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Legal spectres, narrative ghosts: mothers and the law in the Victorian novel

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Legal spectres, narrative ghosts: mothers and the law in the Victorian novel

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Content LEGAL SPECTRES, NARRATIVE GHOSTS:

MOTHERS AND THE LAW IN THE VICTORIAN NOVEL

by

Michelle L. Wilson

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(ENGLISH)

August 2012

Copyright 2012 Michelle L. Wilson

ii

“What brought [it] to life at first?”
“Why, you see, [it] were never really dead.”
--Elizabeth Gaskell, Mary Barton

iii
Table of Contents

Epigraph ii

Abstract v

Introduction: Legal Spectres, Narrative Ghosts: Mothers and the Law 1
in the Victorian Novel
I. The Plot of Motherly Return 3
II. “Covered” under the Law 6
III. Mothers in the Novel (Criticism) 11
IV. Chapter Summary 15

Chapter One: Raised by the Law: The Workhouse Orphan, Oliver Twist, 22
and the Bastardy Clauses
I. The New Poor Law and the Novel 24
II. The Bastardy Clauses: Legalizing Motherhood 28
III. Placing the Workhouse Orphan 33
IV. Tracing the Mother’s Story 45

Chapter Two: Narrative Relations: Re-inscribing Inheritance in Bleak House 58
I. Problems of Naming 63
II. Legal Fictions 67
III. Narrative Relations 70
1. Esther’s Binding Language 73
2. Inheriting the Novel 90

Chapter Three: Operating outside the Law: The Ghost Mother in Jane Eyre and 98
Mary Barton
I. Jane Eyre: Abandoning the Dead-Mother Frame 98
1. Re-Telling Family 104
2. The Dead Mother Returns 111
3. Becoming the (M)other 114
4. “However tired were my arms”: Bearing the child under the 118
New Poor Law
II. Mary Barton: The Heroine without an Inheritance (Plot) 127
1. Personal/Political Plot(s) 128
2. Memory’s Ghosts 132

Chapter Four: “Two people can never literally be as one”: The 139
Matrimonial Causes Act of 1857, Shirley, and the
Problem of the Married Mother
I. Critical Reception: The Novel’s Many Strands 140

iv
II. The Double Heroine Plot? 147
III. Sharon Marcus and the “plot of female amity” 150
IV. The Mother Returns 153
V. Caroline Norton and the Matrimonial Causes Act of 1857 157
VI. Mother and Marriage 160
VII. Keeping the Mother 164

Coda 165

Bibliography 168

v

Abstract

The Victorian novel has been oft-considered as participating in and reifying plots
of “naming”—beginning with the problem of an orphan and solving it by finding the
father and so naming and placing the orphan within the society to which he properly
belongs. The mother, unnecessary to such an endeavor, is little more than an
afterthought, expediently dispatched (usually through early death) at the beginning of the
novel. In this way, the Victorian novel may be read as privileging the contemporary
social and legal emphasis on the father as head of the household. However, this project
argues that the early Victorian novel is obsessed with the mother. Indeed, despite her
early death—or, rather, because of it—she haunts the plot. To read the mother as absent
is to miss the ways in which Charles Dickens, Charlotte Brontë, and Elizabeth Gaskell,
among others, are actively and thoughtfully engaging an emergent discourse of
motherhood. Contrary to family law, which privileges the father as the parent of
legitimate children, the novel suggests—again and again—that it is the mother from
whom we trace our identity, from whom we inherit ourselves. The protagonists learn
their story by learning hers; the mother, not the father, is the one with the right to name.
This novelistic search for the mother’s story occurs against the backdrop of a
series of legal changes with regard to family law. The New Poor Law of 1834 and the
Matrimonial Causes Act of 1857 serve as legal and historical bookends for this project.
Under the New Poor Law, the bastardy clauses created the first legal assignment of
motherhood as mothers were, for the first time, made legally responsible for the

vi
economic maintenance of their bastard children. The Matrimonial Causes Act of 1857 at
last made divorce a civil, rather than ecclesiastical matter. While it was only the first of
many over the course of the century (and women’s right to full custody of their children
would not be guaranteed until nearly the end), the debates preceding the Act of 1857
brought many of the issues regarding women, their rights to property and to custody of
their children, to the fore. With the debates over the bastardy clauses to those over the
coming Matrimonial Causes Act, the legal status of mothers was in contention during the
writing and publication of Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist and Bleak House, Charlotte
Brontë’s Jane Eyre and Shirley, and Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton. In this project, I
consider the ways in which these novels suggest that the legal erasure of women,
particularly mothers, is a tenuous fiction that cannot and should not be maintained. Each
of these novels demonstrates the violence of such a narrative and struggles to tell a
different story.

1

Introduction
Legal Spectres, Narrative Ghosts: Mothers and the Law in the Victorian Novel

In Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton, our protagonist makes the acquaintance of
that great Victorian figure—the self-taught naturalist. When Mary visits Job Legh’s
home for the first time, he recounts the story of how he came into possession of one of
his prized specimens, a “horrid”—and poisonous—scorpion. A sailor had found the
scorpion dead on deck of a ship that came from the East Indies and sold it, once in port,
to Job for two shillings. When Job arrived home that evening, he dumped it out of its
bottle in front of the fire, both to size it up and to show it to his granddaughter, Margaret.
Margaret bends down to get a closer look as Job reads aloud from a description of this
“rare kind o’ scorpion;” the sting, the book suggests, is fatal. Suddenly, the creature
seems “to give a jerk” and “in a minute it was as wild as could be, running at [Margaret]
like a mad dog” (40). After much ado, Job grabs the scorpion with a pair of tongs and
drops it into a kettle over the fire, to kill—but also to preserve—it. While Margaret
reminisces about her fright and amusement at her grandfather’s remaining desire to keep
the creature whole, Mary has a different interest. Indeed, she asks a curious question:
“What brought him to life at first?” “Why, you see,” is Job’s response, “he were never
really dead.”
Although an amusing scene depicting Job’s qualities as a working-class naturalist,
suggestive simultaneously of his intelligence but also his participation in a common
Victorian pursuit, Mary’s response highlights a different kind of narrative. What the
story allows, Mary’s question suggests, is the possibility that the dead can come alive

2
again. What Job’s response suggests is that the dead may not be really dead, after all.
And this is a possibility, of course, that the novel will draw on just chapters later, as it
creates the belief for both Mary and the reader that Mary’s long-dead mother has
returned, has come to comfort Mary in her time of need. These twin possibilities—that
the dead can come alive; that they’re not really dead to begin with—trouble the Victorian
novel. Just as Mary’s question highlights the gothic undertone of Job’s naturalist tale, so,
too, does the plot of motherly return haunt the realist novel.
The Victorian novel has been oft-considered as participating in and reifying plots
of “naming”—beginning with the problem of an orphan and solving it by finding the
father and so naming and placing the orphan within the society to which he properly
belongs. The mother, unnecessary to such an endeavor, is little more than an
afterthought, expediently dispatched (usually through early death) at the beginning of the
novel. In this way, the Victorian novel may be read as privileging the contemporary
social and legal emphasis on the father as head of the household. However, this project
argues that the early Victorian novel is obsessed with the mother. Indeed, despite her
early death—or, rather, because of it—she haunts the plot. To read the mother as absent
is to miss the ways in which Charles Dickens, Charlotte Brontë, and Elizabeth Gaskell,
among others, are actively and thoughtfully engaging an emergent discourse of
motherhood. Contrary to family law, which privileges the father as the parent of
legitimate children, the novel suggests—again and again—that it is the mother from
whom we trace our identity, from whom we inherit ourselves. The protagonists learn
their story by learning hers; she has the right to name.

3
This novelistic search for the mother’s story occurs against the backdrop of a
series of legal changes with regard to family law. The New Poor Law of 1834 and the
Matrimonial Causes Act of 1857 serve as legal and historical bookends for this project.
Under the New Poor Law, the bastardy clauses created the first legal assignment of
motherhood as mothers were, for the first time, made legally responsible for the
economic maintenance of their bastard children. The Matrimonial Causes Act of 1857 at
last made divorce a civil, rather than ecclesiastical matter. While it was only the first of
many over the course of the century (and women’s right to full custody of their children
would not be guaranteed until nearly the end), the debates preceding the Act of 1857
brought many of the issues regarding women, their rights to property and to custody of
their children, to the fore. With the debates over the bastardy clauses to those over the
coming Matrimonial Causes Act, the legal status of mothers was in contention during the
writing and publication of Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist and Bleak House, Charlotte
Brontë’s Jane Eyre and Shirley, and Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton. In this project, I
consider the ways in which these novels suggest that the legal erasure of women,
particularly mothers, is a tenuous fiction that cannot and should not be maintained. Each
of these novels demonstrates the violence of such a narrative and struggles to tell a
different story.

I. The Plot of Motherly Return
Susan Greenfield notes of mothers in the 18
th
century novel: “Whether she is
dead, missing, emotionally detached, or present without her daughter’s realizing it, the

4
mother is conspicuous in her absence”; in the nineteenth-century the mother comes back,
but this return is even stranger than her absence. Re-appearing as a figure, form or
corpse, the mother disturbs rather than reassures. While Freud will later deliver - and
take as fact – the commonsense view that “‘pater semper incertus est,’ while the mother
is ‘certissima,’” the novels of Charlotte Brontë, Elizabeth Gaskell, and Charles Dickens
suggest that it is motherhood that is in question, that is somehow finally unknowable, un-
provable. More than that, it exists outside the law: family law and narrative law. Under
family law the mother has been legally estranged from and made irrelevant to the family
line. In the narratives, the mother’s reappearance is a ghostly return, one that sets in
motion a number of seeming contradictions: it is sometimes a goodbye and sometimes an
introduction (and often both); it both makes familiar and estranges mother and daughter
(through a series of recognitions and misrecognitions); it intertwines realism and the
gothic, past and present. Indeed, a modern reading of these scenes may be haunted by the
more recent, but no less pertinent, realization offered by Norman Bates’s infamous,
terrifying, and quite literally true diagnosis: “Mother’s not quite herself today.” She is,
indeed, not herself. She is someone else or someone else’s: a moon-mother, a disguised
and unrecognized aunt, a jealous and vengeful wife, and a woman who is to be thought of
“as dead,” destroyed by the recognition of the past in the present.
There is something decidedly strange, then, about moments of maternal re-
appearance in the Victorian novel. Often occurring in moonlight, in moments of frenzy,
confusion, madness, and fever, they are relatively brief but critical plot points that also
signal a shift in narrative control, genre, and time. The confusion presented at the level

5
of identity (Who is whom? How do we know?) is accompanied by a confusion – or shift
– at the level of genre: these moments seem more gothic than realist offering a locked
bedroom, stormy weather, moonlight, the dead come alive again, hauntings and other
paraphernalia.
Moreover, these scenes involve a disordering of narrative time by presenting a
constant flux between beginnings and ends. Coming in the second half of all of the
novels, they recount things that could only have occurred prior to the beginning of the
story; in narratological terms, they provide “metadiegetic narratives” (stories told within
the story) in the form of “external analepsis” (accounts of a past outside the time-frame of
the narrative). Thus, we seem to be reading toward the end only to find the beginning.
The mother is the figure of temporal displacement; she represents the play of time – and
here we rejoin the legal story. Her return in the narrative creates a place where many
things (objects, story, genre, and family line) can go astray, where the paternal contracts
that govern inheritance and realism, both of which depend on order and transmission, are
broken or disordered. The mother, made secondary in legal figurings, haunts the
patriarchal structuring of the plot, threatening to undo both. Rather than a person, what
we call “mother” is, then, a narrative technique for getting the story out of order that
allows us, however strangely, to un-think narrative progress, genre, and family. In these
novels, rather than finding the father and so naming and placing the protagonist by
naming and placing the father, it is the mother’s name that matters; the mother’s story
that secures the protagonist’s own. Just as Friedrich Engels is coming to understand that
family structure—and patriarchy—are constructions guided by an interest in property that

6
operate under the cover of being “natural,” these novelists suggest much the same.
1
They
trouble the traditional narratives, telling stories that place the mother, not the father, at the
head of the family line and in so doing create different modes of inheritance and grant her
the power to name.

II. “Covered” under the Law
In A Woman’s Issue: The Politics of Family Law Reform in England, Dorothy M.
Stetson traces the status of women under British family law: “Traditional family law in
England and Wales has roots in judge-made common law modified by equity and
ecclesiastical law. Parliament was not often involved in issues of family law until the
nineteenth century” (5). Until the incremental parliamentary reform that occurred in the
nineteenth century, then, female status under the law was defined by the practice of
coverture. As Anne Laurence relates: “Women played no part in making or changing the
law,” and the common law “did not normally” even “acknowledge the existence of any
woman who was not under the protection of a man: father, husband, brother or guardian”
(227). As a case in point, Laurence points to “a digest of the law for magistrates,
published in 1653” that “has a lengthy entry under ‘wife’, but no entry for women of any
other status and no entry for ‘husband’. It opens with the words, ‘After marriage, all the
will of the wife in judgment of the law is subject to the will of the husband; and it is
commonly said a feme coverte hath no will’” (227). Legally, the woman “covered” by

1
In The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, Engels argues that the
patriarchal nuclear family arose out of a male desire to hold and maintain property. In
order to ensure that a man’s biological heirs inherited, women were necessarily forced
into expectations of first chastity and then fidelity.

7
her husband has no will – in either sense of the word – apart from her husband. By 1765,
when William Blackstone summarizes English common law, he writes:
By marriage, the husband and wife are one person in law: that is, the very
being or legal existence of the woman is suspended during the marriage, or
at least incorporate and consolidated into that of the husband: under whose
wing, protection, and cover, she performs every thing: and is therefore
called … a feme-covert.
2
(emphasis added)

As Stetson describes, before 1857, as a feme covert a married woman “lost her separate
legal status of feme sole and came under her husband’s tutelage as though she were one
of his children or part of his property. She had no legal rights, no right to own or use
property, and no right to custody of her children” (5).
Indeed, this “theoretical, legal, and practical subordination of wives to their
husbands” is “the most striking feature of married life” according to Lawrence Stone.
However, Stone argues that women’s status after divorce or separation was even more
untenable: “They automatically lost all contact whatsoever with their children, unless
their husbands were willing to allow it, and they were also financially reduced to very
small allowances, even if they were innocent parties” (Broken Lives 26).
Stone, Stetson, and Laurence thus address the legal restrictions that married
women faced under coverture. However, their descriptions also make apparent the
manner in which the law, meant to be a source of stability and order, actually destabilizes
relationships and identity. Stetson’s comparison suggests that the law causes relational
shifts: if a wife is like one of her husband’s children, then he is like a father to her and the
conjugal shifts to the patriarchal. And if children are legally the father’s, rather than the

2
“Two people can never literally be as one,” Mrs Pryor warns Caroline of marriage and
marks the paradoxical status of women under the law (in Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley).

8
mother’s, the law seems to remove even the mother’s identity as mother, since children
are what define her as such. As Blackstone’s summary suggests, the married woman’s
“being” is suspended. Even more troubling, perhaps, is the failure to distinguish between
wives and mothers: they are often taken to be one and the same. Indeed, this unstated
assumption is made clear often only through the punishment of women who are mothers,
but never wives – the women who evidence that a woman can be one without the other.
In the nineteenth century, as Parliamentary reform affects a great deal of common
law, the status of women under the law is the subject of both public debate and
incremental change. However, the law continues this practice of destabilization and
erasure for much of the century. The New Poor Law of 1834 “takes for granted the
universality of the stable two-parent family” (Thane 30). Since the father’s wage was
presumed to ensure the family’s economic well-being, the New Poor Law assumes that
“the poverty of women and children was … remediable by the increased earning of
husbands and fathers” (Thane 30). It is the man, then, that becomes the focus of much of
the New Poor Law. Should he go into the workhouse due to debt, his entire family would
follow him there, but would be separated – based on both gender and generation
(husbands separated from wives, children from parents) – once inside. The New Poor
Law also includes bastardy clauses that overturn the traditional practice (as mandated
under the Old Poor Law) of assigning responsibility for the maintenance of bastards to
the father. Under the New Poor Law, R. K. Webb explains:
Responsibility for bastard children was put on the mother; thus, at the cost
of outraging popular sentiment which condemned seducers and forgave
erring women, the commissioners avoided the long, costly, and uncertain
efforts of authorities under the old law to find fathers. The commissioners

9
were also trying to strike a blow for morality by placing responsibility for
chastity on the woman, where both practically and psychologically it
belonged. (246)

Thus, if married, a woman had no right to legal custody of her children, but if unmarried,
she bore the entire responsibility for their care and maintenance. Motherhood is
recognized by law only to define its deviance. Indeed, in an analysis of English Poor
Law, Sidney and Beatrice Webb underscore the lack of legal acknowledgement of
women’s conditions:
The single independent woman is nowhere mentioned. The wife is throughout
treated exactly as is the child; it is assumed that she follows her husband… With
regard to the really baffling problems, presented by the widow, the deserted wife,
the wife of the absentee soldier or sailor, the wife of a husband resident in another
parish or another country – with or without children – the Report is silent. (qtd in
Thane, 31)

Unless mentioned to be punished, à la the bastardy clauses, women go missing under the
law.
3

Over the course of the nineteenth century, though, mothers stage a gradual return.
In 1837, marriage becomes a civil matter and in 1839, married women gain their first
rights to custody of their children under the Infant Custody Act. Conditional upon the
agreement of the Lord Chancellor, children under the age of seven could remain in the
custody of their mother. In 1857, the Divorce Reform and Matrimonial Causes Act
moves the issue of divorce from the ecclesiastical courts to civil courts and the model of

3
The legal punishment of unmarried mothers is targeted at working-class mothers. Thus,
the law does make distinctions (if often unstated) based on class. I would like to think
more about the role of class in motherhood – that is, the role of motherhood in the
working and middle classes. Middle-class mothers and working-class mothers differ both
in the roles that they fulfill (or are seen as failing to fulfill) as mothers and in their
relationship to the law. Just as the law disappears married mothers, the assumption of the
universality of motherhood silences difference, eliding class.

10
marriage was now fully based on the notion of contract, with civil divorces now
legalized. In 1870, the Married Women’s Property Act mandates that a married woman’s
wages are her own property and that she can retain any inheritance she receives of
property and money up to 200 pounds. The act also says that both parents are legally
responsible for the maintenance of their children. In 1873, the Infant Custody Act
increases the age of children from seven to sixteen that could be left in the custody of the
mother, dependent on the best interest of the child. The 1878 Matrimonial Causes Act
grants women full custody of all children in the event that her husband is abusive.
Finally, in 1882, under the Married Women’s Property Act, married women are legally
recognized as individuals. Thus, while married women do achieve the status of legally
recognized individuals by the end of the century, it is not until the 1870s that they even
come close to being so recognized.
At the same time that the married mother is made secondary under the law, she is
somewhat paradoxically gaining prominence in the cultural consciousness. This
prominence is gained, in part, as a result of the relatively new emphasis placed on the
conjugal family. In The Family, Sex, and Marriage in England, 1500-1800, Lawrence
Stone traces the shift from the extended family/ kinship model to the immediate family –
the “conjugal group of mother, father, and children” – as the dominant family pattern
(McCloskey 71). Stone suggests that by 1700, the transition was almost complete. In
this new family the mother takes on an idealized role as keeper of the moral well-being of
the house.

11
While Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall contribute to a more complex
understanding of the family in the nineteenth century than Stone sometimes provides, in
their Family Fortunes: Men and women of the English middle class, 1780-1850, their
analysis still suggests that despite a broader understanding of the household and family
unit, a married couple were still usually at the center.
4
That is, while a consideration of
family was not necessarily limited to the nuclear family (with relatives of various degrees
often living in the same household, they stress that there is “No essential ‘family,’ but
always ‘families’”), most of their examples suggest that a married couple attempted first
and foremost to secure the futures of their children. What Davidoff and Hall’s analysis
does provide is the opportunity to consider more carefully than does Stone how tied to
property and economics notions of family were.

III. Mothers in the Novel (Criticism)
If one overlooks her legal erasure and considers her social importance alone, then
the mother-gone-missing plot in narrative seems quite conspicuous and it has garnered
critical attention. In Mothering Daughters, Susan Greenfield analyzes “the literary,
historical, and psychoanalytic significance” of the “missing mother, mournful daughter
plot” in the eighteenth-century novel (13). Greenfield suggests that rather than
highlighting the impossibility of the ideal – the perfect mother is missing from the novel
because she is missing from the world – the eighteenth century novel actually helps

4
Davidoff and Hall do an excellent job of demonstrating how often central wives were to
the successful operation of middle-class businesses and of considering the seeming
contradiction between the increasing middle-class ethos that women belonged in the
home and the need for them to work either outside of it or within it.

12
construct this ideal of motherhood as the mother’s absence “becomes the point around
which maternal ideals are articulated and reinforced. As the family and social order
collapse without the mother, the novels prove her fundamental importance” (18).
Indeed, Greenfield suggests not only that these novels help construct modern maternity,
she also argues that they help construct “the preoedipal period and thus influenced the
psychoanalytic theories derived from it” (14). That is, both novel and individual identity
depend on the loss of the mother to establish subjectivity.
Moving us into a discussion of the nineteenth century, Carolyn Dever takes up
this same parallel between novels and psychoanalysis in Death and the Mother from
Dickens to Freud, demonstrating that the mother as the figure for loss is central to both
the novel and psychoanalysis’ basic stories. Dever argues: “While the practical
implications of Victorian fiction and psychoanalysis are different, these two distinct
modes of narration deploy the same figure to similar ends: the passage from anxiety to
stability, from loss to mastery, occurs by appropriating maternal loss” (34). Indeed, in
Dever’s discussion, the Victorian novel resembles Freud’s fort-da game: creating the
mother, killing her off, and sometimes bringing her back again. However, unlike
Greenfield’s suggestion that the missing mother confirms/creates the ideals of
motherhood, Dever argues that “by staging the disruption of family – via the mother’s
death or disappearance – these Victorian novels undermine the ideology of the family
that they’re supposed to uphold” (1). The missing mother is made necessary, Dever
argues precisely because the mother is a cultural paradox as she represents the “extremes
of public and private, chaste and erotic, ideal and embodied” meeting in a “single figure,

13
while there remains an enormous investment in keeping them separate” (34). The mother
is, then, “destined to disappear” (39).
I take as my subject her reappearance. While Greenfield and Dever offer
insightful and convincing accounts of the role that the missing mother plays, they are
concerned more with social than with legal history, and so must explain the oddity of her
absence. Also, while both are attempting to intervene in the psychoanalytic discourse –
each suggests that the novel has something to teach us about psychoanalysis – they are
stuck in the inevitable circularity of using one to analyze the other.
5
Psychoanalysis is so
heavily dependent on narrative, both for its own plots of the psyche and for the individual
whose story it tells, that it seems impossible that one can explain the other. Both the
novel and psychoanalysis, that is, tell us stories about ourselves (or, are the stories we tell
ourselves about ourselves). Greenfield attempts to avoid this circularity, but her argument
that eighteenth-century novels create the pre-oedipal period, and so influence
psychoanalysis, is problematic for two key reasons. The first is that it tells, as does
psychoanalysis, a story of fixed origins (a specific historical and literary moment gives
rise to the novel of the missing mother, which in turn creates the Oedipal period). The
second problem is that although Greenfield makes this suggestion in her introduction, in
much of the book she leaves it behind, once again using psychoanalysis to analyze the
texts that she’s discussing. Although Dever’s discussion of psychoanalysis seems much

5
Eve Sedgwick comes close to suggesting this in Between Men in reference not to the
novel in general, but to the gothic in particular: “Indeed, traces of the Gothic are
ubiquitous in Freud’s writing, and not only in literary studies like ‘The “UnCanny”’ or
‘Delusion and Dream’; it is not surprising, though maybe circular, that psychoanalysis
should be used as a tool for explicating these texts that provided many of its structuring
metaphors” (91).

14
less fraught, she still suggests in her introduction that the “Victorian novel has as much to
teach us about psychoanalysis” as psychoanalysis has about the novel.
We seem trapped. Rather than telling a purely psychological story about the
mother’s return, I would thus like to examine the figure of the revenant mother outside of
a psychoanalytic framework. (A difficult task, perhaps, as the two are so often entwined:
“A Freudian slip is when you say one thing but mean [your mother],” the joke goes.) By
considering the mother as signifying something beyond the psyche of the child, we can
see the other disruptions she causes in the narrative and the way that these disruptions
help us question her legal and narrative standing. By thinking about the mother
differently, we can re-consider, re-read, her place in the text and in that other source of
fiction: the law.
To do this, I will draw on narrative theory, which provides a language for talking
about story. In Reading for the Plot, Peter Brooks looks for something to explain the
desire to read forward, to reach the end of the novel, and he finds this explanation in
psychoanalysis (and specifically in the death drive as accounted for by Freud in “Beyond
the Pleasure Principle”). However, as Susan Winnett and Caroline Levine have pointed
out, this explanation is – as is much of psychoanalysis – based on a particularly male
model of desire and the reading of reading that Brooks provides seems incompatible with
female plots, where the end is the end of narrative possibility. I would like to use
narrative theory in conjunction with feminist theory, then, to think about other ways of

15
reading and – in particular – the manner in which the scenes of motherly return disrupt
linear narrative time, moving us not to the end, but to the beginning.
6

As the Victorian novels’ protagonists ask the related, but different, questions
Where did I come from? Where did my legal identity come from?, we find that, despite
her ghosting under the novel and the law, the figure of the mother is central to both
questions. In my project, each chapter will highlight the legal and narrative plots that are
haunted by the dead mother, moving from the bastardy clauses in the New Poor Law of
1834 through the Matrimonial Causes Act of 1857. The spectral mother becomes,
through this perspective, the sign of aberrations in the law. This is what my analysis
lends to the often ahistorical reading of the Gothic: a sense that the mother’s return
signals a way that women record what is most uneasy in the law – and suggest ways to
possible reform. The mother’s return, as I have argued, causes a series of ruptures. The
powerful effect that her return has hints that the mother is off-scene, ghosted, in both
patriarchal narratives and the law because she wields an unauthorized authority; she has
power that the law denies exists.

IV. Chapter Summary

Chapter 1
Raised by the Law: The Workhouse Orphan, Oliver Twist, and the Bastardy Clauses
I begin with Oliver Twist (1837) and its negotiation with the New Poor Law of
1834. Set in the past, the novel ostensibly critiques the Old Poor Law, but it famously

6
Brooks’ argument about narrative theory’s incapability of thinking about time seems
exaggerated. As he himself discusses, Genette does offer such a language.

16
intertwines the two and, indeed, manages to critique most ferociously the aspects of the
Old Poor Law that the New extends. Specifically, I extend the critical consideration of
the novel’s relationship to the poor laws by thinking about its reflection on the bastardy
clauses. And here, of course, is where the mother comes in. Under the bastardy clauses,
the responsibility for economic maintenance of bastard children was, for the first time,
legally assigned to the mother, relieving the father of any and all legal obligation.
Although clearly problematic, the bastardy clauses, enacted in a time when married
mothers had no legal rights to their children, create a legally assigned motherhood,
ushering mothers back into the law.
As I discuss, Oliver Twist critiques the bastardy clauses for their release of the
father while at the same time embraces the placement of the mother at the head of the
family line. In its refusal to release the father from responsibility, Oliver may seem
representative of the typical male social plot, following an orphan and finding him a
place by finding the father and settling the boy within his inheritance. Indeed, Mr
Brownlow’s description of the novel’s aim seems to fit well within a traditional plot of
naming; his goal is “Simply the discovery of Oliver’s parentage, and regaining for him
the inheritance of which, if this story be true, he has been fraudulently deprived” (346).
We just need to find the father, tell the right story, and we’re done. And, indeed, Oliver
dispatches the mother with agreeable quickness.
However, the novel cannot keep her gone. Again and again, Agnes Fleming,
Oliver’s mother (whose name, as a bastard, he shares), haunts the narrative, undoing its
neat, linear transmission. Oliver and the novel thus suggest instead that it is the mother’s

17
story that matters, her name through which to find our own. By containing both plots—
that of the father and the mother—Oliver Twist manages to make clear the violence
inherent in the traditional plot. That is, in order to succeed in Mr Brownlow’s aim, not
only Agnes, but the novel’s other mothers, too, must die. Oliver Twist thus makes clear
the violence implicit in the traditional inheritance plot, plots that necessitate the mother’s
early death.

Chapter 2
Narrative Relations: Re-inscribing Inheritance in Bleak House

From Oliver, I move to Dickens’s other great bastard, Esther Summerson. If
Oliver Twist, with its haunting mother-figure, subverts the typical narrative and legal plot
of inheritance, Bleak House radically inverts it. Rather than a ghost mother, what Esther
finds is a mother still living. The narrative machinery involved in first estranging mother
and daughter (each with reciprocal narratives of the other’s death) and then reuniting
them only to separate them again highlights the tensions that operate under the law as it
strives to maintain its various fictions. Esther Summerson by writing, and so creating, a
lineage through her mother outside of the law and the narrative of chancery, undoes the
patrilineal property structure and the power of the male to name. She creates a counter-
narrative: an inheritance of narrative and identity that operates through the maternal line,
legitimating both herself and her story.

18
Chapter 3
Operating outside the Law: The Ghost Mother in Jane Eyre and Mary Barton

In Chapter Three, I discuss Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847) and Elizabeth
Gaskell’s Mary Barton (1848), both of which are their respective author’s first published
novel. Neither Jane nor Mary is illegitimate and both are well aware of their parentage.
The ghost mothers here, then, do not bring with them the same type of story as in our first
two chapters. However, they continue to bring access to narrative control, creating the
opportunity for both heroines to tell their own story.
Of all the novels, Jane Eyre seems the least interested in bringing the mother
back. Indeed, while the expected plot is present (Jane is an orphan, her mother and father
having died all-too-early deaths), the novel consistently casts its emotional valence
elsewhere. Throughout the novel, Jane invokes the tropes of familiarity and recognition
that usually accompany the mother plot in order to create a kinship between herself and
Rochester (and later, the Rivers). Jane re-routes family plots, rejecting legitimate, legal
families in favor of those based on likeness of feeling, similarity of thought. But in order
for Jane’s narrative of kinship to be successful, she must suppress other narratives—that
of her parent’s death; her proximity to the workhouse; and her role in the mistress plot.
Jane must turn, then, not to her mother, but to the moon.
In Mary Barton, we consider: What can the dead mother do for heroine without
an inheritance plot? For the working poor? While both Esther Summerson and Jane
Eyre’s narratives work against the legal narrative of inheritance, creating alternative and
anti-patriarchal plots outside the law, they do so by working alongside and against these
plots. Mary, however, has no such plot available to her, even to work against, as her

19
class, rather than her gender, places her well outside such a possibility. The invocation of
the dead-mother plot not only exposes how such plots are gendered, it also demonstrates
how they are classed. In Gaskell’s novel, the ghost mother places Mary Barton not
within an inheritance plot, but within a narrative of legal and social power.
In both novels, the ghost mother has the power to move the heroine—placing her
on the road; providing her a new plot to follow.

Chapter 4
“Two people can never literally be as one”: The Matrimonial Causes Act of 1857,
Shirley, and the Problem of the Married Mother

In Charlotte Brontës second published novel, Shirley (1849), we follow closely on
the heels of the concerns of both Jane Eyre and Mary Barton. It is perhaps the strangest
of our novels, with its multiple plots, its odd choice of an eponymous heroine who does
not appear in the novel until nearly the end of Part I, and the narrator’s refusal to provide
the reader any insight into its heroine’s mind. Indeed, the story seems to belong much
more to Caroline Helstone, as we are privy to her thoughts and feelings and spend more
time with her than with Shirley. And it is Caroline who has the plot of the absent/
returned mother. In Shirley, however, the mother is absent, but never believed dead, even
by the reader or the daughter. And yet, the mother’s return is still gothically cast.
Indeed, Mrs. Pryor is nearly vampyric.
However, as Caroline is a legitimate child, the novel must explain the mother’s
absence. If the other novels suggest that it is unmarried motherhood that presents the
problem, Shirley suggests that marriage is no safeguard: “two people can never literally

20
be as one” the married mother states, highlighting the law’s fiction. Indeed, linking the
bastardy clauses to Matrimonial Causes Act of 1857, Shirley anticipates the
parliamentary debates of the coming decade by highlighting the link between economics,
the fictions of legitimacy, and marriage. Forced to explain Mrs Pryor’s abandonment of
her infant daughter upon her separation from her husband, the novel suggests that, having
suffered at the hand of a beautiful, but abusive man, the mother feared her attractive
daughter (resembling, as Caroline did, her father), and so fled them both. However, what
this bizarre narrative belies is the reality that even had Mrs Pryor wanted to take her
daughter with her, the law wouldn’t allow it. Caroline Norton’s case, in which her bully
of a husband refused her access to her own children after their marriage disintegrated and
they separated, thus haunts the text of Shirley. And both speak to the marriage debates
that arise over the 1850s. Mrs Pryor’s story—strange as it is—suggests more than
anything that the novel—and the law—must go through a great deal of trouble to separate
mother from child; the narrative and legal hoops necessary to create such a separation
highlight the absurdity of such a fiction.
Although this link to the law remains buried in the novel, under Mrs Pryor’s
cover-story of fearing her daughter’s beauty, Mrs Pryor’s return highlights the
relationship between the mother plot and the marriage plot in terms of narrative. Indeed,
for much of Shirley, the mother plot substitutes and replaces the marriage plot, suggesting
that the desired home and care that marriage is supposed to provide can be more lovingly
provided by the mother. Shirley thus clearly signals the ways in which the mother’s plot

21
and line are potential un-doings of the law and suggests why both the law and the novel
so carefully and forcefully attempt to suppress them.
The power of the marriage contract and the legal fiction of paternity that it
employs make strangers of mothers and these novels highlight this estrangement. The
sheer extravagance of these plot devices reveals the great amount of narrative energy that
goes into estranging a mother and bringing her back again, echoing the active and violent
outcasting of the mother under patriarchal law. Her strange, bewildering reappearance
ruptures the linear narrative, setting in motion a re-telling of inheritance and identity.

