Brianna Beehler, “The Doll’s Gift: Ventriloquizing Bleak House ” (pp. 24–49) This essay offers a new reading of the split narrative in Charles Dickens’s Bleak House (1852–53). Previous critics of the novel’s split narrative have primarily focused on the unequal knowledge and authority positions of the all-knowing third-person narrator and the unknowing first-person narrator, Esther Summerson. This division, however, does not fully account for the apparent slips and narrative exchanges between the two narrators, in which one narrator takes on the voice or knowledge position of the other. This essay takes up Robert Newsom’s suggestion that the only way to explain these “slips” is to conclude that Esther Summerson writes not only her own narration, but also that of the third-person narrator. However, the essay further argues that Esther uses the third-person narration to ventriloquize the voice of her mother, Lady Dedlock, in an effort to provide herself with the emotional support otherwise denied her. Readers may better understand Esther’s ventriloquism of the third-person narration by tracing how it mirrors her early daily ritual with her doll, in which she assumed both narrative positions at once. Object relations and gift theory further show how this dialogue creates a bond between the two narrations. Thus, characters and family structures that appear in the third-person narration and that may appear distant from Esther are actually her meditations on alternative maternal and familial relationships.

Victoria Wiet, “Dickens’s Tableaux: Melodrama and Sexual Opacity in David Copperfield and Bleak House ” (pp. 167–198) This essay examines the features and function of tableaux in two novels by Charles Dickens, David Copperfield (1850) and Bleak House (1853), in order to rethink the influence of melodramatic conventions on the form of narrative fiction, particularly the understanding of female sexuality that melodrama afforded novelists. Taking Dickens as an important example, literary critics have typically associated melodrama with ostentatious legibility, but recent scholarship on the theatrical tableau has illuminated the complex ways the melodramatic stage both produced and occluded revelation. Drawing on this work, I demonstrate that the adaptation of the tableau into the novel form increases the possibility of illegibility because readers necessarily rely on the narrator’s description and interpretation of the material world. In David Copperfield and Bleak House , this remediation has particularly significant consequences for the representation of sexually compromised women. By inadequately revealing the sexual histories of suspected “fallen women,” densely visual but opaque scenes featuring Annie Strong, Martha Endell, and Honoria Dedlock defer judgment on their characters, with Lady Dedlock’s protracted illegibility preventing her plot from culminating in a decisive narrative or moral conclusion. Because the narrators of both novels depict these female characters as deliberately making themselves illegible, the novel tableau becomes an important way for Dickens to dramatize the fallibility of the omniscient and quasi-omniscient narrators of realist fiction.

Supritha Rajan, “The Epistemology of Trust and Realist Effect in Charles Dickens’s Bleak House ” (pp. 64–106) This essay argues that the narrative structure of Charles Dickens’s Bleak House (1852–1853), which repeatedly shifts from the omniscient narrator’s skeptical stance to Esther’s trusting disposition, demonstrates how skepticism is ultimately grounded in an epistemology of trust. Trust constitutes a non-skepticist, affective attitude whose certitude in the phenomenal world is not subject to demonstrative proof. The latter model of trust is not only fundamental to epistemology, but also to ethical relations and practical life. The important role that trust plays in everyday life also poses relevance to our understanding of realist representation. Using Bleak House as its novelistic example, this essay considers realism as a mode that achieves its effect by inviting readers to adopt an attitude of trust. Such an account runs counter to traditional epistemologies of realism, which have typically aligned it with post-Cartesian skepticism.

This essay argues that Charles Dickens’s imaginative interest in barriers to knowledge and perception throughout Bleak House (1852–53) amplifies and attunes us to the reader’s position of exteriority with respect to the implied fictional world. Whereas novel readers readily describe the act of reading in terms of metaphoric transport to a fictional world, Dickens refuses to obscure the ever-present divide between readers and the absent objects of their sustained attention. In particular, he exposes the reader’s surprisingly limited ability to “fill in” components of the fictional world that the text leaves underspecified. While these areas of indeterminacy do not deter readers from claiming to enjoy intimate access to fictional persons and scenes, they nonetheless lay bare the underacknowledged constraints upon that access. By self-referentially dramatizing the reader’s position as an outsider even as he undertakes to draw readers into his story, Dickens brings us face-to-face with a more intricate phenomenology of reading.