So.
We've read a book with 67 chapters and worth hundreds and hundreds of pages filled with paragraphs that last a page and dedicated to everything from crafty detectives, sad orphans, and mud, mud, shitloads of mud everywhere. That's a long, long road we've traveled, so where does it leave us?
Dickens spent a lot of time giving us things to think about, though without actually making us read essays upon essays of drab, wordy complaints about society. Through an immense amount of characters who represent entire ideas and philosophies, and a carefully, if not overwhelmingly, intricate plot that connect them all together, Dickens has given us something complex. Every connection, every action, every little detail, and especially the time he chooses to make certain things happen to particular people, is done for a reason and speaks about something.
So how has this book changed your perspective? Beyond plot and entertainment, Dickens ultimately had a vision that was meant to inspire some sort of change to your mindset (and mine) on society. What is it?
In partnerships:
We've examined the problems of love vs marriage and relationships for convenience through Lady Dedlock and Nemo/Captain Hawdon, Ada and Richard, and obviously between Esther and John and Alan (we've been on this book so long I feel I have a right to be on a first name basis with the characters).
How does correlate to your own life or your feelings on living for passion and real love vs supposed-realism and being a golddigger (anyone looking for sugar daddies or mamas?) Is the ending with Esther and Alan real? How would it be different if Jarndyce hadn't given them such a merry beginning?
We've seen how things like religion (or particularly religious fundamentalism) have ruined perfectly fine relationships through Ms. Barbary: she ruins the bond she had with her sister, Honoria/LD, she drove LD and Hawdon to split after making a big thing out of Esther's birth and claiming Esther died, and she ruined her own relationship with Boythorn. How else does it affect characters or our own society?
In solving problems:
What about society makes it a failed device? What makes it work? Clearly Dickens has his own ideas about it. In Law we have Bucket as the answer to law enforcement. In Tulkinhorn and Guppy to an extent, we saw law used for personal and selfish goals, and to a larger extent, Jarndyce v. Jarndyce was a device to be used to keep Chancery in such a painful limbo. Do we do the same in modern day? Do we distract or drag out pointless things to take advantage?
In altruism:
How do we help people like Jo with our resources today? Can any of us ever imagine taking in someone to help them without expecting anything in return? Do we push people along? Do we see our Pardiggles and Jellbys in modern culture? Is there any hope for the Jennys and Lizs of our day? Can we, like in chapter 8, ever truly understand people who go through that kind of existence, and, like Esther and Ada, make any kind of difference?
Anything else?
I'm writing alot and this may start to look like an essay or essay questions so I apologize. But if we haven't gotten anything out of this book, except for hopefully a good grade, then in the long run we didn't get much out of this class. This was sure as hell as a long book that wasn't very fun like other huge books (like Harry Potter for Mona) but please share anything you've picked up from the text, our conversations, or even some other form of revelation that dawned on you at the time of this semester through this story.
And, as the final blogger, I can only say that after traveling this long road, it sure as hell feels good to reach the end, rest my figurative feet for the moment, and see what new paths this road has opened up for me.
You've all been fun. Especially Team Handsome. (We're awesome, but so are you). And Prof Reitz. You rock too.
Cheers.
Masoud
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Masoud this was def. a long post but as I read it I did start to think at how this book began shaping the way I saw the world and things around me. I surprisingly added this book to my short list of favorites. The overriding theme that I picked out of this book being that take care of home before venturing out to help others relates alot to todays world. In cases where for example I look at like Brad and Angelina who adopt all kinds of kids all over the world which is great but then you look at whats here in the states we have millions of kids that need homes right here....but I digress...this book has alot important life lessons i it and I hope that as we do our final projects we really begin to realize that incase we haven't already.
ReplyDeleteWow, Masoud, thanks for taking the final-post-of-the-blog ball and running with it! I can't imagine a better topic than to ask us to think about how this book might have shaped how we've been looking at things for the past couple of months.
