“Although in person and in personality Esther is self-effacing, her prominence as narrator makes her perspective, her way of seeing and judging, central” (Langland Angels 88).
“The connections for Esther are eyes, books, mirrors…” (Dever “Mirror” 46).
“I know I am not clever,” Esther Summerson finds it necessary to tell her readers very near the beginning of her first chapter of Bleak House. “I always knew that” (Dickens House 27). So begins the pattern of Esther’s self-effacement throughout the novel, a pattern that can make her seem to retreat into the shadows, especially when compared with the beautiful and active Lady Dedlock, or even the young, hopeful Ada who marries secretly for romantic love. So thoroughly does Esther narrate herself this way that the reader might miss one of the first clues to a disturbance of this reading. Esther admits that “I had always rather a noticing way – not a quick way, O no! – a silent way of noticing what passed before me, and thinking I should like to understand it better” (Dickens House 28). Esther does have power, but that power does not rest in “cleverness” or physical beauty so much as her gaze, her “way of noticing,” and her complicated, changeable relationship to it.
This is not, of course, the only reading of the novel that will allow Esther to have power. It may be in the domestic sphere. Elizabeth Langland suggests this in her section on Esther in Nobody’s Angels, arguing that Esther takes over and directs Bleak House “with little fanfare and great effectiveness” (92). She may attain power specifically through her misfortunes, as Carolyn Dever suggests in “Broken mirror, broken words,” where the loss of Esther’s mother essentially forces her to autobiography. Or she may actually tell the story of the whole of Bleak House, which means the reader cannot escape from Esther’s commanding presence anywhere in the novel. Bert G. Hornback proposes and defends this idea in “The narrator of Bleak House.” While one may not accept any of these ideas, they can serve as readings that give Esther power.
But the idea of Esther as possessor, victim, and defier of the gaze can offer not only a clear idea of Esther’s power, but of the shifting nature of it. Esther’s self-effacement is part of her character, even when she admits that she “had always rather a noticing way,” interrupting herself immediately as if to apologize for an assumption that approaches near to cleverness. Yet she also possesses this “noticing way,” this gaze, and by her own admission. This confession becomes one of the first sites in the novel to embody a shifting, tripartite relationship of Esther to her own gaze.
She victimizes herself with her self-effacement and her attribution throughout the novel of compliments directed towards her to the goodness of others. Yet she also possesses the gaze that creates (at least her parts of ) the story, and which often clearly judges those other characters for who they really are. The third relationship, defiance, is rarer, but it does occur, as when she goes on past her own interruption to remark about her “silent way of noticing,” and “thinking [she] should like to understand [what passes before her] better.” Esther does have power in her gaze, most often as possessor, more rarely as defier, balanced by her victimization. Observation forms a separate route for her, one that leads her past the traps that catch Lady Dedlock and Ada, into not only survival at the end of the novel but a balanced happiness and power to make some judgments of her own, irrespective of what other people say. And in acting so, she does it not only without but also because of the loss of one of the main powers that the other women possess, beauty.
In contrast to Esther, the reader knows Lady Dedlock is beautiful. At least, Sir Leicester considers her so; he “holds her personal attractions in the highest estimation” (Dickens House 22). And the omniscient narrator gives a detailed recitation of her beauty, emphasizing especially the physical features of her face: “She has beauty still…not yet in its autumn. She has a fine face – originally of a character that would be rather called very pretty than handsome, but improved into classicality by the acquired expression of her fashionable state” (Dickens House 22). So Lady Dedlock appears from her first mention as someone who can charm an aristocratic baronet, and attract even the attention and admiration of the narrator’s voice, the closest we have to an objective perspective. As with Mr. Guppy later on, she can fix more than one gaze on her, though the result of such gazing is not always the same. The narrator and Sir Leicester together make clear that, in this case, Lady Dedlock’s beauty has helped her gain high status. It does not do this alone. Lady Dedlock also has “pride, ambition, insolent resolve, and sense enough to portion out a legion of fine ladies…Wealth and station, added to these, soon floated her upward” (Dickens House 22). Beauty, however, stands first in this list of characteristics.