22
Chapter 1
Raised by the Law: The Workhouse Orphan, Oliver Twist, and the Bastardy Clauses

Oliver Twist begins and ends with the dead mother. Opening in the workhouse,
the novel finds itself with an orphaned bastard hero, as his mother’s birthing bed quickly
becomes her deathbed. The novel closes with the image of Oliver and his newfound aunt
standing next to the dead mother’s (empty) tomb. Oliver Twist thus kills off the mother
and manages, it seems, to keep her dead. Given the prevalence of the dead-mother plot in
the Victorian novel (as anticipated by Susan Greenfield’s work on the eighteenth-century
novel and as highlighted in Carolyn Dever’s The Dead Mother from Dickens to Freud),
the mother’s early death is far from unexpected. But as this story about a bastard hero
can only name and place its hero by naming and placing his mother, the novel allows us
to ask: What happens when the mother dies in the wrong place? When she dies in the
workhouse, unwed, in a parish not her own?
Born shortly before his mother’s death in precisely these conditions (Agnes is
unwed, in a workhouse, in a parish not her own), Oliver is left under the care of the Poor
Law, a workhouse orphan. His mother has died without a trace. The only evidence of
her story are her shoes—worn down by walking herself to death—and her ring-less hand.
No one knows from whence she came, or why she came here. No one knows her name.
No one knows her story. The work of the novel will be to uncover this story, and Oliver
is the trace. The OED tells us that trace is first used to signify the way or path taken; then
to refer to the tracks made by the passage, beaten by feet; and then as a mark of
impression left on the face or mind. The novel begins with the trace of the mother on

23
Oliver’s face (Mr Brownlow attempts to recall which the “countenance of which Oliver’s
features bore a trace”), and works backwards in order to track the mother along her
original path. Her story is needed to secure his own. The dead mother is the key to the
bastard hero’s story.
And, at the time that the novel was serialized (1837-1839), the mother was the
key to the bastard child’s maintenance. Under the New Poor Law of 1834, financial
responsibility for bastard children was changed from the putative father to the mother (of
whom there could be no doubt). Thus, for the first time, motherhood was legally
assigned. The New Poor Law, although unfairly burdening already poor women with the
sole financial responsibility for their bastard children, begins the process that will
continue over the course of the nineteenth century of determining—and creating—the
legal relationship between mothers and children. And so I take it as my beginning,
considering the relationship between the New Poor Law and the novel. In both the novel
and the law, the mother—elided under traditional conceptions of novel and legal plots—
comes to yield a ghostly power, threatening to undermine the linear transmission of
inheritance.
What Oliver Twist thus suggests is that the bastardy clauses are faulty, not
because the father is central to the family line, but because without the father’s promise
(represented by marriage, a will, or economic support), the mother risks dying on the
street and the child pays for the sins of the parents. A single parent, the novel warns us
again and again, is not enough. Mothers die too easily and neither common law nor
narrative law can replace them.

24
I. The New Poor Law and the Novel
Representing Dickens’s “glance at the new Poor Law Bill,”
1
Oliver Twist’s
critique of the law is clear and, although the novel is set in the past, it is perhaps
Dickens’s most timely social critique, as the reforms passed in 1834 were still the subject
of heated debate throughout not only the novel’s original serial publication, but also
during Dickens’s extensive revisions for the 1846 edition.
2
The New Poor Law Report of
1834 included three central principles recommended by the Commissioners. The first,
the Principle of National Uniformity, represented the attempt to ensure that relief,
although administered by individual parishes, was done so uniformly throughout the
kingdom. The Principle of Less Eligibility “demanded that the conditions of existence
afforded by the relief should be less eligible to the applicant than those of the lowest
grade of independent labourers” (Webb and Webb 11). The third, the Workhouse
System, according to Sidney and Beatrice Webb, “was recommended on the assumption
that it was the only means by which the Principle of Less Eligibility could be in practice
enforced” (11). The link between the threat of the workhouse and “less eligibility” was
greatly successful (although, outdoor relief was still provided at much greater rates than
the law supposedly allowed) and the notion of “less eligibility” – initially intended to
apply to the quality of relief afforded to able-bodied – was extended to almost every class

1
As Dickens said in reference to the first installment of the novel in a letter to Thomas
Beard (28 January 1837).

2
Upon which Kathleen Tillotson’s wonderfully thorough Clarendon edition is based. For
the purposes of this chapter, however, the original serial edition as it ran in Bentley’s
Miscellany from February 1837 to April 1839, will be the primary source (as provided in
the 2002 Penguin edition of the novel).

25
of pauper. While “treatment of paupers did not become as uniform as the writers of the
Report had wished,” Monroe Engel writes, the principle “most heeded was that paupers
not be treated too well” (497).
Although Oliver Twist is set some time before 1834 – and therefore presumably
critiques the Old Poor Law – the novel famously intertwines the two.
3
In so doing, it
manages to critique all three aspects of the New Poor Law. Much of the critique is
focused on the administrators of the Poor Law (the Board, Mrs Mann, Mr Bumble, and
Mrs Corney), which could be taken as an argument for centralized control, a key aspect
of the recommendations of 1834. However, the shift away from outdoor relief that the
link between the principle of less eligibility and the workhouse signaled is made clear in
the novel: the “very sage, deep, philosophical men” of the board “established the rule,
that all poor people should have the alternative (for they would compel nobody, not they,)
of being starved by a gradual process in the house, or by a quick one out of it” (13).
4
In
the workhouse, the board “made a great many other wise humane regulations” including
undertaking “to divorce poor married people, in consequence of the great expense of a
suit in Doctors’ Commons; and, instead of compelling a man to support his family as they
had theretofore done, [they] took his family away from him, and made him a bachelor!”
(13) The narrator’s use of irony here highlights the way in which the law breaks the very

3
Which was noted in a review in the Spectator (24 Nov 1838): “The earlier workhouse
scenes in Oliver Twist, with the hard-hearted indifference of the parochial authorities, the
scanty allowance of the paupers, and the brutal insolence of office in the beadle, were
intended to chime in with the popular clamour against the New Poor-law: but Boz has
combined the severity of the new system with the individual tyranny of the old. “ Critical
Heritage, 43.

4
Unless otherwise noted, page references are for the Penguin edition (2002) of the novel.

26
familial bonds it is supposed to maintain. In a clear mockery of the notion of “less
eligibility” – the principle that the “situation of the pauper should not be made ‘really or
apparently so eligible as the situation of the independent labourer of the lowest class’”
(Webb 1) – the narrator continues:
There is no telling how many applicants for relief under these last two
heads would not have started up in all classes of society, if it had not been
coupled with the workhouse. But they were long-headed men, and they
had provided for this difficulty. The relief was inseparable from the
workhouse and the gruel; and that frightened people. (14)

Thus, while the novel is presumably set prior to the passing of the New Poor Law Bill,
Dickens critiques the elements of the old system – the workhouse and the treatment of
paupers as criminals – that have, after 1834, become the central focus of the new system.
When paupers are treated as if they are already criminals, the novel suggests, they might
as well act criminally. As Rosemarie Bodenheimer astutely suggests: “The larger
structure of the novel implies, first of all, that to treat poverty as a sign of criminality
makes real crime a preferable choice: who would choose the workhouse against the
activity of Fagin’s gang?” (120). Luckily, for Oliver, this is a choice he never has to
make, or he might not have fared so well under the conditions of his father’s will (which
states that Oliver will inherit only if he has never “stained his name with any public act of
dishonour,” 433).
The novel’s critique of these aspects of The New Poor Law has garnered wide
critical attention, but relatively little mention has been made of its relationship to the
bastardy clauses. In his penultimate footnote to his chapter on Oliver Twist, “The Wise
Child,” Steven Marcus writes:

27
It may simply be an astonishing coincidence, but the most warmly
contested proposal of the new Poor Law (and it is almost certain Dickens
attended the debates)
5
was an amendment abolishing a provision in the old
law known as the ‘search for the father’. Under the new law an
illegitimate child was to be charged solely to its mother, who was
compelled to enter the workhouse in order to obtain relief for her infant.
And so Oliver Twist may have even more to imply about the new Poor
Law and all its Malthusian conceptions than has yet been made apparent.
For Dickens, to abolish the search for the father was to contradict nature.
(89)

Relegated to a footnote, at nearly the end of the chapter, and stated in the conditional,
Marcus’s acknowledgment of the possible connection between Oliver Twist and the
bastardy clauses constitutes one of the very few instances such a connection is made in
the novel criticism. Susan Zlotnick notes that while the novel’s indictment of the
workhouse system has been widely acknowledged, “the novel’s entanglements with the
most controversial aspect of the Poor Law Amendment Act – the bastardy clause –
which, in contrast to Bumble’s bachelor’s law, held the woman to be ‘the more guilty of
the two,’ has been largely ignored” (131). Indeed, beyond Dennis Walder’s suggestion
that Dickens’s critique of the bastardy clause in the novel stems from Dickens’s belief
that Christian charity was failing the poor, Marcus’s footnote and Zlotnick’s article are
the only other references to the connection between the bastardy clauses and Oliver Twist

5
Many critics attribute Dickens’s knowledge of and animus toward the new poor law to
his attendance at the parliamentary debates as a young reporter. However, Dennis
Walder points out that “thorough parliamentary discussion began only with the motion
(proposed by John Walter of The Times) in February 1837 for a Select Committee to
inquire into the working of the new law.” These “early months of 1837 marked the
extension of the New Poor Law into the London metropolitan area, arousing great
popular controversy, as the pages of the Morning Chronicle or The Times testify.”
Walder argues: “it seems likely that it was these events, rather than the early debates on,
or even the passing of, the new law, which directly inspired the writing of the novel.”
(517)

28
that I have found. This chapter insists on the connection. Rather, though, than reading
the novel’s critique of this aspect of the poor law as an assertion of the importance of the
father (as Marcus’s suggestion that to eliminate the search for the father is to “contradict
nature” seems to do), I examine the emphasis that both the law and the novel place upon
the mother.

II. The Bastardy Clauses: Legalizing Motherhood

Under the New Poor Law of 1834, bastard children were deemed the
responsibility of the mother, rather than the father, in the first legal assignment of
motherhood. This change of responsibility from the old Poor Law was intended to
reduce the amount of births outside of marriage by placing the economic burden solely on
the mother. Under the old law, Lisa Forman Cody explains, “single pregnant women
could have turned to local parish authorities, named the father, and expected that the
parish would provide for the cost of lying-in and a small weekly maintenance for the
child until he or she was apprenticed” (134-5). It would then be up to the parish
authorities to find the father and attempt to recoup the cost, an endeavor that could, itself,
be quite costly. “Consequently, the economic burden ultimately fell on local ratepayers,
especially in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries due to an expanding
population, [and] a growing bastardy rate” (Cody 135). For the Commissioners of the
New Poor Law Report, guided by Malthusian concerns of overpopulation, the economic
support provided by the parish to single pregnant women served as an unnatural incentive
to produce children. If allowed to sue the father of her child, the single woman

29
apparently had no reason not to bear illegitimate children. Indeed, ignoring any and all
potential social or material drawbacks faced by women of illegitimate children, the
Commissioners of the Report suggested that bearing such children was a potential source
of great profit. As Lynn Hollen Lees writes, in her history of the poor laws:
Single women could menace their communities independently… through
their sexuality and reproductive powers. The image of women producing
multiple bastards for profit haunted the commissioners. Witnesses before
the Poor Law Commission picture single women as willing to exploit their
sexuality in order to live well on the public purse. (141)

The Commission concludes: “‘To the woman, a single illegitimate child is seldom any
expense, and two or three are a source of positive profit’” (qtd in Lees 141). While the
problem of a growing bastardy rate is ostensibly an economic issue, Lees’s summary
suggests that the unwed mother is a haunting figure. Female desire, ever transgressive, is
here positively vampiric, as unwed women prey upon unsuspecting men first and then the
parish, “growing fat” as it were on the public’s dime. Thus, the New Poor Law shifts the
legal and economic responsibility for illegitimate children to the mother, thereby “placing
responsibility for chastity on the woman, where both practically and psychologically” in
the eyes of the Commission, “it belonged” (Webb 246). “If,” the Commissioners write,
“our previous recommendations are adopted, a bastard will be, what Providence appears
to have ordained that it should be, a burden on its mother, and where she cannot maintain
it, on her parents” (Thane 32). For, to sue the putative father would be to “extend the
rights of matrimony to the unqualified and undeserving” (qtd in Thane 32). Here, not
only does the Commission lay bare the moral judgment of unwed mothers (rather than,
say, straight economic concerns), they also make clear that the central benefit of marriage

30
for women is that it represents the man’s contract to take financial responsibility for any
future children.
This shift from the Old Poor Law is a dramatic one, but it is additionally
remarkable for being one of the few instances in the New Poor Law in which women are
directly addressed. As Sidney and Beatrice Webb note, the Commissioners “devoted
much attention” to “the class of mother of illegitimate children,” whereas the “single
independent woman” is “nowhere mentioned” in the report (7). The Report recommends
a change in chargeability (the mother, not the father, is charged with the child’s
maintenance), but not the method of relief. However, evidence shows that while able-
bodied men were treated uniformly after the New Poor Law regardless of any notion of
“deserving or “undeserving,” women still faced these designations. Mothers of
illegitimate children were more likely to be placed in the workhouse and, once there, to
be assigned to different tasks, such as “picking oakum”
6
(Thane 32?). And unwed
mothers were especially likely to enter the workhouse as their very status as mothers
made it difficult to earn a living. As Marjorie Levine-Clark notes, “pauperism was
understood to be a male problem, as it was men who were associated with work,
independence and ablebodiedness” (107). Unwed mothers, now disallowed the right to
economic dependence on the child’s father, brought “the tension between women as
mothers, workers, and dependents… dramatically into focus” (Zlotnick 135). Working in
order to support her child would – of course – mean that she could not care for her child.
Her alternative, the workhouse. Thus, while the bastardy clauses were clearly intended to

6
Apparently a particularly unpleasant task, “picking oakum” is also something Oliver is
forced to do during his stay at the workhouse (13).

31
serve as a disincentive for unmarried women to have sex (in order, in turn, to control
population growth), its actual result was to make life harder for both unmarried mothers
and their children while freeing men from their responsibilities (“[making] him a
bachelor,” indeed).
While this further burdening of already impoverished mothers led to much debate
(and the clause was eventually amended in 1844), it did yield one possible advantage.
Summarizing the status of married women, William Blackstone writes (in 1765): “By
marriage, the husband and wife are one person in law: that is, the very being or legal
existence of the woman is suspended during the marriage, or at least incorporated and
consolidated into that of the husband.” Hence Mr. Brownlow’s warning to Mr. Bumble
that “the law supposes that [his] wife acts under [his] direction” (436). Dorothy Stetson
elaborates: “Upon marriage a woman became feme couverte: she lost her separate legal
status of feme sole and came under her husband’s tutelage as though she were one of his
children or part of his property. She had no legal rights, no right to own or use property,
and no right to custody of her children” (5). Stetson’s comparison suggests that the law
causes relational shifts: if a wife is like one of her husband’s children, then he is like a
father to her and the conjugal shifts to the patriarchal. And if children are legally the
father’s, rather than the mother’s, the law seems to remove even the mother’s identity as
mother, since children are what define her as such. The law, ostensibly a source of
stability and order, actually destabilizes relationships and identity. Whereas married
women, under the aegis of coverture, lost their separate legal status and rights, including
custody of any children, unmarried mothers had, as Pat Thane highlights, “common law

32
rights over their children” (32). The reassignment of financial responsibility from father
to mother under the New Poor Law formalized the rights that unmarried women had over
their children. Thus, whereas in the majority of family law mothers are all but erased,
under the bastardy clauses of the New Poor Law, the unwed mother is placed at the
center of a certain type of legal family. So, while the bastardy clauses insist that the
moral and economic burden of illegitimate children belongs solely to the unwed mother,
they also usher mothers back into the law, creating a legal relationship between mother
and child.
The bastard child therefore reveals the centrality of the mother that is otherwise
and elsewhere elided. Even in the debates, the argument is about morality (who is the
victim? Who the seducer?) rather than motherhood (what does it mean to be a mother,
legally?). Given the extraordinary amount of work that goes into estranging mothers
from the family line, it is perhaps not surprising that bastardy and unwed mothers become
the site of so much tension. And, we will see that while Oliver Twist is a bastard hero,
his mother an unwed mother, the paternal inheritance plot does all it can to cover over
this story, beginning with the mother’s early death. However, although Oliver’s
successful placement apparently depends upon eliding his (and his mother’s) last name,
the novel seems unable – or unwilling – to let the mother go. Indeed, although the search
for Oliver’s inheritance is purportedly the aim of the novel (as stated by Brownlow), the
text – and Oliver – seem much more interested in the search for the mother’s story.

33
III. Placing the Workhouse Orphan
The novel begins, however, in the traditional way. That is to say, it begins with
the mother’s death. Indeed, Agnes is killed off almost immediately and Oliver seems to
come out of nowhere. (And, beginning with the 1846 edition of the novel, he seems to be
born nowhere, as the town of Mudfog is deleted.) The novel opens with two rambling
sentences:
Among other public buildings in the town of Mudfog, it boasts of one
which is common to most towns great or small, to wit, a workhouse; and
in this workhouse there was born on a day and date which I need not
trouble myself to repeat, inasmuch as it can be of no possible consequence
to the reader, in this stage of the business at all events, the item of
mortality whose name is prefixed to the head of this chapter. For a long
time after he was ushered into this world of sorrow and trouble, by the
parish surgeon, it remained a matter of considerable doubt whether the
child would survive to bear any name at all; in which case it is somewhat
more than probable that these memoirs would never have appeared, or, if
they had, being comprised within a couple of pages, they would have
possessed the inestimable merit of being the most concise and faithful
specimen of biography extant in the literature of any age or country. (3)

The sentences are marked by delay. “There was born” doesn’t find its subject “the item
of mortality” for thirty-five words more and the readerly expectation of a name is greeted
instead with a referral back to the frame of the chapter. Indeed, the opening sentences
and the similarly long-winded opening clause of the third sentence almost forget the
eponymous subject of the novel. Thus the sudden use of his name, “I do mean to say that
in this particular instance [being born in a workhouse] was the best thing for Oliver Twist
that could by possibility have occurred” is rather jarring, appearing, as it does, out of
nowhere [and it is his full name, an explanation for which won’t be provided until later].

34
Of course, Oliver comes out of nowhere in a different sense: he seems to have
been born without the usual aid of a mother. Indeed, the mother’s presence is so
suppressed as to cause Baruch Hochman and Ilja Wachs to claim, apparently
unironically: “Oliver is born motherless” (33). Acknowledgement of the mother’s
existence doesn’t occur until after the narrator discuses the absence of the usual figures
(“careful grandmothers, anxious aunts, experienced nurses, and doctors of profound
wisdom”) – for the best, in this case, as they would have smothered him to death – and
the presence of his actual attendants: “a pauper old woman,” acting as nurse for the price
of beer, and the “parish surgeon,” working on contract (4). Finally, after Oliver struggles
to and finally succeeds in breathing, as signaled by his cry, we move to the next
paragraph and are introduced to his mother. Even this introduction, however, is marked
by deferral:
As Oliver gave this first testimony of the free and proper action of his
lungs, the patchwork coverlet, which was carelessly flung over the iron
bedstead, rustled; the pale face of a young female was raised feebly from
the pillow; and a faint voice imperfectly articulated the words ‘Let me see
the child, and die.’ (4)

Just as Oliver seems to have been born on his own, so, too, here it is the patchwork
coverlet that rustles. We’re then introduced to a “young female,” and then we’re given
the strangely disembodied voice. While the woman’s relationship to Oliver is clearly
implied, the text refuses to call her “mother.” She covered over by both text and quilt.
The novel elides her identity even as it links that identity to death: the mother and the
mother’s death are introduced together, apparently inseparable – to be one is to incur the
other.

35
The nurse attempts to deny this particular narrative:
‘Lor bless her dear heart, when she has lived as long as I have, sir, and had
thirteen children of her own, and all of ‘em dead except two, and them in
the wurkus with me, she’ll know better than to take on in that way, bless
her dear heart! Think what it is to be a mother, there’s a dear young lamb,
do.’ (4)

Here the nurse references a different narrative of motherhood, one that she assumes
Oliver’s mother knows (“think what it is to be a mother”)—it is much more likely, she
suggests, that it will be the child, not the mother, who dies (as Oliver’s near death has
already hinted at).
7
Following the nurse’s exhortation, the narrator steps in, wryly:
“Apparently this consolatory perspective of a mother’s prospects failed in producing its
due effect.” The mother stretches her arms out for the child, kisses its forehead, “pass[es]
her hands over her face, gaze[s] wildly round, shudder[s], [falls] back – and die[s]” (4-5).
Either the narrator is correct, and our dying mother has failed to be consoled, or she has
taken the nurse’s advice all-too-well and, “consider[ing] what it is to be a mother” in a
novel, dies within eight sentences of having been introduced. The novel dispatches
Agnes almost as soon as it deigns to acknowledge her.
After her death, the surgeon goes to leave the room, but stops by her bedside:
“The surgeon leant over the body, and raised the left hand. ‘The old story,’ he said,
shaking his head: ‘no wedding-ring, I see. Ah! Good night’” (5). In death, the mother’s
body is still evidence of the son’s condition: her bare ring finger tells it all, that “old
story.” The rest of the novel will attempt to bury this story along with the mother. The

7
And, of course, this is the narrative that haunts Elizabeth Gaskell’s Preface to Mary
Barton.

36
next paragraph begins: “The medical gentleman walked away to dinner,” while the nurse
begins to dress the infant. No more mention of the mother’s body is made, nor will it be.
Just as the surgeon must have dropped the hand he raised, her body is dropped, without
mention, from the narrative.
As his mother dies in the workhouse, Oliver gets the law in place of a mother. In
the novel, this is an accident of circumstances, as the father cannot be found (he is, we
will later learn, dead), but it also represents the condition of bastard children born after
1834. If the mother dies, the law takes her place. Oliver is not the first orphaned hero, of
course. Speaking of the prevalence of the orphan plot in fiction, Peter Brooks suggests:
[C]learly the parentless protagonist frees an author from struggle with pre-
existing authorities, allowing him to create afresh all the determinants of
plot within his text. He thus profits from what Gide called the
‘lawlessness’ of the novel by starting with an undefined, rule-free
character and then bringing the law to bear upon him – creating the rules –
as the text proceeds. (115)

But as a bastard orphan born in the workhouse, Oliver has the law ‘”bear[ing] upon him”
from his birth. The Beadle “inwents” his name; he’s “raised by hand” by Mrs Mann
(who “feels as a mother does”); and the gentlemen on the board are as “so many parents
to him.”
With a successfully orphaned, bastard child as the hero, the parish board raises the
question: What shall we do with him now? The answer is, over and over, to name him.
Along with his given, “inwented” name of Twist, Oliver is variously called a “chance-
child,” “parish child,” “nameless orphan,” “the orphan of the workhouse,” “work’us
brat,” simply “work’us,” “Nolly,” “young gallows,” “Ned” and “Tom White.” Oliver’s
ever-changing modifiers force us to ask, repeatedly, how do you name (and so place) the

37
workhouse orphan? Mrs Mann, the woman who will raise Oliver “by hand,” asks this
question explicitly: “‘How come he to have any name at all, then?’” (10). Mr Bumble,
the parish beadle replies proudly: “‘I inwented it.’” He goes on to explain:
“We name our foundlin’s in alphabetical order. The last was a S, –
Swubble: I named him. This was a T, – Twist: I named him. The next one
as comes will be Unwin, and the next Vilkins. I have got names ready
made to the end of the alphabet, and all the way through it again, when we
come to Z.” (10)

Despite Bumble’s remarkable preparation (he has “inwented” names for thirty-two future
orphans when apparently there hasn’t been one for eight [and in later versions, nine]
years), his explanation makes clear the failure of the law: with names “ready made” the
workhouse orphans’ names are yet another way in which they are “badged and ticketed”
(5). With a clear reference to the chance involved, Steven Marcus jokes, “what a grace it
was to have escaped being Swubble” (56).
Having named him – by chance – for a certain kind of story (“that boy will be
hung”), the board places him in another. Oliver is apprenticed to the undertaker,
Sowerberry, who decides that he would make “a delightful mute” (38). Oliver thus
becomes the silent mourner in the funeral train, the picture of despondent childhood
innocence. But, the law’s provisions for Oliver are thwarted when his dead mother
reappears in the narrative.
Noah Claypole, the charity boy in Sowerberry’s employ and Oliver’s nemesis
who, unlike Oliver, can “trace his genealogy back all the way to his parents,” antagonizes
Oliver one day by getting “rather personal”: “‘Work’us… how’s your mother?’” (47).
“‘She’s dead,’” Oliver replies immediately, followed by the response we might expect

38
(perhaps) first: “‘don’t you say anything about her to me!’” This is, we’re told, the first
time that Noah is able to get a reaction out of Oliver (he has successfully resisted Noah’s
hair-pulling, ear-twitching, and name-calling). However, at the first mention of Oliver’s
mother, the first time her existence is mentioned to Oliver in the text, Oliver is
immediately upset and insists: she’s dead. Noah attempts to tell the dead mother’s story:
she was a “regular right-down bad ‘un;” it’s good “that she died when she did;”
otherwise, “she’d have been hard labouring in Bridewell, or transported, or hung” (47).
Oliver, furious, grabs him by the throat, shakes him and “fell[s] him to the ground” (48).
The only explanation the narrator can provide is: “his spirit was roused at last; the cruel
insult to his dead mother had set his blood on fire” (48, my emphasis). While Oliver
beats Noah for suggesting that his mother was a “bad-un,” thereby establishing, as Dever
argues, “Oliver’s defense of his mother’s (as yet unknown) ‘good name,’” he also insists,
strangely, that hers is a dead name (28). His mother’s death is the only part of her story
he can tell at this point of the novel, but his fury at Noah is defense not only of her good
name, as Dever suggests, but also a refutation of Noah’s claim that it’s better “that she
died when she did.” While the mother’s death is the only story Oliver can tell, telling it
puts Oliver on the road and opens the plot. The altercation with Noah leads to a beating
and confinement, from which Oliver flees, leaving both the parish and the law behind.
Narrative law takes up where the poor law left off as it attempts to place our hero.
And the novel suggests, at least initially, that you name and place him by locating the
father’s plot and name. Of course, with a bastard hero, the paternal inheritance plot

39
necessarily involves some twists of its own. Blackstone summarized the status of the
bastard:
He can inherit nothing, being looked upon as the son of nobody, and
sometimes called filius nullius [son of no one], sometimes filius populi
[son of the people]. Yet he may gain a surname by reputation, though he
has none by inheritance. All other children have a settlement in their
father’s parish; but a bastard in the parish where born, for he has no father.
(1.16.2.3)

Blackstone thus makes clear that under common law, the bastard – as the son of no one –
has no name and no place. Belonging in neither the father’s nor the mother’s parish, he
belongs where he was born. Thus, is Oliver truly the Parish Boy. The ambiguity
presented in Blackstone’s summary (“son of no one,” and “son of the people”) is also
present in John Brydall’s Lex Spuriorum – the first “legal treatise devoted exclusively to
the problem of illegitimacy” – as commented upon by Wolfram Schmidgen. “Belonging
to everyone and no one,” the law’s “richly contradictory terms” suggest that “the law
actively contributes to the cultural production of the bastard as a multifarious, polyvalent
creature that eludes definition by oscillating between categories” (Schmidgen 139). “In
this sense,” Schmidgen continues, “the bastard is a creature of the threshold: while he
emerges from society, he is not able to take up a position within it and thus remains both
inside and outside. This dilemma is reinforced by the law’s central sanction, the bar from
inheritance” (139). The bastard thus seems to inherit his mother’s liminal status under
the law and a great deal of narrative work goes into fixing him as his father’s rightful
heir. As F.S. Schwarzbach argues, “it requires the ceaseless efforts of an entire
community of rich and powerful grown men to save one small boy” (65).

40
At the heart of the inheritance plot is the story of “a letter and a will” (432). This
story is recounted twice: once by Mr. Brownlow when he confronts Monks (Edward
Leeford) and then again by Monks, himself, in a forced confession in front of witnesses
(having already signed, apparently, written documentation of the same in front of yet
more witnesses – “in London before many gentlemen”).
8
The story goes roughly like
this: Edwin Leeford (after whom Monks is named) was forced into a bad marriage at too
early an age by his father and older brother to a woman at least ten years his senior; he
and his wife (Monks’s mother) ended up leading separate lives, each in a new society as
if single; Edwin met and became intimate friends with a recently widowed naval officer
who was the father of two daughters; by the end of the year he was “contracted, solemnly
contracted” to the eldest daughter, a “guileless, untried girl” (410-11).
9
Edwin becomes
embroiled in his own inheritance plot (a rich and repentant relative has died and left
Edwin his money) shortly after and so must go to Rome to sort it all out. There he falls
ill and dies, leaving no will and so his newfound inheritance falls to his first (and legal)
wife and her son (whom Mr Brownlow calls a “most unnatural issue” - an interesting
contrast to Oliver, Edwin Leeford’s “natural” son).
But, as I said, this is the story of a “letter and a will.” As luck and the novel
would have it, there was a will and it left the majority of Edwin Leeford’s property to
Agnes and her child. Edwin Leeford also wrote a letter to Agnes before his death,

8
Jonathan Grossman discusses this scene: “Instead of his own story, Monks provides the
beginning of Oliver’s, or, more accurately, the middle-class characters literally write that
story for him, make him speak the gist of it aloud, and ascribe his name to it, an author
without authorship” (156).

9
And suddenly we’re in Jane Eyre.

41
explaining his deception and taking full responsibility for her condition (thus assuming a
responsibility that would not have been legally assigned to him under the New Poor
Law). Unfortunately, as bad luck and the novel would have it, Leeford’s wife, Monks’s
mother, finds and burns the will, the only legal document protecting Oliver’s
inheritance.
10
The only remaining proofs are these: a portrait of Agnes painted by Edwin
and left in the care of Mr Brownlow, a locket containing two locks of hair and a gold ring
engraved with Agnes’s first name and the date (within a year before Oliver’s birth), and
Oliver’s face, which, as Steven Marcus has observed, has the uncanny ability to recall
both his mother’s and his father’s faces perfectly (leading Laura C. Berry to suggest that
Oliver’s face “reveal[s] not character but plot” 55).
11
Circumstantial evidence at best.
The case becomes even more difficult to prove, however, as the only evidence that
survives to the end of the novel are the portrait and Oliver, its living likeness.
This is a story, then, about a story. Oliver’s inheritance, his patrimony, is gained
through the successful re-telling of his parentage. The dual narrative accounts, seemingly
necessary to recover the inheritance of a “bastard child” (Monks is the only one to so

10
Mrs. Leeford’s (she’s never named) efforts to thwart the will are excellent examples of
one of the many problems of having a mother roaming around. The Victorian novel
suggests that living mothers possess a remarkable ability to disrupt the transmission of
inheritance (e.g. in David Copperfield and Felix Holt via the mother’s sexual desire,
always transgressive, and in Daniel Deronda via the mother’s rejection of both her
father’s culture and of her own status as mother).