ReplyDeleteI can hardly remember a time when I hadn't read BLEAK HOUSE, so my input here will differ from all of yours. But if I were to take just the past week, BH came to mind just last night when driving home from the Jay and hearing Obama, speaking just up the river in West Point, talk about the costs closer to home of fighting these wars overseas. (Nerdy fun fact: most of the generals who fought in the American Civil War were studying at West Point when BLEAK HOUSE was coming out; you might imagine Robert E. Lee reading an installment of it as he takes a break from his drills.) I also saw a program on CNN recently about kids on the Afghanistan border who make a pitiful living by carrying a wheelbarrow of stuff across the border back and forth every day. One of the kids was asked by a reporter about whether or not he would rather be in school and it sounded exactly like Jo at the inquest -- he had never heard of school, of education, of anything different than being this wheelbarrow boy and he was deeply suspicious of why this reporter was bothering him.
One thing that impressed me during this most recent reading was how good Dickens is at capturing difficult emotional realities. He's not given a lot of credit for this. He's usually seen as a writer of extremes, of caricatures and overwhelming detail/image and writers such as George Eliot or William Faulkner are given props for being better on human psychology and the complexities of the heart. And while I don't take anything away from Eliot or Faulkner, I have been impressed by how much patience it takes for a writer not to write down everything a character is feeling. I think we can all say that Esther is one complicated woman, but not because she came out and wrote a confessional memoir ("I Almost Married My Dad!"), but because we see her struggle with both the enormity of her own personal development but in the context of a world of enormous personal suffering. So on one level, she is very important (as much right to live as a queen!), but she also realizes her own insignificance in the bigger, chaotic modern world and that rings really true to me. Every day I am both deeply concerned with what happens to me and made aware of how incredibly infinitessimal my life is against the span of time and space. It is kind of trippy and is part of what Dickens is attempting with the two narrators.
But I'll stop now and listen eagerly for your own voices. Thanks again, Masoud.
As for Allan, Esther and John Jarndyce- what happened was supposed to happen. From the section where Esther hints that she likes him [Allan] I sort of assumed that they would end up together. I seriously do not see any other way for the novel to end and still have the same impact, to function the same way.
ReplyDeleteLove v. realism- In all the fairy tales that were read to us when we were kids, true love conquers all. True love wins against realism. This novel seems to be of the same opinion. If you think about Sir Leicester and Lady Dedlock, everything he cared about- the traditional aspects of life- did not matter to him where she was concerned. He loved her so much that he married her even thought she was not a traditionally suitable match for him. He also forgave her for her past and all he wanted was for her to come back to him, nothing else mattered, not even his politics and tradition. In the love triangle- Jarndyce, Esther and Allan- same thing happened. Jarndyce loved Esther so much that he wanted her to be happy, even if it was not with him. When he found out that she loved Allan and he loved her back, Jarndyce bought them a house that was almost a replica of Bleak House. Essentially he made sure that she got her happy ending.
“Do we do the same in modern day? Do we distract or drag out pointless things to take advantage?” Sure we do. We use whatever, we can take advantage of, to get the outcome we want.
“How do we help people like Jo with our resources today?” Well, I think our child care/welfare system is in a much better shape than it was at the time of Bleak House. Unfortunately it is still not perfect. There have been a lot of biographical movies about the problems of homeless children, children that mostly no one cares about [Homeless to Harvard, is one of them. It was on the lifetime channel sometime this year].
“Do we see our Pardiggles and Jellbys in modern culture?” I do not have particular examples but I know that there are people who push their beliefs and their way of ‘help’ onto others.
“Is there any hope for the Jennys and Lizs of our day?” Of course there is. There are shelters for battered women and their kids. There are many different programs, government sanctioned and private. Divorce and filing a report of abuse is much simpler now. The key is for these women not to fall for the ‘good ol’ “I’m sorry I hit you. I love you. It will never happen again. And the next day it starts all over’ routine.