So far, then, beauty might seem a positive trait, able to convince the powerful possessors of the gaze to give Lady Dedlock what she apparently wants. However, Lady Dedlock does not possess the clarity of observation, either about herself or about other people, which her daughter, Esther Summerson, does. Appropriately enough, the passage making clear her lack of discernment begins, “She supposes herself to be an inscrutable Being – seeing herself in her glass, where indeed she looks so” (Dickens House 24). The mention of a mirror here is interesting, and perhaps foreshadows the use of a glass by Esther, who looks at herself in the mirror after her illness and forces herself to see and accept her scarring. Like Esther’s, Lady Dedlock’s first impression has little of truth in it; Esther finds out that Woodcourt still loves her despite her disfigurement, and Lady Dedlock turns out to have less of inscrutability than she thought. However, Lady Dedlock falls under the power of those who have clearer gazes in a way that Esther does not: “There are deferential people in a dozen callings…who can tell you how to manage her as if she were a baby…” (Dickens House 24). Despite her high status as “the centre of fashionable intelligence, and at the top of the fashionable tree” (Dickens House 22), Lady Dedlock has little real power over the people around her, and less even than she might because she untruthfully thinks herself impenetrable to their eyes. And the same omniscient voice that tells the reader Lady Dedlock’s impression of herself confirms that those who manage Lady Dedlock do “not exaggerate at all,” quoting Mr. Sladderly as saying that, “I may tell you, without vanity, that I can turn them [his high-class customers] round my finger” (Dickens House 25). Lady Dedlock’s high status does not seem to have brought her much autonomy.
Of course, one could argue that neither does Esther have much autonomy. “The trauma of what she suffered as a child, knowing that she was unloved and unwanted without knowing why…is seemingly the source of her disingenuous modesty and self-effacement” (Hornback “Narrator” 6). From childhood on, she becomes the victim of her own gaze, which focuses on the physical beauty in others, and gives them credit even for the good she performs. Her godmother “was handsome” (Dickens House 28). Even her doll has “a beautiful complexion and rosy lips” (Dickens House 27). When she meets someone new, Esther’s attention seems to fix first on the physical features of a person’s face and sometimes irradiate them with a shine that she herself does not possess. Ada is “such a beautiful girl! With such rich golden hair, such soft blue eyes, and such a bright, innocent, trusting face” (Dickens House 44). Richard is “a handsome youth” (Dickens House 44). And beauty of course must cause the good reactions of other people to those she finds beautiful. Esther believes that the Lord Chancellor “admired [Ada], and was interested by her” (Dickens House 45), and the next sentence calls Ada a “beautiful young creature” again. Later in the book, Esther will even judge other people, such as Skimpole and Boythorn, on the way that they react to Ada’s beauty.
Esther possesses a gaze, but it seems to see exclusively that which glorifies other people, leading to the idea that she, too, becomes a victim of her false perceptions. Her focus on physical features possibly blinds her to the true nature of some of the people she observes.
However, she does possess a gaze that influences the reader’s perceptions of the other characters. Since a good part of the story of Bleak House proceeds from Esther’s first person point-of-view, one might argue that of course she possesses a gaze; this does not impress the reader as a very remarkable fact, and may even seem untrustworthy. After all, Esther still suffers from feelings of worthlessness, and powerlessness. When Ada praises her for taking care of the Jellyby children, for example, Esther attributes the virtue wholly to Ada, talking of “the goodness of her own heart, that she made so much of me” (Dickens House 59)! The reader seems to get a biased view, and may never know if Ada really has that much goodness, or if Esther, enchanted with her beauty, gives her more than her due.
But Esther achieves power by possessing her own gaze, just as she suffers from it. She controls the readers’ observations of characters, and sees the “truth” of matters in ways that the other characters do not. When Richard and Ada begin to fall in love, Esther “found them out quite soon,” even though she “had never seen any young people falling in love before” (Dickens House 137). Her lack of experience does not hinder the clarity of her gaze. Ada does not come to confess her love for Richard to Esther until over eighty pages later, and then is astonished to find out that Esther knows about it. Esther chides her gently, saying, “Why, my pet of pets, I could have told you that, weeks and weeks ago” (Dickens House 209)! Ada’s lack of clarity in viewing other people specifically clashes with Esther’s here, as well as elsewhere in the book. Later Esther notes that she seems “blinded by her love for Richard to his ruinous career” (Dickens House 921). And her beauty, like Lady Dedlock’s, does not grant her power or autonomy. One might say with Langland that the “Victorian myth of the idle angel…is found only in the figure of Ada” (Angels 96). She does not see Richard‘s true character, ties her fate to his, and is left to raise his child after he has died. Her lack of discernment, the blindness of her gaze, victimizes her severely.
