『황량한 집』의 서술전략과 디킨즈의 정치학

This paper asks the question why Dickens uses split narratives to present his legal theme in Bleak House. Split narrative is a narrative strategy to repress the essential connection between the two narratives. The grand scheme which underlies the novel is a hidden narrative about contentions between two opposing forces; forces represented by Tulkinghorn on the one hand and forces represented by Lady Dedlock on the other. Lady Dedlock is replaced by Hortense on the level of plot and by Esther on the level of narrative. This paper attempts to analyze the ways that narrative strategies reveal the hidden connection between the two narratives and to read their meanings in the context of contemporary English politics around the legal debates in relation with the Chancery. The third-person narrative is resonant with an angry narrative voice and yet it seems silent when it presents the Dedlock plot. The silence is produced by the pictorial presentation of the Dedlock plot whose movement is led by Tulkinghorn. Tulkinghorn pursues Lady Dedlock's secret only to exert power upon Lady Dedlock, who resists him. The power struggle between these two characters is at the heart of the third-person narrative. This power relationship repeats between the third-person narrative and Esther's narrative through two ways. One is doubling the role of Lady Dedlock by Hortense who kills Tulkinghorn and Esther, and the other is the supplementary relationship of the two narratives that show Esther asserts her identity writing her autobiography while Tulkinghorn tries to suppress Esther's identity, the embodiment of Lady's secret. This relationship is not visible on the surface narrative structure since Esther's autobiography is a story about her repressed identity. The power relationship between the two narratives is created in the process of reading. These multiple narrative structures are related with the Chancery in some ways. Tulkinghorn, the source of mysteries, can be interpreted as acting the Lord Chancellor, the source of fog mysteries. The fact that Tulkinghorn's power is overturned by Esther has political implications in the context of political debates about the Chancery reform. Dickens seems to be on the side with the radical reformist of Benthamites; and yet what Dickens presents in Esther is against Benthamites who oppose the natural law theory. What Esther implies is the principle of Equity based on the natural law theory, which has revolutionary implications for the English middle-class since it denies any values of traditions and conventions. Esther's principle of Equity is different from that of the traditionalists who adhere to the tradition. In a word, Dickens is a radical reformist, but his ideas of reform coincide neither with Benthamite reformists nor with traditionalists.