[In the following essay, Benton examines the correlation between illness and such issues as justice and progress in Dickens' Bleak House. Benton argues that disease functions in unpredictable and contrary ways, defining society and underscoring societal boundaries, but also existing beyond such boundaries and in some cases breaking them down.]

There was a seeming propensity or a wicked inclination in those that were infected to infect others. … Others placed it to the account of the corruption of human nature, who cannot bear to see itself more miserable than others of its own species, and has a kind of involuntary wish that all men were as unhappy or in as bad a condition as itself. Others say it was only a kind of desperation, not knowing or regarding what they did, and consequently unconcerned at the danger or safety, not only of anybody near them, but even of themselves also. And indeed when men are once come to a condition to abandon themselves, and be unconcerned for the safety of themselves, it cannot be so much wondered that they should be careless of the safety of other people.

—Daniel DeFoe (154)

PREFACE: (DIS)EASE, PARANOIA, AND PUBLIC PERCEPTIONS OF CONTAMINATION

Under the Public Health Act of 1848, Parliament established a General Board of Health in order to combat the rising spread of contagious diseases that began to surface in large urban centers. Two hundred years after the Great Plague, England again had to confront disease as a force responsible for decimating significant segments of the population: the death rate by tuberculosis and phthisis rose to almost 20٪ in 1851, and epidemic outbreaks of cholera and smallpox in 1831, 1848, and 1870 exacerbated the problem of ineffective disease control (Woods 84-94). A public outcry for legislative reform focused attention on the urban slums of London as a primary contributor to contagion and social blight: The Report on the Sanitary Condition of the Laboring Population of 1842 cited working class neighborhoods, with their “broken panes in every window frame, and filth and vermin in every nook … with stagnant puddles here and there with their foetid exhalations, causeways broken and dangerous, ash-places choked up with filth, and excrementitious deposits on all sides,” as areas that not only bred disease, but also instilled within its inhabitants a “moral degradation … and vicious habits and criminal propensities” (Dyson 23). Thus, although contagious disease refuses to recognize boundaries of class, it has become aligned with the disenfranchised and disavowed segments of society, and, more significantly, disease became emblematic of other unrelated but equally horrific social ills.

Disease was (and of course, is, today) a “real” entity to be negotiated. And yet, disease also produces an imagined and hysterical reaction that transcends its actual participation within societal systems. Diseases, and particularly those that carry the threat of social transmission, induce fear and paranoia: infection works to stratify the population between the sick and the healthy, between the rich and poor. The operative processes of disease are often veiled through the use of military euphemisms: a “victim” is “attacked,” or “stricken” by an illness, one's immune system is rendered “defenseless,” and the “disabled” individual attempts to “fight” the illness through various medical and medicinal approaches. Contagious disease operates as an elusive signifier in that it exists above and through society. It is an encompassing and invisible entity that manifests itself upon individuals as it marks bodies to ultimately produce an isolated signified. Disease exists “in the air”: it cannot be seen or smelt or heard until one “catches” it and harbors it, and even then one exhibits symptoms of the disease, while the malady itself remains amorphous—dangerous and undetectable. Its manifested form differs from its form in general, for in general, it has no form.

I

Disease and illness appear repeatedly in Bleak House: Jo infects Charley who infects Esther; Sir Leicester Dedlock accepts his gout as a token of his aristocratic heritage; Lady Dedlock succumbs to either pneumonia or hypothermia; Richard falls ill as a result of the protracted Chancery suit; and the good doctor Allan Woodcourt surfaces repeatedly throughout the narrative to aid the many ailing individuals. The presence of disease in the text does more than provide a tension between sickness and health in the various characters—it posits the entire novel as a document searching for a cure. It shows a “sick” world coming to terms with its diseased body. As Susan Sontag has noted of the use of disease in literature, “Illnesses have always been used as metaphors to enliven charges that a society was corrupt or unjust. … Disease imagery is used to express concern for social order, and health is something everyone is presumed to know about” (71). Disease shifts and floats over the action in a manner similar to that of the Chancery fog, touching down in various places to “attach itself” onto characters in order to illuminate, to provoke, and to disrupt specific concerns of innocence, contamination and corruptibility in the novel. Not only does the actual presence of disease project certain implications regarding individuals and social systems, but because of its encompassing and exhaustive appearances and reappearances it exceeds its own representation and becomes a larger and more complex metaphor for other conditions and constructions.