“Can we, like in chapter 8, ever truly understand people who go through that kind of existence, and, like Esther and Ada, make any kind of difference?” I think that we can be there for them. Not push our ideals onto them but just be there and if they need to talk listen, if they need to listen - talk and if they need for someone to be near and say nothing we could be silent.
On to one of the final notes of the class: I still dislike the Dickensian narrator. I hated him at the beginning, making us read so much of the overly repetitive stuff. Yes he got his point across but it was just too much and too tedious. Listening to most of you liking him so much, I thought I would warm up to it. I didn’t like Shakespeare, at first, I thought his plays were too hard to understand but after a some time of reading his books they became easier. I expected that the same would happen with this one but it did not. I still had to force my self to read him, if only to get to the Esther part.
Well, I guess this is it. Goodbye blog.
I have also thought about the ways in which Bleak House seems to shape my thinking because I realize that there really are may homeless people who are like Jo who do not have a home or family to go to. The difference I see in these people now and Jo's character who represents the past is that there are actually more places in which the people who are homeless now can go to in order to get something to eat or some place to stay until they get back on their feet.
ReplyDeleteAs for my ideas of love and relationships, the book still seem to show me that relaionships can be hard to get and maintain. It shows that some people would do what they need to do in order to protect their loved one (Lady Deadlock and Sir Deadlock, also Lady Deadlock and Esther). While reading the book I did not seem to understand why Lady Deadlock did not want to continue having a relationship with Esther after she realized she was her daughter and very much alive. While continuing to read the book I realized that she was doing what many mothers would do and that is to protect her daughter from the shame that she would eventually indure from the people of Chancery World.
Reading Bleak House has opened up my eyes to what is really going on around me. Although this book is ficttion it still has some realistic aspects to it that everyone can relate to.
Keeping up with this blog has been kind of hard during this Semester, but I'm glad that we did this as a class so that everyone could write out their opinions. Now we all could see eachothers view of what was really going on in the book.
Now that we are done with the novel I can appreciate the slow detailed beginning. It was a little hard for me to get into the story, but slowly it all connected and became very interesting. One of the things that really caught my attention was how easy it was for disease to spread. For our main character to go through this means a lot.
ReplyDeletePollution was an issue back then, and it looks like instead of us working on how to make the problem better we did the opposite. That is why we are where we are now. Dickens was warning us and we did not listen, now global warming is here and it is not going anywhere. It is really upsetting to know that there are still people who think global warming is a myth, these people just really care about money.I think it is time for us to really do something about this problem.
I really liked how Dickens managed to connect all these characters together.
I think the ending was very clever, Esther never shut her mouth and he kept her that way.
My favorite character has to be Lady Dedlock. Dickens gave her a soul by the end of the novel.
I have never spend a whole semester on one book, its usually no more than 2 weeks so I never got attached like I feel I did with all these characters.
Krooks death was awesome.
Now that Bleak House has come to an end,I can express my opinion on Esther and Alan marriage. It was meant to be, their love was genuine and real and John Jarndyce knew that and that is why he couldnt marriage Esther. Dickens wanted her to grow and if she married John Jarndyce that would not happen because he would "baby" her. although he gives her respect as a woman and treats her as such, she is younger and he would treat her a young child since he claims to be her guardian. I know deep inside John Jarndyce knew he was not going to be the man she needed and he know his place was to be her guardian. THe whole time when he gave her the keys to the house and made her the housekeeper was to train her to be a wonderful respected wife to someone else.
ReplyDeleteAs for Esther and Honoria aka Lady D, im glad they finally reunite only to last for a couple to minutes. Esther got to have a mother and got to receive the love she never got from her or her aunt whom was to suppose to give her that love.
Personally, im glad that Sir D forgave Lady D although it was too late, it really showed that he did marry her for love and not for looks.
Finally thought, Miss Barbary is selfish and deserved to die alone, how does someone lie and say that their child is dead and takes the child to care for and make the child life miserable. Honoria did not deserve that at all, I believe if Miss Barbary mind her own business Honoria would be happy with Nemo and Esther. It is hard to live with the pain that your only child is gone. i believe that Miss Barbary told this lie and ran with Esther so that she can run away from Mr. Boythorn. Which is sad because he really loved her and wanted to be with her.