11
Although children who look remarkably like their parents are a common novelistic
device, the old poor law, under which the parish could hold the putative father
responsible for the maintenance of bastard children, also emphasized family likeness:
“The maintenance order was usually made after the child was a month old. It seems
probable that the justices looked for a family likeness.” Cf. Galmorgan County Records,
Quarter Sessions Order Book, Epiphany, 1833, p. 306 (Henrique 104)

42
name him), actually make evident the fact that paternity is always a legal fiction, one that
depends on narrative. The successful transmission of inheritance depends upon the
successful transmission of the story. And both inheritance and story depend upon
carefully stringing together pieces of evidence. One must tell the story right. The novel’s
realism and the hero’s inheritance thus take on, in Ian Watt’s terms, “the circumstantial
view of life” (31).
Hachman and Wachs, summarizing the ostensibly happy ending for the novel’s
hero despite his almost total lack of action to bring such an ending about, claim: “Oliver
is utterly passive and helpless.
12
No other Dickens hero so effortlessly gains, not only
love, but a providential inheritance that provides him with a name, a preordained identity,
and a ready-made world that enfolds him in the warmth and security he has never
known” (32). But, how happy is his world? Is he ever named? Are we satisfied with this
resolution?
The novel criticism suggests no. Bayley, Walder, and Tracy all refer to the novel
as a type of waking nightmare and James R. Kincaid argues that the novel’s “one
undoubted effect” is “discomfort” (501). Certainly, it’s disorienting. While Alexander
Welsh and others (J Hillis Miller, Steven Marcus, and Robert Tracy) have pointed to the
labyrinthine nature of space (particularly London) in the novel, suggesting that we must
constantly ask ourselves ‘where are we?’, an equally important question is “when are
we?” There is confusion in time as Dickens attempts to track multiple narratives – a trick
he will master in Bleak House – and mark their simultaneity. Oliver seems to move

12
This is a common critique. See Marcus, Sadrin, Jordan, and Greene.

43
forward only to fall back – as Fagin and his gang pull him from the domestic plot. Much
of the novel seems to trap him and us; Peter Brooks’s argument about the frustration
experienced when the desire for forward progress is forestalled seems especially
applicable to Oliver Twist: “the inescapable middle is suggestive of the demonic” (100).
People don’t go by their “real” names, characters are connected in ways that the reader
isn’t privy to, and we – like Oliver – often have less knowledge than the narrator and the
adult characters. We must, like the many eavesdroppers in the novel (Nancy on Fagin
and Monks, Oliver on Fagin, the old women on Sally and Mrs Corney, Noah on Nancy
and Rose), stick around, listen, and hope we hear something.
Part of the confusion may be explained by Dickens’s own. Just as Oliver is
haunted by his beginning, Oliver is haunted by its. Burton Wheeler, in “The Text and
Plan of Oliver Twist” suggests – contrary to Kathleen Tillotson’s reading as presented in
the Clarendon edition – that Dickens decided to make Oliver Twist into a novel only after
the publication of the first few of its monthly parts (and that this belated decision makes
sense of the differences between the first few chapters and the rest). Wheeler argues:
The assumption that Oliver Twist was conceived as a full-length novel
offers no satisfactory answer to four insistent questions: 1) Why does no
hint of mystery surround Oliver’s parentage in the first ten chapters? 2)
Why is the conspiracy between Monks and Fagin so long withheld and so
implausible when finally established? 3) Why does the focus shift so
drastically from Oliver to Nancy in the latter portion of the work? 4) Why
is there such a pronounced alteration in narrative mode following the
opening chapters? (535)

He provides a convincing reading of Dickens’s editorial changes made for the ’46 edition
to demonstrate that the changes for the most part bring the first few chapters into better
line with the narrative that follows. In the Bentley’s Miscellany edition, when young

44
Dick blesses Oliver on his road to London (“‘Good-b’ye, dear! God bless you!’”), the
narrator speaks to its effect: “The blessing was from a young child’s lips, but it was the
first that Oliver had ever heard invoked upon his head; and through all the struggles and
sufferings of his after life through all the troubles and changes of many weary years he
never once forgot it” (57, emphasis added). As Oliver is safely rescued by the middle-
class within months of Dick’s blessing, the “many weary years” casts a shadow on the
story of near “perfect happiness” that the novel attempts to tell. This is one of the key
changes that Wheeler addresses (Dickens’s changed it to read “and through all the
struggles and sufferings, and trouble and changes, of his after life, he never once forgot
it” for all other editions) as evidence that Dickens’s intentions for “The Parish Boy’s
Progress” evolved as he wrote, but the “weary years” cast a shadow on the rest of the
novel.
While Wheeler’s argument goes a long way toward explaining the oft-noted
awkwardness of the novel (the plot seems thrown together; the novel is a mix of gothic,
Newgate, romance, melodrama, and realism; and the eponymous hero is no hero at all,
the criticism goes), the novel, even in its revised form, rests uneasily. As Anny Sadrin
cannily asks: “who ever heard of Oliver Leeford?” (31) She elaborates: “The false
identity, which from the start allows the narrator to designate his protégé and so
guarantee his future, will never be obliterated by the genuine one even though the plot
has no other function than to help us discover the child’s parentage” (31). Oliver Twist,
Bumble’s “inwented” name is the only one we ever know and it is suspect. As both
Hilary Schor and Robert Tracy note, Bumble – a bit of an author himself – names our

45
hero for a very specific kind of story: he will twist. But twist he doesn’t. And as Sally,
the nurse who attends Oliver’s birth and Agnes’s death, reports when asked the child’s
name: “They called him Oliver,” suggesting that the boy’s name, too, is illegitimate, a
fiction (197). If, then, “the vindication of [Oliver’s] illegitimacy is the event toward
which the entire novel is directed” as Steven Marcus suggests, and that “Oliver’s
character is substantiated, and his circumstances are transfigured, by the status and name
he at last inherits from his father” (85, 89), what does Oliver’s lack of a name suggest?
Whose story are we reading, anyway?

IV. Tracing the Mother’s Story

Although the paternal inheritance plot serves as the sense-making narrative in the
novel, it depends on the mother; in order to demonstrate paternity, one has to prove
maternity. It is Oliver’s resemblance to his mother’s portrait that causes Mr. Brownlow
to investigate the inheritance plot and it is her name on the now-lost ring. Oliver’s
successful inheritance plot thus paradoxically depends both on establishing the mother’s
identity and eliding her, especially her last-name, that sure sign of Oliver’s bastardy. The
novel, often read as if it were a search for the father’s name, seems – instead – to be a
search for the mother’s name, the mother’s story. Anny Sadrin suggests that “a totally
secular grace” is granted to Oliver (comparing it to Bunyan), but that this grace “is to be
his father’s son and the chosen one of his creator” (33). However, it seems that Oliver’s
grace is to be his mother’s son. And this is where the dead-mother frame returns.

46
While Brownlow initiates the search for the father’s will, the novel seems to
search for the missing mother. Indeed, as Oliver constantly slips through the gaps of the
law, the narrative attempts to provide him the safety net of a mother-replacement. From
Mrs Bedwin to Fagin, Nancy, and Rose, the novel throws as many mothers as it can at
young Oliver. But, just as the parish did before them, they all fail. And, just as she did at
Sowerberry’s, the ghost mother signals their failure.
After a period of fever, while in the house of Mr Brownlow and safely attended
by Mrs Bedwin, Oliver considers his mother’s ghost: “‘Perhaps she does see me,’
whispered Oliver, folding his hands together; ‘perhaps she has sat by me, ma’am. I
almost feel as if she had.’” Here, the mother’s ghostly return is kept at bay: (perhaps,
perhaps, perhaps, “almost feel”; “as if”) and yet remains a persistent possibility (“she
does see me”; “she has sat by me”; “she had”). And when he sees what will, of course,
be discovered to be his mother’s portrait, he is transfixed with a look that causes Mrs
Bedwin to ask him if he’s “sure [he’s] not afraid of it?” (90) “Oh, no, no,” Oliver quickly
responds, but he goes on to say that “It makes my heart beat … as if it was alive, and
wanted to speak to me, but couldn’t” (90). Again, the power of the mother seems to
animate the otherwise non-sentient. But Oliver’s interest and response to his mother’s
portrait is interesting for reasons beyond his eerie (but all too novelistic) recognition and
response to his heretofore unseen mother. Oliver does not think, as Esther Summerson
later will, that looking at the portrait is like looking in a mirror. Mr Brownlow and Mrs
Bedwin see the resemblance. (“There was its living copy, – the eyes, the head, the mouth;
every feature was the same” 93.) But this is not Oliver’s response. Indeed, the absence of

47
such a recognition on his part highlights the absence of mirrors more generally in Oliver
Twist. One must wonder: does Oliver know what he looks like? Or doe he learn what he
looks like by learning what his mother looks like? Learn who he is, by learning who she
is? Learning his story, by learning hers?
Later, when ensconced in the domestic idyll that is the Maylie home, the mother
haunts the text again as Oliver roams among “the green hills and rich woods of an inland
village” where, the narrator claims, “the memories which peaceful country scenes call up,
are not of this world” (261-2). This is the place for a ghost-mother visit if ever there was
one, the text suggests: “Oliver often wandered here, and, thinking of the wretched grave
in which his mother lay, would sometimes sit him down and sob unseen; but, as he raised
his eyes to the deep sky overhead, he would cease to think of her as lying in the ground,
and weep for her sadly, but without pain” (262). Here, Oliver first thinks of his mother’s
corpse, but then seems to remove her safely to heaven. Although the mother quickly
disappears from the narrative, Oliver’s tears are left, casting doubt upon the claim with
which the next paragraph opens: “It was a happy time.”
As James Kincaid notes: “The whole Maylie-Brownlow camp swim in a virtual
bath of tears” and even “‘delight’… causes the dismals here” (507). Oliver, in his first
months with the Maylie’s seems strikingly Esther-like in his attempt to earn his place:
“Every morning he went to a white-headed old gentleman, who lived near the little
church, who taught him to read better and to write, and spoke so kindly, and took such
pains, that Oliver could never try enough to please him” (262, emphasis added). And,
two sentences later, “[…] the ladies would walk out again, and he with them: listening

48
with such pleasure to all they said, and so happy if they wanted a flower that he could
climb to reach, or had forgotten anything he could run to fetch, that he could never be
quick enough about it” (263, emphasis added). Oliver, we are told, has “become
completely domesticated” (263). Who needs the law, we can hear D.A. Miller asking,
when you have a family to provide discipline? And, of course, this narrative of domestic
bliss that covers over the one of laboring to please is, as noted above, interrupted by
Oliver’s thoughts of his dead mother, as happiness never seems to completely cover the
sorrow.
The happiness of this household thus seems uneasy, and this uneasiness is
continued in the end.
13
Rose’s apparently successful marriage plot (dependent upon the
discovery of her legitimacy) lends one of the closing threads to the “happy” ending of the
novel. However, Oliver troubles this plot in two key ways: he both denies Rose’s
legitimate status as his aunt, and disrupts the happy marriage plot by introducing news of
Dick’s death. In the first, Oliver cries out upon the discovery of Rose’s actual family
history: “‘Not aunt, … I’ll never call her aunt – sister, my own dear sister, that something
taught my heart to love so dearly from the first – Rose, dear, darling Rose’” (438).
Oliver’s tender greeting thus pulls Rose into his immediate family, which is – of course –
an illegitimate one, thus denying her new-found legitimacy. The violence of this
proclamation is made clearer when compared to Nancy’s similar naming of Oliver as her
brother, ‘Nolly,” in the street. Nancy’s re-naming of Oliver removes him from his

13
One is reminded of Henry James’s claim that he found, in Cruikshank’s drawings the
domestic scenes as terrifying as the “frank badnesses and horrors”: “The nice people and
the happy moments, in the plates, frightened me almost as much as the low and the
awkward” (419-20).

49
comfortable middle-class life with Mr Brownlow. Oliver’s loving naming of Rose would
do much the same.
The second disruption comes just after Rose has accepted Harry’s proposal thus
cementing the marriage plot, that sure sign of closure. Complete with Rose “blushing”
appropriately, the stage is set for a happy conclusion. Suddenly, however, the paragraph
breaks:
‘Oliver, my child,’ said Mrs Maylie, ‘where have you been, and why do
you look so sad? There are tears stealing down your face at this moment.
What is the matter?’

It is a world of disappointment – often to the hopes we most cherish, and
hopes that do our natures the greatest honour.

Poor Dick was dead! (440)

Indeed, despite the fact that Oliver Twist supposedly ends happily, this is the second of
the four final chapters, all of which end with death (Sikes and his dog, Dick, Fagin,
Agnes).
In comparison to the haunted happiness provided by the Brownlow and Maylie
households, Fagin’s den is perhaps the happiest home in which Oliver finds himself, and,
indeed, Fagin and Nancy are possibly the best mothers living in the novel (which is
perhaps why they, too, shall die). Certainly, Fagin’s den is the only place in the novel
where Oliver laughs, as James Kincaid has noted, and it is the only home in which Oliver
is never disturbed by thoughts of his mother’s ghost. In addition to Fagin’s feeding the
boys and his motherly “my dears,” as Kincaid has already noted, Fagin also watches over
Oliver as he sleeps. As Fagin enters the thieves’ den, he asks:

50
‘Is Oliver a-bed? I want to speak to him,’ was his first remark as they
descended the stairs.

‘Hours ago,’ replied the Dodger, throwing open a door. ‘Here he is!’

The boy was lying fast asleep on a rude bed upon the floor, so pale with
anxiety, and sadness, and the closeness of his prison, that he looked like
death; not death as it shows in shroud and coffin, but in the guise it wears
when life has just departed: when a young and gentle spirit has but an
instant fled to heaven, and the gross air of the world has not had time to
breathe upon the changing dust it hallowed.

‘Not now,’ said the Jew turning softly away. ‘To-morrow. To-morrow.’
(161-2)

The description of Oliver is possibly in the narrator’s voice, but something has clearly
moved Fagin from his initial excitement to the decision to let Oliver remain asleep,
suggesting that he sees – and perhaps even thinks – what the narrator notices. Michael
Slater argues that this scene is evidence that Oliver’s “temporarily check[s]” the devilish
Fagin (511). But there’s something touching in this scene, as Fagin seems to resemble
nothing more than the mother who looks in on her child, finds him sleeping, and quietly
backs away. Fagin also has the privilege of a ghostly reappearance. As Oliver drifts
between sleeping and waking in the Maylies’ home, he catches sight of Fagin at the
window. Starting up, Oliver calls out, but the resulting search finds that Fagin has left no
evidence behind, not even footprints. Apparitional, he simply disappears.
Nancy, even more than Fagin, serves as a relatively successful mother-
replacement for Oliver and her similarities to the fallen Agnes has been widely noted,
most convincingly by Hilary Schor. Fittingly, she is a ghost almost from the start. In the
Preface to the Third Edition, Dickens writes of Nancy as an example of “these
melancholy shades of life,” thus marking her spectral quality even while living. In the

51
plot, Nancy haunts the halls of Fagin’s hideouts, ghosting herself as she eavesdrops on
Monks and Fagin (when Monks spies a shadow, he leaps up and searches, but turns up
nothing – Nancy just disappears without even the reader knowing she was there). And,
of course, after her brutal death, her eyes haunt her lover turned murderer.
The ghostly Nancy, contrary to Fagin’s early bet (“The man against the child, for
a bag of gold!”), chooses both man and child against herself and in so doing, guarantees
Oliver’s inheritance. She not only risks her life when she tells Oliver’s story to Rose
Maylie and again to Mr Brownlow; she also gives it when Sikes discovers what she has
done (thanks to Fagin’s machinations).
14
Her murder at Sikes’s hands becomes the
bargaining chip with which Mr Brownlow forces Monks’s confession, claiming that if the
law becomes involved, Monks will be tried as an accomplice to murder. The novel thus
necessitates Nancy’s death, just as it did previously with Agnes’s, to secure Oliver’s
inheritance. Nancy and Agnes are thus both sacrificial lambs, whose deaths are
necessary first to get the story going and then to move it toward its close. Agnes is
actually called a lamb (“such a gentle lamb!” the dying Sally recalls on 197), while
Nancy is likened to one even before her sacrificial death. When she’s imploring Oliver to
go along with Sikes quietly, she points “to some livid bruises upon her neck and arms,”
saying “I have born all this for you” (166). “Remember this,” she continues, “and don’t
let me suffer more for you just now.” Do this in remembrance of me.

14
Fagin has had her followed by Noah Claypole (aka Bolter). As Claypole follows
Nancy to her secret meeting with Rose and Brownlow, the chapter closes: “The spy
preserved the same relative distance between them, and followed with his eye upon her”
(379). The notion of surveillance, of being watched without one’s knowing it, will, of
course, become even more prevalent in Bleak House.

52
Unlike the dying and dead Agnes, however, Nancy’s body does not disappear. As
Bill enters the room, having just learned of Nancy’s treachery, he draws “back the curtain
of the bed.” Here, Nancy is lying “half-dressed upon it. He had wakened her from her
sleep” (395). Asleep on the bed, in Bill’s room, the fact that Nancy and Bill share the
bed is evident, although unstated. However, this intimacy will be quickly covered over
by Bill’s attack, as murder replaces sex. Unlike the elision of their sexual relationship,
the novel provides Nancy’s murder in explicit, violent detail. As Nancy begs Bill for her
life (and for his own), he “grasp[s] his pistol:” and knowing he will be caught if he fires
it, “beat[s] it twice with all the force he could summon, upon the upturned face that
almost touched his own” (396). Nancy, “nearly blinded with the blood that rained down
from a deep gash in her forehead,” “raise[es] herself with difficult on her knees, [draws]
from her bosom a white handkerchief” and breaths “one prayer for mercy.” We enter
Sikes’s perspective once more: “It was a ghastly figure to look upon. The murderer
staggering backward to the wall, and shutting out the sight with his hand, seized a heavy
club and struck her down” (397). Nancy’s murder is not only depicted, but her body
continues to be on narrative display. Sikes’s must “shut out the sight.” As the next
chapter opens with Sikes preparing to flee the scene of his crime, we look again at the
body: “And there was the body – mere flesh and blood, no more – but such flesh, and
such blood!” (397) Nancy is all too bodily here; she cannot be dismissed. Sikes burns
the club that he used to strike the final blow, but as he puts it into the fire, he realizes:
“there was human hair upon the end” and it “blazed and shrunk into a light cinder, and,
caught up by the air, whirled up the chimney.” “Even that,” the narrator tells us,

53
“frightened him.” Nancy’s blood, splattered as he struck her, will not wash out of his
clothing. And the blood has so covered the floor that “the very feet of the dog were
bloody” (398). In death, Nancy is inescapable. And in the room of her death, she is no
mere ghost.
Nancy’s body is necessarily displayed; as a corpse, her body attests to her brutal
death, condemning Bill Sikes, Fagin, and Monks. As stated earlier, her death—which
must be witnessed, her body must be seen—is necessary to the uncovering of Oliver’s
story. However, her body also makes visible the narrative violence entailed in killing off
the mother. While Agnes conveniently disappears under the quilt, Nancy’s body is seen,
rendered visible, a testament to the violence inherent in the inheritance plot.
Both Nancy and Fagin, the novel’s criminal-class mothers, hold information
regarding Oliver’s story. Fagin, of course, stresses the father’s inheritance plot (“let him
feel that he is one of us… and he’s ours, - ours for his life!”), but Nancy focuses on a
different story, one apparently rehearsed again and again. We hear it for the first time on
Sally’s deathbed:
‘Now listen to me!’ said the dying woman aloud, as if making a great
effort to revive one latent spark of energy. ‘In this very room – in this very
bed – I once nursed a pretty young creetur’, that was brought into the
house with her feet cut and bruised from walking, and all soiled with dust
and blood. She gave birth to a boy, and died. Let me think – What was
the year again?’

‘Never mind the year,’ said the impatient auditor; ‘what about her?’ (196)

Here, an end takes us back to the beginning, a shift in time, even as we remain in the
same place (in the same bed where our story began, where Oliver was born, and where
Agnes told her story and died, Sally will now tell hers and die). As with Oliver’s birth,

54
this scene is marked by delay as Sally slowly confesses to having stolen what she
promised Agnes to keep for her child. She had stolen “it”: “‘the only thing she had! She
wanted clothes to keep her warm, and food to eat; but she had kept it safe, and had it in
her bosom. It was gold, I tell you! – rich gold, that might have saved her life!’” “‘Who
was the mother? – when was it?’” Mrs Corney asks the questions to which the reader
already knows the answer. Rather than answer, Sally continues to obsessively repeat
Agnes’s story:
‘The mother,’ said the woman, making a more violent effort than before, -
‘the mother, when the pains of death first came upon her, whispered in my
ear, that if her baby was born alive, and thrived, the day might come when
it would not feel disgraced to hear its poor young mother named. ‘And oh,
my God!’ she said, folding her thin hands together, ‘whether it be boy or
girl, raise up some friends for it in this troubled world, and take pity upon
a lonely desolate child abandoned to its mercy!’ (197)

Strangely, while both Burton M. Wheeler and Robert Tracy forward the argument that
Dickens began Oliver Twist as a series of sketches much in the vein of Pickwick and only
later developed the idea of its being a novel, they also both claim that Sally’s story is the
one major flaw remaining in the plot. As the surgeon who attended Oliver’s birth
remains in the room (and on the page) until Agnes’s death, the scene described on Sally’s
deathbed could not have taken place. They forgive the oversight, suggesting that had
Dickens known he was writing a novel, he surely would not have hemmed himself in so
tightly. However, while I remain convinced by the majority of their arguments, and
while Sally’s story may present a surprise, it is hardly impossible. Agnes’s request
quoted by Sally clearly demonstrates that this conversation takes place before Oliver’s
birth (“if it be born alive,” “whether it be boy or girl”). Sally’s story is therefore an

55
extradiegetic, analeptic narrative: it takes us back to before the beginning of the novel,
one that is not contradicted by the opening chapter.
Sally’s telling of Agnes’s story (which will be told again by Nancy as she repeats
it to Rose as she has overheard it told by Monks to Fagin) is repeated by Martha and her
companion when she claims: “‘Sally told us often, long ago, that the young mother had
told her that, feeling she should never get over it, she was on her way, at the time that she
was taken ill, to die near the grave of the father of the child’” (436). Here Agnes’s story
is extended further as we discover the reason why she was walking in this particular
parish when she collapsed and was taken to the workhouse. Agnes here becomes an
uncanny precursor of Lady Dedlock, and both end in the pauper graveyard. Agnes’s
story is thus told again and again within the novel. Agnes, Sally, and Nancy all tell the
story only to die. Like reverse Scheherazades, for these women storytelling does not
delay death; death instead seems to be the price of having a story to tell (whether it is
one’s own, or not). Through the obsessive re-tellings, the iteration of the mother’s story
highlights the difficulty of its recovery. Indeed, it takes all of these women to tell one
mother’s story. And Agnes, whose story is only ever partially recovered, is the only
mother named in the novel. As various characters serve as stand-ins for Agnes, she – in
turn – stands in for the many unnamed mothers only alluded to by the presence of so
many orphans in the text.
In the final paragraph, Rose and Oliver stand looking up at Agnes’s tomb, the
marker they have had placed in their village church: “Within the altar of the old village
church there stands a white marble tablet, which bears as yet but one word, - ‘Agnes!’

56
There is no coffin in that tomb; and may it be many, many years before another name is
placed above it” (455). Although the mother’s name is present, her body – the body that
served as the surgeon’s text – is not. While the second sentence hints at the meaning of
the “one word” of the first (Agnes is the only one represented at present), the single word
of Agnes also leaves the unmarried Agnes unnamed.
15
Her name and her story are thus
put under erasure. However, the text cannot – or will not – leave her behind altogether.
The paragraph continues (and the novel ends) with:
But if the spirits of the Dead ever come back to earth to visit spots
hallowed by love – the love beyond the grave – of those whom they knew
in life, I do believe that the shade of that poor girl often hovers about that
solemn nook – ay, though it is a church, and she was weak and erring.
(455)

The “weak and erring” Agnes lays bare the dangers of the mobile, unmarried mother.
While Oliver can ostensibly be named and placed – through the “inwention” of adoption
– Agnes cannot. Unfixed, she “hovers.” With the workhouse orphan plot framed by the
gothic mother plot, Oliver Twist suggests that the way to the orphan’s plot is through the
dead mother’s plot, making evident the centrality of the mother to the family line and
plot. And her unsettled plot – necessary to his – hints at the instability of both.
As the novel closes, Dickens refuses to recreate the nuclear family; it has been
broken beyond repair. Oliver and his aunt stand by his mother’s empty tomb, with a
“strange little society” awaiting them at home, put together by law (by plot, marriage, and

15
With regard to Agnes’s lack of a last name, Zlotnick argues: “Agnes floats free of
Victorian domesticity and is dangerously unhitched, dependent neither on father nor
husband” (140). While I think this reading is partly correct, I think that Agnes’s retention
of her maiden name goes unmentioned throughout the novel because it is the clearest sign
of Oliver’s illegitimacy.

57
adoption) and held together by “love and duty.” The latter, of course, is Esther
Summerson’s watchword (“duty, duty, Esther”) as Dickens reenacts the bastard orphan/
dead mother plot in Bleak House. In that novel, of course, he lands, as Hilary Schor
argues, on his favorite subject (“a daughter after all”) and – through the use of first-
person narrative – enables her to tell her own story, something that Oliver never does,
despite being asked for it by almost every person he meets.
16

16
Indeed, Oliver is regularly robbed of his voice; one wonders if Dickens didn’t agree
with Sowerberry in believing that Oliver would make “a delightful mute.” Brownlow
says to Oliver, “let me hear your story,” but Oliver’s telling is forestalled by his
kidnapping (109). Doctor Losberne asks for it, and we’re told that Oliver recites it, but
his re-telling is not provided in the text (241). And, seven pages later, Losberne will bury
Oliver’s story, telling a different one to appease the bow street runners.

58
Chapter 2
Narrative Relations: Re-inscribing Inheritance in Bleak House

Esther Summerson. Mother-less, father-less, portion-less bastard heroine, marked
by her powerlessness and, as of Chapter 8, nicknamed into namelessness,
1
she is a proper
mistress for a bleak house. Esther is, from the very beginning of her “progress,” narrated
by others. Her life story is first told to her by her “Godmother”: “It would have been far
better, little Esther, that you had had no birthday; that you had never been born. Your
mother, Esther, is your disgrace, and you were hers” (19). Esther’s social status as a
bastard is later summarily narrated in a quick whisper in Chancery – a re-telling of “your
mother is your disgrace, and you were hers” – and she is the heroine in Mr. Jarndyce’s
love plot long before she knows his name.
2
It is no wonder, then, that such a character
would strive to gain some power and control over her life by writing her own story (“I
know how I am used, and I am not to be talked over”).
3

1
In “Covering a Multitude of Sins,” Mr. Jarndyce teasingly quotes a portion of a child’s
rhyme to Esther. She then writes: “This was the beginning of my being called Old
Woman, and Little Old Woman, and Cobweb, and Mrs. Shipton, and Mother Hubbard,
and Dame Durden, and so many names of that sort, that my own name soon became quite
lost among them” (90). As Hilary M. Schor suggests, it is “no wonder, we might
speculate, Esther talks so much to herself – by midway through the novel, she is the only
person remaining who calls her (self) by her own name” (112-113). All references to
Bleak House will refer to the Norton Critical Edition, 1977.

2
Mr. Kenge whispers (presumably) Esther’s status as a bastard to the Lord Chancellor on
p32. On p751, Mr. Jarndyce references the “old dream I sometimes dreamed when you
were very young, of making you my wife one day.” The time he must be referring to is
when he met Esther on the coach (without introducing himself), as she was making her
way to school, p24.

3
So says Caddy to Esther, 166.

59
Esther Summerson, like Oliver, is a bastard protagonist. Signifying her marginal
social status as a bastard, Esther is marked both physically (she is scarred by small-pox)
and socially (she is both nicknamed into namelessness and literally the daughter of no-
one, “Nemo”). However, she is the narrator who provides the reader with the sense of
the “true” story. An autodiegetic narrator, Esther Woodcourt is narrating her own life
story as Esther Summerson. Esther, our bastard heroine, is a beginning that was taken as
an end, her mother having believed her to be a dead baby. Esther must tell her story in
order to solidify her identity (she must undo her aunt’s version: it had “been better if you
had never been born”). And this story is driven by her search for her mother, Lady
Dedlock (“the pivot it all turns on”), through whom Esther traces her identity. Thus, the
inheritance from the mother is both identity and her narrative itself.
Just as legal discourse is entirely evacuated of meaning in Bleak House through
the “foggy” workings of Chancery, the novel suggests that traditional modes of legal
inheritance are no longer satisfactory, perhaps simply because it is an inheritance that
excludes female plots and possibilities. Instead, in this realist novel, we have a rather
gothic family-plot that emphasizes the mother as the source of inherited identity and the
ability to speak and to narrate one’s own existence. By not only searching for the mother,
but by telling the story of the search, Esther creates a counter-narrative, one that places
the mother at the head of the family line, giving the mother—not the father—the right to
place and name the bastard daughter. Esther legitimates herself outside the law’s story,
wielding a narrative power that threatens to subsume all other stories.

60
When Esther first sees Lady Dedlock in church – the woman whose face is “like a
broken glass” to Esther and makes her “fluttered and troubled” – she does not yet know
that Lady Dedlock is her mother (although the narrator, Esther, does, of course, know).
“I – I, little Esther Summerson, the child who lived apart, and on whose birthday there
was no rejoicing – seemed to arise before my own eyes, evoked out of the past by some
power in this fashionable lady” (225). The discussion of Lady Dedlock allows Esther to
not only affirm her status as self and narrator (“I” she repeats twice, with italic emphasis,
before saying her entire name), it also allows her to question, as she did when she was a
little girl, why there was “no rejoicing” on her birthday. The “no rejoicing” first
discussed early in her “portion of these pages,” Esther brings up the lack again in relation
to “this fashionable lady,” in a demand to share her mother’s status.
Esther’s first encounter with her mother is marked by confusion and “strange
emotion[s]” (225). The suggestion of doubling and fractured identity (hinted at by the
“broken glass”) is emphasized when Ada mistakes Lady Dedlock’s voice for Esther’s
later in the chapter. After taking refuge at a lodge during a rainstorm (a slightly more
gothic mood), a question is suddenly asked:
‘Is it not dangerous to sit in so exposed a place?’

‘O no, Esther dear!’ said Ada, quietly.

Ada said it to me, but, I had not spoken. (228)

A tricky narrator, Esther presents the questions and Ada’s response without first signaling
Lady Dedlock’s arrival, tricking the reader, along with Ada, into attributing the initial
question to Esther. Robert Newsom argues that this scene is one of many in which the

61
reader shares with Esther a feeling of uncanniness (64). However, while I agree that the
reader is as unsettled as is Esther by this scene, we do not share her perspective. We are
closer to Ada’s—the one who does not know, when a woman’s voice asks: “Is it not
dangerous to sit in so exposed a place?” that Esther is not speaking. Indeed, since the
question is unattributed, we must wait for Ada’s response (“O no, Esther dear!”) to guess
who has spoken. We must, that is, read ahead, only to be tricked. Esther fools us into
first making Ada’s assumption, and only then corrects us. This displacement marks the
strangeness of the scene. It is not until the third line of the series (“but, I had not
spoken”), that we realize that someone else is there and that that someone else apparently
sounds just like Esther. We are, then, forced to go back to understand what has just
happened.
The “strange[ness]” of this scene is echoed by the moment in Esther’s narrative
when she realizes who her mother is. Just beyond the half-way point in the novel and just
after surviving small pox, Esther is again in the park-wood by Chesney Wold, resting and
looking at the Ghost’s Walk. Esther is “picturing…the female shape that was said to
haunt it, when I became aware of a figure approaching through the wood” (448). Just
thinking of ghosts seems to conjure up a figure. Shadows and leaves obscure Esther’s
view, but: “By little and little, it revealed itself to be a woman’s – a lady’s – Lady
Dedlock’s” (448). Esther’s narrative delay and progression mimics her own move from
mis-recognition to recognition (and it will move back again – they will be estranged once
more). Once again, Esther is “fluttered” and a “dread and faintness [fall] upon” her: “I
looked at her; but I could not see her, I could not draw my breath. The beating of my

62
heart was so violent and wild…” (449). Esther has a physically erratic/erotic reaction to
the appearance of her mother – a reappearance that is apparently to be both desired and
feared, perhaps simultaneously – even before knowing who she is. Lady Dedlock holds
on to Esther and says: “ ‘O my child, my child, I am your wicked and unhappy mother! O
try to forgive me!’” (449). News of Esther’s illness has evidently moved Lady Dedlock
to her confession, which she makes both in person and in the form of a letter, which she
gives to Esther at this meeting, asking Esther to “consider her as dead” after this moment
and to destroy the letter upon reading it. Their introductory meeting as repentant mother
and (apparently) forgiving daughter is thus also a goodbye.
Although this will be the last time that Esther speaks with her mother, Lady
Dedlock’s narrative of Esther’s birth (given to us via transposed speech, identified by
Genette as the “intermediary degree” of mood between narratized and reported speech)
allows Esther to both refute her aunt’s story (“I clearly derived from [the letter] – and that
was much then
4
– that I had not been abandoned by mother”), and to somehow make her
illness and the resulting scarring redeemable (“I felt… a burst of gratitude to the
providence of God that I was so changed as that I never could disgrace her by any trace
of likeness”). However, Lady Dedlock not only disrupts, she is also a potential source of
narrative rivalry and must be guarded against. Thus, while Esther does provide us with
Lady Dedlock’s transposed speech, Lady Dedlock does not speak directly and her written
narrative – the letter – is allowed no space in this, Esther’s story.

