The Selfless Esther
Bleak House is a novel of interconnections. As its readers, we are asked to imagine a sprawl of nodes, hubs, and hinges between which worlds are made and unmade. Caroline Levine even argues that āBleak House uses networks to reconceptualize characterā, casting narrative persons āless as powerful or symbolic agents in their own right than as moments in which complex and invisible social forces crossā. These defining āmomentsā are precisely of the kind that motivate philosopher and sociologist Bruno Latour to speak of āactantsā rather than āactorsā. In an effort to overcome the ingrained hierarchy between subjects and objects (which is really a purification of āhumansā and ānonhumansā), Latour maintains that āthe two cannot be had separately, but are always bound up with each other in a network of relationsā. Whatās more, āactantsā, whether human or no, āmust not be conceived as free-standing entities that then enter into relations with each other. Only in these relations do they become actants; they āemergeā within the networks that exist between themā[1].
So Bleak House is also a novel of self-constructions. Consider how Estherās identity is bound to her place in a network: āI thought, all at once, if my guardian had married someone else, how should I have felt, and what should I have done! That would have been a change indeed. It presented my life in such a new and blank form, that I rang my housekeeping keys and gave them a kiss before I laid them down in their basket againā. Indeed, for despite having been raised ālike some of the princesses in the fairy storiesā who altogether lack āworldly experience or practical knowledgeā, the Esther we know clearly emerges within the domestic matrix the keys realize. Though first āquite lost in the magnitude of [her] trustā, Esther quickly finds herself transformed into āa methodical, old-maidish sort of foolish little personā, who, with real zest, takes to remembering the contents of āeach little store-room drawer and cupboardā. You see, the keys make a difference; they are āactantsā, connecting Esther to Bleak House, her station, and the world beyond. We could say the keys afford access, a particular mode of being toward things ā amid Bleak Houseās garrets and cellars we find our ālittle old womanā, our āDame Durdenā.
But this is only half the story. Perhaps more interesting is the way the keysĀ translateĀ Bleak House. Esther likens the manor āone of those delightfully irregular housesā with a ābountiful provision of little halls and passages, of unexpected places and rooms and a back-stairs where you could hear the horses being rubbed downā. The keys disclose an economy of nooks brimming with ājams, and pickles, and preserves, and bottles, and glass, and china, and a great many other thingsā. Esther writes of the houseās āhospitable jingleā, of itsĀ snugĀ little rick-yard, itsĀ dearĀ little farm-yard. About Bleak House all is of the sameĀ quaint variety, a āperfect neatnessā exemplified in the whitest linen stored up with rose-leaves and lavender. What Esther gives us, then, is no outsiderās description, but fragments of an intimate knowledge, a kind of poetry of the houseĀ [2]. The bunches of keysĀ openĀ Bleak House, both literally and figuratively.
[1] Taken from Peter-Paul Verbeekās What Things Do, pg. 149-150.
[2] āFor instance, in the house itself, in the family sitting-room, a dreamer of refuges dreams of a hut, of a nest, or of nooks and corners in which he would like to hide away, like an animal in its hole. In this way, he lives in a region that is beyond human images. If a phenomenologist could succeed in living the primitiveness of such images, he would locate elsewhere, perhaps, the problems that touch upon the poetry of the houseā (The Poetics of Space 50).