Esther does remain the victim of her own gaze in some part; the same power of observation that functions on others does not function on herself, any more than Lady Dedlock sees herself in the mirror in the way that others see her. Esther, as with Ada’s praise of her in the Jellybys’ house, tends to turn aside the gazes of others if they compliment her, and decide they come from the persons’ intrinsic goodness, or from some other source that has nothing to do with her.
When Mr. Guppy comes to make his proposal of marriage, and confronts her with one of the gazes that most victimizes Lady Dedlock in the novel, Esther notes that he “looked at me with an attention that quite confused me” (Dickens House 148). His proposal comes as a complete surprise to her, and she does not believe or want to listen to him when he declares, “Thy image has ever since been fixed in my breast” (Dickens House 153, emphasis added). The power of seeing has convinced Mr. Guppy that he would like to marry Esther, and he, predictably enough, phrases his own convictions in the language of vision. He has fixed his gaze on Esther, and tries to convince her to marry him with its power. Esther, however, refuses him, though admitting afterward that “an old chord had been more coarsely touched” (Dickens House 154) by the proposal than it had since she was a child. This perhaps goes back to her recognition of physical beauty in others—she mentions the doll to which she earlier attributed such beauty—and her own apparent acceptance of such a lack in herself. Yet Mr. Guppy has described her in terms of an image, in terms of vision, perhaps stirring doubts for her as to whether her dismissal of herself is accurate.
The proposal may touch Esther on another level as well. “While Esther resolutely dismisses Guppy's offer of marriage as ridiculous, her action later brings up old feelings of negativity and worthlessness that she had thought long buried with her doll in Miss Barbary's garden” (Currie “Stereotype” 17). She has sought to combat these feelings with the vow she made as a child, and which sums up her ambitions, at least at that period of her life. She vowed “to do some good to someone, and win some love to myself if I could” (Dickens House 31). This vow is repeated a few pages later (on 39). This, too, contrasts with Lady Dedlock’s apparent ambition to rise in society, just as Esther’s power of the gaze contrasts to her mother’s. In some ways, neither woman achieves her ambition. The people around Lady Dedlock can “manage her like a baby,” while Esther refuses to believe that she has done good to others, or that she has won love for herself when it apparently happens. Esther’s own self-effacement and feelings of worthlessness, which she sees as necessary when she turns her gaze on herself, destroy, not the good she does or the love she wins, but her belief that such things actually exist. That which gives her power turns on her as well, and serves to restrict the scope of her autonomy.
Lady Dedlock’s beauty does the same thing in some ways; it raises her to the heights of “fashion,” and consequently gets her into a position in which she becomes the toy of others and “has been bored to death” (Dickens House 182). It also exposes her to the eyes of Mr. Guppy, and makes her a victim of his gaze. But while Esther manages to defy and escape Guppy’s gaze—ironically, her blindness that she herself deserves love can also seem clear insight into Mr. Guppy’s character, since his love cannot survive the destruction of her facial features by disease—Lady Dedlock falls victim to it. Esther embodies three distinct relations to the gaze: possessor, victim, defier. She retains some autonomy and “freedom from,” if not as much “freedom to.” Lady Dedlock, however, in the anxiety of keeping her secret even when she knows that Esther is her daughter, falls victim and can neither successfully defy the gaze—at least in life—or see a way out of the trap.
In a doubled way, Mr. Guppy’s gaze exerts power over Lady Dedlock precisely because of a visual likeness. The narrator describes his reaction to Lady Dedlock’s portrait as “fixed and fascinated” (Dickens HouseHouse 110)! Once again, the gaze, as with Esther, equates knowledge, and knowledge assumed to hold truth, about a person. Since Lady Dedlock has a secret to hide, this gives Mr. Guppy power over her.
