Reading the Body in Dickens’s Bleak House and Our Mutual Friend

2019 ◽  
Vol 27 ◽  
pp. 275-292
Author(s):  
Zeynep Harputlu Shah
Keyword(s):  
The Body ◽  
Literary Responses ◽  
Infant Deaths ◽  
Bleak House ◽  
The Dead ◽  
Our Mutual Friend ◽  
Physical Degradation ◽  
Mutual Friend ◽  
The Grotesque ◽  
Grotesque Body

This article examines the ways in which the Victorian body and identity were being transformed in the mid-nineteenth century and identifies three distinctive ways the biological and normative boundaries of the body were violated as represented in Dickens’s fiction: the grotesque body, the vulnerable body and the dead body. In this sense, Dickens’s Bleak House (1851-53) and Our Mutual Friend (1864-65) present creative and challenging literary responses to the Victorian body abjected through deprivation, physical vulnerability and death. In the novels, the grotesque body challenges the abject via a tragicomic and hybrid representation of the body and of character. Regarding the vulnerable body, the study elaborates on a body “out-of-control”, threatening the boundaries between the object and the subject, inside and outside, by holding a liminal state through ill-health, excessive labour, starvation and physical degradation. Finally, it is argued that there was an intimate and abject relationship between the living and the dead bodies in the capital, beside prevalent infant deaths, high mortality rates, diseased bodies and overflowing graveyards in the city.

BEAUTY OR THE BEAST? THE GROTESQUE BODY IN THE SONG OF SONGS

2000 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. 302-323 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fiona Black
Keyword(s):  
Gender Politics ◽  
The Body ◽  
Song Of Songs ◽  
The Grotesque ◽  
Grotesque Body

AbstractThe expressions of love and desire made by the lovers in the Song of Songs include intimate and detailed poetic descriptions of the body. These often cause difficulty for interpreters because the imagery used is cryptic and seemingly nonsensical. Biblical scholars frequently express some discomfort or embarrassment over this language, yet largely maintain the view that it should be interpreted positively—as complementary and loving description. In all this, they are bowled over by their own amorous relationships with this text, which make them stutter and fumble almost as much as the Song's lovers do. This essay looks at (scrutinizes) the bodies in the Song of Songs—the physical bodies described in the Song and the textual body (corpus) with which readers engage. The literary and artistic construct of the grotesque serves—ostensibly perversely—as a heuristic for viewing bodily imagery and readerly desire. The grotesque's emphasis on the exaggerated and hybridised body and its weavings of the comic and the terrifying facilitate an investigation of the Song's gender politics and its complicated and potentially conflicting presentation of desire.

Baldesar Castiglione, Thomas Wilson, and the Courtly Body of Renaissance Rhetoric

1993 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 241-274 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wayne A. Rebhorn
Keyword(s):  
Human Body ◽  
Social Position ◽  
The Body ◽  
Rhetorical Tradition ◽  
Thomas Wilson ◽  
The Grotesque ◽  
Grotesque Body

Abstract: Historically, the Renaissance marks a transformation in wfiich the elite classes come to define themselves by their aesthetic refinement, taste, and good manners. Accompanying this change is a special vision of the human body which is distinguished from that of artisans and peasants. This opposition has been described by Bakhtin as one between the classical body and the grotesque one, and it appears in the most unportant book for the Renaissance redefinition of the upper classes, Castiglione's II libro del cortegiano. Castiglione's view of the body actually derives from the rhetorical tradition of antiquity, in particular from Quintilian and Cicero's De oratore. A similar view appears in the works of Renaissance rhetoricians and can usefully be illustrated by analysis of Thomas Wilson's The Arte of Rhetorique (1553), although the latter also retains a vision of the grotesque body as a result of the ambiguous social position of its author.

