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'Part of the dreadful thing': The Urban Chronotope of Bleak House

  • Elana Gomel

Date Published:

7 June, 2011

Abstract:

This essay addresses the paradox of Dickens as an urban writer through exploration of his narrative space. On the one hand, like Mayhew, Engels, and other Victorian urban explorers, Dickens is a fierce critic of the social ills of the industrial metropolis. On the other hand, Dickens is ranked alongside Baudelaire and Benjamin as the creator of a new vocabulary for urban pleasures, such as flânerie, consumption, visual distraction, and psychological stimulation. This ambiguity of Dickens' urban attitudes is encapsulated in the doubleness of his urban chronotope. The city of Dickens is often imaged in vertical terms as the dichotomously divided space of the rich and the poor. But equally often, it is structured horizontally as a maze, network, or ring of contagion that unites all the city dwellers in a complex ecology of mutual interdependence. These two axes of representation correspond to the two types of urban involvement, that of the reformer and of the flâneur. In Bleak House they are epitomized by the omniscient narrator's "bird's eye" view of society and Esther's "street level" vision of it. The essay explores the tension and interaction between the detached aesthetics of flânerie and the passionate involvement of social reform in the narrative fabric of Dickens's world. It analyzes the narrative architecture of Bleak House by focusing on the techniques of vision and focalization rather than on the novel's thematic concerns and/or characters' actions.

 

Elana Gomel is an Associate Professor at the Department of English and American Studies at Tel-Aviv University. She has taught and researched at Princeton, Stanford, University of Hong Kong, and Venice International University. She is the author of six non-fiction books and numerous articles on subjects such as narrative theory, posthumanism, science fiction, Dickens, and Victorian culture. Her latest books are Narrative Space and Time: Representing Impossible Topologies in Literature (Routledge, 2014) and Science Fiction, Alien Encounters, and the Ethics of Posthumanism: Beyond the Golden Rule (Palgrave/Macmillan, 2014). As a fiction writer, she has published more than 40 fantasy and science fiction stories in The Singularity, New Realms, Mythic and other magazines; and in several anthologies, including People of the Book and Apex Book of World Science Fiction. Her fantasy novel A Tale of Three Cities came out in 2013 and her novella Dreaming the Dark in 2017. Two more novels are scheduled to be published this year.

              She can be found on Facebook and Twitter. Her email is egomel@post.tau.ac.il

 

updated on September 26, 2018

 

Publisher's Version

Last updated on 04/16/2020