They Might be Monsters: Law, Gender, and Sympathy in Dickens' Bleak House, Dombey and Son, and Oliver Twist

Session Organizer: Erin Chamberlain
Purdue University
324 Heavilon Hall
500 Oval Drive
West Lafayette, Indiana 47907
edchambe@purdue.edu

Performing Progress: Chancery and the Art of Injustice in Bleak House

Bleak House has been well established by scholars as a highly satirical commentary on the heights of corruption and bureaucracy the court system had become by mid-century England. Rather than be a place of fairness or “equity,” in Bleak House the court of Chancery functions as the embodiment of injustice to all who are unfortunate enough to be victimized by it. Chancery illustrates the false reform of the legal system; instead of truly resolving issues and bringing about change and ultimate resolution, it merely masks them with the appearance of progress. As an intended system of justice, Chancery should be the champion of the defenceless and the vulnerable. However, Dickens portrays it instead as the monster which swallows whole the lives of generations of Jarndyces and any others associated with it. This monster inspires madness, greed, hate, distrust, and, most importantly, economic ruin. Born in the shadow of Jarndyce v. Jarndyce, the suitors of Chancery are prisoners of this monstrous system, a system which regulates vice by encompassing it, as it wreaks havoc on everything around it. Such a performance of justice legalizes monstrosity and defines the discipline of disorder.

Erin Chamberlain
Purdue University

Mr Dombey and Mr Carker: Vampirism and Homosocial Relationships in Dickens' Dombey and Son

Much of the literary discussion of Charles Dickens' Dombey and Son has focused on Dickens' treatment of marriage as the connector of Victorian conceptions of the domestic and economic spheres. Even though the commentary rightly points out the importance of conventional notions of marriage between and man and woman—an institution Captain Cuttle at the end of the novel insightfully describes as a “house of bondage”—the current criticism has neglected the importance of the gothic conventions Dickens artfully employs as a way of discussing male relationships. Gothic conventions surface in a variety of guises in Dombey and Son , but perhaps most strikingly in the figure of Mr Carker, whose false white smile and desire to appropriate Mr Dombey's economic and social prowess by preying on Edith Dombey, marks him as a vampire. As Nina Auerbach has pointed out in Our Vampires, Ourselves, early in the English vampire tradition vampirism functions as a way to talk about male homosocial relationships, and it is in this light that I propose a reading of Dombey and Son that Dickens' use of the gothic conventions of the vampire to problematize the relationship between Mr Dombey and Mr Carker.

Kristi Embry
Purdue University

The Monstrous Reader: Schadenfreude and the Crowd in Oliver Twist

Oliver Twist abounds with criminals and with crowds taking pleasure in the spectacle of other people's pain. After his murder of Nancy, Bill Sikes' death becomes a spectacle for the watching crowd; later in the novel, a crowd gathers to wait for Fagin's hanging. While the two scenes might seem similarly spectacular, the difference between them is a matter of sympathy. Readers anticipating justice experience Sikes' death as a form of schadenfreude: a moment in which the pain of another becomes pleasurable. In contrast, schadenfreude is missing in the description of Oliver's last meeting with Fagin, who garners sympathy in contrast to the waiting crowd. Fagin's death is not shown to the reader and the waiting crowd is characterized as a mob. If readers enjoy the death of another as a form of pleasure, they indulge in a moment of monstrosity that can only be reclaimed through a sympathetic response to Fagin's hanging. Readers lose the monstrous enjoyment of schadenfreude by sympathizing more with Fagin than with the crowd outside his cell and leave the novel with a renewed ability to sympathize with real social problems outside the novel.

April Toadvine
Purdue University