4
Esther’s interjection – “and that was much then” – highlights the gap in time between
the events narrated and the act of narrating. This rupture in time is attended by an
emphasis on the reader’s lack of knowledge compared to Esther’s – what does “then”
suggest here? – completing the disjunction of the moment.

63
Esther takes the letter—her mother’s secret, her mother’s story—and with it, her
own. It is a secret that she cannot tell—she says that it is not “her own”—until after the
mother’s death. The search for the mother will take Esther out on the road, as she rides
with Bucket in pursuit of Lady Dedlock, who has fled her home. Another letter will
come to her—Lady Dedlock’s wills and Esther’s inheritance in one: a scrap of paper, a
story. It will not be until Esther finds her mother—after yet another series of
misrecognitions, as she approaches the body of whom she believes is Jenny, “the mother
of the dead baby” and turns the head, pushes back her hair, and finally realizes and
accepts: “it was my mother, cold and dead”—that the story will belong to her. (And the
marriage plot proper begins.)

I. Problems of Naming
As with Oliver, Esther’s story must be discovered, her identity must be
uncovered, due to the circumstances of her birth. Although they are raised differently,
both are born to mothers whose identity is unknown to them (and to almost all of the
characters around them). And, as with Oliver before her, Esther’s link to the mother will
be formed due to the similarity of appearance between Esther and Lady Dedlock, a
similarity that is discovered, once again (although more strangely this time as the mother
is still living), through a portrait of the mother. As did Agnes before her, Honoria will
walk herself to death, moving toward the pauper graveyard, and die there from exposure.
And her path becomes the trace her daughter must follow to fully understand her own
story, to know her own name.

64
However, if Oliver’s name is elided, Esther’s is never even revealed. The last
name that we’re given, Summerson, is an invention of her aunt, Miss Barbary. This last
name, too, is a fiction (taken after Miss Barbary “renounced [Honoria] and [her] name”).
While the father is discovered, his name (Hawdon) is of course no use to Esther, as he
and Honoria were never married. Honoria, married by the time the narrative is told, has
replaced her last name with that of her husband (Dedlock) and her maiden name is never
spoken. So, after sixty-seven chapters, after learning how fifty different characters are
related to one another, after stringing together the various plots, and after solving a
murder, Esther’s name remains a mystery. This elision is “covered,” of course, by her
married name—the only legal name we are given—Esther Woodcourt. But what name
appears on the marriage certificate is uncertain. And even her married name must be put
together by the reader; Esther never writes it. As Anny Sadrin notes: “[Esther]
provokingly refers to herself as ‘the mistress of Bleak House’, or ‘the doctor’s wife’,
never Esther Woodcourt” (65). Esther is perhaps more concerned with her place, than
with her name, having worked so hard to earn it.
But Sadrin invites us to speculate: what if, she asks, Mr Bagnet were to question
Esther, as he does his own children: “What is your name? and Who gave you that
name?... And how do you like that name?” (65). Sadrin argues that “Of course, nobody
can tell, for nobody knows how much she knows: has she read the other ‘portion’ of the
story or has she merely handed her manuscript over to the editor without enquiring
further into the matter?” (65) Sadrin thus suggests that the gap here is a result of either a
gap in Esther’s understanding or of our lack of knowledge regarding how far that

65
understanding extends. How much does she know? What has she read? But while
Sadrin’s name game hits upon one of the most striking elisions in the novel (What is
Esther’s name?), her explanation for our lack of answer seems slightly wrong. That is, all
of the answers to Mr Bagnet’s customary questions (what is your name? who gave it to
you? How do you like it?) lay within—or should lay within—the purview of Esther’s
narrative. She knows she is her mother’s daughter; she knows her mother was
unmarried; and she knows—or at least Mr Jarndyce certainly knows—Honoria’s maiden
name. The only strand of Esther’s story that exists entirely within the third-person
narrative, is that of her father, Hawdon. But, as Sadrin suggests, when Guppy “asserts
that ‘the little girl’s name was not Esther Summerson, but Esther Hawdon,’” he has no
legal backing. As a bastard child, Esther has no claim on the father’s name. Nor, it
seems, is she interested in it. When Mr. Jarndyce recommends the match that he has
established between Esther and Allan Woodcourt, he says to Esther: “Allan Woodcourt
stood beside your father when he lay dead—stood beside your mother” (753). Even here,
the only mention of Esther’s dead father in her text, the mother (whose death is left
unmentioned in this description, as if unspeakable) is the key. And it is never clear to the
reader how or when the fact that Nemo was Esther’s father crossed from the third-person
narrative to Esther’s. Esther never records her discovery of her father or her discovery of
her father’s death. And, returning to our questions, his name does not matter. Only the
mother’s does. And we are never told it. Esther knows her name. But she refuses to say
it. If Michael Ragussis is correct when he argues that the failure to name properly is a
central crime in the novel (“call things by their right names,” Sikes’s demand seems to

66
echo throughout), then Esther’s narrative—rather than a corrective to the mis-namings of
Chancery—is itself doubly unlawful.
5
It both operates alongside and against the
narrative of Chancery, but also refuses to fill in the final gap. Esther will emphasize her
wrong name, over and over: “I—I, little Esther Summerson” or, to the maid’s “Miss
Summerson, if I don’t deceive myself?,” “Yes, that is my name” (65). But she will never
correct it in the text.
As with the similarly mis-named Oliver before her, Esther will track the mother’s
story to tell her own. However, the plots our two bastard orphans face are quite different.
Alex Zwerdling suggests that “Between Oliver Twist and Bleak House, [Dickens’s]
vision of childhood suffering became much more psychological. Oliver’s deprivation is
primarily physical, external” (95). Esther, by contrast, is deprived of love, instead of
food. However, their plots are also gendered differently. Eugenia DeLamotte, writing
about gothic fiction, highlights the problem for the female narrator: “It is about the
nightmare of trying to ‘speak “I”’ in a world in which the ‘I’ in question is
uncomprehending of and incomprehensible to the dominant power structure” (166). She
continues: “The difficulty of knowing and being known arises in several contexts in
women’s Gothic, all linked to this problem of alienation: the relationships of women to
men, the restriction of women’s education, and the need for and impossibility of self-
defense through self-explanation” (166). “Self-explanation” is especially difficult when
one cannot explain (because one does not know) one’s self; the effect of illegitimacy on

5
Ragussis makes a convincing case for this line of argument. However, he suggests that
the correct name for Esther is Esther Hawdon, which is clearly untrue; it is its own mis-
naming.

67
women is thus particularly detrimental. Whereas the male bastard’s problem is depicted
as his lack of property, the problem for female bastards seem to be more closely tied to
issues of identity.

II. Legal Fictions

And the law affects both property and identity. If Oliver Twist suggests that the
law deals in fictions (“for the law supposes”), Bleak House makes this explicit. The
opening chapter, dealing as it does with the “foggy” workings of Chancery, provides the
first mention of the difference between fact and law. As Jarndyce and Jarndyce “drones
on” in the background, the court’s various attendees are enumerated. Among them is the
ruined suitor from Shropshire (Gridley, Esther’s narrative will name him), who
periodically appears and “breaks out into efforts to address the Chancellor at the close of
the day’s business” (7). He cannot understand, we are told, “that the Chancellor is legally
ignorant of his existence after making it desolate for a quarter of a century,” and so the
man from Shropshire “plants himself in a good place and keeps an eye on the Judge,
ready to call out ‘My Lord!’ in a voice of sonorous complaint, on the instance of his
rising” (7). Already, the text creates the contrast between what can be seen and heard—
the man is planted in the Chancellor’s path; his shout is one of “sonorous complain”—
and what the law can see and hear. Indeed, after apparently standing around for twenty-
five paragraphs, as the chapter closes and the Chancellor steps down for the day, the man
from Shropshire shouts out again, “My lord!,” but we are told that “the Chancellor, being
aware of him, has dexterously vanished” (10, emphasis added). With its first chapter,

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Bleak House thus highlights the gap between the facts and the law, or the facts as the law
would have them. And, the novel suggests, this gap—or, better—these fictions that the
law creates, have the potential to inflict harm.
The discrepancy between life and the law is evidenced again just two chapters
later, in the first chapter of Esther’s narrative, “A progress.” Upon the death of Esther’s
godmother, Kenge absent-mindedly refers to Miss Barbary as Esther’s aunt. “My aunt,
sir?” she asks, surprised, having never before heard mention of a direct relation between
herself and her godmother. “Aunt in fact, though not in law,” Kenge replies and later
emphasizes, “for in law you had none” (21, 22). The law strips one of family; it will
disallow Esther her aunt and it and the novel will replace Miss Barbary, Esther’s aunt in
fact though not in law, with Mr. Jarndyce, Esther’s new “guardian.” Guardian is, of
course, as Barbara Gottfried reminds us, a legal term, one that she substitutes for the
“cousin” that Ada and Richard use to address Mr. Jarndyce. Michael Ragussis links this
stripping away of one’s family under the law to the work that Chancery (as represented in
the novel) does more broadly. Although supposedly responsible for determining the
proper dispensation of wills, the novel’s critique of Chancery suggests that its primary
aim is to create more work for itself. In so doing, it casts family connection in doubt.
(Carolyn Dever points out that the problem Chancery creates for families is made explicit
by locating family contention in the case title, Jarndyce v. Jarndyce [82].) When Gridley
tells of his dealings with Chancery he says that after two years of waiting for the case to
be addressed, it was stopped for another two years while “the Master (may his head rot
off!) inquired whether I was my father’s son—about which there was no dispute at all

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with any mortal creature” (193). Chancery makes bastards of everyone. Indeed, over the
course of the novel, not a single case is settled and Jarndyce and Jarndyce, that
“scarecrow of a suit,” is finally “absorbed in costs” with no resolution. No one inherits.
This is, of course, one of the novel’s primary critiques and the absurdity of
Chancery is made quite clear. But through its link to wills and inheritance, we also return
to the legal and narrative problem of the bastard child. As the child of no one, she can,
we are told again, and again, inherit nothing. But because Esther is a bastard daughter,
Sadrin suggests that she “exists as few Dickens heroes do: being a woman, with no need
to transmit – and therefore to inherit – any tokens of her origins, she has the privilege of
existing as a heroine in her own right, self-made, self-written” (73). However, neither
the novel nor its heroine seem entirely content with this position outside of inheritance.
Esther’s portion of the novel begins with Esther’s claim being dismissed. “Miss
Summerson is not related to any party in the cause, I think?” the Lord Chancellor asks.
“No, my lord,” is Mr. Kenge’s quick reply followed by a whisper which, as mentioned
above, sums up Esther’s status as bastard dependent. After the whisper, Esther notes that
the Lord Chancellor “did not look towards me again, until we were going away” (32).
Her interest in the case dismissed, her presence ignored, Esther’s status as bastard ensures
that she is, truly, “set apart.” However, she will discover, indeed she knows as she writes
this narrative, that she was related to a party in the case, as the daughter of Lady Dedlock
whose interest in “Jarndyce and Jarndyce” was the only property that she brought into her
marriage (15). Related in fact, though not in law, this is an interest that the law would
deny Esther and one she never mentions directly in the novel. But, in the end, no one’s

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claim is given priority over her own, as the case comes to naught. Although Chancery’s
absorption of all funds, time, and life of its suitors is key to the novel’s critique, it also
means that no one inherits; no one is legitimated over Esther; no one’s claim is privileged
over hers. In the end, we find that in Esther’s narrative (where the result of the case is
discovered), if the bastard daughter cannot inherit, no one can.

III. Narrative Relations

Instead, Esther will continually deny the language of the law, using her own
narrative to fix herself a place in the world, binding her relations to her. She must, that is,
undo the versions of her story as told by others, telling her own and telling it differently.
The primary story that she works against is, of course, her godmother’s version: “It had
been better had you never been born.” As with Oliver before her, Esther, a bastard child,
must fight against the notion that she is a mistake. In her examination of bastardy, Jenny
Teichman addresses the ways in which by regulating population—no matter the goal or
means—“the existence of a system of regulation and control must of necessity generate
the concept of ‘a child which ought not to have been born’” (7). Teichman discusses
various ways in which this may be the case: in nations with miscegenation laws, a child
of an interracial couple may be considered a mistake; for a eugenicist, a baby born with
any type of disability is to be regretted; and for a nation that is over-populated, multiple
children may be looked down upon. However, in nations where the concern seems to be
primarily economic (as with say the New Poor Law), it is the children for whom

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maintenance is uncertain that become the unwanted ones. And so the bastardy clauses
enter again.
Of course, Miss Barbary’s summation of Esther’s circumstance put in play three
distinct narratives. When she says that “It would have been far better, little Esther, that
you had had no birthday; that you had never been born. Your mother, Esther, is your
disgrace, and you were hers,” Miss Barbary finishes with the narrative that will guide
Esther’s behavior for the rest of her life: she is “set apart” and so must work very hard to
“earn a little love” for herself. But Miss Barbary also suggests that it would have been
better either if Esther had never been conceived (if Honoria had never been a “fallen”
woman), but, by delaying the “that you had never been born,” she suggests that it also
would have been better if Esther had been a dead baby (“if you had had no birthday”).
And this, as with Oliver, was almost the case. Esther initially showed no signs of life,
presenting Miss Barbary with the material for the other fiction of Esther’s life that Miss
Barbary has, herself, created, the story that she told Honoria: that Esther died at birth.
Miss Barbary, we later learn from Mr. Jarndyce, then “blotted out all trace of her
existence” (213). The daughter’s trace, like the mother’s, is erased. Indeed, there are two
central fictions operating within the novel: one that Honoria is dead, the other that Esther
is. And, as we will see, however tragic it is, Esther must ensure that her narrative is the
one that survives until the end of the novel. (But more on that later.)
Esther, as we will see, writes herself against the law, putting into play a narrative
of identity that will compete with the legal narratives for supremacy. (And it will win.)
As Kieran Dolin argues, “Esther’s narrative represents a completely different story-

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telling practice from that adopted in the Court of Chancery” (86). “Above all,” Dolin
suggests, Esther’s narrative is a “vindication of her identity, a proof that she is not filia
nullius, the daughter of Nemo, nobody” (87). Esther’s narrative is not only a completion
of the third-person narrative, providing us with the story of the individual in contrast to
that of the court; it also operates counter to the narrative of Chancery, creating relations
(narrative and familial) outside the law. Esther’s attempt to gain and then maintain
power over her own life/story, however, necessitates her constantly warding off the
potential for other characters to narrate, and to narrate differently; such a narration would
thereby remove her as the subject of her own narrative, re-creating her as the object of
another’s. As Audrey Jaffe writes, “first-person narrative … makes explicit what
omniscient narration obscures: that the subject of narrative is also a potential object of it.”
And later, “these first-person narratives thus suggest what omniscience has already
shown: that the subject of narrative can imaginatively avoid becoming a character in
someone else’s narrative simply by making others into characters in his or her own
story.” Accordingly, Esther must either “talk over” the characters around her or, perhaps
even more violently, force them to speak her language, all telling the same story. This is
a violence that I would suggest the reader is both complicit with and resistant to.
Complicit in a shared desire for Esther to gain and maintain power, a female narrator who
resists a system in which “above all other prohibitions, what has been forbidden to
women is anger, together with the open admission of the desire for power and control
over one’s life (which inevitably means accepting some degree of power and control over
others lives)” (Heilbrun 13). Esther, who shows both anger and narrative control, fulfills

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the necessary “task for women,” to subvert these prohibitions, by “assum[ing] the
position of the authoritative, speaking subject” (Butler 147, summarizing Wittig’s
argument in Wittig’s The Lesbian Body). This assumption of voice, however, involves a
serious degree of violence, a violence that the reader is resistant to when it is enacted
upon the other characters, especially characters with whom the reader sympathizes. The
housekeeper of the first-person narrative, Esther creates and then maintains the narrative
discipline of the familial.

1. Esther’s Binding Language

D. A. Miller argues that although Bleak House constantly creates the private
sphere of the home as opposed to the public sphere of Chancery (and the police, Tom-
All-Alone’s, etc.), this separation is always-already incomplete. Indeed, “police and
family” are “blurred into one another” and so “‘discipline’ – within the domestic circle as
well as outside it – ‘must be maintained’” (76). Esther is, of course, both the subject and
object of discipline. She only maintains her place in the household because, as Miller
suggests, she constantly works to keep it. Esther’s self-discipline involves forcing herself
to constantly re-tell the same story. The story of John Jarndyce’s extreme goodness and
of Esther’s happiness with her role in his household is told so often and so fiercely, that it
deserves the label of a metadiegetic narrative in Genette’s terms.
6
In Narrative
Discourse: An Essay in Method, Genette defines the metadiegetic as the level of
narratives told within the main narrative as opposed to the simply diegetic (or

6
Of course, Esther never acknowledges her metadiegetic narrative as narrative, as story.

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intradiegetic) level which is comprised of the events recounted within the narrative.
7
The
self-violence involved in Esther’s maintenance of her metadiegetic narrative is clear
when Esther first learns that Charley is her maid. The scene begins with Esther thinking
of Allan Woodcourt: “And I looked up at the stars, and thought about travellers in distant
countries and the stars they saw, and hoped I might always be so blest and happy as to be
useful to some one in my small way” (298). Here, both “travellers” and “they” refer to
Allan, a character that Esther rarely names in the story she almost never tells. Telling this
love story would, of course, necessarily disrupt her other narrative of sublime happiness
in Jarndyce’s household. This sentence ends the paragraph and the next begins:
They were so glad to see me when I got home, as they always were, that I could
have sat down and cried for joy, if that had not been a method of making myself
disagreeable. Everybody in the house, from the lowest to the highest, showed me
such a bright face of welcome, and spoke so cheerily, and was so happy to do
anything for me, that I would suppose there never was such a fortunate little
creature in the world.

We got into such a chatty state that night, through Ada and my guardian drawing
me out to tell them all about Caddy, that I went on prose, prose, prosing, for a
length of time. (298)

The semi-hysterical, rambling speed of these sentences marks a swift shift in tone from
the Woodcourt sentence. We are, of course, in Esther’s metadiegetic narrative, proper;
the possibility of crying is masked as a result of happiness. This happiness is emphasized

7
In Genette’s terms, Esther is an Extra-diegetic, homodiegetic narrator, that is, the
narrator creating the narrative who also exists as a character within the narrative. In this
sense, there are at least two Esthers: the extradiegetic, narrator Esther (Esther Woodcourt)
and the Intradiegetic, character Esther. Of course, such a designation presupposes the
status of Esther as either equal to the third-person narrator in terms of narrative level, or
as pre-existing the third-person narrator (and so, as the creator of the third-person narrator
or the third-person narrator, herself). This is a supposition that I do in fact make in my
reading of Bleak House, convinced by readings (provided originally by Robert Newsom)
that posit Esther as both the first-person and third-person narrators.

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as much as possible, both in Esther and in those around her (“such a bright face of
welcome,” “spoke so cheerily,” “was so happy”) as she “prose, prose, Pros[es]” to Ada
and her guardian, herself, and the reader; to convince and be convinced. “At last” Esther
retreats to her room (“quite red to think how [she] had been holding forth”) and then
hears a “soft tap” at the door (298-299). It is Charley (“if [Esther] please[s]”). Esther
responds:
“Why, so you are,” said I, stooping down in astonishment, and giving her a kiss.
“How glad I am to see you Charley!”

“If you please, miss,” pursued Charley, in the same soft voice, “I’m your maid.”

“Charley?”

“If you please, miss, I’m a present to you, with Mr. Jarndyce’s love.”

I sat down with my hand on Charley’s neck, and looked at Charley. (299)

The dialogue, beginning with astonished gladness on Esther’s part, quickly devolves into
shocked surprise and pain (a state that Charley is experiencing from the very beginning,
speaking in her “soft voice”). Charley is a “present” (horrifying for any character, she is
an object of this narrative indeed), but, most frighteningly for Esther, Charley is a
“present’ with Mr. Jarndyce’s love. The scene continues:
“And O, miss,” says Charley, clapping her hands, with the tears starting down her
dimpled cheeks…. “I should have been here – all a deal sooner, miss; only Mr.
Jarndyce thought that Tom and Emma and me had better get a little used to
parting first, we was so small. Don’t cry, if you please miss!”

“I can’t help it, Charley.”

“No, miss, nor I can’t help it,” says Charley.

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This is a heartbreaking – and violent – scene for both of the characters. Charley is
comfortably situated now, with her siblings in similarly better positions, but she is
separated from them, turned into an object of exchange. Esther is forced at once to
acknowledge the love-plot portion of the story that she continually narrates and to deny
the love plot that she never tells (at least, never completely). In the last part of the scene,
Esther makes an attempt to resist the love-plot and her role in Charley’s placement. She
says: “O Charley, dear, never forget who did all this!” Esther implies that Mr. Jarndyce is
entirely responsible for Charley’s new position, his goodness his motivation. But,
Charley responds: “No, miss, I never will. Nor Tom won’t. Nor yet Emma. It was all
you, miss,” implicating Esther in the plot. Esther continues to resist: “I have known
nothing of it. It was Mr. Jarndyce, Charley.” But Charley is firm: “Yes, miss, but it was
all done for the love of you, and that you might be my mistress. If you please, miss, I am
a little present with his love and it was all done for the love of you. Me and Tom was to
be sure to remember it” (299). The effect of Charley’s continual affirmation of Mr.
Jarndyce’s love (she says “love” three times in this passage alone) for Esther becomes
clear quickly:
Presently, Charley came creeping back to my side, and said: “O, don’t cry, if you
please, miss.”

And I said again, “I can’t help it, Charley.”

And Charley said again, “No, miss, nor I can’t help it.” And so, after all, I did cry
for joy indeed, and so did she. (299)

Crying for joy, indeed. Charley’s “Me and Tom was to be sure to remember it,” suggests
that Mr. Jarndyce has trained this storyteller. Esther’s failure to refute the love-plot

77
results in a repetition of both the tears and the exchange: “don’t cry” and “I can’t help it,
Charley” followed by “No, miss, nor I can’t help it.” To maintain her metadiegetic
narrative, then, Esther enacts self-violence and must write over pain with tears of joy.
This writing-over, however, is not entirely successful. The repetition of pain in this
scene, signified by the repetition of words and phrases (“prose, prose, prosing”; “don’t
cry if you please, miss”; “I can’t help it”), and the strain evidenced by the emphatic
“indeed” reveals the difficulty of maintaining this narrative, showing the seams.
Esther must extend this narrative violence to the characters around her in order to
maintain the narrative control that she has. Perhaps the clearest extension of the violence
is Esther’s “talking over” of other characters. She first talks over Mr. Turveydrop. When
Prince and Caddy first announce their engagement to Prince’s father, Mr. Turveydrop,
Esther quotes him: “‘My son and daughter, your happiness shall be my care. I will watch
over you. You shall always live with me’; meaning, of course, I will always live with
you; ‘this house is henceforth as much yours as mine; consider it your home. May you
long live to share it with me!’” (294) Esther ends the passage with a semi-colon, refusing
to allow him to end on a complete sentence and then interprets what he has just said for
the reader: “meaning, of course, I will always live with you.” Esther’s interpretation,
however, completely contradicts Turveydrop’s intended meaning and so she successfully
talks over him.
Esther’s talking-over of Turveydrop is unlikely to meet with much resistance
from the reader. Esther’s talking-over of Caddy, however, seems to be much more
violent and more difficult to accept. Caddy is a character that Esther must try to subdue

78
because she is constantly questioning Esther’s right to narrate. As Alexander Welsh has
observed, “Caddy talks back alarmingly on her first appearance in the first number” (77).
In Chapter 5, Caddy is angrily discussing the state of her mother’s house, attempting to
force Esther to tell the same story. “‘It’s disgraceful,’ she said. ‘You know it was.’” And
later in the same paragraph: “It’s a great shame and a great story of you, if you say you
didn’t smell [Priscilla] to-day. It was as bad as a public-house, waiting at dinner; you
know it was!” (44, my emphasis). Caddy consistently attempts to ensure Esther’s
agreement with Caddy’s story (“you know it was”) and she suggests that Esther would be
lying – would be telling a false story – if Esther disagrees. Esther resists this move, “‘My
dear, I don’t know it.’” Caddy responds: “‘You do,’” and “‘You shan’t say you don’t.
You do!’” To which Esther replies:
“O, my dear!” said I, “if you won’t let me speak--,

“You’re speaking now. You know you are. Don’t tell stories, Miss Summerson.”

“My dear,” said I, “as long as you won’t hear me out --,

“I don’t want to hear you out.”

“Oh yes, I think you do,” said I, “because that would be so very unreasonable.”

Caddy constantly cuts Esther off, refusing her story and her right to tell one (“Don’t tell
stories, Miss Summerson.”) However, Esther wins this skirmish over the narrative by
totally dismissing Caddy’s claim that Caddy does not “want to hear [Esther] out.” Esther
both denies the truth of Caddy’s claim and then suggests that were it true, it would be “so
very unreasonable.” Caddy continues in her resistance, however. She next refuses
Esther’s right to narrate in Chapter 14, “Deportment.” Caddy says:

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“I couldn’t be worse off if I was a what-‘s-his-name – man and a brother!”

[Esther] tried to say something soothing.

“O, it’s of no use, Miss Summerson,” exclaimed Miss Jellyby, “though I thank
you for the kind intention all the same. I know how I am used, and I am not to be
talked over. You wouldn’t be talked over, if you were used so.” (166)

Caddy refuses Esther’s attempt to deny the severity of Caddy’s situation, but she also
questions what such an attempt involves; Caddy suggests that Esther’s “soothing” is a
“talking over” and Caddy refuses Esther this right.
Caddy will be talked over by the end of the novel, of course. Caddy not only
learns “housekeeping,” from Esther, but she also truly “learn[s] anything that [she] can
learn of [Esther]” (370-371); she learns how to be narratable. Caddy no longer questions
Esther’s right to talk over her, or Esther’s right to tell stories. By Chapter 38, “A
Struggle,” Caddy struggles no more. Esther has fully recovered from her illness and
returned to her duties at Bleak House. She tells herself, “Once more, duty, duty, Esther,”
and immediately sets out to do her duty, bringing both Bleak House and the characters
around her back under control. In the second paragraph of the chapter, having finished
her immediate duties (comprised mainly of the “re-arrangements of drawers and
presses”), “[Esther] paid a visit of a few hours to London, which something in the letter
[she] had destroyed at Chesney Wold had induced [her] to decide upon in [her] own
mind” (472). The reason for the visit is to ensure that Mr. Guppy will no longer pursue
the question of Esther’s parentage (now that Esther knows both who her mother is and
what danger Esther’s existence may cause Honoria). However, Esther begins the third
paragraph by stating, “I made Caddy Jellyby – her maiden name was so natural to me that

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I always called her by it – the pretext for this visit” (472). Esther first refuses a
successful conclusion to Caddy’s love plot, referring to her by her maiden name. Esther
also now manipulates Caddy’s character to fit her story; she cannot reveal the real reason
for her visit to London and so uses Caddy as a cover. Two paragraphs later, as Esther is
recounting the visit, she begins by “transposing” Caddy’s speech.
8
While closer to
Caddy’s voice than pure “narratized” speech would be, Caddy is still removed from
direct quotation, giving Esther more power over Caddy’s language. Esther writes: “Her
father-in-law was extremely kind and considerate, Caddy told me, and they lived most
happily together” (473). This distance from Caddy’s voice is then emphasized when
Esther interrupts, parenthetically, with her own interpretation of Caddy’s meaning:
“(When she spoke of their living together, she meant that the old gentleman had all the
good things and all the good lodging, while she and her husband had what they could get,
and were poked into two corner rooms over the mews)” (473). The “she meant” seems to
suggest that Esther is accurately transposing Caddy’s inner speech in addition to her
uttered speech. However, this is immediately troubling; the reader has always known
Caddy to say exactly what she means. At this point, then, Esther’s training has been
successful in at least one of two ways. Caddy has either become content to be the object
of someone else’s narrative, freely giving way to Esther to narrate her and/or Caddy is
following in Esther’s footsteps, telling a story of happy domestic comfort that covers over

8
Genette describes “three states of characters’ speech” (relates to both uttered speech and
“inner speech”): 1. Narratized speech – the most distant from actual speech, and usually
the most reduced, 2. Transposed speech – akin to free-indirect discourse, and 3. Reported
speech – speech “as it supposedly was uttered by the character.” (170-173)

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the narrative of endless labor. Either way, Caddy has been brought – violently – under
control by Esther’s narrative.
However, Caddy still has the potential to ruffle Esther’s story. In “Beginning the
World” (Chapter 65), Allan and Esther pass Caddy on their way to Chancery. Esther
writes:
Of course we turned back; and the affectionate girl was in the state of rapture,
and was so overjoyed to talk about the night when she brought me the flowers,
and was so determined to squeeze my face (bonnet and all) between her hands,
and go on in a wild manner altogether, calling me all kinds of precious names,
and telling Allan I had done I don’t know what for her, that I was just obliged to
get into the little carriage and calm her down, by letting her say and do exactly
what she liked. Allan, standing at the window, was as pleased as Caddy; and I
was as pleased as either of them; and I wonder that I got away as I did, rather than
that I came off, laughing, and red, and anything but tidy, and looking after Caddy,
who looked after us out of the coach-window as long as she could see us.

This made us some quarter of an hour late… (758, my emphasis)

In this passage, although Caddy still does not get to speak directly, she does seem to gain
some type of control over Esther. It is Caddy that names Esther, she gets to “say”
whatever she likes, and she makes Esther both untidy and late. Esther no longer controls
the narration entirely and, indeed, it seems as if she willingly surrenders some of the
control: Esther “lets” Caddy “say and do exactly what she liked,” Esther is as “pleased”
with the encounter as both Allan and Caddy are, and she leaves the passage “laughing,
and red.” Esther’s narrative control over Caddy, and the violence involved in it, is
ruptured, is incomplete. And yet one must wonder if Esther is allowing Caddy to do what
she, herself, would like to: exult in her successful (although extraordinary) courtship plot.
It seems that even here Esther is unwilling to rejoice in what amounts to a rejection of

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John Jarndyce in favor of Allan, (a rejection, that is, of her mother’s plot) and so allows
Caddy to seize temporary narrative control so that she may do so.
And Esther exerts narrative control through other means. Rather than simply
talking over all of the characters, Esther also forces them to speak the same story; her
language infiltrates the language of those around her in the way that the language of the
law infiltrates those involved in Chancery. D.A. Miller writes: “the power organized
under the name of Chancery is repeatedly demonstrated to be all too effective. To violent
acts of penetration it prefers the milder modes of permeation” (61). Power’s subjects
“internalize the requirements for maintaining its hold” (61). So, too, does the power
organized under Esther permeate those around her, especially through language, both
written and spoken. I will be looking at three instances in which Esther clearly
disciplines Woodcourt’s language, evidencing the power that she exerts over the
narrative. Esther must be especially careful to ensure that Woodcourt speaks the correct
story because he – or, her desire for him – is the greatest threat to her metadiegetic
narrative, as seen by Esther’s inability to narrate whenever their potential love plot
threatens to surface.
The first instance that I will be looking at is the beginning of Chapter 51, when
Esther narrates Woodcourt’s story. The chapter opens, “When Mr. Woodcourt arrived in
London, he went, that very same day, to Mr. Vholes’ in Symond’s Inn. For he never
once, from the moment when I entreated him to be a friend to Richard, neglected or
forgot his promise” (607). The following pages relate Mr. Woodcourt’s visit first to Mr.
Vholes and then to Richard, ending roughly three pages later, with “Afterwards, when

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Mr. Woodcourt came to reflect on what had passed, he was so very much impressed by
the strength of Richard’s anxiety on this point, that in telling me generally of his first visit
to Symond’s Inn, he particularly dwelt upon it. It revived a fear I had had before…”
(610). Beginning with this last sentence, the rest of the chapter is in Esther’s standard
narrative voice. It is this rupture in the middle of the paragraph that highlights how
strange the entire beginning of the chapter is; Esther is narrating a scene in which she was
not present; she says that Woodcourt told her “generally” of this visit and yet she quotes
entire conversations. Esther’s narration includes bizarre pieces of conversational
information, as seen in the following: “(‘The number, sir.’) said Mr. Vholes,
parenthetically, (‘I believe I have already mentioned)’” (608). Why does the
extradiegetic Esther choose to narrate this, rather than having Woodcourt tell a
metadiegetic narrative? Genette discusses this same phenomenon with relation to
Recherche. Genette talks about the “odd telling, as if diegetic [or intradiegetic], that
which must be metadiegetic” (236).
9
Genette calls these phenomena “reduced
metadiegetic” or “pseudo-diegetic” narratives (236). By taking a story that must be
metadiegetic, that is a story told within the narrative (as Woodcourt must have told this
story to Esther) and narrating it as if it were intradiegetic, the narrator favors her voice
above that of the “original” storyteller. Esther, then, is refusing Woodcourt the power to
narrate a story of this length; instead, she is telling it for him.

9
Genette also describes the pseudo-diegetic as what occurs when “a narrative second in
its origin is immediately brought to the first level and taken charge of” (240, my
emphasis).

