Narration in “Bleak House”: or, Is she or isn’t she???

SPOILER ALERT

My report contains mention of important plot points that may not be known to first time readers of Bleak House.

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In my quick research into whether Esther is the third person omniscient narrator (“TPON”) of Bleak House I found only four sources that suggest or argue this as a possibility. More sources may exist, but my resources are limited and I have no academic affiliation through which to do a more extensive search. The four sources are:

• Robert Newson, Dickens on the Romantic Side of Familiar Things: Bleak House and the Novel Tradition, (1977)
• D. A. Miller, “Discipline in Different Voices: Bureaucracy, Police, Family, and Bleak House”, Representations, Feb., 1983, pp. 59-89
• Hilary M. Schor, Dickens and The Daughter of the House, (1999), specifically Ch. 4 – “Bleak House and the dead mother’s property”, (pp. 101-123)
• Bert G. Hornback, “The Narrator of Bleak House”, Dickens Quarterly, March 1999, pp. 3-12

Briefly stated, the arguments presented in these sources for Esther being the TPON are: 

• Esther’s awareness of the TPON, proven primarily by her comment “my portion of these pages” (Newsom 14; Hornback 10; Schor 117).
• Esther “often falls into the voice of the other narrator” (Newsom 87; ) 
• Esther “attends . . . to [the TPON’s] concerns (repeating even his events)” (Schor 117) 
• The two narratives eventually “converge” (Miller 76)
• The “angry, often outraged” voice of the TPON is that of the “traumatized” Esther expressing her “repressed” emotions while at the same time giving her the anonymity she craves (Hornback, 10; Schor 116-123) 

Newsom’s and Miller’s arguments are based on scant evidence and are made with very little exposition – indeed in only a few paragraphs – and thus are not very convincing. That Esther is aware of the TPON does not in itself suggest that she is the author of that portion, nor does the fact that she sometimes slips into similar language or that the two narratives eventually come together. These things can just as easily be explained by Esther either knowing the identity of the TPON, or of her “portion” being just what she says it is, a part of a larger report on the events of the novel (see below for more on this).

Hornback’s and Schor’s arguments are more substantial. Hornback’s article picks up the thread suggested by Miller of a connection between the two narrators in both the writing style and content. His larger argument though is that Esther has been traumatized by her upbringing and by the events she experiences after she meets her mother. He asks, 

“Can the traumatized woman [Esther] – so afraid of self-assertion but so obsessively concerned with knowing – who has written her ‘portion’ of the novel, be thought of as also the author of the angry, often outraged omniscient narration? Is the omniscient narrator’s portion of the story the part of her experience and understanding which she is unable or at lease unwilling to tell?” (10) 

Hornback suggests the novel is a kind of therapeutic venting for Esther, a means of “putting together . . . her understanding of this world” in an effort to “release . . . her traumatic past”. (10-11) Schor argues this same point giving Esther a thorough Feminist treatment. Esther must speak in two distinct voices because she must treat the events she did not witness or experience directly differently from those she did. Esther disguises her own feminine familiar (i.e., comforting) voice with a masculine anonymous voice for those non-first hand events because of the difficulty she has in dealing with them directly. Like Hornback, Schor argues that Esther has been traumatized and has deep-seated anger at those who are responsible for her situation – her aunt, the System, and, most of all, her mother. In Schor’s analysis, the TPON is the portion of Esther’s narrative in which she most comes to terms with her history – which is also her mother’s history. Their shared history is the only legacy that Esther, the bastard daughter, can receive from her mother. Like many mother-daughter relationships, their’s is complicated. Esther is torn between wishing to openly love her mother and be loved in return yet understanding why this cannot be so and being bitterly angry with her mother for that impossibility; Esther feels rejected by her mother at the moment of their long wished for reunion. By writing her history in both her own voice and that of the TPON, Esther’s Voice gains power and she gains mastery over her legacy.

