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Will and Society in Bleak House

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Joseph I. Fradin
Joseph I. Fradin*
Affiliation:
State University of New York, Buffalo
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Extract

Lionel Trilling has observed that Little Dorrit is “about the will and society” and that “the whole energy of the imagination in the novel is directed toward finding the non-personal will in which shall be our peace.” Little Dorrit is “not only the Child of the Marshalsea ... but also the Child of the Parable, the negation of the social will.” Professor Trilling's comment, enlightening over a large area of Dickens' work, seems to me especially applicable to the first and most germinal of Dickens' “dark novels,” Bleak House; and I want here to approach Bleak House through Dickens' analysis of will and society.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 81 , Issue 1 , March 1966 , pp. 95 - 109
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1966

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References

1 Lionel Trilling, “Little Dorrit,” in The Opposing Self (New York, 1955), pp. 50–65.

2 For some balancing views see Leonard W. Deen, “Style and Unity in Bleak House,” Criticism, iii (1961), 206–218; Robert A. Donovan, “Structure and Idea in Bleak House,” ELH, xxix (1962), 175–201; W. J. Harvey, “Chance and Design in Bleak House,” in Dickens and the Twentieth Century, ed. Gross and Pearson (Toronto, 1962), 145–157; J. Hillis Miller, Charles Dickens, The World of His Novels (Cambridge, Mass., 1958), and Morton Dauwen Zabel, Introduction to the Riverside Edition of Bleak House (1956).

3 Mark Spilka develops interesting parallels and connections between Kafka and Dickens in his Dickens and Kafka, (Bloomington, Ind., 1963).

4 But see John Butt, “Bleak House in the Context of 1851,” NCF, x (1955), 1–21; and Humphrey House, The Dickens World (New York, 1942).

5 Donovan, pp. 177–178.

6 Dorothy Van Ghent, The English Novel, Form and Function (New York, 1961), p. 132.

7 For a possible source of Dickens' own admiration (“the behavior of a group of manufacturers”), see Butt.

8 Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton, N.J., 1957), pp. 187–188.

9 For a fuller description and analysis of Esther's journey, see James H. Broderick and John E. Grant, “The Identity of Esther Summerson,” MP, lv (1957–58), 252–258; and Norman Friedman, “The Shadow and the Sun: Notes Toward a Reading of Bleak Bouse,” BUSE, iii (1957), 147–166.