as I have briefly sketched it here, resembles that of the psychoanalyst who accompanies his patient down into the world of the unconscious, wanders with her there, searching for clues that will enable her to escape from the prison of her neurosis, locates, if he is lucky, the path that will enable her to find her way back up to the surface, allows his reassuring presence to help her on her way, and then finally releases her to take the final steps on her own, since no one other than the patient can work through and master the conflicts that have imprisoned her, so to speak, in the realm of the living dead. In the somewhat anachronistic analogy I am proposing, Bucket performs the role of psychoanalyst for Esther, or rather of Orpheus, going down into the depths of her soul and accompanying her, following as well as leading, on her difficult path toward recovery. The extent to which he and they succeed remains to be seen.
If I am correct in suggesting that in Bleak House Dickens was revisiting the story of Orpheus and Eurydice, what is most extraordinary in the novel's handling of the myth is that Dickens allows the story to be told by and from the perspective of Eurydice. Or, to press my psychoanalytic analogy still further, Bleak House is the story of a psychoanalysis, complete with episodes of extreme dissociation and even psychosis, narrated by the patient.
When Bucket first comes for Esther to seek her help in searching for Lady Dedlock, it is in the middle of the night. Awakened from sleep, Esther goes with him, and the rest of their journey unfolds as if in a dream. The object of their search, as both of them recognize, is Esther's mother, but it is equally Esther herself. The rescue project that Bucket undertakes has Lady Dedlock as its initial goal, but it soon becomes a project of rescuing Esther as well. Likewise for Esther, though she does not recognize it consciously at the time, finding her mother is a way to find herself. She is in pursuit not only of the lost bond of affection with her mother, but also of the face that she dimly recalls from infancy, “the first thing in the world I had ever seen.” The face is also her own, sometimes beautiful like Ada's, but more often blank like Dolly's, staring “not so much at me, I think, as at nothing.” In order to recover her beauty and vitality, in order to return from the land of the living dead, Esther must confront the blankness of the negative, must look her “dead mother” fully in the face. Before there can be any hope of rescue, Eurydice must somehow acknowledge and come to terms with the fact that she is dead.
The earliest parts of Esther's journey are the most regressed and the most frightening.10 Bucket first takes her down by the river, thinking that her mother may have thrown herself into the Thames. Literally, he is mistaken, of course, but Esther's hallucinatory description of these scenes (always in retrospect, but focalized through her younger self) suggests that what Bucket finds there may in fact be part of what they are looking for. After descending through a labyrinth of streets, crossing and recrossing the river, they arrive at “a little slimy turning, which the wind from the river, rushing up it, did not purify” (868). Recalling the scene in retrospect, Esther re-creates syntactically, by the use of a reflexive verb and a strategically placed prepositional phrase, her experience of dissociation, of being at the same time present and not present at an encounter with some secret, abjected part of the self: “I had no need to remind myself that I was not there, by the indulgence of any feeling of mine, to increase the difficulties of the search” (869; emphasis mine). As if in “the horror of a dream” that she still “never can forget,” Esther recalls that “a man yet dark and muddy, in long swollen sodden boots and with a hat like them,…whispered with Mr. Bucket, who went away with him down some slippery steps—as if to look at something secret that he had to show. They came back, wiping their hands upon their coats, after turning over something wet; but thank God it was not what I feared!” (869). The slimy “something” is not her mother, but it may be a part of herself.
The process of descent into the depths of the unconscious continues under Bucket's watchful eye. He gazes “into the profound black pit of water, with a face that made my heart die within me.” As she writes, Esther's prose richens and darkens; it becomes powerful in the way that it does whenever she gains access to unconscious modes of thought.
The river had a fearful look, so overcast and secret, creeping away so fast between the low flat lines of shore: so heavy with indistinct and awful shapes, both of substance and shadow: so deathlike and mysterious. I have seen it many times since then, by sunlight and by moonlight, but never free from the impressions of that journey. In my memory, the lights upon the bridge are always burning dim; the cutting wind is eddying round the homeless woman whom we pass; the monotonous wheels are whirling on; and the light of the carriage lamps reflected back, looks palely in upon me—a face, rising out of the dreaded water. (870)
In this extraordinary passage, full of primary process thinking and marked by a shift into the present tense of recollection, Esther/Eurydice conveys what it felt like at the time, and still feels like in her haunted memory now, to wander in the realm of the dead. The face that she sees “rising out of the dreaded water” is her mother's, but of course also her own.
Meanwhile, Bucket remains alert and watchful, at times almost cheerful, and it is worth paying close attention to the way in which he conducts his investigation, both what he says (always as reported by Esther) and what she remembers of his mannerisms and gestures. We have already observed Bucket on several occasions earlier in the book, in chapters told by the other narrator, and his interactions with Esther are generally consistent with his behavior in those contexts. He maintains an easy, garrulous manner with people of every class and background while at the same time keeping an eye out for any detail that might prove helpful in his search. Several small habits of speech and gesture deserve notice. One is his trick of calling people by their name. Almost every time he speaks to Esther, he calls her “Miss Summerson” or “my dear” and once, after he has realized that Lady Dedlock and Jenny have switched clothes, even “my darling” (885). (We find the same device in chapter 56, where Bucket repeatedly addresses the paralyzed Sir Leicester by his full name and title, “Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet.”) Another little verbal tic is his habit of beginning sentences with the adverb “Now.” “Why, now, I'll tell you, Miss Summerson,” he begins in typical fashion, as he launches into one of his stories. Yet another mannerism is his habit of asking Esther how she is doing—“Are you well wrapped up, Miss Summerson?”—and offering polite little reassuring comments that often sound trite: “‘It may be a long job,’ he observed; ‘but so that it ends well, never mind, miss’” (868). Somewhat more unusual is his kindly but slightly intrusive way of telling Esther what she feels. When he hands her a cup of tea at one of their stops, for example, he says, “Drink it, Miss Summerson, it'll do you good. You're beginning to get more yourself now, ain't you?” (872). More curious yet is his habit of telling Esther who he is: “You know me, my dear; now, don't you?” and again, “Inspector Bucket. Now you know me, don't you?” (885).