The entire juridical system can be read as a diseased enterprise (“this High Court of Chancery, most pestilent of hoary sinners” [50; ch. 1]), and Richard's bitter antagonism towards John Jarndyce results because of the “subtle poison of such abuses to breed such diseases” (547; ch. 35). Disease, in Bleak House, transcends the textual representations of disease to include a metaphoric diseased society. Indeed, the power of disease as an evil force works to construct social divisions—one must ward off a virus as one would ward off poverty and squalidness. This is made clear in the personification of Tom-All-Alone's as a vindictive and malevolent carrier of destruction:

There is not a drop of Tom's corrupted blood but propagates infection and contagion somewhere. It shall pollute, this very night, the choice stream (in which chemists on analysis would find the genuine nobility) of a Norman house, and his Grace shall not be able to say Nay to the infamous alliance. There is not an atom of Tom's slime, not a cubic inch of any pestilential gas in which he lives, not one obscenity or degradation about him, not an ignorance, not a wickedness, not a brutality of his committing, but shall work its retribution, through every order of society, up to the proudest of the proud, and to the highest of the high. Verily, what with tainting, plundering, and spoiling, Tom has his revenge.

(683; ch. 46)

Disease produces diverse and oppositional forces on a textual level that serve to elevate or to diminish the diseased character in terms of his/her relation to society and self. Within different morphological representations, disease assumes different “roles” in relation to various thematic gestures and implications.

This paper will look specifically at the way illness functions within the novel, not only as it reflects societal fears and superstitions, but also how illness is inscribed within the text to articulate concerns of decay, justice and progress. As much work has already been done in the field of mental illness in the Victorian novel, I will attempt to stay within the context of physical illness, except in those occasions in which the physical malady produces symptoms of mental instability.¹ Attention will also be given to the construction of Nemo as he participates in the discourse of the diseased individual: his addiction and eventual death parallel certain components of societal ostracism that prevail in other narrative strands. Disease both releases and confines; it stigmatizes and unifies. Disease operates as a state of suspension between health and death: it marks a transitory position in time as it isolates and immobilizes individuals for public scrutiny.

II

One powerful feature of contagious disease rests in its inability to be “seen” in certain instances, which allows for its transmission from person to person, transgressing over spheres of the public and domestic space, and over boundaries of class distinctions. Because of this nature of “undetectablility,” disease figures as an organization of power similar to that of the Chancery. D. A. Miller has noted that “an essential characteristic of the court is that its operations far exceed the architecture in which it is apparently circumscribed” (60). And as the court “permeates” society and resists detection because of the “ultimate unlocalizability of its operations” in the “very heart of the fog,” so too does disease pervade the text with no validated source of origin and no sense that it can be recognized and defeated. It is no accident that the most prominent disease, that which strikes Jo, Charley, and Esther, remains unnamed. Although the generated symptoms suggest smallpox, the disease's ambiguousness contributes to its power as a dangerous and concealed force. This disease is acknowledged only in veiled terms: Jo describes his condition as “a-being froze … and then burnt up” (486; ch. 31), Charley simply “falls ill” (494; ch. 31), and Esther just “lays ill” (543; ch. 35). By generalizing that which attacks the characters, Dickens grants a potency to the disease—a potency that is both real in the sense that it is transmitted easily from one individual to the next, and symbolically, in that that which is never explicitly named affirms the fear and terror of the unknown which accompanies it.²