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In contrast to these arguments for one author of both narratives, there are many more sources that champion two separate authors. Here are four which do so in rebuttal to the above:

• Justine Pizzo, “Esther’s Ether: Atmospheric Character in Charles Dickens’s ‘Bleak House’”, Victorian Literature and Culture, 2014, pp. 81-98
• Michelle L. Wilson, “Esther Summerson’s Narrative Relations: Re-Inscribing Inheritance in Bleak House”, Dickens Studies Annual, 2015, pp. 209-230
• Kieran Dolin, Fiction and the Law: Legal Discourse in Victorian and Modernist Literature (1999)
• Doris Stringham Delespinasse, “The Significance of Dual Point of View in Bleak House”, Ninetheenth-Century Fiction, Dec. 1968, pp. 253-264

In another Feminist perspective, Pizzo discusses Esther in terms of Bleak House’s fog metaphor and argues that through her self-deprecating manner, Esther “melts” from view like ether while still permeating the story. (82) Esther is ether – an invisible, organic yet permeative entity – as opposed to the TPON’s fog – a London particular, man-made and pervasive. Thus, and more to the point of narrator identity, Pizzo argues that we should question their claim, referring specifically to Newsom, Miller and particularly Schor, of Esther being the author of both narratives because “these totalizing theories grant Esther a clear-sighted perception that the novel’s climate repeatedly occludes”. (87)

Clear-sighted perception is arguably the purview and ultimate goal of the Law, represented here by the Courts of Chancery. (Whether they are successful is another question, to which Dickens’s novel answers with a resounding “NO!”.) Dolin describes how evidence in Courts of Chancery was always written down in the form of depositions, affidavits and responses to interrogatories. Esther’s narrative then should be seen as her deposition – her “portion” – made in response to “a larger document” of evidence provided by, or collected by, the TPON. (86) Esther’s separate narrative “is not only a completion of the third-person narrative, providing us with the story of the individual in contrast to that of the court; it also operates counter to the narrative of Chancery, creating relations (narrative and familial) outside the law.” (Wilson 210) These relations add humanity to the larger impersonal TPON/Chancery report. The “character” of the decidedly masculine TPON, Delespinasse says, “is too uninvolved, too journalistic in tone, to reveal himself as a person. Thus he presents thematic opposition to Esther; he is merely a mechanical intellect which impartially observes; she is above all human, a creature of feeling, of warmth, of total involvement with her surroundings.” (256)

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Conclusion

While the idea that Esther may also be the writer of the TPON is tantalizing, after reading these arguments I’m remain unconvinced that she and the TPON are one entity. While I understand Hornback’s and Schor’s arguments about how tying the two narratives together might give greater agency to Esther’s Voice, I have some difficulty believing Esther capable of writing some portions of the TPON’s narrative. For example, I’m unconvinced Esther has the necessary grasp of the workings of Chancery or the legal profession to write the sections of the novel that sharply and pointedly critique them, or that she could conceive the thoughts or callousness of Mr Tulkinghorn, or treat her father’s death with the stoic distance of Chs. 10 and 11. And I wonder why the bulk of Esther’s anger should be directed toward her mother, and not toward her aunt who is really the architect of her sad story. Further, Schor’s argument is so weighted in modern Feminist perspectives that I have trouble imagining Dickens’s sensibilities being such that he would make them the basis of an entire novel. (How much of a feminist was Dickens is an entirely other rabbit hole down which I am not prepared to go.) That Esther is the common denominator of the two narratives is enough to hold them together, especially if we consider Bleak House as a transcript of the legal proceeding that is Jarndyce and Jarndyce. However it may be, I am in accord with Delespinasse’s summation:

“But one must not ignore the fact that [in Bleak House] the strands are woven into one work, a work which must finally be treated as a whole. Because the two threads are intertwined, Esther’s view of the world is contrasted throughout with the impersonal narrator’s. . . . And it is from the play between the two . . . world views they represent, that the final point of the work emerges: it is a book about how self-destructive a detached, unfeeling position is; about how much better a sympathetic, loving attitude, a search for beneficence, can make this rather cruel world appear.” (264)