The meeting between Lady Dedlock and Mr. Guppy in fact emphasizes the Lady’s powerlessness, and does it using visual language. Mr. Guppy describes how he used the portrait to link Esther to Her Ladyship. There is “such a resemblance between Miss Summerson and your ladyship’s own portrait that it completely knocked [him] over” (Dickens House 464), and in the next sentence Mr. Guppy admits to have spied on Lady Dedlock, using the words “beholding,” “looking,” and “saw.” Lady Dedlock’s beauty has an immediate physical effect on him, emphasizing the power that her features often bring her, and have brought her in the past. Yet here, while Lady Dedlock gazes at him, the narrator chooses to say to Mr. Guppy, “There have been times, when ladies lived in strongholds and had unscrupulous attendants within call, when that poor life of yours would not have been a worth a minute’s purchase, with those beautiful eyes looking at you as they look at that moment” (Dickens House 464). At once this brings together the beauty of Lady Dedlock’s eyes, the fact of her gaze, and the idea that such power as her gaze could inspire lies in the past. She can look at Mr. Guppy with an expression that would have brought “unscrupulous attendants” in the “times…when ladies lived in strongholds,” but that brings none now. Lady Dedlock can only sit still and stare while Mr. Guppy goes on to describe his hopes that Esther, if she learns of her connection to Lady Dedlock’s family, will look with an “eye of more decided favour on my proposals” (Dickens House 465).
Lady Dedlock still has her beauty, as verified by the narrator, before Mr. Guppy’s gaze, but his gaze disconnects beauty from the power it usually carries, and renders her a victim. The beauty that has gained her high status turns against Lady Dedlock in the same way that Esther’s own perception turns against herself, but Lady Dedlock gains no status as a defier.
Esther, on the other hand, retains a shred of autonomy in the face of even a disease, an enemy more implacable than Mr. Guppy. When she falls sick—a sickness marked, significantly, by the words, “For I cannot see you, Charley; I am blind” (Dickens House 504)—Esther loses what she has of physical beauty to the scarring. She forces herself to stand in front of the mirror and “look…at the reflection in the mirror, encouraged by seeing how placidly it looked at [her]” (Dickens House 572). The face in the mirror reflects calmness; Esther has an expression of calmness upon her own face. Here, her gaze turns her into a victim of her own focus on physical beauty. Esther remarks to herself that “I had never been a beauty, and I had never thought myself one; but I had been very different from this. It was all gone now” (Dickens House 572). She weeps a little because of that, and thinks that she can never let Woodcourt know of her love because of the change in her. “I could have loved him -- could have been devoted to him,” but that is “irrevocably past and gone, never to be looked back on any more, in any other light” (Dickens House 573).
So she appears as victim. But, once again, Esther does not possess as direct or simple a relationship to the gaze as Lady Dedlock does. The loss of beauty that makes her weep and turn away from romantic love reveals love at the same time, defying her self-victimization. When she meets John Jarndyce for the first time after her illness, Esther realizes that “He has seen me, and he loves me better than he did; he has seen me, and is even fonder of me than he was before; and what have I to mourn for” (Dickens House 558). Where before she seemed determined to assign any love of herself to the friend’s own goodness of heart, or to deny that it existed, this gives her proof of love that she decides to trust. The disease has bereft her of her beauty, and her gaze has sharpened as a result, revealing a truth that saddens her and one that joys her at the same time.
Nor does only Jarndyce reveal what Esther considers his “true emotions” in the wake of her disease, and partially because of the disease. Woodcourt does so as well. She learns towards the end of the novel that her “scarred face was all unchanged to him” (Dickens House 937). Again, Esther becomes willing to accept that he loves her as truly as she loves him after this, though she still puts aside the thought of marrying him since she has accepted Jarndyce’s proposal. The mainstay of self-discipline, imposed by an unflinching if not always correct gaze, sustains Esther in this moment as it has at other times, keeping her from falling into despair and enabling her to win through to the end of the novel.