To return to “Discipline in Different Voices,” Miller asserts the police become “a representation of the containment of power,” and, conversely, “the police thus allow for the existence of a field outside the dynamic of power and free from its effects” (75). I would argue that disease also fills such a dual role, that disease represents a containment of power in that it “selects” and “isolates” certain individuals upon whom it asserts its authority, and at the same time disease, because of the arbitrary nature of contamination, remains outside the artificial construction of power relations. Disease is “god-given”: through a discourse of poetic justice, one can argue disease represents the ultimate juridical system. And yet, expectations are reversed in Bleak House—it is the innocent and the “good” who are afflicted. Such an inversion operates to produce sympathetic readings, and forces the reader to look for causes for such an eteliologically derived tragedy. As disease constitutes a force of nature, nature must, in one respect, be held responsible for the agency of disease. Pestilence acts as a form of God's condemnation of the fall of man.³ Thus, J. Hillis Miller aptly recognizes Dickens's construction of “an absolute incompatibility between this world and the far-off supernatural world” (28). The world of man, and specifically the societal system of English urban life, is inherently diseased. On his deathbed Richard sets out to begin “the world. Not this world, O not this! The world that sets this right” (927; ch. 65). Can illness, then, be associated with the failure of an individual to maintain his/her position in the social teleos? Certainly not in the case of Jo, who figures as innocent carrier of evil; nor in the case of Esther, who poses both as nurse and victim, embracing a social ill in an attempt to exorcise society of such a problem. Richard and Nemo, however, warrant a different analysis in their relations to disease and death.

Consider the description of Captain Hawdon/Nemo as he is discovered by Krook and Tulkinghorn:

He lies there, dressed in shirt and trousers, with bare feet. He has a yellow look in the special darkness of a candle that has guttered down, until the whole length of its wick (still burning) has doubled over, and left a tower of winding-sheet above it. His hair is ragged, mingling with his whiskers and beard—the latter, ragged too, and grown, like the scum and mist around him, in neglect. Foul and filthy as the room is, it is not easy to perceive what fumes those are which most oppress the senses in it.

(188; ch. 10)

Enveloped in grime and smothered in putrid air, Nemo's dead body is likened to the remains of a lit candle: yellow, waxy, and ultimately spent, he has been consumed by the polluted atmosphere that has refused to sustain him. In his desire to escape the confines of societal pressure through voluntary isolation and drug addiction, Nemo succeeded in closing himself off from the haunted past, for it was a past involving an incompatible social interaction which led to his demise. Woodcourt reflects on the change in Nemo's status: “I recollect once thinking there was something in his manner, uncouth as it was, that denoted a fall in life” (191; ch. 11). As a result of his illicit affair, Nemo was forced into an intolerable situation that jeopardized his health. He accepted his fallen position and allowed his physical state to disintegrate. The inner, diseased condition of his psyche, brought on by excessive guilt and sorrow, manifested itself upon the body to induce a decrepit and dissolute sickness. Just as Nemo could not live within society (i.e. with Lady Dedlock), he could not live outside of society. If the social systems are indeed diseased, they also act as support mechanisms, and one can no sooner reject the world (however contaminated) than one can thrive in isolation.

Richard Carstone's situation parallels Nemo's in that he, too, ultimately collapses under the pressures of a world he cannot alter. Richard's health begins to subside soon after he engages in battle with the massive and unrelenting court which he believes holds, and refuses to relinquish, his future happiness. The effects of the court do not, at the beginning, take the form of physical disease:

“It is not,” said Mr. Woodcourt, “his being so much younger or older, or thinner or fatter, or paler or ruddier, as their being upon his face such a singular expression. I never saw so remarkable a look in young person. One cannot say that it is all anxiety, or all weariness; yet it is both, and like ungrown despair.”

“You do not think he is ill?” said I.

“No. He looked robust in body.”