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Genette states that the “dominant feature of the narrating in the Recherche, [is] the
almost systematic elimination of metadiegetic narrative” by reducing it to pseudo-
diegetic (239, his emphasis). While this may not be the dominant feature of Bleak House,
it certainly seems to be playing an important role in Esther’s first-person narrative. Upon
considering this moment with Woodcourt, it is interesting to look at a couple of instances
when other characters are allowed to tell metadiegetic narratives, given the potential
threat such narratives pose to Esther’s status as narrator. Both Miss Flite and Mrs.
Woodcourt are allowed to tell Esther stories; both storytellers, however, are questioned,
often by labeling them as storytellers. In Chapter 30, Mrs. Woodcourt tells the story of
her (and so Allan’s) ancestors – referring, thereby, to their possession of origins – to
Esther. Afterward, Esther thinks: “It gave me the most inconsistent opinions of her. At
one time I thought she was a story-teller, and at another that she was the pink of truth.
Now, I suspected that she was very cunning; next moment, I believed her honest Welsh
heart to be perfectly innocent and simple” (367-368). Storytelling and cunning are
connected and opposed (unfavorably, of course) against honesty and simple[mindedness].
Thus, Mrs. Woodcourt’s narrative is undermined by the very fact that she tells it.
Miss Flite’s tale is treated in a similar fashion, though she is given more page
space. Esther actually solicits Miss Flite’s story: “I thought I would lead her to her own
history” (439) and later, “as I saw she would go on, I thought it best to try to be
serviceable to her by meeting the them, rather than avoiding it” (440). Miss Flite is a
very good storyteller, as it turns out, and when she finishes her tale, Esther grants it the
status of a “short narrative” (441). However, Esther dismisses her ability as a narrator,

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suggesting that Miss Flite seems “to lose the connexion,” and that her story is marked by
“incoherence,” ending with the statement that “there were moments when [Miss Flite]
was very mad indeed” (441, 443). Esther again tries to undermine other attempts at
narration beyond her own, violently binding Miss Flite in a description of incoherent
madness. However, Miss Flite’s story never fails to cohere and, if she is mad, it seems to
be a fitting result of the mad world that surrounds her, one that she describes/narrates
very well.
In order to study how Esther’s language (her narrative power) actually permeates
those around her, I will be looking at Woodcourt’s narration of his visit to Richard and
Ada after he has joined the search for Lady Dedlock (in Chapter 59). Although a direct
quotation (“reported speech”), Esther’s language infiltrates Woodcourt’s. To begin with
the end: Esther describes Woodcourt’s narrative as having a “friendly and familiar way of
speaking” (706). Familiar, here, has a possible double meaning. Esther is clearly
referring to Woodcourt’s familiarity with Richard and Ada. However, his “way of
speaking” is now familiar for another reason: it is Esther’s way. The narrative begins
when Woodcourt tells Esther that he has just left Richard; Esther worries that Richard is
ill; Woodcourt responds:
No, no, believe me; not ill, but not quite well. He was depressed and faint – you
know how he gets so worried and so worn sometimes – and Ada sent to me of
course, and when I came home I found her note, and came straight here. Well!
Richard revived so much after a little while, and Ada was so happy, and so
convinced of its being my doing, though God knows I had little enough to do with
it, that I remained with him until he had been fast asleep some hours. As fast
asleep as she is now, I hope!

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Although initially in Woodcourt’s voice, the first interjection (“so worried and so worn”)
strikes a different note than his customary manner of discussing illness. Indeed, in the
chapter “Enlightened,” when Esther is oddly re-narrating Woodcourt’s story, his wording
is quite different: Woodcourt says he “could not forget the haggardness of [Richard’s]
face,” nor the “dejection of [Richard’s] manner” (609, my emphasis). “So worried and so
worn,” comparatively, are gently alliterative and sound much more like Esther’s own
description of Richard later in the novel: in “Beginning the World,” she tells the reader “I
fully saw, for the first time, how worn away [Richard] was” (761). As the passage
continues, Woodcourt’s narration begins to sound more and more like Esther: “Well!” in
a suddenly upbeat mode, followed by Richard having “revived so much,” and Ada being
“so happy, and so convinced of its being my doing.” This structure, in terms of its
repetition and its insistence (“so”) on happiness, comes almost straight out of Esther. In
Chapter 8, Esther writes of Ada and Richard’s confessions of love: they “put me between
them” and “they were so confiding, and so trustful, and so fond of me” (160).
Woodcourt, then, is not only positioned as Esther is – between Richard and Ada, their
confidant and counselor – but he is also speaking her language (or she is speaking him).
Her discipline has permeated his speech. What is unclear is whether or not, as stated
above, he has been disciplined into speaking her language, or whether or not Esther is
actually “speaking” him, creating the speech of her narrated characters. Both choices
involve an extreme form of the narrative violence that we have been tracing in the strict
discipline of conformity with Esther’s language and modes of acting.

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Esther’s permeation of Woodcourt’s speech is incomplete, however. The
qualifier that follows (“though God knows I had little enough to do with it”), while
similar to Esther’s own usual self-effacement, differs strongly in its almost casual
reference to God, a figure that Esther rarely acknowledges.
10
It is this rupture, at once
similar and different (the entire passage is uncanny in a way), that emphasizes just how
closely the beginning of the sentence mirrors Esther’s.
But even more troubling, perhaps, is a scene in which our intradiegetic Esther
disciplines Woodcourt’s language. At the end of Chapter 61, “A Discovery,” Allan
confesses his love for Esther. In response, Esther must, of course, guide them both back
to the metadiegetic story she has been telling for most of the novel. Esther’s first
response to his declaration is one that she shares only with the reader: “O, too late to
know it now, too late, too late” (731). She immediately terms this response “ungrateful”
– and yet repeats it again! “Too late” – and then works for the rest of the chapter to bring
them both back to the “right” story.
“Mr. Woodcourt,” said I, “you will be glad to know from my lips before I say
Good night, that in the future, which is clear and bright before me, I am most
happy, most fortunate, have nothing to regret or to desire.”

It was indeed a glad hearing to him, he replied. (732-733)

Esther forces herself to tell the story of her domestic happiness and lack of desire for any-
thing/one else, and then forces Allan to agree that he is glad to hear it. She continues:

10
At this point, I can find only one direct mention of God from Esther. In “The Close of
Esther’s Narrative,” Esther writes “When I saw the strength of the weak little hand [of
Richard and Ada’s son], and how its touch could heal my darling’s heart, and raise up
hope within her, I felt a new sense of the goodness and the tenderness of God” (767).
She does, earlier, reference “the father” that had made her orphan’s path smooth.

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“From my childhood I have been,” said I, “the object of the untiring goodness of
the best of human beings; to whom I am so bound by every tie of attachment,
gratitude, and love, that nothing I could do in the compass of a life could express
the feelings of a single day.”

“I share those feelings,” he returned. “You speak of Mr. Jarndyce.”

“You know his virtues well,” said I, “but few can know the greatness of his
character as I know it. All its highest and best qualities have been revealed to me
in nothing more brightly than in the shaping out of that future in which I am so
happy. And if your highest homage and respect had not been his already, - which
I know they are, - they would have been his, I think, on this assurance, and in the
feeling it would have awakened in you towards him for my sake.”

He fervently replied, that indeed indeed they would have been. (733)

Esther forces Woodcourt to speak the right story, feeding him the correct lines. Her
technique is remarkably similar to Caddy’s earlier one (“You know...”) and his reply,
although “correct” is strained by the repetition of “indeed indeed.” This seems to me to
be the most violently disciplining technique that Esther engages in, both to herself and to
Woodcourt. Occurring at the intradiegetic level, there is no distance here; this is the
character Esther forcing the character Woodcourt to speak a story that goes against his
every wish and desire, as well as her own. The issue of distance is key. Usually Esther’s
violence occurs at the extradiegetic level; that is, Esther-the-narrator enacts the violence
and her power is often masked by the seemingly powerlessness of Esther-the-character.
Even if not successfully masked, the powerlessness of Esther-the-character creates a
desire in the reader for her to gain and maintain some degree of power at the level of
narrator. But here Esther reveals her power at both levels and the violence inherent in its
exercise.

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However, there is a degree of uncanniness in all three of the Woodcourt passages,
disrupting the discipline. The strangeness of Esther narrating Woodcourt’s story – and
the peculiar conversational descriptions that she includes – is striking. Esther’s
permeation of Woodcourt’s speech is remarkably familiar and yet different at the same
time; it unsettles the reader. The power that Esther holds over Woodcourt’s language, the
manner in which she succeeds in getting Woodcourt to mimic her is disturbing. And this
gives the reader pause, highlighting Esther’s narrative violence and thereby disrupting
Esther’s success.
The ease with which Esther’s language “permeates” Woodcourt’s, though, both
explicitly and inexplicitly, suggests the power that operates under Esther. She is, indeed,
disciplining the characters around her – teaching them both how to narrate and how to be
narratable. The borders between Esther’s language and that of the characters around her
are blurred; just so, the spheres of public discipline and private family-life collide. They
never entirely mesh, however. As with everything else in Bleak House – such as the
double narrative or the realms of discipline – created division between characters,
between the right story and the wrong one, while never destroyed, are rarely successfully
maintained. The ruptures in Esther’s disciplining of other characters (and herself) reveal
the violence involved in that very discipline, the extreme difficulty inherent in controlling
the narrative. This exposure denaturalizes Esther’s metadiegetic narrative of domestic
happiness, calling it into question.

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2. Inheriting the Novel

Narrator Esther will use this narrative power and the guise of powerlessness it
provides her to create relations. Over the course of the novel, just as the legal narrative
attempts to strip away family ties, Esther will reinscribe them, creating narrative familial
relationships and re-populating the novel as she goes. In Hilary Schor’s introduction to
Dickens and the Daughter of the House, she retells two stories that come from Dickens’s
daughters, Kate Dickens Perugini and Mamie Dickens. Theirs is a story of filial
inheritance, the father’s name. As Kate says, his name was their “best possession.” But
Mamie’s version is slightly different. “ “It is a glorious inheritance to have such blood
flowing in one’s veins’; she was ‘so glad,’ Mamie said, “I never changed my name’” (2).
In Mamie’s account of her inheritance, we see a link between biological inheritance (“to
have such blood flowing in one’s veins”) and the father’s name. Biological inheritance,
that is, is the key. And it is signaled in the novels by appearances; a true child looks like
her parents. They mirror one another.
Miss Barbary creates the mirror relationship between mother and daughter to
which Esther will hew (“Your mother, Esther, is your disgrace, and you were hers”), but
Esther will draw it differently. She will draw it outside of shame (“I knew I was as
innocent of my birth as a queen of hers”
11
[454]). When we are first introduced to Lady
Dedlock “(who is childless)” in Chapter Two, we are told that she, having conquered her
world (of fashion) like the great Alexander before her, has fallen into the “freezing
mood” and that “if she could be translated to Heaven tomorrow, she might be expected to

11
Esther, of course, here plays on the link between herself and her namesake, Queen
Esther.

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ascend without rapture” (13). In the next chapter, Esther’s first, “A Progress,” we begin
to see the linguistic relationship. When Miss Barbary first delivers her version of
Esther’s story on Esther’s birthday (“It would have been far better, little Esther, that you
had had no birthday” and “Your mother, Esther, is your disgrace,”), Esther writes: “She
checked me, however, as I was about to depart from her—so frozen as I was!” (19,
emphasis added). Here, news of Esther’s mother causes her to replicate her (as-yet-
unknown) mother’s state, that of the freezing mood. Miss Barbary checks Esther in this
moment to add: “Submission, self-denial, diligent work, are the preparation for a life
begun with such a shadow on it. You are different from other children, Esther, because
you were not born, like them, in common sinfulness and wrath. You are set apart” (19).
Esther, after crying herself to sleep, forces herself (as she will learn to do over and over)
to deny her sadness, as gratitude and cheer become her constant covers for sadness and
grief. Esther determines to grow up to be “industrious” and to “win some love to
[her]self” (20). And, just seven pages later, we learn that she has succeeded. As “six
quiet years” have passed and Esther learns that she is to leave the school at which she has
lived and worked in order to become a companion to Mr. Jarndyce’s “Ward of the
Court,” Esther is surrounded by the “dear girls,” all of whom are sad to see her go.
Esther writes:
It was so tender in them to care so much for me; it was so gracious in that Father
who had not forgotten me, to have made my orphan way so smooth and easy…
that the pain of it, and the pride and the joy of it, and the humble regret of it, were
so blended, that my heart seemed almost breaking while it was full of rapture.
(27)

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Here, Esther’s initial discovery of her mother’s story (or, of Miss Barbary’s version) and
her feeling of “rapture” is linked. The girls’ tenderness is the reward of Esther’s plan,
hatched when her aunt first tells her that she is “set apart.” And in this moment she
recalls her origins, as she references her “orphan” way. However, the inclusion of
“rapture,” the phrase that both links her and separates her from Lady Dedlock creates the
link between mother and daughter. The same, but different: “It is her and it ain’t her,” as
Jo would say (282). If Esther is an orphan, her narrative suggests, she is an “orphan of
the living.”
12
Esther creates a discursive relationship to her mother through language.
She binds her mother to herself, creating a familial relationship that the law denies. The
descriptions of Lady Dedlock precede Esther’s, providing them with a seeming primacy.
Lady Dedlock, that is, narratively precedes and seems to produce Esther (as it is stories of
her that create in Esther the linguistic similarity).
But it is important to remember that Esther is writing her portion; that is, the
narrative relationship drawn between Lady Dedlock and Esther—the narrative link
between them—is Esther’s work. And it is she that, “having what [she has] to tell,” will
describe seeing Lady Dedlock for the first time as like looking into a broken mirror. As
the sermon begins (“ ‘Enter not into judgment with thy servant, O Lord for in they
sight—’”), Esther interrupts: “Shall I ever forget the rapid beating at my heart,
occasioned by the look I met, as I stood up! Shall I ever forget the manner in which those
handsome proud eyes seemed to spring out of their languor, and to hold mine!” (224)

12
This is the title Diana Dewar’s study of bastardy. Her concern is for the “problem” of
bastardy in the twentieth century and so bears little relation to my own concerns. But her
phrase is a striking one.

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Esther reacts physically to the presence of Lady Dedlock, with a racing heart and yet is
“held” by the eyes of the other woman. Lady Dedlock is here almost predatory in her
abilities—she can “spring” out of her languor, holding another fast. It only takes a
moment, Esther reports, for her to know “the beautiful face quite well,” and it “very
strangely” takes her back to the “lonely days” at her godmother’s house, when she would
stand on “tiptoe to dress [herself] at [her] little glass” (224). Shortly after, Esther says
that she knows this woman must be Lady Dedlock, but cannot understand “why her face
should be, in a confused way, like a broken glass to [Esther], in which [she] saw scraps of
old remembrances” (225). Esther’s physical reaction, her emphasis on the visual, and her
constant framing of Lady Dedlock as simultaneously strange and familiar has invited
many critics to consider the uncanniness of these moments of meeting. Robert Newsom,
in Dickens On the Romantic Side of Familiar Things, provides perhaps the most complete
discussion as he sees the uncanny running throughout the entire novel, a result of its
many doubles (characters, narrators, narratives, etc.). He is followed in this reading by
Judith Wilt, Hilary Schor, Carolyn Dever, and John Jordan (to name only a few). And
these readings seem dead on to me, in many ways. They account for the constant sense
of déjà vu experienced by both the characters in the novel and the reader, a key
component of Freud’s notion of the uncanny. Newsom attributes this largely to the two-
strand narrative structure and the fact that it means that we meet most of the characters as
if for the first time, twice. Jordan highlights the way in which the retrospective narration
creates much the same effect—the future is already present in the past, we get lost in
time, and so are completely disoriented.

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But while these readings provide a fundamental understanding and explanation
for the reader’s experience of the novel, I would like to focus on the fact that Esther is,
herself, creating this experience, not living it. That is, the familiar yet strange and same
but different qualities of her interactions with her mother—the manner in which Esther
creates Lady Dedlock as a broken mirror for herself—enable Esther to create and
maintain a discursive filial relationship with her over the course of the story. And, of
course, even after Honoria’s death, both the portrait (and the familial relationship it
signifies) and Esther’s narrative will live on.
By telling the story of her relations to her mother, Esther creates a mother-
daughter relationship outside the law. When Esther finally discovers that Lady Dedlock
is her mother within the narrative, she seems to regret her life (as she is now a threat, as
she sees it, to her mother’s continued well being) and she retreats (finally) to her aunt’s
narrative: “I had a terror of myself” and was “possessed by a belief that it was right, and
had been intended, that I should die in my birth; and that it was wrong, and not intended,
that I should be then alive” (453). As Esther feels “attracted to [Chesney Wold] for the
first time,” she peers up at “one lighted window that might be my mother’s” and her
“footsteps … made an echoing sound upon the flags” (454). Suddenly, Esther is
stricken: “my echoing footsteps brought it suddenly into my mind that there was a
dreadful truth in the legend of the Ghost’s Walk: that it was I, who was to bring calamity
upon the stately house; and that my warning feet were haunting it even then” (454).
Esther’s ghosting of herself in her own narrative has been read as the nadir of the
uncanny identity plot. She is so stricken by the danger she (innocently) presents to Lady

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Dedlock that she wishes herself never to have been born. However, by ghosting herself,
Esther not only once again narratively aligns herself with her mother (“the novel’s living
ghost,” as Hilary Schor calls her); she also creates a story in which she is a legitimate part
of Lady Dedlock’s family. That is, the Ghost Walk and the footsteps that haunt it are a
Dedlock story; and while the footsteps are harbingers of the family’s downfall, only a
female member of that family can haunt it. Esther here enacts a twisted version of the
family romance, legitimating herself by ghosting herself.
And while writing her relationship to her mother is Esther’s primary narrative
feat, she uses narrative to secure the other novel relations. Even while maintaining, as
argued above, the narrative of contented domestic happiness in John Jarndyce’s Bleak
House, character Esther will constantly (and supposedly unknowingly) disrupt that early
romance plot by calling him “father.” As both Freud’s “Family Romance” and Goldie
Morgentaler’s Dickens and Heredity suggest, as long as illegitimate children remain in
doubt as to their parentage, “they are potentially related to everyone they meet” (89).
Esther makes use of this potential telling us early that she suspected Mr. Jarndyce was her
father. And, even after he has told her her story as far as he knows it (disallowing the
possibility of his paternity), Esther insists on thanking one “who has been as a father to
her.” Esther here uses the gesture of a filial relationship both to continue to secure her
own place in Bleak House, but also to disrupt the love plot that she is otherwise too
grateful to deny.
And, working outside of both biological and legal modes of transmission and
inheritance, Esther populates the novel. She trains the characters around her to act and

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speak as she does. Even Caddy Jellyby is Esther’d by the end. But this training starts
early. When Caddy first undertakes her plan of being trained at Esther’s hand, she
reports: “I am not clever at my needle, yet” (177). Of course, denying one’s cleverness is
famously Esther-like. By the end of Caddy’s romance plot, she sums up dutifully: “‘In
short,’ said Caddy, cheerily, ‘and not to prose, I am a very fortunate girl, and ought to be
very grateful’” (476). From her cheer, to her concern about “prosing,” and finally to her
expression of gratitude for the great amount of work that comes her way, Caddy is truly
Esther’s daughter. Little Charley, too, is trained in the ways of Esther, most content with
herself when she is serving and serving well. However, Little Charley has her moments
of disruption—she never learns how to form her “Os” properly, and so breaks from
Esther’s house style.
And Esther names Ada’s child. The obsession with naming and names in Bleak
House makes this an uncomfortable move—it makes Esther’s narrative violence, her
assumption of control of those around her, clear. Of the child, Esther writes: “It was a
boy; and I, my husband, and my guardian, gave him his father’s name” (767). Ada’s
entire lack of presence in this moment, supplanted first and foremost by Esther (Esther
lists herself first), is horrifying. As Alex Zwerdling argues, Esther’s successful narrative
plot comes at the cost of Ada’s. Ada takes Esther’s place in the original Bleak House,
and will now call Mr. Jarndyce “guardian.”

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This dis-ease at the end,
13
the discomfort that arises from the knowledge that
Esther’s narrative success comes at the cost of those around her, makes even the end un-
restful. In this way, when Michael Slater writes that “the close of Esther’s narrative”
“may remind us, in fact, of nothing so much as the ending of Oliver Twist” he is exactly
right. He is, of course, acknowledging how both novels contain an ending that
necessitates that the “good characters withdraw form the dark city… to form ‘a little
society, whose condition approached as nearly to one of perfect happiness as can ever be
known in this changing world’, with benevolent old bachelor John Jarndyce in place of
benevolent old bachelor Mr Brownlow” (359). Slater is right, here. But, just as in Oliver
Twist the emphasis of this happy society covers over the uneasiness of the end, so too, in
Bleak House, does Esther’s happy ending attempt to elide all of the unhappiness suffered
along the way. In this way, Esther’s narrative both counters and yet mirrors the third-
person narrative. Both of them tell stories that necessitate subsuming other possibilities.
But Esther’s narrative creates a vision of the familial that opposes the legal narrative of
legitimacy. In Esther’s narrative, as with Darwin, “what ever lives inherits.”
14

13
Replacing the disease of small-pox that creates the narrative turning point (Lady
Dedlock, learning of Esther’s illness, seeks her out.) Of course, Esther’s scars are her
only inheritance from the father, as the small pox is said to originate from Tom All
Alone’s and the pauper graveyard: from the father’s grave to the daughter’s face.

14
Gillian Beer, discussing the biological truth inherent in evolutionary theory.

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Chapter 3
Operating outside the Law: The Ghost Mother in Jane Eyre and Mary Barton

Oliver Twist and Bleak House secure the bastard child’s inheritance by
uncovering the dead mother and re-telling her story. In both, the mother is central to the
family line and necessary to re-claiming the proper place of the orphan child. In
Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, we will see that securing Jane’s “proper” place is the work
of the novel, but it is work that must be done by keeping the mother’s plot at bay.
Necessary to securing Jane’s inheritance and independence, the mother’s story is also
dangerous as it simultaneously threatens to place Jane in the workhouse. Jane must then
invoke not the dead mother, but a ghost mother—the moon. And Elizabeth Gaskell’s
eponymous heroine Mary Barton will follow in her stead, calling on a ghost mother not to
fix her place, but to fix her plot. In both Jane Eyre and Mary Barton, the appearance of a
ghost mother provides, not (as in Bleak House) a story to tell, but the power to tell it.

I. Jane Eyre: Abandoning the Dead-Mother Frame
“Of the novels included here, Jane Eyre has the least relation to its time.” So
Kathleen Tillotson begins her final chapter of her study of the Novels of the Eighteen-
Forties. She continues: “Such social commentary as it may offer is oblique, limited,
incidental. It is both in purpose and effect primarily a novel of the inner life, not of man
in his social relations; it maps a private world” (257). In her assessment of the novel
Tillotson was perhaps guided by Brontë’s own assertion: “I cannot write books handling
the topics of the day; it is of no use trying” (qtd. in Tillotson, 115). However, as critics

99
from Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, to Adrienne Rich, to Gayatri Spivak, and to Susan
Fraiman have noted, it is most powerfully in this mapping of a “private world” that the
novel’s social commentary occurs.
1
Indeed, Jane Eyre like Oliver Twist seems to be both
asking and attempting to answer the question: What do we do with these people? By the
time we get to Jane Eyre, the melodramatic dead mother/bastard hero frame has been left
behind, but the underlying concerns about familial relations, identity, and class still reside
at the heart of the novel.
Although she waits until Chapter X to tell us definitively, the reader may quickly
be sure that “this is not to be a regular autobiography” (70). Rather than beginning with
her birth or her family history, that is, Jane opens in the middle of the day, describing
what is supposed to be her common treatment in the Reed household. Having been found
reading in her hiding place, Jane is confronted by her cousin, John Reed:
‘You have no business to take out books; you are a dependent, mamma says; you
have no money; your father left you none; you ought to beg, and not live here
with gentlemen’s children like us, and eat the same meals we do, and wear clothes
at our mamma’s expense. Now, I’ll teach you to rummage my book-shelves; for
they are mine; all the house belongs to me, or will do in a few years.’ (8)

Here, we get the first account of Jane’s origins, as it stems from John’s explanation of her
current class/economic status. Jane is a “dependent” because she has “no money”
because her “father left [her] none.” Jane’s patrimony plot is thus denied within the first
chapter of the novel (just as John’s is confirmed: “they are all mine; all the house belongs

1
Spivak, it should be noted, provides a critique of the novel as functioning within and
reifying an imperialist ideology, rather than celebrating it as a feminist achievement. She
writes that we must consider the ways in which Jane’s success as a “feminist individualist
heroine” comes at the cost of the violently othered (native) Bertha. Fraiman reads the
othered mad-woman as the working-class Grace Poole.

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to me, or will do”). As a result, Jane should be “begging” (qualifying her for the
workhouse), rather than eating “the same meals” or “wear[ing] clothes” at the Reeds’
expense. This concern over begging, eating, and clothing that John instantly associates
with Jane’s class status (she should not be with “gentlemen’s children”) will arise again
and again. We learn all too quickly that the problem isn’t simply that Jane is an orphan,
but that she is poor. Bessie, cautioning Jane after her fight with John, says, “‘You ought
to be aware, Miss, that you are under obligations to Mrs. Reed: she keeps you: if she were
to turn you off, you would have to go to the poorhouse” (10).
Although this mention of the poorhouse and Jane’s proximity to it is the first of
the novel, they are familiar to Jane: “I had nothing to say to these words: they were not
new to me: my very first recollections of existence included hints of the same kind. This
reproach of my dependence had become a vague sing-song in my ear; very painful and
crushing, but only half intelligible” (10). Jane has clearly been made aware of her
dependent status, but seems to barely understand it. Indeed, as part of her “rebellion”
against John Reed she proclaims, “Why master?” and insists that she is not a servant.
Miss Abbot quickly underscores Jane’s precarious social status: “‘No; you are less than a
servant, for you do nothing for your keep’” (9).
2

Jane’s rebellion (celebrated by Gilbert and Gubar as a feminist revolt and, in a
more tempered fashion, by Fraiman as class resistance) leads not only to her
imprisonment in the Red Room and her fear and resulting fit of seeing the ghost of her

2
Abbot’s statement, apparently the first of its kind, clearly makes an impression. When
Jane is speaking with the apothecary, Mr. Lloyd, she tells him “It is not my house, sir;
and Abbot says I have less right to be here than a servant” (19).

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dead Uncle Reed, it also leads to the decision (on the apparently well-intentioned advice
of the apothecary) to send Jane to school and to a story about her parents. Abbot speaks
to Bessie: “ ‘Missis was, she dared say, glad enough to get rid of such a tiresome, ill-
conditioned child” (21). Jane goes on to report the overheard conversation:
On that same occasion I learned, for the first time, from Miss Abbot’s
communications to Bessie, that my father had been a poor clergyman; that my
mother had married him against the wishes of her friends, who considered the
match beneath her; that my grandfather Reed was so irritated at her disobedience,
he cut her off without a shilling; that after my mother and father had been married
a year, the latter caught the typhus fever while visiting among the poor of a large
manufacturing town where his curacy was situated, and where that disease was
then prevalent; that my mother took the infection from him, and both died within
a month of each other. (21)

Susan Fraiman summarizes: “in life, death, and burial, then, Jane’s parents bear witness
to the stress of filth and crowding on working people in new industrial towns” (96).
Fraiman is correct in noting the allusion to the social conditions of industrial towns at the
time. However, I think that it is also worth noting Jane’s complete absence from this
story. When and where was she born? How did she survive a fever to which both her
parents succumbed? No “let me kiss the child and die” this.
3
In this revelation of what
should be Jane’s origins, she is nowhere. In Jane’s re-telling, she has already absented
herself from this story.
Bessie, who is both a better storyteller and reader than most of the people around
her, responds appropriately to the story of an orphaned child, as she “sighed and said,
‘Poor Miss Jane is to be pitied, too, Abbot.’” Abbot agrees: “if she were a nice, pretty
child, one might compassionate her forlornness; but one really cannot care for such a

3
As Agnes Fleming says of Oliver Twist.

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little toad as that.”
4
The conversation then quickly turns to how well Miss Georgiana
would fill the role of the sadly orphaned child, “with her long curls and her blue eyes,”
but these musing are abruptly cut-off by Miss Abbot’s interjection “Bessie, I could fancy
a Welsh rabbit for supper.’” Bessie responds, “‘So, could I – with a roast onion. Come
we’ll go down.’” And Jane the narrator completes the scene: “They went.” As noted
earlier, the melodrama of the orphan plot seems to have been completely emptied out,
even of the orphan. Not only is Jane not present in this story, she is completely absent in
the response to it, and nearly absent as a narrator. Following the story, the exchange
between Bessie and Abbot is all dialogue. The “They went” is the only addition that
narrator Jane makes. Jane provides no reflection on this scene and almost never mentions
her parents except to say that she has none.
5
Unlike Oliver, and later Esther Summerson,
Jane never longs for the absent mother. Indeed, Jane’s parentage is a story that she often
suppresses, distancing herself from the conditions of working poverty in which her
parents first lived and then died.
Fraiman reads Jane’s summary and her “They went” as a sign of longing of a
different sort. She suggests that here Jane longs to be amidst and among the working-
class women. Jane’s ability to recount Miss Abbot’s desire for “welsh rabbit” may seem

4
“Orphaned, poor, and plain” is how Helen Moglen describes Jane, quickly highlighting
the three traits that lead to Jane’s outcasting (1976). The suggestion is clear in the novel
that had she been only two of these three, she would have fit in well at Gateshead.

5
Indeed, the only time that she calls on them directly is as a threat to Mrs. Reed. “What
would uncle Reed say to you, if he were alive? My uncle Reed is in heaven, and can see
all you do and think; and so can papa and mamma: they know how you shut me up all
day long, and how you wish me dead.’” Even here, though, the “papa and mamma” are
subordinated to the uncle. (22-3)

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as no more “than dashes of local color thrown in by the older, hindsighted narrator. But
they also suggest to [Fraiman] the strained attention of a young, desiring Jane” (98). This
desire, though, in Fraiman’s analysis, is suggestive of “her wishful presence, her position
adjacent to but outside such companionable exchanges, that is indicated by the terse
report: ‘They went’ (22). Jane’s initial relation to working as well as leisured society is
one of the lonely spy or eavesdropper, frequently the object but rarely the subject of
conversation” (98).
Jane’s careful attention to this moment is, as Fraiman argues, a sign of her desire
for more of some kind. But I think that this moment more clearly signals her
simultaneous and competing desires to hear about her parents (and, via them, herself) but
also to distance herself from their condition; to maintain the space between her and the
workhouse. She and Oliver seem closer together than ever and she cannot risk his
beginning. Indeed, the central distinction between Oliver and Jane would seem to be his
bastardy, as she is a legitimate child. However, the idea of bastardy seems to haunt
readings of her, as Fraiman notes: “Adele makes explicit the illegitimacy so often
associated with Jane” (109). But Jane is clearly “set apart,” (in the description of our
other bastard, Esther), perhaps the result of being the poorer relation. Indeed, as her
mother was disowned upon her marriage to Jane’s father, neither she nor Jane could
inherit anything, placing them in the position of bastards outside the line of patrilineal
inheritance; they are illegitimated. This illegitimation comes, of course, as a result of the
mother’s marriage, of the mother’s becoming “one” with a poor clergyman who, himself,

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lives among the working poor. What Jane Eyre thus hints at, but never says outright, is
that bastardy is contagious—proximity to the workhouse can make it catching.