The disease gives her one final benefit: the sharpening of her gaze in such a way that she can take the offensive against Mr. Guppy. She has seen enough of his character to guess the shallowness of his love. When she confronts him, Esther comments that “I could hardly have believed that anybody could in a moment have turned so red, or changed so much, as Mr Guppy did when I now put up my veil” (Dickens House 615). Mr Guppy confirms Esther’s suspicion that she has rid herself of an unwelcome suitor when he withdraws his proposal of marriage, and confesses his reaction to her face in the same words that he earlier used in relation to Lady Dedlock’s portrait; the change in her face “rather knocks [him] over” (Dickens House 616). Esther here has turned her gaze outward, and freed herself from Mr. Guppy’s influence in the way that her mother cannot. This time, unlike her previous defiance of him, she does not suffer under her own gaze, thinking herself unworthy of a declaration of love. She uses her knowledge of his own focus on beauty to rebuff him instead, and to make him promise to stop inquiring into her past (617-619). If nowhere else in the novel, here Esther fully takes on defier status, and even evinces the power “of knowledge and understanding,” of possessing the gaze that she does.
The novel does not move completely in this direction, of course, no more than it did before. Esther continues to suffer from the effects of her gaze, having to see past her own self-perception when she gauges Woodcourt’s reaction to her scarred face. His shock prompts her to declare that “And I saw that he was very sorry for me…He was so very sorry for me that he could scarcely speak” (Dickens House 705). His pity, whether or not it actually exists, does not affect his love, but Esther does not learn this truth until much later. Her gaze still victimizes her. Perhaps one could argue that she pays this price for the clarity of her observation in other matters; but given how often one circumstance affords her more than one status, this inverse relationship seems suspect. Power to do things with the gaze, helplessness in the face of it, and defiance of its constructions do not compensate for each other, but exist side by side, tugging and shifting on each other, in many cases.
This tension between the simultaneous benefits and prices of the gaze endures until the very end of the novel. Esther cannot forsake her own focus on beauty, even after she has seen that others love her without it, even after she has seen the death of Lady Dedlock, beautiful and helpless. The novel ends with the following conversation between Woodcourt and Esther, and the thoughts it leads her to.:
“Do you ever look in the glass?’ “You know I do; you see me do it.” “And don’t you know that you are prettier than you ever were?” I did not know that; I am not certain that I know it now. But I know that my dearest little pets are very pretty, and that my darling is very beautiful, and that my husband is very handsome, and that my guardian has the brightest and most benevolent face that ever was seen; and that they can very well do without much beauty in me – even supposing--. (Dickens House 989).
Esther still looks in the mirror, meeting her own gaze, perhaps mourning her lost beauty. She accepts her husband at his word, giving others the credit for good judgment as she has done throughout the novel, and gives her first few statements (still focused on the physical beauty of everyone around her) the status of knowledge with “know.” When she begins to describe Jarndyce, however, it veers back to “seen;” the power of the gaze, of Esther’s perception, makes itself felt again. The novel ends on a highly uncertain note; “without much beauty in me” is the last concrete sentiment expressed.
Esther does not have a simple relationship to her own power. Readings that embody this in different ways—even readings that embody the power of the gaze in different ways—can be and have been expressed. Hornback, in proposing the novel idea that Esther tells the whole story of Bleak House, argues that it makes the conclusion of the novel happier: “If you will entertain a reading -- an understanding -- of the novel that makes Esther in some way the author [of the whole book]…the emphasis of Esther's final self-doubting paragraph and that last unfinished sentence will lie more on Esther's release from her traumatic past than on her continuing, unrelieved trauma” (“Narrator” 10-11). Langland can propose that Bleak House grants Esther power as the maintainer of the domestic sphere, an “alternate site…of power operations” (Angels 89). Dever can decide that Esther has power as the result of “a direct relationship between abandonment and articulation, and specifically, between the death of a mother and the birth of an authorial subject” (“Mirror” 42). Esther seems difficult to grasp even as narrator, having power in one sphere, none in another, a mixture of sliding power and weakness, a self-effacement that prevents her from attaining any power, true or false, at all, a crippling self-denial. She does not have access to stunning beauty as Ada and Lady Dedlock do, and loses what beauty she does have in the course of the novel. Yet she arrives at the end of the novel, alive as her mother is not, with the man she loves beside her as Ada does not have, still doubting but still retaining some perceptions of her own outside both the judgments of others and her tendency to self-doubt. Perhaps her relationship to power need not be direct or simple; nor does her self-effacement necessarily cancel out what power and defiance she does have. In her “rather noticing way” all three find expression, and in certain moments of the novel Esther attains all three at once, existing simultaneously as victim and defier and possessor of herself—an achievement that no other character manages.