(681; ch. 45)

His condition deteriorates rapidly, however, and when Esther asks him if his apartment at Symond's Inn is a “healthy place to live,” he replies that he must remain in such a state until a conclusion is reached: “it can only come in one of two ways, I should rather say. Either the suit must be ended, Esther, or the suitor” (751; ch. 51). The dark and disarrayed living quarters, reminiscent of Nemo's dingy lodgings, operate to keep Richard “out of the light” that shines on Esther. He begins to falter: “‘I get,’ he repeated gloomily, ‘so tired. It is such weary, weary work’” (752; ch. 51). His resignation signals the beginning of the end. He has “lost” his battle with Chancery, and because the suit has acted as his principal sustenance, he must lose his life. By investing his future in that institution that “overthrows the brain and breaks the heart” (51; ch. 1), Richard shuns life and accepts death. His collapse is slow, and if the exhaustion results merely from a psychosomatic response to an intolerable situation, its “progress” mirrors that of a consumptive disease.

Although Richard's illness differs from Nemo's in that he embraces a “diseased” enterprise while Nemo attempts to suffocate himself through a lack of all societal ties, together they provide an interesting construction of the individual's position in a contaminated system. Both begin life as innocent people, both fall prey to the infections of society (illicit affair, greed) and both die pathetically—one in his desire to disengage from the world, the other in his misguided attempt to change the world to suit his own wishful designs.

Within this section I have tried to construct a reading of Nemo and Richard as they participate within the context of a system of poetic justice: both fall ill and die because of certain faults inherent in their individual psyches. And yet, this reading becomes problematized when one considers that the world/society/structure which they confront is in itself diseased. Their depicted conditions—the pathos of Nemo and the reader's sympathetic attachment to Richard (and, in a tangential consideration, Lady Dedlock)—result because of a flawed teleos that projects their sufferings as ultimately grounded in a purity or innocence of social mechanisms. Terry Eagleton notes that “Dickens' fiction reveals a contradiction between the social reality mediated by childhood innocence, and the transcendental moral values which that innocence embodies” (128). All the young diseased characters in Bleak House, including Nemo and Richard, but more particularly Jo and Esther, find themselves in possession of these “moral values” which run against social reality and ultimately cause tension, or illness, in their inability to “come into adulthood” in a misaligned world. Jo, Esther, Richard, Charley, and Nemo do not suffer for their particular sins, but they suffer as child-figures caught in a malevolent system. Their innocence makes their suffering all the more poignant, and they achieve an almost martyr-like status as individuals sacrificed to an uncaring world. Dickens manages to transcend successfully the tired trope of poetic justice by framing sickness within a wider sphere to incorporate considerations of societal constructions that would not necessarily revolve within a clearly delineated illness/health binary.

III

Bleak House “concludes” with a caesura, and many critics have commented on this peculiar ending as representative of the text's overall resistance to closure in various instances. D. A. Miller asserts:

Not to be identified with Chancery, the novel contrasts the aimless suspension of the suit with the achievement of its own ending; but not to be confused with the police either, it counters the tidy conclusion of the case with a conspicuous recognition of all that must elude any such achievement. If in the first instance, the novel must affirm the possibility of closure, in the second it is driven to admit the inadequacy of this closure.

(97)

