Dis-ease in Bleak House: An Overview
Much has been written on Dickens's use of illness and disease in Bleak House and in his other novels; however, these comments usually fall into one of three categories: Disease as plot device; disease as a reflection of Victorian social dis-ease; and disease as contributing to "the feminine" or female identity in Victorian England. Each of these three approaches, however, ultimately returns to and requires an understanding of Dickens as a "realist" writer--that is, a writer who created texts that accurately reflect the intrusion of the mundane and abject (such as filth in the streets).
**Note: Most critics agree that the unnamed disease that strikes Esther is smallpox, despite the prevalence of cholera at the time Dickens is writing.
Disease as plot device
Perhaps the simplest use of "disease" is as a rhetorical device to move either the plot or the reader. The scarring characteristic of smallpox is an ideal plot device because "the infection provides a crisis in the heroine's life that Dickens uses in Carlyle's fashion to transform Esther from a naive girl to a true Bildungsroman character" (Gurney 79). As a highly transmittable disease, smallpox is better able to move between characters and scenes to create thematic links and move the story forward (Gurney 89). Further, "the presence of disease in the text does more than provide a tension between sickness and health in the various characters--it posits the entire novel as a document searching for a cure" (Benton 70). As readers, we are implicated in this cure--once the tensions of the novel are resolved, we should administer those same antidotes to our own dis-eases.
Readers are further implicated in the story of disease by means of the sympathy (or lack thereof) the text arouses in readers. Maura Spiegel argues that Dickens is "everywhere attempting to expand our sympathy" but that he is also "careful in negotiating what he understands to be readers' points of tolerance and intolerance" of descriptions that require sympathetic responses (Spiegel 3). In particular, Bleak House educates its audience about propers emotional responses to illness, either one's own illness or that of others. Esther is our model character, who teaches not only how to be sympathetic, but how to manage and control our sympathy: "The proper or moderate balance must be struck, and Dickens appears to have been convinced that an effortful but not distorting self-management intensifies our sympathy" (3-4). This sympathy is key to Dickens's social reform rhetoric: only by having sympathy for the characters he depicts in terrible conditions will we be moved toward social change.
Disease as social dis-ease
As social criticism, Bleak House offers a vision of England that would have inspired not only sympathy, but fear in its contemporary readers (Gurney 82). Although there are many diseases present in the novel, smallpox is clearly Dickens's central device for arguing for social change. According to Schwarzbach, the prominent theory of disease transmission in Victorian England was the "pythogenic"--"the theory held that rotting organic matter produced specific poisonous agents; when a person cam in contact with them he contracted on fo the several fevers" (22). Unlike germ theories, then, pythogenic theories tie a disease to a location and a hygenic (and aesthetic) condition; represented as "miasmas" or fogs, these centers of disease had to be visited for the illness to be caught, such as at Tom-All-Alone's (22-23). From this pythogenic theory, Dickens could argue for better social conditions leading to fewer illnesses.
Smallpox was known to be one of the few "contagious" diseases that could be transmitted person-to-person--one of the few illnesses that could cut across social classes (Schwarzbach 26). Unlike the pythogenic diseases, smallpox as device could help Dickens argue for sympathy towards suffering in general (Fasick 137), which would hopefully lead to social reform. Graham Benton puts it most clearly:
I would argue that disease...fills...a dual role, that disease represents a containment of power in that it 'selects' and 'isolates' certain individuals upon whom it asserts its authority, and at the same tme dsease, because of the arbitrary nature of contamination, remains outside hte artifical construction of power relations. Disease is 'god-given': through a discourse of poetic justice, one can argue disease represents the ultimate juridical system. And yet, expectations are reversed in Bleak House--it is the innocent and the 'good' who are afflicted. Such an inversion operates to produce sympathetic readins, and forces the reader to look for causes for such an eteliologically derrived tragedy (72).
Disease as sign of the feminine
Robert Lougy identifies Dickens's preoccupation with disease (and the filth, contagion, and death that accompanies it) with Julia Kristeva's concept of the abject, "particularly its relationship to sexual difference and the feminine" (Lougy 476). Lougy notes that we cannot escape the abject in Bleak House, that "it rubs our noses in this quotidian muck" (477) anymore than we can escape death, for the novel is "structured...around an extended joke about death" (Jarndyce and Jarndyce) (479). Lougy, like Kristeva, places disease, death, filth, and sex in the liminal--the transitional space outside of the symbolic order. Lady Dedlock, as a liminal character marked early on by death, sex, disease, and an actual physical stain (after visiting the graveyard), represents a break with the (masculine) order, and must be dealt with accordingly (489). More importantly, however, the novel itself acts as a mediating, ordering device: it describes the indescribable, erases what must be erased, and teaches us how to deal with the abject--just as Esther does, by redirecting her narrative at the moment she encounters her mother in death (Lougy 493).
Disease is further linked to the feminine realm by Esther's scarring; disfigurement and disease literally marks the women as sexually and culturally different. Helena Michie, using Elaine Scarry's terminology, claims that pain can make or unmake "a self and a world" for the female character, and that for Dickens, "the process of making and unmaking is itself foregrounded in the illnesses of his heroines, and that pain necessarily both temporarily reproduces female physicality and makes any notion of the stable and fully representable female self impossible" (Michie 199). The female self in Dickens is always marked by some dis-ease which prevents that character from wholly constructing herself. "Bleak House and Our Mutual Friend become, then, not only gigantic experiments in realism, but texts in which female pain produces a discourse of and for the female self, of and for the female body" (200)--the literature is "equipment for living" in that it teaches its readers what appropriate female identity and discourse looks like.
Key Passages:
Bibliography
Benton, Graham. "'And Dying Thus Around Us Every Day': Pathology, Ontology and the Discourse of the Diseased Body. A Study of Illness and and Contagion in Bleak House." Dickens Quarterly. 11 (1994): 69-80.
Fasick, Laura. "Dickens and the Diseased Body in Bleak House." Dickens Studies Annual. (1996): 135-151.
Gurney, Michael S. "Disease as Device: The Role of Smallpox in Bleak House." Literature and Medicine 9 (1990): 72-92.
Lougy, Robert E. "Filth, Liminality, and Abjection in Charles Dickens's Bleak House." ELH 69 (2002): 473-500.
Michie, Helena. "'Who Is This In Pain?': Scarring, Disfigurement, and Female Identity in Bleak House and Our Mutual Friend." NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction 22.2: 199-212.
Schwarzbach, F.S. "The Fever of Bleak House." English Language Notes. 20.3/4: 21-27.
Spiegel, Maura. "Managing Pain: Suffering and Reader Sympathy in Bleak House." Dickens Quarterly 12.1: 3-10.