1. Re-Telling Family
Just as Bessie and Miss Abbot tell the story only to re-tell it in a more dramatic
fashion, better allowing for generic conventions (including the substitution of the more
pleasing heroine, Miss Georgiana), and then immediately forget it, so too, will Jane allow
the occasional narrative of her parents to enter the text, only to cast the emotional valence
elsewhere (onto another heroine), eventually leaving her parents behind, dead and buried
in the pauper graveyard. Over the course of the novel, we see that themes already
familiar from Oliver Twist (and that will be re-played in Bleak House) are addressed, but
played out differently. Jane must, as with Oliver before her and Esther after her, tell a
story outside of patrilineal inheritance, but Jane cannot bring the mother back to do so. If
Oliver ran the risk of the mother’s name undoing his own, so, too, does Jane. Rather than
bringing the mother back, then, and eliding her name (as in Oliver), Jane tells a story that
re-routes family plots, embracing a world of Uncles and alternative forms of kinship.
Eileen Cleere provides, of course, the most complete discussion of the role of the
uncle in the nineteenth-century imagination in her fantastic Avuncularism: Capitalism,
Patriarchy, and Nineteenth-Century English Culture. Cleere argues that inheritance from
an uncle destabilizes, disrupts the linear (vertical) path of patrilineage:
The money [the ‘conveniently childless and aged uncle’] bestows is different
from the paternal legacy because it is profit of successful capitalist enterprise
rather than hereditary wealth. As Rossetti has explained, money from ‘my uncle’
is a departure from familial economic systems: such wealth is not subject to the

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vertical laws of patrilineage, and can transform the economic identity of even the
most insignificant younger sons and impoverished, orphan daughters. (4)

By operating outside of the traditional modes of inheritance—distributing wealth that has
been created rather than inherited; wealth that is not subject to entailments or other
traditional forms of primogeniture; and distributing it from uncle to nephew, or uncle to
niece, bypassing both the father and choosing an heir—money from the uncle undoes not
only patrilineage but also the nuclear family.
Novels that provide an uncle plot are frequently classed: they provide an
“imagining [of] a striving middle-class British family transformed by colonial wealth, an
economic boon that enters the family horizontally” (Cleere 4). And it was, of course,
precisely in part due to the increasing wealth of the British middle class that agitation for
changes in inheritance and marriage law came about. Middle class patriarchs, that is, had
little desire to see the wealth they distributed to their daughters automatically and legally
stripped from them upon marriage. Thus, while the childless, unmarried, rich uncle
bypasses the traditional lines of legal inheritance (and the father with them), his plot also
lays the groundwork for modes of inheritance that changes in the law would allow.
In Jane Eyre, while the mother and father’s story is often suppressed, Jane’s
narrative foregrounds three uncles, one on her mother’s side and two on her father’s.
6
As
Cleere summarizes:
During her childhood at Gateshead, Jane’s imprisonment in Uncle Reed’s death-
chamber initiates her first emancipation from her cruel Aunt and cousins; after
leaving Thornfield Hall, Jane is able to enter Moor House on terms of equality
with its also orphaned siblings due to her Uncle Rivers’s recent demise; and, most

6
John Reed is Jane’s mother’s brother; John Eyre is Jane’s father’s brother; and Mr.
Rivers is Jane’s father’s brother-in-law. There are a lot of Johns in Jane’s family.

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significantly, the death of Uncle Eyre, a Madeira wine merchant, leaves Jane with
a modest inheritance that allows her to marry Rochester with financial
independence. (5)

What Cleere does not mention in this brief, but illuminating summary, is that Jane’s
Uncle Reed is also the person who saved Jane from a childhood in the workhouse, “raised
by the law.” Although the house to which he removed her (his own) was unkind to Jane,
she makes it quite clear that it is preferable to her than being poor. When the apothecary
Mr. Lloyd asks Jane if she doesn’t have any other relatives with whom she could live
(after she has told him her story of mistreatment), narrator Jane steps in to illuminate
child Jane’s reflections: “Poverty looks grim to grown people; still more so to children:
they have not much idea of industrious, working, respectable poverty; they think of the
word only as connected with ragged clothes, scanty food, fireless grates, rude manners,
and debasing vices: poverty for me was synonymous with degradation” (20). After
contemplating, Jane replies: “‘No; I should not like to belong to poor people.’” “‘Not
even if they were kind to you?’” asks Mr. Lloyd. Jane responds:
I shook my head: I could not see how poor people had the means of being kind;
and then to learn to speak like them, to adopt their manners, to be uneducated, to
grow up like one of the poor women I saw sometimes nursing their children or
washing their clothes at the cottage doors of the village of Gateshead: no, I was
not heroic enough to purchase liberty at the price of caste. (20)

It is in these moments—when Jane contemplates whether she’d rather be treated well or
kept well; when she respond with a silent shake of her head “no” to the idea of being
poor—that we see Jane’s silent dismissal of her poorer relations (which will, by the end
of the novel, only include her parents). It is also in Jane’s choice that we see the largest
problem with Fraiman’s suggestion that Jane identifies with and desires to be part of the

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group of working class women. Certainly, we can see Jane’s situation as a commentary
on the position of these women, but that is not the same as suggesting that Jane identifies
herself with them, nor that she wants to be among them. Indeed, throughout the novel,
Jane’s attempt to relieve herself of her liminal position, constantly “set part,” takes the
form of setting herself apart in different ways.
Jane’s uncles keep her from the workhouse, get her out of the mistress plot (as,
having received a letter from Jane telling him of her upcoming marriage, John Eyre sends
Richard Mason back to stop the wedding), keep her from starving to death, and, finally,
provide her with an inheritance that ensures her independence. But Jane unsettles the
family plot in other ways. She also creates new forms of kinship, outside the family line.
If Spivak considers the novel as a constant working through of the family/counter-family
dyad, to show how Jane moves over the course of the novel from a member of the
illegitimate counter-family to member of the family-in-law (at the expense of Bertha
Mason)
7
, we can consider how Jane’s narrative actually continually undermines these
“families” that are legally legitimate, instead privileging a view of kinship that does not
depend upon the law for its legitimacy.
In the days following Jane and Rochester’s first meeting, he promises to explain
to Jane Adéle’s place in his household. However, his narrative seems concerned more
with recounting his affair with Céline Varens. Adéle’s history gets strangely lost here—

7
Bertha Mason is the name Spivak uses. It seems to follow in a line of critics that refer
to Bertha by her maiden name even though this is not a name that the character actually
bears in the time-frame of the novel; it is only in Rochester’s retrospective narrations that
such a name is used. To continue its use seems to suppress, as Rochester and Jane might
both prefer, the fact that Bertha is Edward’s wife—she is Bertha Rochester.

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the story of his affair and Céline’s betrayal takes over. Of Adéle, only a quick: “But
unluckily the Varens, six months before, had given me this fillete Adéle; who she
affirmed was my daughter, and perhaps she may be, though I see no proofs of such grim
paternity written in her countenance. Pilot is more like me than she” (123-4). After
claiming a better chance of having fathered his dog than his daughter, Rochester finishes:
“but now you know that it is the illegitimate offspring of a French opera-girl, you will
perhaps think differently of your post and protégée” and desire a new post (124). But
Jane quickly denies the dismissal he attributes to her: “‘No. Adéle is not answerable for
either her mother’s faults or yours. I have a regard for her, and now that I know she is, in
a sense, parentless—forsaken by her mother and disowned by you, sir—I shall cling
closer to her than before’” (124). Here Jane defends the illegitimate child, placed much
as she was (as an unwanted poor relation) and remains (as a governess), and likens
Rochester’s refusal of paternity to a “disowning.” This operates in both senses of the
word: Rochester refuses to “own” Adéle, to acknowledge that she is his own; but by
refusing to legitimate her, he necessarily also places her outside of the line of inheritance.
Jane follows this recitation with an interesting reflection of her own. Considering
this conversation and others, Jane confesses: “I felt at times as if he were my relation,
rather than my master” (125). Of course, this cannot but recall Miss Abbot’s shock at
Jane’s striking John Reed—“[her] benefactress’s son! [Her] young master” (9).
“‘Master! How is he my master? Am I a servant?’” young Jane replies indignantly (9).
No, she is less than a servant, for she does nothing to earn her keep is Abbot’s reply. In
Abbot’s positioning of Jane, we can see how she substitutes the familial relationship—

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that of cousinship—with that of master and subservient. Here, Jane performs the
opposite substitution, rejecting the master/servant relationship and blood-family bonds,
by claiming “relation” to Rochester. Doing so, of course, not only defies traditional
definitions of family, it also elevates Jane (above even John). Jane consistently traces a
line of kinship based not on blood or class connection, but based on likeness of feeling,
similarity of thought. Rochester echoes this definition, taking the place usually held by
the mother, when he tells Jane that she is his “likeness” (217). Here, likeness—usually
invoked to demonstrate filial bonds, genetic heredity—is re-routed to create a kinship
outside of the nuclear family. And it repeats a move Jane makes earlier. When Jane is
meeting with “the Sybil,” the fortune-teller whom Rochester has disguised himself as and
whom Jane twice addresses as “mother,” Rochester suddenly quits his act, with costume
still on. “That will do,” he says, “So far I have governed myself thoroughly. I have acted
as I inwardly swore I would act; but farther might try me beyond my strength. Rise, Miss
Eyre: leave me; ‘the play is played out’” (172). “Where was I?” wonders Jane. “Did I
wake or sleep? Had I been dreaming? Did I dream still? The old woman’s voice had
changed: her accent, her gesture, and all were familiar to me as my own face in a glass—
as the speech of my own tongue” (172, emphasis added). Jane deploys the narrative
device of mirroring usually suggestive of the mother/daughter relationship to highlight
the link between Rochester and herself. Jane reinvests the notion of likeness and
mirroring, re-writing kinship against the expected parent/child narrative.
Jane’s re-writing of kinship occurs again with the Rivers family. Even before the
discovery of her inheritance (part of which is non-economic—Jane “inherits” a family),

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Jane claims a kinship with Mary and Diana Rivers. And after her inheritance, Jane
claims a closer kinship, not that of cousin, but of sister, claiming a sisterhood based not
on fact, but on love. As St. John tells Jane the remainder of her story (the part of her
story she inherits with her uncle’s wealth), Jane asks him: “ ‘You three, then, are my
cousins; half our blood on each side flows from the same source?’ ‘We are cousins; yes,”
St. John replies (328). Jane “surveys” him. “It seemed I had found a brother: one I could
be proud of,—one I could love; and two sisters whose qualities were such that, when I
knew them as mere strangers, they had inspired me with genuine affection and
admiration.” Jane immediately moves from the fact of her familial relationship with the
Rivers children (“cousins” asked and answered; affirmed twice—“We are” and “yes”) to
a relationship that she creates: “It seemed I had found a brother…and two sisters.” Jane
cements this relationship by immediately declaring that she will split her inheritance
among the four of them equally; Jane’s restructuring of this family may resemble a mock-
nuclear family, but its difference is signaled in the inheritance—all inherit equally.
But of course, all is not happy here. If Jane has the power to create a brother and
two sisters out of three cousins, St. John threatens to turn Jane into a wife. The power
that is, to create one relationship out of another has the possibility to work both ways.
And this is only one sign of trouble. Jane’s resistance of the traditional family plot—due
to her place outside of it—does not always cohere (as no narrative can; all have points of
resistance). Jane’s is made uneasy in large part due to the plots that she suppresses. The
first of these, as referenced earlier, is that of her parentage and her proximity to the
workhouse.

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2. The Dead Mother Returns

Jane’s continual refusal of curiosity regarding her parents’ story and her own is an
attempt, I have argued, to distance herself from the workhouse and the pauper graveyard.
However, although Jane does not long for her dead mother (such longing would only
affirm her proximity to poverty) in the way of Oliver or Esther (or, as we will see, as do
Mary Barton and Caroline Helstone), she cannot suppress her entirely. In the two links to
Jane’s inheritance plot (the letter from her uncle Eyre, first introduced by Aunt Reed, and
in St. John’s summary of his discovery of Jane as the inheriting niece of John Eyre),
Jane’s mother is brought back into the story.
As Jane sits beside her dying aunt, Mrs. Reed invokes the dead mother, placing
her at the center of Jane’s story. Mrs. Reed, when asked why she so hated her niece,
replies: “I had a dislike to her mother always; for she was my husband’s only sister, and a
great favourite with him: he opposed the family’s disowning her when she made her low
marriage; and when news came of her death, he wept like a simpleton. He would send
for the baby; though I entreated him rather to put it out to nurse and pay for its
maintenance” (197). Here, Mrs. Reed places Jane’s mother at the center of her
explanation of not only Jane’s placement in the house (her uncle loved her mother, and so
took Jane in in memory his sister), but her place in it (her aunt, jealous of this affection,
turned her hatred from mother to daughter). The emotional response usually attributed to
the child in retrospection is here given to the uncle (“he wept like a simpleton”), as his
grief replaces Jane’s. And we see in Jane’s treatment a reactivation of her mother’s story.
Uncle Reed brings Jane back to the family home (the home in which her mother grew up,

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although only upon a re-reading is this evident), undoing the disowning/displacement of
Jane’s mother, only to have Jane, after his death, cast aside again, displaced from the
home and family (first by being separated from them and then by being removed to
Lowood).
And in Mrs. Reed’s response to John Eyre’s letter (advising Mrs. Reed that he
would like to adopt Jane as his legal heir), Mrs. Reed creates the narrative that she so
wished was true in life: she turns Jane into a dead baby. “‘I said I was sorry for his
disappointment, but Jane Eyre was dead: she had died of typhus fever at Lowood,’” Mrs.
Reed reports to Jane (204). In Mrs. Reed’s story, she cements Jane as the proper child of
her parents, dying from their disease and buried in an unmarked grave.
When the next letter regarding Jane’s uncle comes, it is to announce his death and
her inheritance in one. But, again, before the letter’s contents can be revealed, a story
must be told, as Jane’s identity must be pieced together (this time due in part to her
deception in taking an alias, Jane Elliott) by St. John. But, St. John, rather than simply
asking Jane if she is actually Jane Eyre, rather than Jane Elliott, insists on catching her
out, telling her own story to her as if it were the story of a stranger.
8
And he begins,
again, with her parents’ marriage and their death. Jane can suppress the story of her
origins again and again, but the novel continually insists upon its return; it is a narrative
necessary to securing her independence.

8
St. John initially comes to Jane’s cottage in order to hear her story from her, but he says,
“on reflection, I find the matter will be better managed by assuming the narrator’s part,
and converting you into a listener” (323). St. John thus assumes narratorial control,
turning Jane not only into “a listener,” but also into the object of her own story. He thus
presents himself as a narrative threat, as is the Rochester of the novel’s middle section.
Jane, accordingly, flees both, seizing control of her narrative and her plot.

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Once St. John has delivered the news of Jane’s monetary inheritance, he continues
with the second thing she has inherited—cousins. As he begins this story, however, he
once again goes back to the mother. “‘My mother’s name was Eyre; she had two
brothers; one a clergyman, who married Miss Jane Reed, of Gateshead; the other, John
Eyre, Esq., merchant, late of Funchal, Madeira” (327). St. John begins not only with his
mother, as the relative at the center of the connection between himself and Jane, but he
also names Jane’s mother, rather than her father (despite the fact that it is Jane’s father
through whom they draw their blood tie). Jane’s father is nowhere named. We, of
course, know his surname, but his given name is under erasure. It is the mother, St.
John’s story suggests, who matters, the one for whom Jane is named.
The mother thus remains central to Jane’s plot of inheritance, even if the
emotional valence of her narrative has been emptied out. Jane’s narrative attempts to
keep this plot at bay, but it cannot suppress it entirely. Jane’s narrative resonates with
both that of Oliver Twist and Bleak House, but its differences from them are even more
suggestive. By re-casting the emotional investment in the novel away from the mother,
Jane highlights the other narrative that she also attempts to cover—her role not as the
orphan, but as the potential mother of the bastard child. We find that Jane’s plot
resembles less and less that of Oliver and Esther, but is, instead, a reiteration of the
mother’s plot: Jane is very nearly Agnes Fleming. This, of course, is the second of the
two narratives that threatens to place Jane in the workhouse.

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3. Becoming the (M)other

During her stay at Thornfield, Jane dreams over and over of carrying a child that
she cannot put down. She first introduces these dreams to the reader by taking us back in
time:
When I was a little girl, only six years old, I, one night, heard Bessie Leaven say
to Martha Abbot that she had been dreaming about a little child; and that to dream
of children was a sure sign of trouble, either, to one’s self or one’s kin. The
saying might have worn out of my memory, had not a circumstance immediately
followed which served indelibly to fix it there. The next day Bessie was sent for
home to the deathbed of her little sister. (187)

Here, Jane does the narrative work of the revenant mother, by taking us back in time,
telling us a story that occurred before the time frame of the novel. And in it, she connects
dreams of children with death. Jane then goes on to tell us the import of this recollection:
“Of late I had often recalled this saying and this incident; for during the past week
scarcely a night had gone over my couch that had not brought with it a dream of an
infant” (187). The tenor of the dreams change (“It was a wailing child this night, and a
laughing one the next: now it nestled close to me, and now it ran from me”), but
“whatever mood the apparition evinced, whatever aspect it wore, it failed not for seven
successive nights to meet [Jane] the moment” she fell asleep (187). “I did not like this
iteration of one idea,” Jane says, “this strange recurrence of one image, and I grew
nervous as bedtime approached, and the hour of the vision drew near” (188). And,
finally, “It was from companionship with this baby-phantom I had been roused on that
moonlight night when I heard the cry; and it was on the afternoon of the day following I
was summoned downstairs by a message that some one wanted me in Mrs. Fairfax’s
room” (188).

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Jane has buried her lead. She provides us with the entire episode of being awoken
by a cry (it is when Mr. Mason has been attacked in the night) with no mention of her
dreams of children (which apparently had been occurring for seven straight nights).
Jane’s story, then, takes us back in time in two ways: it, as mentioned above, takes us
back to Jane’s overhearing of Bessie’s story (before the beginning of the novel); and it
also takes us back to before Bertha’s (as it will turn out to be) attack of Richard Mason.
But by presenting her story of the dreams after this attack, Jane elides the connection
between her dream and Bertha, and instead emphasizes the summons that follows. The
summons that she receives is, of course, the news of Mrs. Reed’s illness and imminent
death. Thus, Jane’s recollection of Bessie’s story allows her to present the dreams as if
they are omens of the coming death in Jane’s family. Jane presents them, that is, as
presentiments of death, inviting us to take them figuratively rather than literally, as if
their being dreams were not invitation enough.
And critics of the novel have been happy to do so. In perhaps the most thoughtful
of the considerations of Jane’s dreams, Margaret Homans suggests that Jane is both child
and (surrogate) parent; the dreams are suggestive of a split/double self. Homans
acknowledges that in the dreams, themselves, “Jane is clearly distinct from the child, and
the trouble external to her,” but, she argues, “it is also following this series of dreams that
she is called to the sickbed of Mrs. Reed, who deliriously dreams aloud of Jane as a
troublesome child: ‘I have had more trouble with that child than any one would believe.
Such a burden to be left on my hands’ (chap. 21)” (90). Homans thus suggests that while
Jane is conscious of being the adult in the dreams, Mrs. Reed’s description of Jane as a

116
child implicitly links Jane with the baby (“wailing” one night, “running away” the next)
and so Jane is a divided self. She continues, “Splitting the sense of self between child
and adult, these dreams question and break down the boundary between subject and
object, between self and other” (90). The problem, Homans suggests, is not the self that
Jane as child represents (a “bad animal,” a “picture of passion”) or even that this self is
difficult to settle, but that she sees herself as divided at all:
That there are several equally plausible readings suggests that what generates the
sense of danger is not the particular part of the self the child represents, but that
such a representation or division of the self into parts occurs at all. The dreams
give Jane an intimation of what it would be like to become other than herself. (92)

Homans thus links this division in self in Jane’s dreams to the divide that she already
anticipates between herself as Jane Eyre and her coming self as Jane Rochester. The
latter of whom, of course, as the successor of the former, would be the child to which
Jane Eyre has given birth: “childbirth enters the figurative structure of the novel as a way
of describing the danger that the self will become something other than itself” (90).
While Homans is concerned here with the symbolic, we can also consider the ways in
which Jane’s fears of becoming Mrs. Rochester entail very real ways of becoming
“other” than herself—she will, as Homans notes, be an object, the wife, of Mr. Rochester
and lose, under coverture, her legal status as individual, independent woman. “When
Jane Eyre contemplates giving metaphorical birth to Mrs. Rochester, she justifiably fears
that the law will cause the ‘child’ to replace and supersede the ‘mother’” (Homans 98).
Jane’s hesitance about marriage is quite evident within the text. Not only must
Jane fight Rochester’s attempt to turn her into an adorned object, she also must fight off
his narrative control, as he begins to dominate, more and more, the role of storyteller. As

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we come to the eve of the wedding, narrator Jane tells us: “The month of courtship had
wasted: its very last hours were being numbered. There was no putting off the day that
advanced—the bridal day” (234). Rather than anticipation, Jane’s description of the
passing of time and the approaching wedding is one of dread, which is followed by
uncertainty. Echoing Homan’s depiction of Jane Eyre as mother to Jane Rochester, Jane
proclaims of her new name: “Mrs. Rochester! She did not exist: she would not be born til
to-morrow, some time after eight o’clock A.M.; and I would wait to be assured she had
come into the world alive before I assigned to her all that property” (235). Jane clearly
realizes what is at legal stake in her marrying. She will, as she makes clear, become a
different person in the eyes of the law. With Jane’s invocation of the birth metaphor, she
alludes both to the narrative of the dead baby (“wait to be assured she had come into the
world alive”)
9
and to inheritance (“before I assigned to her all that property”). Of course,
as a soon-to-be married woman, Jane is about to cede her right to will away anything.
Jane’s many and obvious fears of marriage and its limitations lead John Kucich to
remark: “It is no accident that the charade in the middle of Jane Eyre uses the syllable
‘Bride’ to form the word ‘Bridewell’” (65); to be married is to risk imprisonment, as the
caged Bertha knows all too well. To be unmarried, however, as we will see, is to run a
different kind of risk.

9
And, of course, she doesn’t, as the wedding is called off due to the existence of
Rochester’s previous (and still very much alive) wife. So Jane is part of yet another
narrative in which she is figuratively the dead baby.

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4. “However tired were my arms”: Bearing the child under the New Poor Law

Homans reading of Jane’s dreams thus opens up productive ways of considering
what’s at stake in Jane’s division of self, but I would like to think about Jane’s dreams
differently. Not because I think that Homans is incorrect in her reading, but simply
because I think that this reading is incomplete. That is, by reading Jane’s dreams only as
a reflection of her own identity—she is both adult and child—we cover over the
possibility of reading them as genuine fears of a quite real possibility: that Jane will bear
a child that she, by law, cannot put down.
When Jane returns from her visit to her aunt Reed’s, she does so with the growing
certainty that Mr. Rochester will marry Blanche Ingram, a certainty that Rochester, of
course, does little to diminish (and, in fact, plays with), in the hopes of making Jane
jealous. One night, as Jane’s grief over what she feels must be her imminent departure,
forever, from Thornfield, she is moved to speak, and tell Mr. Rochester that “if God had
gifted [her] with some beauty and much wealth, [she] should have made it as hard for
[him] to leave [her], as it is now for [her] to leave him” (216). “It is my spirit that
addresses your spirit,” Jane tells Mr. Rochester, as an “equal.” When Mr. Rochester
gather Jane to him, and affirms their equality, Jane forestalls him, “and yet not so; for you
are a married man—or as good as a married man, and wed to one inferior to you—to one
with whom you have no sympathy—whom I do not believe you truly love; for I have
seen and heard you sneer at her. I would scorn such a union: therefore I am better than
you—let me go!’” (216) Jane uses her dismissal of Mr. Rochester’s engagement to
Blanche Ingram as the basis on which to find herself (morally) superior to him, her

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economic master. However, within this description is, of course, a true account of Mr.
Rochester’s current state. Although ostensibly about Blanche, writer Jane is also
describing Rochester’s marriage to Bertha. He is a married man; wed to one that he and
the novel suggest is “inferior” to him; “one with whom [he] has no sympathy”; and one at
whom, by the end of what should have been Jane and Edward’s wedding day, she will
have “seen and heard [him] sneer.” Thus, in between Jane’s two descriptions of her
dreams of infants in the novel, she quite accurately summarizes Rochester’s state. He is a
married man. She is, then, a woman being courted as a mistress. Of course, this
narrative—and its possible implications—will remain buried until her wedding day.
As Jane waits for Rochester to return (outside, in the moonlight) the night before
their wedding, she tells us, “Something had happened which I could not comprehend”
and “Stay till he comes, reader; and, when I disclose my secret to him, you shall share the
confidence” (235). Narrator Jane mixes time quite strangely here—as if character Jane
were telling Rochester and us her secret at once. What Jane has to tell is that in the
middle of the night, some “form,” some “shape” that “seemed…a woman, tall and large,”
but that belonged to no one that Jane knows, not even “that strange woman, Grace
Poole”—a form that resembles nothing so closely that Jane can think of as “the
Vampyre”—entered her bedchamber and rent Jane’s wedding veil in “two halves” (242-
3). What precedes this event though, are two more dreams in which Jane carries a child
of which she cannot let go. She recounts the first:
I continued also the wish to be with you, and experienced a strange, regretful
consciousness of some barrier dividing us. During all my first sleep I was
following the windings of an unknown road; total obscurity environed me; rain
pelted me; I was burdened with the charge of a little child: a very small creature,

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too young and feeble to walk, and which shivered in my cold arms and wailed
piteously in my ear. I thought, sir, that you were on the road a long way before
me; and I strained every nerve to overtake you, and made effort on effort to utter
your name and entreat you to stop—but my movements were fettered; and my
voice still died away inarticulate; while you, I felt, withdrew farther and farther
every moment. (240)

And the second:
I dreamt another dream, sir: that Thornfield hall was a dreary ruin, the retreat of
bats and owls.[…] Wrapped up in a shawl, I still carried the unknown little child:
I might not lay it down anywhere, however tired were my arms—however much
its weight impeded my progress, I must retain it. I heard the gallop of a horse at a
distance on the road: I was sure it was you; and you were departing for many
years, and for a distant country. I climbed the thin wall with frantic, perilous
haste, eager to catch one glimpse of you from the top: the stones rolled from
under my feet, the ivy branches I grasped gave way, the child clung round my
neck in terror, and almost strangled me: at last I gained the summit. […] I sat
down on the narrow ledge; I hushed the scared infant in my lap: you turned in
angle of the road; I bent forward to take a last look; the wall crumbled; I was
shaken; the child rolled from my knee, I lost my balance, fell, and woke. (241)

In the first dream, Jane is the walking mother, following an “unknown” road, exposed to
the elements, attempting to close the gap between she and the father. This is, of course,
Agnes’s story; or, it is the part of it we know. As she walked and walked and walked
(until her shoes were worn through), attempting to make it to the grave of Oliver’s father,
but never arriving there, so Jane walks endlessly always attempting to “overtake”
Rochester, but with the gap widening instead of decreasing. Agnes, too, was burdened by
the child she was “carrying,” just as Jane’s movements are “fettered” by hers, both of
them unable to leave it behind. In the second dream, the burden of the child becomes
clear (“I might not lay it down anywhere, however tired were my arms—however much it
impeded my progress”), as does the threat of death. Every step Jane takes upward is
dangerous (“the stones rolled from under my feet,” and “the ivy branches…gave way”);

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the child nearly strangles her; and she cannot stand at the top for the wind. Finally, of
course, in her attempt to catch one last glimpse of Rochester, both the infant and Jane fall
from the wall (assumedly to their deaths).
By considering Jane’s dreams as manifestations of writer Jane’s fears of what
might have actually befallen her had Rochester succeeded in his original aim (to get Jane
to live with him “as if” married, either with her consent or without her knowledge), we
can see the connections between Jane’s plot and that of our other wandering mothers
(Agnes, Honoria, and Esther) and the burden they all bear in wake of the New Poor Law.
Of course, originally published in 1847, Jane Eyre comes in the wake of the “Little Poor
Law” of 1844, which undid much of the work of the 1834 law, due to public outcry. The
new bastardy clauses were seen, as I have discussed earlier, as unfairly burdening women
while simultaneously encouraging men to act without regard for any moral or economic
responsibility. Indeed, the census reports for both England and Wales suggest that there
was an increase in illegitimate births from 1830-1840. U.R. Henriques reports that the
“illegitimate births in 1830 averaged one in twenty in England, and one in thirteen in
Wales. In 1840 they averaged one in seventeen in England, and one in ten in Wales”
(122).
10
Thus, while the stated aim of the changes to the New Poor Law was to reduce
the population of bastards, and so reduce the economic strain on the parish, their chosen
route of fixing financial responsibility solely on the mother did not work. Not only did

10
These statistics are far from reliable, but it seems that if anything, the bastardy number
were worse than reported in 1840, so the suggested trend of increasing bastardy rates still
holds true: “As Bishop Phillpotts pointed out, before 1834 the mother had been obliged to
proclaim her child to get parish relief. Now her aim was to avoid exposure, and her
temptation to keep the child from baptism.” (Henriques 124)

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the rates of bastardy not decrease, they actually increased after the law took effect. The
bastardy clauses were thus both unpopular, but also counter-effective. And, ostensibly,
with the changes in 1844, public opinion won over the concerns of the Poor Law
Commissioners:
The ‘Little Poor Law’ of 1844 took affiliation and maintenance out of Poor Law
hands. It forbade parish or union officers to intervene in maintenance actions so
long as the mother was alive and capable. It became a misdemeanor to attempt to
induce persons to marry by threat of a maintenance order. Instead, the mother
obtained a direct action in Petty Sessions against the father, subject to the
provision of corroborative evidence of paternity. The amount recoverable was
limited to ten shillings for the midwife, and two shillings and six pence weekly
until the child was thirteen. (Henriques 119)

Under the new provisions, unwed mothers could legally obtain assistance from the
child’s father, no longer burdened with the sole responsibility of maintenance.
However, Henriques suggests that “few working-class women were likely,
without the intervention of the parish officers, to start their own action before the
magistrates. The majority were probably unaware of their right to do so; and when they
became destitute the parish had no remedy” (119). Following the changes in 1844,
women were unlikely to attempt file charges against the putative father, and the parish
was disallowed from doing so on their behalf. Therefore, the burden still largely fell to
the mother. By thinking about Jane’s dreams in connection with Bertha—the one whose
actions awaken Jane twice from her dreams about infants and which provide the occasion
for Jane’s relation of these dreams—we can consider the ways in which Jane’s dreams
are directly connected to Rochester’s married state and so to her own risk of becoming an
unwed mother, that “old story” that Agnes represents. Under this reading, Bessie’s
suggestion that a dream of an infant is always a bad omen, a sign of trouble or death to

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one’s self or one’s kin is made real in a different way than Jane suggests. Here, it echoes
the narrative of the death of the mother—to be a mother is to die.
This possibility, Jane’s position in “that other Victorian plot” (as Susan Fraiman,
in a nod to Steven Marcus, dubs it), is constantly covered over in the text through Jane’s
connection of her dreams with presentiments of Aunt Reed’s death and her terror of the
Vampyre. When the risk that Jane runs is made explicit—when it is announced during
her wedding ceremony that Mr. Rochester has “a wife now living,” a fact that “the law
recognises” even if he does not—she is quick to relocate. She does provide, of course,
her own grief-stricken and horrified reaction, as well as Mr. Rochester’s demands that
she stay with him anyway. But these are, within the space of a day, safely removed
through the intervention of another mother/child scene.
In this dream, of course, we have the ghost-mother intervention of the novel, an
inversion of Jane’s previous dreams in which she was the one bearing a child. Margaret
Homans links these dreams, suggesting that Jane’s early dreams “as the unwilling mother
surrogate for a difficult child-self are complemented two nights later by a third dream in
which the child is Jane and the mother is a benign spirit. The threat presented in the first
two dreams seems to have been at once fulfilled and avoided” (92). Homans thus argues
that the threat of the divided self, particularly of being the self that will soon replaced by
an “other” is here safely removed as Jane fulfills once more the role of daughter. And
here is where our different readings of Jane’s infant dreams come together. For both
Homans reading of the threatening divided self, overcome by the stranger that is Mrs.
Rochester and my reading of Jane’s very real threat of becoming an unwed mother,

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subject to the new poor laws bastardy clauses, and of her being unwillingly placed within
the plot of the wandering woman, are alleviated by the appearance of the moon.
As Jane bids Rochester farewell for the evening (and “for ever” as “Despair
add[s]”), a series of ellipses mark a gap in time, rather than an official chapter break. The
next section begins: “That night I never thought to sleep; but a slumber fell on me as soon
as I lay down in bed” (272). Jane dreams that she “lay in the red-room at Gateshead,” the
room where she was sent when she was the “picture of passion” and was so frightened
that she had a “species of fit.” Her mind “impressed with strange fears,” Jane notes that
“in this vision”:
The light that long ago had struck me into syncope…seemed glidingly to
mount the wall, and tremblingly to pause in the centre of the obscured
ceiling. I lifted up my head to look: the roof resolved to clouds, high and
dim; the gleam was such as the moon imparts to vapours she is about to
sever. I watched her come – watched with the strangest anticipation; as
though some word of doom were to be written on her disk. She broke
forth as never moon yet burst from cloud…then, not a moon, but a white
human form shone in the azure, inclining a glorious brow earthward. It
gazed and gazed and gazed on me. It spoke to my spirit: immeasurably
distant was the tone, yet so near, it whispered in my heart – ‘My daughter,
flee temptation!’