»Auch die Wörter werden zu Körpern« Body, Sexuality and Carnavalesque Writing in Emine S. Özdamar’s Stories Mutterzunge and Großvaterzunge

2015 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 51-70
Author(s):  
Clara Ervedosa
Keyword(s):  
The Body ◽  
Embodied Writing ◽  
The Grotesque ◽  
Grotesque Body

Abstract Based on the analysis of Mutterzunge and Großvaterzunge, this article demonstrates that Özdamar’s mode of dealing with the body and sexuality corresponds to Bakhtin’s concept of the »grotesque body« and that body and language are strongly interwoven. It argues that Özdamar’s »embodied writing« is emancipatory and that it subverts not only patriarchal discourses, but also bourgeois concepts of body, sexuality, and literature. Writing is not only a mental but also a corporeal activity that goes through the body and gives voice to it.

Ruins of Paper: Dickens and the Necropolitan Library

2007 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew M. Stauffer
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Charles Dickens ◽  
Ancient Egypt ◽  
Victorian Era ◽  
Bleak House ◽  
Technological Developments ◽  
Our Mutual Friend ◽  
Egyptian Archaeology ◽  
Mutual Friend

AbstractIn his journalism and novels (particularlyBleak HouseandOur Mutual Friend), Charles Dickens presents London as a writer’s necropolis, a city of disintegrating paper and dead letters, a failed archival space. This essay examines a nexus of images in Dickens’ work – involving dust, Egyptian ruins and mummies, and paper – as revealing characteristic Victorian concerns regarding the changing status of paper and the archive. With reference to developments in papermaking technologies and the beginnings of Egyptian archaeology, I demonstrate some of the ways that nineteenth-century authors were newly troubled by the archival as such. Dickens is particularly haunted by an urban vision of paper as everywhere and everywhere turning into blank, wasting forms. I connect this phenomenon to the British reception of the material legacies of ancient Egypt, particularly the mummified dead. The Victorian era was the great age of paper, as technological developments transformed the industry and multiplied its productivity many times over. Read in the context of these changes, and in relation to Egyptology (that other burgeoning industry of records and remains), the work of Dickens reflects deep anxieties regarding the whelming flood of precariously fragile paper—anxieties that have a center in the necropolitan library.

JASPER PACKLEMERTON, VICTORIAN FREAK

2006 ◽  
Vol 34 (1) ◽  
pp. 209-232
Author(s):  
Kelly Hager
Keyword(s):  
Victorian Novel ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Our Mutual Friend ◽  
High Degree ◽  
Mutual Friend

ONE OF THEOED'S DEFINITIONSof the word “freak” is that of a freak of nature, “a monstrosity, an abnormally developed individual of any species; a living curiosity exhibited in a show.” The freak of nature I wish to focus on in this essay is marriage, and specifically, marriage as it is “exhibited” in Dickens's novelThe Old Curiosity Shop(1840–41). To refer to marriage in a Victorian novel as a freak of nature is perhaps surprising. To refer to the sacred institution as freakish in a Dickens novel may seem to border on heresy. After all, Dickens is the self-appointed novelist of hearth and home, the creator of conservative domestic plots that celebrate marriage as the institution that establishes closure for the novel and for the society it represents. Despite this apparent conservatism and despite our vague sense that most marriages in Dickens are as happy as David and Agnes's, Esther and Allen Woodcourt's, Biddy and Joe's, it is in fact the case that in all his novels, fromThe Pickwick PaperstoOur Mutual Friend, Dickens is fascinated–in a multiplicity of ways both large and small, in a manner that is alternately comic, tragic, melodramatic, ironic–with marriage's discontents. In fact, the disintegration of the institution is one of the things that Dickens makes fictions from, giving the failure of marriage a surprisingly high degree of visibility and presenting the breaking of the matrimonial bond with remarkable clarity and persistence. Dickens novels are full of wives who leave their husbands (Edith Dombey, Lady Dedlock, Louisa Gradgrind), breach of promise suits (inPickwickandOur Mutual Friendmost famously) and characters who try to find legal ways of escaping their marriages (Stephen Blackpool, Betsey Trotwood,Nickleby's Madame Mantalini). This essay, then, is an analysis of how Dickens undermines the institution early in his career, and of how the comic and grotesque display of the body, the sprawling, teeming physical surfaces ofThe Old Curiosity Shop, both conceal and reveal a story of marital skepticism.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document