4 - Bleak House and the dead mother's property

Summary

The specter of female inheritance walks a revolutionary path in Bleak House. The novel brings together the strands we have been tracing – adultery, history, and writing; more explicitly, it takes up the plot of the portionless daughter, playing these larger questions through the bastard daughter's quest for her legacy. But Bleak House imagines a different form of inheritance. Here, inheritance is not the father's name, the father's word, or even the father's house; instead, it is the mother's, it is dispossessed and homeless, and it is the daughter's revenge. The questions of history and adultery that circulated throughout Hard Times and A Tale of Two Cities come home in this novel to what is truly a bleak house, emptying out the inheritance plot and the lines of property, to ask what is property; what is the role of the will; and what can the dispossesed, illegitimate daughter inherit? In Bleak House, the daughter stages her own revolution: her recapture of weapons of writing, which in this novel are the weapons of property. Bleak House is the novel the orphan daughter writes to reclaim her property; more than that, it is the autobiographical fiction the bastard daughter writes to ask, “who killed my mother?”