Colloquial, jocular, slightly comic in their redundancy, these mannerisms of speech serve another, more serious purpose. They are Bucket's way of maintaining contact with Esther during her arduous descent; they keep him attuned to her in the present time, the “now,” of their journey. Largely phatic in their address, they have little content other than to tell Esther who he is and who she is and that she can rely on him to stay with her no matter how long or difficult their trip may be. More important than the content of what he says—those homely moral bromides—are the sustained contact and empathic attunement his verbal mannerisms provide.
Bucket's speech mannerisms are accompanied by a repertoire of nonverbal gestures. He uses his finger as a directional pointer, the finger that the other narrator has already endowed with semi-magical qualities. He never leaves Esther alone, but keeps coming back to her in the carriage to report on what he has seen or learned. Most important of all, in terms of the book's major pattern of visual recognition, he lends Esther his face. She refers regularly to his face, and it is his face more than his words that she reads for evidence of how the investigation is proceeding. In his regular rhythm of going away and coming back, going away and coming back, Bucket stages his own game of “peek-a-boo” for Esther's benefit. This is a version of the famous Fort/Da game of absence and presence that Freud describes in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, in which the infant learns to master the trauma of maternal separation and develop the capacity to be alone without anxiety. In his constant attention, his attunement to her feeling states, and his willingness to offer her the reassurance of his face, Bucket functions as Esther's analyst, capitalizing on her maternal transference to him in order to do for her what no mother ever did and thus help bring her back toward life.
This versatile repertoire of verbal and nonverbal response is part of Bucket's “technique,” both as detective and, in the analogy I have been pursuing, as psychoanalyst. We could even say, if the term were not too grand, that it is his song. Bucket is a homely Orpheus. (Recall that when he takes Hortense away in a cloud of smoke at the end of the exposure scene in chapter 54, the other narrator calls him a “homely Jupiter” [837].) “Now I am not a poetical man myself,” he tells Esther in one of his digressions during their ride, “except in a vocal way when it goes round a company” (875). In chapter 49, before placing George under arrest, Bucket joins the musical Bagnets in a chorus of “Brit Ish Gra-a-anadeers!” and, in one of the few revelations he makes about his private life (assuming he is to be believed here more than in the other stories he invents about himself), he “confess[es] how that he did once chaunt a little, for the expression of the feelings of his own bosom.” He goes on to tell Mrs. Bagnet that he considers his rendition of the ballad “Believe Me If All Those Endearing Young Charms” to have been “his most powerful ally in moving the heart of Mrs. Bucket when a maiden, and inducing her to approach the altar” (763). Along with Little Swills, Bucket is the novel's other accomplished vocalist, and in this respect he is a plausible, if somewhat unlikely and ludic, candidate for the role of Orpheus.
Chapter 59, the one that always makes me weep, brings Esther's journey to a close. Bucket has a smaller role to play here; he has already done his work. When he realizes that Lady Dedlock and Jenny have switched places, he turns and follows what he calls “the other” (884). This decision means that instead of pursuing the substitute deeper “down” into the country, away from the city, he and Esther will go “up” toward London, as he insistently tells the stable hand: “Up, I tell you! Up! An't it English? Up!” (884). Having started down by the river's slimy edge, they now head back out of the depths of the unconscious toward the conscious realization that Esther must make when she reaches the burial ground. Bucket's most interesting intervention during this part of the journey is to reassure Esther that she is “a pattern, you know, that's what you are,” adding, “My dear,…when a young lady is as mild as she's game, and as game as she's mild, that's all I ask, and more than I expect. She then becomes a Queen, and that's about what you are yourself” (902). Bucket's homely compliment summons Esther to her true identity as biblical queen, the young and beautiful self that awaits her at the end of her journey toward health.
The rest of the journey Esther must make chiefly on her own. She becomes more active, helping Bucket to retrieve her mother's final letter from the Snagsbys' orphan servant and commiserating with her, “laying my face against her forehead” (911) as poor Guster recovers from a seizure. Mirroring the orphan servant girl, Esther too seems headed toward recovery. As they get closer to the graveyard where Esther's father is buried and where Lady Dedlock will end her life, Esther must go on foot. They are joined by the physician Allan Woodcourt, but even he, Esther's friend and future husband, is not permitted to go the last few steps with her to where the body lies. Esther, meanwhile, has not allowed herself to think of what lies ahead of her. She remains fixated on the phrase “the mother of the dead child,” believing that ahead of them is Jenny, who will tell them where to find her mother. Unconsciously, of course, Esther knows whose body it is, and Esther Woodcourt has known all along that the journey can end nowhere else.
As she approaches the body, struggling against the knowledge she cannot escape, Esther's internal world begins to strain and collapse. Remembering and reexperiencing this awful moment, Esther undergoes a seizure of her own. She writes “that the stained house fronts put on human shapes and looked at me; that great water-gates seemed to be opening and closing in my head, or in the air; and that the unreal things were more substantial than the real” (913). The phrase “the mother of the dead child” is the key to the mystery. Esther is the dead child, and when she lifts the head, parts the hair, and turns the face, what she sees is the dead mother and her own dead self.