‘Mother, I will.’ (272)

Thus, in a moment of crisis – not only a present crisis, but a past one remembered, as
well – a mother comes and stirs Jane to both resolution and action.
Although this moon mother gives Jane the encouragement she needs to leave, she
is a strange figure. Recalling “the light that long ago had struck [her] into syncope,”
Jane’s night vision links these two crises. In this, her later vision, all of Jane’s fears in
the red-room come to fulfillment. Here, the answer to her question “was it the moon?” is

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“yes.” Here, no aperture in the blinds is necessary as her dream vision replaces the
physical roof with “clouds, high and dim.” “The gleam was such as the moon imparts to
vapours she is about to sever” seems to suggest that we are still in the realm of simile –
the gleam is like that of the moon. But, with the next sentence, it is the moon: “I watched
her come – watched with the strangest anticipation.” Considering the young Jane’s very
real and quite rational fear of any such “vision from another world,” her current
anticipation seems strange, indeed. The visual then cedes to the textual as Jane looks for
meaning to be inscribed in the moon. As she waits, textuality is left behind, as is –
gradually – the female pronoun just as, oddly, the inhuman moon becomes a human form.
Thus, as the vision figure seems to get closer to Jane (the moon/form comes, breaks forth,
and inclines earthward), she and we are simultaneously distanced from it (we move from
“she” to “it” and from a known object – the moon – to an unknown form). The close
relationship suggested by the end of the paragraph (and the vision): “My daughter, flee
temptation!” is thus startling, and yet the gender of the speaker is still unknown (to the
reader, not to Jane). We have to wait for Jane’s reply “Mother, I will,” before we know
that the first speaker is female. The paragraph following Jane’s response begins: “So I
answered after I had waked from the trance-like dream” (272). Jane’s response, then,
does not occur within the vision, but after it is over, delaying even further the
identification of the moon-mother, a mother that is strange not only in her appearance,
but also made strange by Jane’s use of “it,” the pronoun used for corpses. This, then, is
the ghostly apparition that the young Jane had so feared.

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This brief moment, colored by moonlight, amidst troubled dreams, and marked
twice as “strange,” not only provides the impetus for Jane to act, it also marks the
definitive shift back to Jane as narrator (“So I answered after I had waked from the
trance-like dream,” the next paragraph begins) in a chapter that has previously been
dominated by Rochester’s intradiegetic narrative of how he met and married Bertha.
Indeed, Rochester follows one metadiegtetic narrative with another. After recounting his
marriage to Bertha and the ten years that followed (all in the form of “external
analepsis”), he actually re-tells Jane and his story from his perspective, replacing Jane as
the consciousness through which we see their relationship (266-8). By doing so, of
course, Rochester is not only taking over the role of narrator, he is also attempting to
control the plot (as he has been for some time). Here, he is trying to fix Jane as the
protagonist, not of the marriage plot, but of the “mistress” plot. Their back-and-forth
struggle of whether or not Jane should stay with him is mirrored by a struggle for
narrative control, a battle of who is telling the right story. By recounting her trance-like
dream, however, and reacting to it, Jane is decidedly in narrative control for the rest of
the novel (with the exception of St. John’s brief attempt to take over, in his move to place
Jane in his marriage plot, an attempt that another moon scene will allow Jane to thwart).
The next paragraph is filled with Jane’s actions as she prepares to leave before anyone
else awakens and, of course, her leaving is the first step toward discovering her living
relatives. But it is also a near coming-true of the young Jane’s earlier plans to run away,
or “of never eating or drinking more, and letting myself die” as her departure leads her to

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starvation and near death. Nature as mother may grant Jane narrative control and
independence, but it does not promise a warm embrace.

II. Mary Barton: The Heroine without an Inheritance (Plot)

While Oliver, Esther, and Jane all face different plots, they are all placed, in the
end, comfortably within the middle class. And this placement, as we have seen, comes in
part from telling the mother’s story. But as we turn to Mary Barton, our second novel
that returns the ghost mother, it allows us to consider: What can the dead mother do for
the working poor? When there is no possibility of inheritance, not because our orphans
are women, but because they are working class and there is nothing to inherit? If
Esther’s narrative creates an alternative and anti-patriarchal inheritance plot that is
outside the law, it does so by working alongside and against the legal inheritance plot
represented (and mangled) by Chancery. Jane Eyre’s story, with its turn to uncles and
kinship, similarly invests in family inheritance plots in order to re-route them. Mary,
however, it is quite clear, has no such plot available to her, even one to which the society
of the novel can create only to deny her access. By drawing on the dead-mother plot,
Mary Barton thus exposes the tensions between the economic classes, and highlighting
ways in which plots of inheritance are decidedly and problematically classed. In Mary
Barton, the ghost mother therefore places Mary not within a narrative of inheritance, but
within a narrative of legal power.
Two pivotal scenes of near-madness in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton connect
the mother’s ghostly return with legal testimony. In this novel, the appearance of the

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ghost mother stirs our protagonist on when she must do the near impossible: perform the
law. Mary’s testimony, however, is a rejection of the law’s demands as she refuses to
mark the innocence of her lover by testifying to the guilt of her father. In the end,
testimony is replaced by a better legal story, that of alibi.

1. Personal/Political Plot(s)

Mary Barton, published anonymously in 1848, was Gaskell’s first novel and has
been often lauded as the finest of the industrial novels. This is heavily qualified praise, of
course, as it seems to say more about the genre of industrial novel, rather than Gaskell’s
novel itself. As John Lucas writes: “If we turn directly from Kinglsey and Disraeli’s
novels to Mary Barton, we encounter so striking a difference that we shall be tempted to
overpraise Mrs. Gaskell’s first novel” (161). For “Mrs. Gaskell is much superior to the
company she keeps as a social-problem novelist. Ever her failings are proof of merits
that her nearest rivals, Kingsley and Disraeli, quite lack” (141). Raymond Williams
praises similarly: “Mary Barton, particularly in its early chapters, is the most moving
response in literature to the industrial suffering of the 1840s” (87). The standard problem
with the industrial novels is that they attempt to address the grievous economic and social
woes created by industrialization only to fail to offer any realizable solution. The
conclusion to the majority of the novels entails representing the closing of the breach
between classes via the standard narrative of a marriage. Just as two people come to
know, sympathize with, and understand one another, so, too, must the working and

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manufacturing classes. However, as critics have suggested again and again, such a tidy
conclusion offers no solution for the “real” world.
Gaskell, Lucas and Williams suggest, is the most successful primarily due to her
careful and sympathetic portrayal of working-class life. As Williams says, “The really
impressive thing about the book is the intensity of the effort to record, in its own terms,
the feel of everyday life in the working-class homes” (87). The gathering of the Wilson
and Barton families for tea in the beginning of the novel, the careful description of both
the Bartons’ and Alice Wilson’s home, and the scene in which George Wilson and John
Barton attempt to aid the dying Davenport all convey the author’s sympathetic spirit.
“The structure of feeling from which Mary Barton begins,” Williams argues, “is, then, a
combination of sympathetic observation and of a largely successful attempt at
imaginative identification” (88).
“If it had continued in this way,” he continues, “it might have been a great novel
of its kind” (88). And this is where the novel has been regarded as demonstrating its
author’s growing pains. Mary Barton, Kathleen Tillotson tell us, is “not a great novel; it
is the first novel of a great novelist.” The main problem, the criticism goes, is that the
novel is fundamentally split between John Barton’s political plot and Mary’s romance
plot. And that, as the author leaves her initial hero behind in favor of her heroine, so, too,
does she leave behind her sympathy and attempt to identify with the working class. As
Rosemarie Bodenheimer suggests, the novel has:
Conventionally been seen to fall into two unequally serious parts: the ‘tragic’
story of John Barton’s vision of social injustice, with its consequent action and
suffering, and the ‘conventionally romantic’ story of his daughter Mary’s love
triangle, with her exciting mission to save her working-class lover from

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conviction for a crime committed by her father against her would-be seducer.
(196)

She continues: “It has been assumed almost universally that these plots are only
circumstantially connected, that the important contribution of the novel is the portrait of
John Barton, and that the story of Mary relies directly on romantic patterns and is
designed to entertain the reading public.”
Gaskell’s assertion in her letters that her original title was John Barton does little
to counteract this perception. Williams and Lucas both suggest that this turn is the source
of the novel’s failure, and Ruth Bernard Yeazell echoes them, in her “Why Political
Novels Have Heroines,” as she asks: “What sort of ‘cover’… does the innocent heroine
provide?” Yeazell, as with Williams and Lucas, suggests that by moving the heroine to
the center and the working-class hero to the periphery, the “social and political anxieties
are contained—and eased—in the narrative of…courtship” (127).
11
However, Rosemarie
Bodenheimer, Hilary M. Schor, Elsie B. Michie, and Jonathan Grossman have providing
readings against this version of the novel’s failings. They all successfully demonstrate
that even a brief summary of the novel suggests how inextricably linked the political plot

11
While Williams and Lucas both argue that Gaskell’s turn to Mary provides the novelist
a “way out” of the political plot, they differ slightly in their assessment of why she makes
this turn. Williams suggests that Gaskell does so after the possibility of sympathizing
and identifying with her working-class hero is gone, erased by his murder of Harry
Carson. Williams suggests that Gaskell turns her “hero” into a murderer as a
“dramatization” and working through “of the fear of violence [from the oppressed
working classes] which was widespread among the upper and middle classes at the time”
(90). Lucas, differently, suggests that Gaskell actually represents the crisis so well, that
the complexity of the problem overwhelms her. He writes: “she finds the murder
necessary, because by means of it she can simplify a complexity which has become too
terrific for her to accept consciously. Her mind shuts out the awareness of a muddle so
colossal that it defeats the explanations of her social creeds” (173).

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and the romance plot are—the assassination, the climax of the political plot is mis-read
by most of the characters in the novel (including, particularly, the detectives) as a result
of the romance plot. And perhaps more importantly, the criticism that dismisses Mary’s
romance plot as either a sop to popular tastes (if read as the result merely of Gaskell’s
publisher’s insistence that she change the title) or as an easy way of avoiding the very
problems that the first half of her novel raise implicitly dismisses it as therefore un-
political. However, the narrator makes it immediately apparent that Mary’s primary
interest in Harry Carson is his class; by marrying him, she would be a lady and her father
would no longer have to work. As Hilary Schor writes: “Mary’s romance, then, is not
just her passive status as ‘love interest,’ but her plot for social improvement” (20). Harry
Carson, as Mary’s suitor and the son of Mr. Carson, mill owner, thus becomes the crux of
both the romance plot and the political plot, highlighting the link between personal and
socio-economic relations. As Jonathan Grossman argues: “it is clearly a mistake ever to
think of these strands as separate, as if the tale could be divided between them, and ‘John
Barton,’ the novel’s working title, somehow separable from ‘Mary Barton,’ the novel’s
final title” (107). Throughout, he suggests, “Gaskell intentionally juxtaposes personal
and political, individual relations and socioindustrial ones, insisting on their
inseparability and carefully plotting a story organized toward their crossover” (107).
While Mary’s plot is thus positioned as no less political because primarily
domestic than John’s, the crossing point between the plots is Harry Carson. Because of
the on-going strikes, both workers and master have time on their hands. Of course, for
the working classes, this “free” time means that they also starve. For Harry Carson,

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however, it means that he has more time to pursue Mary. As Elsie Michie notes, “The
narrator of Mary Barton emphasizes that Carson’s economic and erotic predations take
place simultaneously and seem almost to reinforce one another” (116). Harry creates the
narrative transition point—in chapter fifteen, it is by following him that we get from John
Barton (at a meeting between masters and men) to Mary (169) and his death provides for
the plot crossing point. Despite Mr. Carson’s immediate assumption that the striking
workers are to blame for his son’s murder (“It’s the doing of those damned turnouts”), the
police superintendent denies the political plot: “I imagine not,” he tells Mr. Carson and
then goes on to relate how Jem Wilson, Mary’s working-class suitor, having previously
been caught in an altercation with Harry (in the same place) has already been arrested for
the murder. Thus, the legal story prioritizes the romance plot as the narrative of revenge
and murder; it replaces the murderous, political and economically disadvantaged John
Barton with the jealous, spurned lover Jem Wilson. And it provides for the entrance of
Mary Barton’s ghost mother.

2. Memory’s Ghosts

As news of Jem Wilson’s arrest spreads to Mary, she falls into a type of psychic
frenzy and the stage is set for the return of our revenant-mother figure. After
“staggering” home, where “no welcome, no love, no sympathising tears awaited her,” the
narrator enters Mary’s thoughts: “Oh! she was going mad; and for awhile she lay
outwardly still, but with the pulses careering through her head with wild vehemence”
(222, 224). And then, we’re told, “came a strange forgetfulness of the present, in thought

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of the long-past times; —of those days when she hid her face on her mother’s pitying,
loving bosom” and it seems as if “once more the dead were alive” (231). Mary’s
temporary descent into madness, or hysteria, or nostalgic denial, her memory of a time
“when mother was alive, and he was not a murderer,”
12
takes us back in time, before the
beginning of the novel. Back to the sympathy that the novel suggests is the only mode of
reconciliation and which the novel’s critics suggest its author leaves behind; a sympathy
that is linked to the mother. Suddenly these memories shift from “remembering, to
wandering, unconnected thought, and thence to sleep” (231). “Yes!” Mary Barton’s
extradiegetic, omniscient narrator interjects, temporarily abandoning the focalization
through Mary: “it was sleep, though in that strange posture, on that hard, cold bed” (231).
The next paragraph begins: “She suddenly wakened! Clear and wide awake!
Some noise had startled her from sleep” (231). With still-“flushed cheeks,” Mary listens.
We’re told it’s after midnight, but the moon (our haunting figure from Jane Eyre) shines
through “the unshuttered window, making the room almost as light as day, in its cold
ghastly radiance” (231). At the sound of a knock at the door “a strange feeling crept over
Mary’s heart, as if something spiritual were near; as if the dead, so lately present in her
dreams, were yet gliding and hovering round her, with their dim, dread forms” (231).
With madness, moonlight, and living dead, we have a “strange,” gothic scene. Suddenly,
a voice “in the accents of her mother’s voice” breaks in: “ “Mary! Mary! Open the
door!’” (231-2):

12
The pronoun “he,” although referencing Jem, opens up the possibility of covering
Mary’s father, the actual murderer.

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There, against the moonlight, stood a form, so closely resembling her dead
mother, that Mary never doubted the identity, but exclaiming (as if she
were a terrified child, secure of safety when near the protecting care of its
parent):

‘O mother! mother! you are come at last?’ she threw herself, or rather fell
into the trembling arms of her long-lost, unrecognized aunt, Esther. (232)

This line closes the chapter, as the narrator once more steps back from Mary’s viewpoint,
revealing the identity of the “form.” Mary’s greeting is “strangely like” her sad
exclamation to her mother’s corpse in the beginning of the novel: “Oh, mother! mother,
are you really dead?” (22) Unable, or unwilling, to follow Mary into unconsciousness, the
narrator’s abrupt abandonment of focalization marks the disjunction of the scene as we
become unusually aware of the difference and distance between character and narrator,
gothic and realism, past and present. We—unlike the unconscious Mary—end the
chapter knowing that Esther, not Mary’s dead mother, has come to the door.
13

Mary’s aunt Esther, her mother’s sister, is “long-lost” in two ways. She
disappeared years ago, with no trace left behind. But she has also, long ago, lost her
virtue. She is a working woman who makes real John Barton’s fear that by taking to the
streets to work (entering public life) women risk becoming street walkers. She is, in
many ways, Mary’s precursor, having lived a failed romance plot. She ran away with a
man, had a baby girl, was abandoned, and took to prostitution to feed her ailing child (a
child who dies anyway). In order to mask this story, Esther leaves her soiled clothes

13
Although we end the chapter knowing that Mary’s dead mother has not returned, the
scene is written so it seems as if it’s a “real” possibility, especially given the narrator’s
informing us of Esther’s version of events (including her intention to visit Mary) only
after Mary falls into her arms. For a fuller discussion of this scene, see Hilary Schor’s
chapter.

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behind and dresses up as a housewife. The next chapter is primarily focalized through
Esther (although the narrator opens it with an equally strong presence – “I must go back a
little”), revealing via analepsis how she came to be on Mary’s doorstep and catching us
up to the present moment in the narrative. In a strange use of ellipsis, the actual moment
of the meeting – and Mary’s greeting of Esther as mother – is left out of Esther’s
narrative. Thus, although we experience with Mary her initial misrecognition of her aunt
and her desire for her mother’s presence, we do not get Esther’s reaction to hearing a girl
that reminds Esther of her own long-dead daughter calling her “mother.”
Although Esther does occupy the point of focalization for much of the next
chapter, what she brings with her provides Mary with the actual truth as to the murder of
Henry Carson, revealing her father as the culprit. Esther, we are told, has found the piece
of paper that was used as wadding in the gun that shot Harry Carson. She, following the
same plot as the police, believes that the evidence lays in the handwriting; it is Jem’s, an
old valentine he wrote to Mary. Mary, however, knows that the paper itself—not the
writing on it—is the actual evidence. She has, just chapters earlier, copied a Chartist
poem on it for her father and given it to him. Jonathan Grossman, when discussing this
scene, hits upon the oddity of this piece of evidence. Why, his analysis provokes us to
wonder, didn’t John Barton use the piece of paper with the “X” on it, the random drawing
of which marked him as an assassin, the piece torn from the caricature of the working
men that Harry Carson drew? (117) But the choice of the valentine does something else.
It not only, that is, serves as a neat plot device, providing for Mary’s understanding of her
father’s guilt and Jem’s innocence in one. It also combines, yet again, the romantic and

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the political. Although the valentine was from Jem, the fact that the piece ends up
facilitating the murder of Harry, highlights the love triangle. And it’s suggestive of the
buried plot. As Bodenheimer argues, “John Barton ‘ought’ to be murdering Harry
Carson because Carson has sexual designs upon his daughter; and Barton’s sensitivity to
that issue has been carefully created through his antipathy to factory work for women.
But the plot is divided in such a way that he does not know the sexual sins of his victim”
(207). John denies Esther when she approaches him with her concerns about Mary (“she
listens as I listened,” she says) because when he hears the name, he thinks of his dead
wife, not his living daughter, and spurns Esther in anger, blaming her for his wife’s death
(from grief at Esther’s departure)
14
. It is Jem who hears Esther’s story and so Jem who
must take responsibility for the knowledge of Mary’s romance plot.
The knowledge that this mother-figure transmits to Mary thus stirs her to action
(establishing an alibi for the innocent Jem, while hiding her father’s culpability) and
places her firmly in the center of the rest of the narrative, providing her with a degree of
narrative control. But it is a painful chapter, not only because Mary is forced to realize
that her father is a murderer and that he has abandoned all responsibility for his actions,
but also because of the reader’s awareness of the difference between Mary’s and Esther’s
knowledge and our own. We know—because we have heard—Esther’s story; Mary does
not. And we know—because we have heard—what Mary now knows (that her father is
the murderer, not Jem); Esther does not. As the narrator continuously moves back and

14
This inability to distinguish between Marys is a problem resolved early by the mother’s
death. And it is only John’s remembrance of this death, provoked by Esther’s
appearance, that brings it back.

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forth between Esther’s thoughts and Mary’s, the reader knows about, but cannot correct,
the misunderstandings. Thus, the disjunction of the earlier scene is continued in its
culmination.
The abrupt shift between the third-person narrator observing Mary and sharing
her thoughts is mirrored by the shift in genre and time. And these shifts move us from
what could be read as John Barton’s story to one that is certainly Mary’s and from the
realm of union and economic politics to that of criminal law. Belying the legal erasure of
women, it will be Mary that secures Jem’s alibi; Mary that destroys the evidence of her
father’s guilt, refusing the legal system of identifying the innocent by finding the guilty;
and Mary’s testimony that refuses the story her courtroom audience expects to hear.
Mary, as her father has attempted to do before her, thus sets out on the road, in order to
speak publicly about an injustice. As Hilary Schor argues, “the heroine’s movement
toward speech, her ability to ‘own’ her own story, is as significant as her father’s need to
have his petition heard. Woman’s speech was a politically charged question for
contemporary readers, and the novel’s critique of the restricted lives of women makes her
speech itself a political act” (15).
Of course, her obligation to know both plots and how they’ve become confused;
her need to tell the “truth” as the courtroom would have it (that she’s in love with Jem,
not Harry), but not the “whole truth” that the novel conveys (that her father is the
murderer) drives her mad, once again. Upon leaving the witness stand, she falls ill,
rambling uncontrollably. Although she will eventually recover, Mary’s contracting of
her “heroine’s disease” effectively ends her role as active heroine; she will follow Jem’s

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lead for the rest of the novel (and his lead will take them to Canada).
15
The onset of
Mary’s madness has been read in different ways,
16
but it is my argument that this descent
into temporary madness links the trial scene with that of the revenant mother, both in
being the two times in the novel when Mary not only feels as if, but actually says aloud
that she is going mad, but also by bracketing her role as active heroine in performing the
law.
What the ghost mothers of Jane Eyre and Mary Barton thus make clear is that the
dead mother has the power to move the heroine—to place her on the road; to change the
course of her plot. But what Mary’s plot makes clear that Esther’s and Jane’s (as a result
of being self-narrated) elide, is that the end of the narrative is the end of narrative
possibility. The value in the mother is not only that she moves the heroine elsewhere, but
that she has the power—if only momentarily—to take us back in time, to disrupt the
linear movement towards the end. That is, despite Peter Brook’s famous declaration that
all reading is reading for the end, Mary Barton shows us that female heroines, as perhaps
with female readers, must write and read for the middle.

15
Of the end and the removal to Canada, Raymond Williams writes: “there could be no
more devastating conclusion” (91).

16
Jonathan Grossman provides the most thorough reading of this scene. Under his
analysis, Mary’s temporary madness is a result of having to maintain two different types
of narrative: that of the novel and that of the courtroom. He writes that it is a
“dramatization of the logical breakdown that occurs when Gaskell mixes together two
different narrative epistemologies—the law court’s and the novel’s. The result is a crisis
of narration.” (122)

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Chapter 4
“Two people can never literally be as one”: The Matrimonial Causes Act of 1857,
Shirley, and the Problem of the Married Mother

Oliver Twist, Bleak House, Jane Eyre, and Mary Barton in various ways present
the problems posed by the unwed mother. In Oliver and Esther’s stories, the unwed
mother is also unknown, and her identity must be recovered before a place can be fixed
for the bastard child. In Mary Barton, Aunt Esther’s role in a marriage turned mistress
plot places her in a liminal state, ghosting her within the text. And Jane Eyre runs the
risk of becoming the unwed mother. While each of the novels focus on recovering the
mother’s plot (or getting out of it, in the case of Jane) in order to tell the hero/ine’s story,
they also implicitly suggest that the problem is the state of being both mother and
unmarried. One can be one or the other, these novels tell us, but never both.
Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley suggests that the married mother presents problems of
her own. This novel, with the mother neither single nor dead, still relies upon the missing
mother plot, absenting her from the heroine’s life for eighteen years. However, the
daughter knows her mother’s story and knows the mother’s name as well as her own.
There is no question, it seems, of identity. But as dissimilar as the mother’s plot may
initially seem, the novel still seeks to reunite mother and daughter and their reunion takes
a gothic turn, occurring amidst the fever of the sickroom, after midnight with the
moonlight streaming in, behind a locked door. What is the gothic mother’s return doing
in such a novel? What does the mother’s plot provide? In Shirley, we find that the
mother’s return highlights the link between the mother’s plot and the marriage plot, a link
that is present in the other three novels featuring heroines, but one that is often implicit.

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And through the narrative work of explaining away the mother’s absence, the novel
closes the gap between the bastardy clauses of The New Poor Law and the approaching
debates over what will eventually become The Matrimonial Causes Act of 1857.

I. Critical Reception: The Novel’s Many Strands

If Jane Eyre calls upon nature as mother, replacing the story of her own origins
with a new narrative of a motherly moon who guides her on her way, Caroline Helstone,
the secret heroine of Shirley, undoes this substitution of moon for mother, nature for
parent, space in place of an embrace. Shirley, the novel’s apparently eponymous heroine
and an orphan herself, echoes Jane and rejects the demands of society and church by
choosing to say instead “with [her] mother Eve, in these days called Nature. I love her –
undying, mighty being! She is taking me to her bosom, and showing me her heart” (304).
But Caroline, when encouraged by Shirley to “Hush! You will see her and feel as I do,”
thinks of a different mother: “Shirley had mentioned the word ‘mother:’ that word
suggested to Caroline’s imagination not the might and mystical parent of Shirley’s
visions, but a gentle human form – the form she ascribed to her own mother; unknown,
unloved, but not unlonged for” (305). The thought of the mother brings the “longing of
her childhood” in to “fill her soul again” (305).
Caroline’s longing for a mother from whom she has long been parted, her
provocation to think and feel once more as she did as child, seems to place her safely
among our other literary orphans. However, like Esther Summerson, Caroline Helstone’s
mother is still alive. Unlike Esther Summerson, Caroline is aware of this fact from the

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beginning, as is the reader. “Her connexions are soon explained,” the narrator tells us.
“She was the child of parents separated soon after her birth, in consequence of
disagreement of disposition” (74). Caroline’s father, the brother of Mr. Helstone, the
uncle with whom Caroline now lives, apparently “rendered his wife unhappy” and “died
comparatively young.” “Caroline had never know her mother, as she was taken from her
in infancy, and had not since seen her” (74). This is all the explanation that is provided
until the mention of a “mother,” by her friend Shirley, stirs Caroline to think of her past.
In the scene above, Caroline considers her most cherished aspiration: “Oh, that the day
would come when she would remember her child! Oh, that I might know her, and
knowing, love her!” Caroline’s desire for her mother has apparently led her to create a
small fantasy story, which “relit suddenly,” “glowed warm in her heart:”
That her mother might come some happy day, and send for her to her presence –
look upon her fondly with loving eyes, and say to her tenderly, in a sweet voice: -
‘Caroline, my child, I have a home for you: you shall live with me. All the love
you have needed, and not tasted, from infancy, I have saved for you carefully.
Come! it shall cherish you now.” (305)

In Caroline’s fantastical reunion, in which the mother physically embodies fondness,
tenderness, sweetness, and love, the success of the reunion is represented in terms of
space: to be reunited with the mother is to have a home, a place. And it is a place where
not only is one loved, but the love of a lifetime has been stored, saved to make up for past
need—it can fill the emptiness of the mother’s early absence.
And it is this dream, this desire for something to meet every need, to provide both
a home and care, that connects Caroline’s plot with the many strands of the novel.
Shirley responds in many ways to the two novels of the previous chapter. As her second

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published novel (1849), it represents Brontë’s response to the criticism of Jane Eyre.
And, as a condition-of-England novel, it also speaks to the concerns of Mary Barton.
1

Set in 1811-1812, Shirley presents a world divided, where everyone is in competition for
a limited amount of resources. As Drew Lamonica neatly summarizes:
The world of Shirley is racked by divisions and confrontations on all fronts:
England is at war with France; Whigs clash with Tories over the government’s
handling of the war effort; the Church collides with Dissenters (enacted in the
Whitsuntide procession); Luddites challenge the masters, who are determined to
replace man with machine. (162)

To this list of divisions, we can add the heroines’ struggle against the constraints of their
gender, each wanting to find work and value in the world. As the Napoleonic Wars
remain primarily in the background—the fact of war is used as a frame for the novel and
sets up the primary conditions of the tension between Robert Moore, millowner, and the
workers who resent and attempt to destroy the machines he brings in to increase his
production while lowering labor costs—the central concerns of the novel are the tensions

1
Shirley is somewhat overlooked in discussions of the Condition-of-England novels (or
the Industrial Novels), as it is set in the past, rather than dealing directly with
contemporary issues, most specifically the Chartist movement. Indeed, Catherine
Gallagher does not include it in her great The Industrial Reformation of English Fiction.
However, in Brontë’s presentation of the Luddite riots, the connections between past and
present are quite clear.

The link between Shirley and Gaskell’s Mary Barton were not, however, overlooked at
the time of publication. William Howitt, in a review for the Standard of Freedom, wrote:
“We observe in Shirley evidence traces of the author’s admiration for Mary Barton. The
impression is clear and strong, but does not for a moment detract from the originality of
Shirley” 10 Nov 1849 (Allot 134). Shirley, unlike Mary Barton, takes the perspective of
the mill owner, Robert Moore, rather than the workers, making it in some ways more
similar to Gaskell’ later North and South (1855). Sally Shuttleworth and Helene Moglen
make perhaps the most generous arguments regarding Shirley’s classification as an
industrial novel in Charlotte Brontë and Victorian Psychology and Charlotte Brontë: The
Self Conceived, respectively.

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at home, tensions that reflect a world at war with itself. But, as the above description
reveals, the plots are many, and connections beyond the conflict they all reveal are few.
Shirley, a novel written in the third person, with an ironic, rather than confiding
narrator, represents a sharp shift from the focused plot as guided by the voice of Jane. It
seems to be an attempt at the breadth of novels by Thackeray and Scott, in perhaps a
response to the criticism of the limitations of Jane Eyre and also an attempt to silence the
suggestions that Currer Bell was a woman.
2
However, if these were Brontë’s intentions
(for it is difficult to know),
3
she did not succeed. The plot fails to cohere and her
reviewers were more certain, for the most part, than ever that Currer Bell was a woman.
This is not to say that the novel was poorly reviewed as a whole, but it did not find as
much admiration as her first. And the fault seems primarily to be found in its multiple
plots, its “loose construction,” as Miriam Allot describes it (20). “Currer Bell,” an
anonymous reviewer for the Critic writes, “has even gone rather into the opposite
extreme [of Jane Eyre], and the incidents of his story are, if any thing, too much
crowded” (73). George Henry Lewes, in one of the sharpest critiques of the novel, stated
flatly: “It is not a picture; but a portfolio of random sketches for one or more pictures”

2
It should be noted that although there were central criticism of Jane Eyre shared by
most of its reviewers, it was widely admired and these criticisms were rarely held against
judgment of the novel as a whole. (Elizabeth Rigby’s famous review decrying Jane Eyre
is the most notable exception. (Quarterly Review Dec 1848; Allot 105)

3
Although, she does frequently in her letters express her dismay that reviewers are
claiming her as a woman. For example, in one she asks: “Why can they not be content to
take Currer Bell for a man? I imagined, mistakenly, it now appears, that Shirley bore
fewer traces of a female hand than Jane Eyre; that I have misjudged disappoints me a
little, though I cannot exactly see where the error lies” (Allot 73).

144
(218). His judgment: “The book may be laid down at any chapter, and almost any
chapter might be omitted” (Lewes 217). Even the primarily positive reviews admitted to
plot problems: “Story there is none in Shirley,” Albany Fonblanque admits point-blank
(Allot 127). But he argues, “The principal continuous interest of the book attaches to two
brothers and two girls with whom they are in love” and “So instinct with life, however,
are these [scenes] … That the want of continuity in the tale is pardoned” (128).
And here Fonblanque hits upon the source of one of the two primary strands of
criticism that the novel has generated more recently. They, too, revolve around a lack of
coherence, but are more concerned with the disjunction between the problems raised in
the novel and the “solutions” provided. Shirley, that is, with its “two heroines” who
question why their place in the world is so limited by their gender, end up ensconced
safely in a double marriage plot by the novel’s end. The workers, aligned in many ways
with Caroline Helstone—the middle-class heroine who is similarly, it suggests, limited
by the world around her—end the novel with work, but the heroine does not.
4
The “loose
construction” has been noted, but addressed, at least by Susan Gubar and Sandra Gilbert,
as a point of interest. “Brontë does fail to create an integrated, coherent novel,” they
admit, but, they go on to suggest, “this very failure illuminates crucial issues” (233). By

4
The labor plot is, of course, the other source of much of the novel’s criticism. E.P.
Thompson writes: “Shirley’s limitations, of course, are in the treatment of the Luddites
and their sympathisers. But the novel remains a true expression of the middle-class
myth” (561). Shirley is similar to both Mary Barton and Gaskell’s North and South in
that the only solution it can seem to offer is sympathy and understanding, a solution that
occurs at the individual, rather than social level. And so criticism of the novel’s labor
plot “solution” recall discussions of Gaskell. Of course, Brontë and Gaskell held very
different political beliefs and so much of the Brontë criticism also addresses her Toryism
and the effect of it that they read into the novel. This stance on the novel seems to me to
be an oversimplification.

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imitating Scott and Thackeray, Brontë shows that she “has become enmeshed in
essentially the same male-dominated structures that imprison the characters in all her
books” (233). “Shirley is worth studying, then, not only because, like Brontë’s other
works, it voices her sometimes overt and sometimes secret rejection of patriarchy, but
because its very failure defines the contradictions experienced by women writing within
male literary culture” (Gubar 233). Reading the novel’s failure to cohere as a sign that
Brontë was constrained by the very structures that limit both Shirley and Caroline
provides an interesting way of thinking about the problems the novel has provided for its
readers, both then and now.
For, just as clearly as some of her early readers found the lack of a coherent and
focused plot frustrating, so too have later readers been frustrated by the seeming lack of
coherence between the problem the plot presents for its heroines (what to do with this
time on their hands?) and its solution (marry them off). The novel that is, begins with
interesting feminist promise, only to end where apparently all novels with heroines do: in
marriage. But the course of love is far from smooth in the novel, which leads to some
interesting tensions. Judith Mitchell attributes this disjunction to Brontë’s own growing
disillusionment: “Shirley, the weakest of Brontë’s mature novels, reveals her growing
awareness that Cinderella stories—such as that of Jane Eyre and Rochester—don’t
happen” (58). Mitchell concludes: “the overriding ‘message’ of Shirley, insofar as there
is one, is the message of the prevalent mood: that love is painful (you can die from it, in
fact), that marriage is difficult but the alternative is terrible, that women can only wait
passively for love to come to them” (60). The idea that marriage is bad, but old maidism

146
is worse, doesn’t make for much of a happy ending for those readers looking for a
heroine plot outside of the marriage plot.
5
Drew Lamonica highlights the problem:
“From a feminist perspective, it is perhaps the most frustrating aspect of Shirley that only
the working-class petitioners are granted ‘a place and occupation’” (178). Part of the
frustration comes from the fact that of Brontë’s novels, Shirley poses the clearest
“demand for middle-class female occupation outside the domestic sphere.” “But,”
Lamonica acknowledges, “Shirley is also the only one of Charlotte’s novels in which the
heroine who seeks employment never achieves it” (178).
Marriage takes the place of an occupation, as the novel’s heroines (Caroline
Helstone and Shirley Keeldar) marry and the novel looks to their resolved marriage plots
to provide a sense of closure for its many strands. As many recent critics have suggested,
the novel aligns the suffering of the dispossessed women and the dispossessed workers,
disrupting the borders between the private and public sphere. And this alignment
provides some unity to the many-stranded plot. Robert Moore, as both problematic
master and hero of a marriage plot, becomes the focus of a need for change. “Robert’s
domestic relationships, like his industrial ones, are reduced to a question of personal
economic advantage. Caroline Helstone stands as Charlotte’s representative victim when
cash payment is the sole relation between men and women, as well as between master
and men” (Lamonica 163). Robert, seeing only the need to make his business successful
once more, initially refuses the needs of men in preference for machines and denies
Caroline in preference for a woman with money (Shirley). The work of both plots is to

5
Indeed, the marriage plots in the novel may recall nothing so much as Charlotte Lucas’s
grim assessment that marriage is “the pleasantest preservative from want.”