I would have to agree with Katherina and say that the one thing i got from this book is that one must help themselves before they help others. Esther being the best example, she spent so much time on others that he neglect for herself left her scared. lady Dedlock being another character that couldn't be their for Esther because eh realized how much of a mess she was herself. i feel as though there is an emphasis on focusing on ones self before lending a helping hand.
ReplyDeletethe book also makes you think of the decisions we make not because we want to but because of our surroundings. lady Dedlock had to give Esther away because the stigma surrounding being a single mother would have damaged her too much. and Esther marrying Jarndyce was the most practical option for her because of the benefits and prestige it held.
as for reading the book, I'm not going to lie... it was rough at times. but finishing it makes me think how the problems in the book are still prevalent today, not just in our society but around the world.
I'm really enjoying reading these comments. Keep 'em coming!
ReplyDeleteI wanted to speak to Carlos's point about taking care of one's self first. I think we need to frame that differently. Certainly the good characters in this novel put others first (Jarndyce, Esther, Alan) even at a cost. But there is the message that looking too far out to help leads to the kind of "telescopic philanthropy" that has such bad effects on the Jellyby family. So there needs to be a balance. Charity starts at home. But that's not the same as looking out for number one.
Team Handsome forever.
ReplyDeleteA popular Ms. Jellyby of today would have to be Oprah: the ultimate woman! Like Ms. Jellyby, she does so much to help poverty-stricken youth, or helpless victims of civil war in third-world countries. She also does not need to care for a family, the way Dickens implies Ms. Jellyby should care for her own, because she is a single woman in her 50s. If Oprah were a character in Bleak House, the theme would be that women cannot balance having an interest in worldly affairs along with having an interest in the home. And the obvious direction Dickens would guide the good women in his novel, like Esther, would be towards family life. This makes me wonder: would Oprah be able to manage a family and doing her "telescopic philanthropy" if she did in fact have a husband and children? Sadly, my answer would have to be the same as Dickens: no. Perhaps it is true that women cannot conquer two roles at once.
ReplyDeleteI agree and I think that Bleak House has also shaped the way that I think on different things. For example, the issue with homelessness is one that still exists today and through Jo Dickens shows us the trip that he takes throughout Bleak House. He gets told to "move on" by nearly everybody and they seem to be oblivious to the fact that they are not helping the situation. Dickens has shown us not only through Jo but through his diversified stack of characters that the problems do need to be addressed in order for society to continue to exist.
ReplyDeleteThis is sooooo sad :-(
ReplyDeleteI can't believe it's over. I enjoyed this class very very much! Thanks so much, Professor Reitz. This class was amazing.
But now to comment on the blog. Great post, Masoud! On love, I would like to say it is optimistic the Dickens thinks that love will conquer all. We did have a successful love story, that of Esther and Alan, but Sir Dedlock's romance with Lady Dedlock did not succeed. Perhaps it did not succeed because Lady Dedlock's heart was not in it, but Sir Dedlock ends up being an invalid. Of course his illness is symbolic of the "old" system needing to die out, but if Dickens claimed that love had any way of healing society, he would have at least allowed Sir Dedlock to live on in good health, since Tulkinghorn died. Tulkinghorn was really a symbol of antiquity and the old order, so killing him shoukd have been enough. I want love to conquer all, and I think it should. So I will say that maybe Sir Dedlock cannot live on without love, so he will remain crippled. It is a sad ending for him, but maybe a necessary wake up call for people who take love too lightly.
Eddie, there is a four-word minimum for commenting, so you'll have to add one.
