Women and Dickens

A few links for Monday's session: we are talking about the representation of women in Bleak House, and the representation of Esther in particular, as a way of trying to articulate a more cogent approach to the question of women in Dickens' fiction ... more cogent than just saying 'he doesn't do women very well, does he.'

The key text, even after all this time, is Michael Slater's Dickens and Women (Stanford Univ. Press 1983): chunks of which are available on Google Books. Definitely worth checking out.

There are many good articles on Esther herself. Here are a few:

Alex Zwerdling 'Esther Summerson Rehabilitated', PMLA (88:3/May, 1973), pp. 429-439. The splendidly named Zwerdling was one of the first to challenge the reading of Esther as a 'sentimental, insipid character' arguing instead for the psychological acuity of Dickens's comprehension of the effects of repression and isolation of the development of her consciousness: 'she is ... the unconscious spokesman of the many characters in Bleak House who have never known parental love [which] makes her tale the most important illustration of one of the novel's major concerns-the breakdown of the parent-child relationship.'

Judith Wilt, 'Confusion and Consciousness in Dickens's Esther', Nineteenth-Century Fiction (32:3/Dec 1977), 285-309. One of the best readings of the Esther's charactarisation and voice I have read; particularly good on Self/Other representations.

Timothy Peltason, 'Esther's Will', ELH (59:3 Autumn, 1992), 671-691. Interesting, although a little dense: reading of the novel via discourses of 'will'.

Eleanor Salotto, 'Esther Summerson's Secrets: Dickens's Bleak House of Representation' Victorian Literature and Culture, (25: 2/1997), 333-349. Salotto reads Esther's narrative voice not, as many critics do, as a straightforward articulation of 'angel-in-the-house' Victorian feminine ideology, but rather as a 'duplicitous' reappropriation of masculine idioms. Not sure how convinced I am, but it's an interesting read.