147
get Robert to see his relations with people as social rather than economic. Susan Fraiman
suggests: “Like Margaret Hale in Gaskell’s North and South, Caroline ‘applies a single
standard of behavior to both private relations and the relations between classes’” (166).
And Drew Lamonica echoes: “Through the characters of Caroline Helstone and Robert’s
workers, Charlotte Brontë calls for a reassertion of domestic and social paternalism—for
fathers to see the sufferings of their dependents, to hear their complaints, and to ‘alter
these things’” (164-5). Citing Rosemarie Bodenheimer’s argument about the novel, he
confirms: “Relations in the workplace ultimately should be modeled on relations in the
home, a home ideally governed and protected by a benevolent father who, through his
benevolent provision, earns the respect of his children” (164).
But we can wonder how true this is. After all, there are no benevolent fathers in
the novel. There is, however, a benevolent mother. And it is according to her model that
Robert is eventually judged (“She was faithful when I was false”). And the mother is the
figure of Caroline’s early, recurrent dream of the provider of home and love.

II. The Double Heroine Plot?
But before we can consider the mother, there is one final plot confusion to work
through—the matter of the novel’s heroine. If David Copperfield wonders whether or not
he is the hero of his own life, Shirley seems to represent what David’s novel might look
like if he had called it James Steerforth. Indeed, the eponymous heroine does not appear
until nearly the end of the first volume (187 long pages in my edition). Shirley Keeldar,
orphan and heiress in one, is clearly a striking character, compelling and charismatic as

148
James. And her story might even make for a novel. But we barely get her story. And
we’re never in her thoughts. Because of her wealth, Shirley is free to come and go; she is
not limited in her movement. But the novel never goes with her; it stays in Yorkshire.
And though it is not always with Caroline Helstone, the novel is apparently limited to her
social milieu. The lack of insight into Shirley’s character is part of what drives the
narrative: we do not know, until nearly the end, that Shirley has already fallen in love
with Louis Moore, Robert’s brother, and so her refusal of any and all suitors in the novel
(initially read as a rejection of marriage) is actually a result of her previous marriage/love
plot. The characters’ ignorance of this plot (and our own) creates the opportunity for the
love triangle that dominates most of the second volume: Robert, in love with Caroline
(who loves him in return), believes he must marry for money to save his mill (and
Caroline being without fortune), and so courts Shirley (who has by this time become
Caroline’s closest friend).
Thus, while the narrator’s refusal to allow us inside Shirley’s thoughts and
feelings is narratively productive, it also distances the reader from Shirley, securing us
more closely to Caroline’s story. This has lead many readers to consider the novel as
much Caroline’s as Shirley’s, regardless of Brontë’s chosen title.
Thinking about the novel as a double heroine plot, of course, allows us to consider
what this doubling does. The responses to this narrative seem themselves divided
between considering Caroline and Shirley as double heroines (that is, Shirley is
Caroline’s double) and in split heroines. Susan Fraiman suggests that the novel splits its
heroines “between an eager and balking bride” in order to convey its ambivalence about

149
marriage. Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar read Shirley (as with Bertha before her) as
Caroline’s double: “a projection of all her repressed desire, becomes apparent in the acts
she performs ‘for’ Caroline. What Shirley does is what Caroline would like to do” (239).
They make the connection to the narrative of doubling in Jane Eyre explicit: “The fact
that Shirley emerges only when Caroline has been completely immobilized through her
own self-restraint and self-submission is reminiscent of the ways in which Bertha Mason
Rochester offers a means of escape to the otherwise boxed-in Jane Eyre” (Gubar 239). In
their reading of the double, Gilbert and Gubar use the reader’s distance from Shirley as
evidence: “In spite of her independent activity and exuberant liveliness, Shirley seems
slightly unreal to most readers and this very unreality serves to remind us that she is part
of a fantastic wish-fulfillment, an affirmation of what ought to be possible for women”
(239).
Sharon Marcus, in Between Women, offers a different and productive reading of
the double heroine plot. Whereas Gilbert and Gubar suggest that when Shirley rejects
Robert as a suitor she is fulfilling Caroline’s wish to punish him for previously rejecting
her (Caroline), Marcus reads this moment as straight-forwardly the act of the female
friend to forward the marriage plot on her friend’s behalf. By “just reading,” as she calls
it, she considers what the double heroine plot accomplishes if we take both heroines as
“real” characters, rather than psychologizing one away as the other’s fantasy-fulfillment.

150
III. Sharon Marcus and the “plot of female amity”
Marcus attends to the recurrence of the female friendship plot in novels that end
with successful marriage plots. She suggests that rather than threats to the marriage plot,
“the plot of female amity” actually works in tandem with the marriage plot to secure the
heroine’s happy placement in a heterosexual union by the end. But, Marcus asserts:
The female friend is not simply an auxiliary, brought onstage as matchmaker,
then whisked off after fulfilling the secondary function to which she would
therefore be reduced. She is a mate, an ally, and a critic, the repository of
confidences, a bestower of wisdom, a conspirator, nurse or patient, teacher or
pupil, a source of physical contact and pleasure, an object of admiration, a link to
the past and bridge to the future. Often as securely in place at a novel’s end as at
its beginning, female friendship has longevity. (79)

Marcus thus, in contrast with Gilbert and Gubar who read the second woman as a
projection of the heroine’s self, privileges female friendship by literalizing it.
The female friend, Marcus suggests, in contrast with the love interest is never a
source of tension. Although “friendship provokes none of the suspense or distress we
typically associate with plot, it sustains the reader’s interest and attention” (79). Thus,
Marcus suggests, “with respect to female friendship, Victorian novels succeed in making
the reader actively desire that nothing will happen.” Under Marcus’s analysis, “female
friendship defies Peter Brooks’s equation of plot with the dynamic forward movement of
plotting, and circumvents the classic distinction D. A. Miller makes between the
necessary instability of the narratable and the quiescent plenitude of the non-narratable”
(79-80).
While in texts with only one available hero (Middlemarch, David Copperfield,
and Aurora Leigh are some of the examples Marcus cites), the female friendship evolves

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to a point where the female friend willingly and lovingly gives the hero “back” to her
friend, to whom, the narratives suggest, he rightfully always belonged. This usually
necessitates some sacrifice on the part of the female friend, who usually leaves the novel
through death or travel. However, while Shirley begins in a world of lack—no one has
enough of anything (money, work, food, love)—it ends with plenty for all, even
providing two heroes, in the form of brothers, where there had only been one. And so we
end with a double marriage plot rather than a love triangle. Unlike in the single-
marriage-plotted novel, in novels with double marriage plots, “in which female friends
marry male friends or relatives, female friendship can be represented as marriage’s
original cause and one of its surviving effects” (96). By marring brothers, Caroline and
Shirley “both become Mrs. Moore; when they relinquish their own names for those of
their husbands, they give linguistic form to the social bond they have already created with
each other” (96). Shirley thus resolves the potential problem of female rivalry “by
focusing on rivalry as a false problem in a bountiful economy that provides a man for
each woman who desires one” (Marcus 97).
But Shirley provides another female friendship, that between Caroline Helstone
and Mrs Pyror, Shirley’s governess. Mrs Pryor will, of course, turn out to be Agnes
Helstone, Caroline’s long-absent mother. However, as her identity remains hidden for
more than half the novel, the developing relationship between Caroline and Mrs Pryor
“comes close to replacing the plot of female amity for the plot of female marriage” (101).
And here Marcus is one of the few critics to focus on the mother plot. Marcus notes that
“critics often ignore Brontës dramatic decision to conceal that familial connection for

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much of the text” (101). But, “because of delay in revealing who Mrs. Pryor is—there
seems to be a proposal scene; Mrs. Pryor therefore threatens the romance plot, replacing
Robert Moore” (101). Marcus here refers to the scene where Mrs Pryor, responding to
Caroline’s doubts about what she will do with her life, proposes that Caroline and she
live together. When Caroline says that she “wants to make [herself] a position by some
other means [than marriage],” Mrs Pryor responds:
‘My dear, listen to me. […] I must tell you that I possess a small independency,
arising partly from my own savings, and partly from a legacy left me some years
since; whenever I leave Fieldhead, I shall take a house of my own: I could not
endure to live in solitude: to you, my dear, I need not say I am attached; with you
I am happier than I have ever been with any living thing’ (this was said with
marked emphasis). ‘Your society I should esteem a very dear privilege – an
inestimable privilege, a comfort, a blessing. You shall come to me then.’ (360-1)

Mrs Pryor finishes: “‘All I have I would leave to you’” (361). Mrs Pryor thus opens up
an alternative to marriage, one that resonates precisely with Caroline’s dream of her
mother’s return. As Marcus argues, even though Mrs Pryor is creating an alternative to
marriage, “she formulates it according to the rhetorical rules of a Victorian proposal: she
begins with an account of the financial resources that justify her right to speak at all,
continues with an assertion of her high regard for the woman she offers support, and
concludes with an anxious inquiry about whether her love will be reciprocated” (101).
Mrs Pryor thus initially has the power to overthrow the marriage plot. However,
Marcus suggests that the revelation that Mrs Pryor is, in fact Caroline’s mother, undoes
this dangerous potential: “but Shirley ultimately absorbs the plot of female marriage into
the plot of female amity, for once Mrs. Pryor admits that she is Caroline’s mother, she
assumes a friend’s symbiotic relationship to the male-female marriage plot” (101). She

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continues, “Mrs. Pryor literally keeps Caroline alive for Robert by restoring the health
Caroline loses when she despairs of ever receiving Robert’s love.”
While Marcus provides a powerful reading of the work of female friendship in the
novel and her lovely link between Mrs Pryor’s suggestion for Caroline’s living situation
and the typical proposal scene is compelling, her final conclusion that Mrs Pryor’s
revelation that she is Caroline’s mother closes, rather than creates, disruptive potential
seems to be a simplification. Indeed, as one of the few critics who discuss this
relationship, she still pays almost no attention to Mrs Pryor’s story. I would like to turn
to that now.

IV. The Mother Returns

In Shirley, the re-appearance of the missing mother again takes place beyond the
mid-point of the novel, in a time of crisis: Caroline seems to be on her death-bed when
Mrs Pryor reveals herself. In her fevered state, Caroline is speaking “strange words” and
the scene is initially marked by the now-familiar themes of mis-recognition and
confusion. Caroline looks at Mrs Pryor with “an unrecognizing glance.” With the moon
just “lately risen,” Caroline asks: “‘Then is it not morning? I am not at the cottage? Who
is this? – I see a shape at my bedside’” (399). The shape, of course, is the mother, as yet
unknown. Mrs Pryor responds: “It is myself – it is your friend – your nurse – your –”
(399). Once again, knowledge and recognition are delayed, marked by a literal gap in the
narrative (the dash). As Mrs Pryor attempts to reveal her identity to Caroline, she moves
from self-identity (“It is myself”) to self-renunciation (identity only in relationship to

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Caroline, until she is erased altogether: “mother” is not said as we end with “your”). This
self-denial though (rather reminiscent of Lady Dedlock’s) will not last long, as we will
see.
Believing that by revealing her relationship to Caroline, Caroline will find the will
to recover from her illness, Mrs Pryor decides to tell her their story (yet another
metadiegetic narrative takes over). First, however, Mrs Pryor “glided to the door, softly
turned the key in the lock, ascertained that it was fast, and came back. She bent over her.
She threw back the curtain to admit the moonlight more freely. She gazed intently on her
face” (like the moon-figure that “gazed and gazed and gazed” at Jane [403]). “[Y]ou are
mine – my daughter – my own child” (403). When Caroline asks Mrs Pryor whether or
not she means to adopt her (anticipating, perhaps, the adoptive-mother plots to come),
Mrs Pryor responds: “I am your true mother: no other woman can claim the title – it is
mine” (403). Here, aristocratic titles are replaced by maternal ones, and property is found
to be invested in people (and “mind[s]”), rather than material goods. Mrs Pryor’s
confession is rewarded with Caroline’s assurance: “But if you are my mother, the world
is all changed to me. Surely I can live – I should like to recover” (404). Although
Caroline does recover, her slight resistance to Mrs Pryor’s insistence marks the return of
the mother as questionable (“But if you are my mother,” she qualifies). Indeed, this
instance – where the actual, living mother returns to claim her child – seems to be no less
strange than the other ghostly reappearances. In fact, Mrs Pryor – in this moment of
revelation – seems the closest to the vampire mother, a Geraldine to Caroline’s
Christabel, as Mrs Pryor’s emphasis on owning Caroline is rather terrifying (“God

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permitted me to be the parent of my child’s mind: it belongs to me: it is my property –
my right”). Indeed, Caroline questions such a right no less than four times: “Is what I
hear true?”; “Is it no dream?”; “My own mother! Is she one I can be so fond of as I can
of you?”; “But if you are my mother…” (404). Caroline, like Esther, thus allows us to
ask: to whom do we belong and from whom do we inherit what? But, as the supposed
fulfillment of a long-held desire, Caroline is strangely, although only implicitly, resistant.
But unlike Esther, who is placed within the narrative of a dead baby as Lady
Dedlock explains why Esther never had a mother, Caroline is told a different story:
‘I let you go as a babe, because you were pretty, and I feared your loveliness;
deeming it the stamp of perversity. They sent me your portrait, taken at eight
years old; that portrait confirmed my fears. Had it shown me a sunburnt little
rustic – a heavy blunt-featured, commonplace child – I should have hastened to
claim you; but there, under the silver paper, I saw blooming the delicacy of an
aristocratic flower – ‘little lady’ was written on every trait. I had too recently
crawled from under the yoke of the fine gentleman – escaped, galled, crushed,
paralyzed, dying – to dare to encounter his still finer and most fairy-like
representative. My sweet little lady overwhelmed me with dismay: her air of
native elegance froze my very marrow. In my experience I had not met with
truth, modesty, good principle as the concomitants of beauty. A form so straight
and fine, I argued, must conceal a mind warped and cruel.’ (407-8)

In Caroline, the usual narrative devices of appearance and portraits as representatives of
lineage, instead of linking mother and daughter via visual similarity, separate them.
Here, as with both Twist and Bleak House, the portrait is taken as a sign of the heroine’s
true aristocratic nature, but here that nature is reviled and rejected, a sign of the
daughter’s relationship to the father, rather than the mother. And in Shirley (as in,
perhaps all of our novels), to follow the father is to err.
George Lewes, in his review of the novel, provides one of the only commentaries
on Mrs Pryor’s strange story: “Mrs. Pryor, in the capital event of her life – at least as far

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as regards this story – belies the most indisputable laws of our nature, in becoming an
unnatural mother, - from some absurd prepossession that her child must be bad, wicked,
and the cause of anguish to her, because it is pretty!” (221) Lewes calls Mrs Pryor what
she calls herself: “an unnatural mother.” “This child,” Lewes continues:
which universal experience forces us to exclaim must have been the darling
consolation of its miserable mother; this child, over whom the mother would have
wept scalding tears in secret, hugging it closer to her bosom to assure her
fluttering heart, that in the midst of all her wretchedness, this joy remained, that in
the midst of all the desolation of home, this exquisite comfort was not denied her:
- yet this child, we are informed, she parts with, because it is pretty! Really this is
summer madness! (221)

Although we might take issue with the notion of “universal experience,” Lewes here does
hit upon the strangeness of Mrs Pryor’s story. He, of course, in his alternative version
cites nicely the melodramatic tale one might expect with such beginnings (“miserable
mother,” weeping “scalding tears in secret,” holding her child close “to her fluttering
heart,” basing all of her joy and happiness on her child). Mrs Pryor’s story seems more
than anything a sign of the trouble the novel must go through to separate the mother from
daughter; the narrative hoops of maintaining the absent mother plot. And so it hints at
the absurd fictions that the law maintains by creating just such a separation.
For, what Mrs Pryor’s story covers over is another plot of absent mother/missing
daughters: that written by the law. Mrs Pryor, as a woman separated from her husband,
would have had no legal right to her child, had she wanted to take her. And this is the

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story that the novel’s cover-story shields.
6
Shirley is thus haunted by Caroline Norton
and both Norton and the novel are spectres of the coming divorce debates of the 1850s.
V. Caroline Norton and the Matrimonial Causes Act of 1857

Caroline Sheridan, granddaughter of the playwright, married George Norton in
1826 on little acquaintance. Caroline’s mother having been misled regarding George’s
finances, the couple was soon in financial distress. Caroline begin to publish her poetry,
earning some money for the couple, and used her connections (to Lord Melbourne) to
find George a position. The story goes that the couple found themselves at odds early
and often, disagreeing on almost everything, including politics. By 1836, their marital
disagreements were widely known and become the fodder for public gossip when George
“removed their three children from their London home” and brought a lawsuit against
Lord Melbourne for criminal conversation (Poovey 62). A success in said lawsuit would
be one of the necessary steps for George to be granted a divorce under the current divorce
laws. George’s suit however was summarily dismissed, leaving the two husband and
wife.
Over the course of their separation, George took every possible advantage granted
to him by the law. He refused to let his wife see their children and he took the money she
earned from publishing her writing. While Caroline and George’s marital troubles and
public scandal extend well beyond the 1849, when Shirley was published, their situation
was public known well in advance of Brontë’s novel. Caroline’s story—and the position

6
Of course, this is the plot of Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, which presents
a mother who steals away from her child, hiding both from husband and the law.
Charlotte was perhaps attempting to simply tread new ground.

158
of the unhappily married mother under the law—runs in the background of Mrs Pryor’s
story. Of Norton, who published pamphlets relating her own story and analyzing
women’s position under the law, Mary Poovey notes, “Her life history made absolutely
clear what her writing made legible: that women were not necessarily protected in
exchange for their dependence and that women were always alienated—both outside the
home and within it—from their economic productivity, their sexuality and desires, and
even the children they bore” (81).
What Caroline Norton and Shirley suggest is that law, when assigning the
husband all legal rights of running the household, does so under the faith that the husband
is a wise steward. It cannot account for marital infelicity. As Frances Power Cobbe later
argues of the law’s fiction: “Such being the case, it would naturally happen, were there
no law in the case, that the husband should manage all the larger business of the family.
The law, then, when the husband is really wise and good is a dead letter” (13). If, that is,
the family operates in the manner that the law intends, the law, itself, is unnecessary. For
“The poor woman whose husband has robbed her earnings, who leaves her and her
children to starve, and then goes unpunished,” there is no recourse, “because the law can
only recognize the relation of husband and wife as it ought to be—and he and she are one
before the law” (Cobbe 15).
Over the course of the fifties, marriage and divorce come under heated debate
resulting in the eventual adjustments to divorce law in the Matrimonial Causes Act of
1857. However, these changes in law were not an attempt to create an equal legal
relationship between man and wife. They were, instead, primarily intended to free men

159
to divorce unfaithful wives as a way of shoring up, once again, fears of illegitimacy. The
major adjustment that the law provided was moving the issue of divorce from
ecclesiastical courts to civil courts, so that a full divorce might be more easily obtained.
As a result, as Fiona Montgomery demonstrates, the law “also enshrined the double
standard: men could divorce on grounds of adultery alone but not women. A woman had
to prove that her husband was guilty of rape, sodomy or bestiality; or, if she was suing on
the grounds of adultery this had to be coupled with incest, bigamy or cruelty” (10).
Because divorce reform was carried out primarily to protect the legitimacy of the
husband’s family line, female adultery was the central concern: “This reflect the idea that
adultery was the most serious offence a woman could commit within a marriage because
it raised the possibility that children might not be legitimate and therefore inheritance
could pass to a bastard” (Montgomery 10). Indeed, Mary Lyndon Shanley concludes:
“The notion that only a wife’ adultery justified severing the marriage bond assumed that a
man’s sexual authority and the legitimacy of his offspring were the basic considerations
of the marriage contract” (43). Shanley’s analysis thus makes clear what lies at the base
of the law’s interest in marriage—shoring up the paternal line, constantly under threat. A
husband’s infidelity, on the other hand, would have no such effect and so was of little
concern.
The law does represent, however, “the first major piece of British legislation to
focus attention on the anomalous position of married women under the law” (Poovey 51).
And there are some minor concessions. “The Select Committee recommended that a wife
who was legally separated but not divorced from her husband should be treated as a feme

160
sole with respect to her own property and contracts” (Shanley 39). Thus, a woman in
Caroline Norton’s position would be able to keep the money she earned separately from
her husband. “Compared to the proposal in the married women’s property bill that would
have given every married woman the rights of a feme sole, the proposal to give a
separated wife the status of a feme sole was a minor concession,” however. But Shanley
stresses that “Although the adjustments in the bill were simply tinkerings with patriarchal
authority in marriage, without feminist intervention the debates on the Divorce Act would
have been confined exclusively to questions about the relationship of ecclesiastical to
civil law and the justifiability of civil divorce” (39). Some concessions are better than
none, the sentiment goes. But custody of children still remains primarily with the father
(with limited rights of mothers over infants).
This, then, is the narrative of married women’s position under the law, both with
regard to their spouses and their children. And it haunts Mrs Pryor’s narrative, who
highlights one of the law’s fictions (“two people can never literally be as one”), only to
cover another (by claiming that to leave her child behind was a matter of choice).

VI. Mother and Marriage

If, however, the legal plot of marriage haunts the novel, the mother plot manages
to haunt the narrative marriage plot. With the absent mother, the novel seems as if it
may, in the manner of Jane Eyre, use the romance plot to play out the stands of the
mother plot. When Caroline “gives up” Robert and “[gives] him up to Shirley,” she
thinks: “I do not grudge them their bliss; but I groan under my own misery” (222).

161
“Truly,” she goes on, “I ought not to have been born: they should have smothered me at
the first cry.” This narrative abnegation, the wish for not only death but that one had
never lived, is the typical response to a realization of the circumstances of one’s birth, as
we see with Esther. It is a wish to un-make the unwed mother, to turn her back into the
safe heroine. However, Caroline invokes this narrative in response to a currently
unsuccessful marriage plot, seemingly replacing the mother story with the lover story.
This substitution will be inverted, however, over the course of the novel. When
Mr Helstone denounces marriage, leading Caroline to claim that one would think he was
“an old bachelor,” he re-affirms: “It is decidedly the wisest plan to remain single,
especially for women” (97). And then continues, “Millions of marriages are unhappy: if
everybody confessed the truth, perhaps all are more or less so.” Rather than leading
Caroline to consider her own potential marriage plot, however, her uncle’s claim leads
Caroline to think back on what her mother’s life must have been like, married to
Caroline’s abusive father. Here, then, the marriage plot is subverted in two ways: it is
readily denounced and the fantasy of happy marriages solidly undone; and the mother
plot, rather than the marriage plot is foregrounded.
But the primary substitution comes during Caroline’s illness. Falling ill can
operate, as Mary Barton has shown, as a means for the heroine to be finally reunited with
the hero. In Shirley, both heroines fall into a wasting illness marked most by their
inability (refusal) to eat. While Caroline’s is at least in part a result of her unrequited
love for Robert (and, indeed, when she believes herself about to die, she exclaims: “Oh I
should see him once more” [397]), her illness has been read by feminist scholars as a

162
rejection of her world. “Far from being merely love sick,” Gilbert and Gubar argue,
“Caroline is discontent. Her illness is a result of her misery at her own impotence. She
seems to have no alternative except resignation as she sits ‘still as a garden statue’” (244).
And Lasghari extends this analysis:
Individual eating disorders in Charlotte Brontë’s novel Shirley (1849) are
portrayed as part of a much larger picture, in which a dysfunctional society
starves women, literally and metaphorically, and women internalize that dis/order
as self-starvation. Contrary to some readings of the novel, Brontë is not selling
the two heroines out to conventional female passivity, either when she has them
stop eating or when she marries them off at the end of the story. Caroline and
Shirley have both struggled against gender roles and relationships that are ‘killing
them.’ When each in turn finds herself blocked from any effective overt protest
and barred from speaking her pain, she asserts control over her life in the only
arena available, inscribing her hunger on her own body in a desperate plea to be
‘read aright.’ (142)

And indeed, the hero will not save the day; his love is not what brings Caroline back.
The mother plot in Shirley supersedes the marriage plot, as Robert Moore is away for the
entirety of Caroline’s illness. It is the mother with whom she is reunited; the mother who
nurses her back to health. As Deirdre Lasghari suggests, Caroline’s illness is thus
“significantly different” from Shirley’s later one (which will lead her back to her love
interest, Louis Moore): “What saves [Caroline] is not the magic kiss of romance but her
discovery of her lost mother. When Mrs. Pryor reveals herself to Caroline, she gives her
a reason to live and the ability, finally, to eat” (149).
“Accordingly,” Miriam Bailin suggests, “Robert is placed in a subordinate
position to Mrs. Pryor, a position from which he is only partially redeemed” (267).
Indeed, even after Caroline is well and Mrs Pryor has shed her nursing role in the favor of
mothering, the possessiveness that she revealed by moonlight has not given way. “The

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evening,” the narrator tells us “restored Caroline entirely to her mother, and Mrs Pryor
like the evening; for then, alone with her daughter, no human shadow came between her
and what she loved” (416). Mrs Pryor’s possessive love admits of no rival, permits
nothing to come between her and her daughter. And it is in this sense that I think that
Miriam Bailin’s reading of the mother-daughter reunion – when she suggests that “The
nurse-patient relationship preserves the intensity and significance of familial and
communal ties while remaining outside the economic, political, and sexual considerations
that complicate and distort them,” and so opposes Caroline’s relationship with her mother
to that of her relationship with Robert – misses. That is, as Adrienne Rich and other
feminists have argued, Shirley seems to suggest that the strongest erotic tie is to the
mother. Between them no shadow should come.
In the final scene of mother/marriage substitutability, in the final chapter of the
novel, “The Winding-Up,” Caroline is studying the sky, “whence the sun had vanished,”
and as she sighs at the sight, “a hand circled her, and rested quietly on her waist” (600).
Caroline receives “the touch unstartled,” and says, “ ‘I am looking at Venus, mamma:
see, she is beautiful.’” “The answer,” we’re told “was a closer caress; and Caroline
turned, and looked, not into Mrs Pryor’s matron face, but up at a dark manly visage.”
Robert, not mamma, has embraced Caroline. This conflation of the mother and marriage
plots, the seemingly endless substitutability of mother and man, suggest the power the
mother holds to disrupt not only her family line, but her daughter’s as well. “I am so
happy,” Caroline says, “in mamma” (563).

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VII. Keeping the Mother

What Shirley suggests over and over is that the desire for a home and care,
traditionally depicted as the provisions of marriage, are more readily provided by the
mother. And it is here that the final novel of my project makes clear what the others
suggest: the mother is necessary to the happy home. If suppressed, killed, walked to
death, she must be brought back, through narrative and memory, to secure the child’s plot
and story. Just so, Caroline must assure her mother’s place before accepting Robert’s
proposal: “must I leave her?’” she asks. The answer provided by psychoanalysis and
society would be “yes,” of course; the daughter must leave the mother, we’re told, in
order to secure her own identity. But the novel’s answer is “you never shall leave her,”
she will live “with us.” In Shirley, as in Mary Barton, families may “go up as well as
down” and the problem that “two can never literally be as one” is dispatched by having
three.

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Coda

Mrs Pryor’s vampyric strangeness – despite her status as biological mother – is
echoed by the mother-strangers in George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda (1876) and Felix Holt
(1866). The latter two novels, however, join Dicken’s Little Dorrit (1857) in an odd
combination of a daughter’s story accompanied by a mother/ son plot. A complete
analysis of these novels falls outside the scope of this project, but as their mother plots
add an interesting complexity to the arguments traced here and allow us a glimpse of the
trajectory of the mother plot over the course of the century, I will discuss them briefly. In
these three novels, the reappearance of a Mother by Adoption brings the daughter
together with various not-mothers, complicating the typical parent/child narrative. In a
transformation of the earlier mother/daughter plots, the mother’s return or revelation in
the text involves an estrangement of the family line as here she estranges sons rather than
mere daughters, those “piece[s] of base coin.”
In Eliot’s Daniel Deronda, the Alcharisi, an “unnatural” mother, “had willingly
made herself a stranger to” her son, Daniel, and had told her family that he was dead;
boys, not girls, “are thrown away in this house.”
1
Recounting her story to her son, the
Alcharisi reveals a tale that could quite easily read as gothic: a young girl living in an
exotic locale, trapped by her father’s desires. Highlighting the limitations on what
mothers pass on to their children, Princess Halm-Eberstein speaks of her situation: “A
great singer and an actress is a queen, but she gives no royalty to her son.” However, in

1
The latter quotation (“girls are thrown away in this house”) is from Dombey and Son,
not Daniel Deronda, as is the description of a girl as a “bad boy,” a “piece of base coin
that couldn’t be invested.”

166
an odd re-structuring of the legal system, the Alcharisi places herself between husband
and son in the line of inheritance (“I gave you your father’s fortune”). In Daniel
Deronda, though, it is not the inheritance of the father that is prized; the Alcharisi passes
on the “real” inheritance that passes directly through her line: the casket of letters that
signify Deronda’s Jewishness, his cultural inheritance.
Mrs. Transome, in Felix Holt, also estranges the family line. However, rather
than fictionally killing-off her son, as in Daniel Deronda, Mrs. Transome has an
illegitimate child while married. Indeed, although Mrs. Transome will follow in the
literary footsteps of other ghostly mothers, by pacing steadily in the middle of the night
and appearing unexpectedly at Esther’s door, in Felix Holt, it is the previously unknown
father who “reappears” as such with the dramatic exclamation to Harold Transome: “I am
your father.”
And the disappearance, if you will, of the mother in Little Dorrit is perhaps the
strangest of them all. Rigaud is quite literally right in his description of Mrs Clennam,
that “ghostly figure,” as “strange mother,” if referring to the definition of strange as “not
of one’s own kin or family.” In Little Dorrit, Rigaud, Flintwinch, and Mrs Clennam all
wrestle for the right to tell the story, but Mrs Clennam succeeds in taking over the
narration and her story once again moves us from the end to the beginning as she says of
Arthur that she wanted “to give him the reputation of an honest origin.” In her move to
reverse the rules of the marriage contract – attempting to claim Arthur, her husband’s
bastard son, as her own – Mrs Clennam replaces working-class with middle-class
motherhood by taking the place of Arthur’s biological mother (who, in Affery’s

167
estimation, is yet another ghost mother). And the telling of the story brings the house
crashing down; the mother’s plot destroys the father’s house. Daniel Deronda, Felix
Holt, and Little Dorrit thus suggest that not only mothers, but children too, are alienable
property, undoing the strict bonds of the family line.
In these three novels, while the mother’s story is still the key to the child’s, she
also wields a dangerous power that must be guarded against—she has the power to the
place the child within the family line or outside of it. While Little Dorrit, Felix Holt, and
Daniel Deronda thus add an interesting twist to the earlier novels, they also suggest that
the plot of motherly return is beginning to be played out. As the law begins to catch up
with the novel, the concern over finding the mother’s story fades. Indeed, in Henry
James, the search for the mother seems to have ended as Tess must attempt to define
herself against her mother, rather than through her. By the time we get to Oscar Wilde’s
Lady Bracknell, we’re left with a world of aunts.

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Creator Wilson, Michelle L. (author)

Core Title Legal spectres, narrative ghosts: mothers and the law in the Victorian novel

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program English

Publication Date 07/23/2014

Defense Date 05/07/2012

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag bastardy clauses,Law,Mothers,OAI-PMH Harvest,victorian novel

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Kincaid, James R. (committee chair), McCann, Edwin (committee member), Rollo, David (committee member)

Creator Email michelle.l.wilson@gmail.com,wilsonml@usc.edu

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c3-61987

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