ReplyDeleteI think the idea that social problems can be solved by love is both compelling and problematic. At times this ending seems really inadequate to the intense portrait of social ills Dickens paints, but I'm a lot like Sara in what I root for in a novel. I end up being half in love with Sir Leicester and that is just embarassing. But to try to put a scholarly spin on it, a big technique of nineteenth-century fiction is sentimentalism. If you've read UNCLE TOM'S CABIN, you know what I'm talking about. There, the evils of slavery can be conquered by love. In a way, it's not that silly. You might argue that Christianity, historically a fairly transformative social force, is based on love (that is the argument, in fact, of UNCLE TOM'S CABIN).
Sifat, I've always wondered that about Oprah.
Felipe, I do think the representation of "moving on" is one of Dickens's greatest contributions. It is so expressive of how things get so bad -- not because we are all intentionally evil, but because we tend to kick things down the road.
Good luck on your presentations everyone. I'm looking forward to them.
I admire your writing style Masoud. And thanks for the shout out with Harry Potter. This book had definitely opened my eyes about love and relationship. Mr. Jarndyce unconditional love for Esther, even after her ugliness, gave me hope that there is someone out there who doesn't care about looks, but whats inside. Esther, even though I despise "doormats" and pushovers like Esther, who are too nice, reading this book made me realize that being a nice and kind person like Esther really isn't that bad. You actually end up marrying a hot doctor (Alan).
ReplyDeleteI came from a very poor country so reading about Jo wasn't a surprise, but it definitely made me want to reach out to the poor and not want anything in return (NOT BSing. I admit, this book really wasn't that bad. I dreaded the beginning, but later from the middle to the ending, I was surprised how beautifully it was written.
Thank you Professor Reitz, you are awesome
This book in a lot of ways reflects the world that we live in today. There are many issues such as poverty and a corrupted government that are often over looked or considered a social norm. This book has mad me more aware in a sense that I notice or think more of social issues that were not so much apparent to me before.
ReplyDeleteThank you everyone for replying, and I'm glad to see so many responses that have gotten something out of it. Like Mona, I dreaded this title and now I'm honestly moved by the effort Dickens put in writing this book and the intent to so carefully encourage social change without necessarily forcing down your throat (plus his caricatures were funny at times).
ReplyDeleteI personally have gained more resolve to, as a creative writer, keep the focus of my work layered with different meanings and metaphors instead of the mild symbolism I had before. As a person, I want to stop being so passive and scared to speak my mind, now favoring the idea of being moderately and politely outspoken, if that makes sense.
In regards to Bucket, I almost consider it fate that I got him. At the time we received names I regret to say I was loosely following the book, but that part gave me the focus I needed to continue reading and remain alert. Bucket in particular really grew on me, as far as the concept he represented, because my mother had reminisced about the days when neighborhoods had "beat cops" cops, who knew or were from the neighborhood they were patrolling, were friendlier and more responsive to special situations that required not brash action and vulgar tones but instead more reasonable and personal solutions, and were more about proactive help and reform than reactive violence and extreme measures.
I like those ideals in the people who are paid to take care of my life.
The rest of the book only reinforced what I feel inside. That true love should be, if possible, pursued, and I've become a real fan of Nemo and Honoria.
That the only way to really help others is to experience that pain with them, like when Esther and Ada were present for the death of Jenny's baby, a scene which could only be understood by people who have experienced lost and have no where else to go.
In Jo I feel something deep because my life and my job has drawn me towards people who have lost and I have always felt very sympathetic. There are those who have never known the luxury of a fine home, of good parents (as that novel PUSH can attest, from what I heard) or even of a kind gesture. And money can only go but so far, as we see with Jo, who ultimately dies, pocket money or not.
If this novel has anything to prove, I think, it's that the only way to make any change in our lives is to make our lives as connected and altruistic as possible. For if everyone in a village is willing to help another, there cannot be any who go without. If every single one of us, in our school, in midtown, on Manhattan island, in the 5 boroughs, in the state of NY and especially in the country as a whole were to help one another out instead of being greedy, irresponsible, uncaring and selfish, none other could ever go without.
And if we could extend that message to the world...
Well...
Yeah...
Masoud, that last paragraph was such a joy to read and that is not something I say often in December!
ReplyDeleteThanks for such a fantastic final blog.
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