J. Hillis Miller also remarks on the text's open-endedness: “The novel too has a temporal structure without proper origin, present, or end. It too is made up of an incessant movement of reference in which each element leads to other elements in a constant displacement of meaning” (29). This perception of the text's temporality and unfixity operates in a manner similar to that suspension of time brought on by a debilitating disease. An ill person remains incapacitated (incarcerated in a dysfunctional body); unable to operate in a normal “everyday” way, and yet unwilling to relinquish his/her hold on reality. This static position of illness suspends time and concurrently marks time. One either declines into death, or one progresses into health. Esther, in sickness, becomes confused in terms of sequential time and spatial location: “I am almost afraid to hint at that time in my disorder—it seemed one long night, but I believe there were both nights and days in it … I knew perfectly at intervals, and I think vaguely at most times, that I was in my bed” (544; ch. 35). Illness, accompanied by delirium, serves to fold time: days and nights merge together. Again, a comparison can be drawn with the Chancery suit: “Jarndyce and Jarndyce drones on … Jarndyce and Jarndyce still drags its dreary length before the Court, perennially hopeless” (52; ch. 1). Illness produces a strange kind of time, one not measured in hours, but by recollections and nightmares which reconstitute time and non-time. Esther first tells us she remembers life “at once a child, an elder girl, and the little woman I had been” (543; ch. 35). She then dreams of never-ending stairs “piled up to the sky” refiguring a death-wish ascent to heaven coupled with a dystopic conception of eternity. Her self-depiction as a bead on a necklace that wants to be disengaged reflects her desire to be “well,” and to be distanced from the ill society with which she is inevitably tied. To be separated from the necklace, however, is to die a lonely death in the manner of Nemo. People must remain fixed within the social system, and at the same time they must maintain a notion of individual and societal progress.

This progress becomes distorted, as made clear by Jo, who continuously is forced to “move on.” His “journey,” however, is lateral, not progressive. Only in death does one achieve finality, and even here, death “constitute(s) only in a paradoxical way ‘ends’ which establish the destinies of those who die” (J. H. Miller, 29). The tragic demise of Jo serves to point out the sorrowful state of a disinterested society, but Jo also leaves a legacy of the corrupt nature of such a society. Jo's role in the text imports significance in that he is the carrier of disease, thus providing the apparatus of infection to spread from individual to individual through varying strata of social classes. At the same time he embodies childhood innocence and an initial ignorance of his wake of destruction. He has been infected by a society that has rejected him (allowed him to fend for himself in Tom-All-Alone's), and, ironically, has forced him to spread disease by refusing to let him remain in his own environment. Skimpole's blunt and mercurial attitude towards Jo mirrors what society has done, but will never confirm aloud: “You had better turn him out. … If you put him on the road, you will only put him where he was before. He will be no worse off than he was, you know” (489; ch. 31). While contagious disease remains a tangible impetus for societal reform, it is the societal disinterest in its poor and weak which comprises the basis of such a problem. Dickens, through Jo's suffering and Skimpole's lucid reaction, posits the particular disease as a component of disease-in-general, namely the inadequate state of domestic care for one's own.

IV

As noted in the previous section, the condition of illness operates as a state of suspension; as the occupied marginal space between the life/death binary. One may remain ill for quite some time, but one must eventually succumb to death (as Sontag has remarked: “the standard euphemism in obituaries is that someone ‘has died after a long illness’” 13), or one must recover into a state of health. To “get better,” in a medical context, actually is to return to the mental and physical state that one had previously held. Certain characters in Bleak House recover, and certain characters die: if one is to construct a configuration of disease as an institution representative of societal evils, one must negotiate the complex implications surrounding the linguistic connotations accompanying a character's “survival” through disease, and the processes by which a “cure” is implemented.

Esther slowly returns to a state of normalcy after her long and hallucinatory period of incapacitation: “By now, my sight strengthening and the glorious light coming every day more full and brightly on me, I could read the letters that my dear wrote me. … By and by, my strength began to be restored” (544-5; ch. 35). As her illness was marked by darkness (her blindness and the depiction of obscured figures in her dreams), non-sequential time, and physical weakness, with health appear oppositional textual signifiers: the arrival of “the glorious light” and the ability to read, a definitive recognition of mornings and evenings, and a repeated assertion of a gained strength and vitality. Esther (and Charley) have recovered, in part, because they had proper care during their infirmities. In their quarantined (carceral) location, they adopted and then reversed complementary positions as nurse and patient: “‘Now Charley,’ said I after letting her go on for a little while, ‘if I am to be ill, my great trust, humanly speaking, is in you. And unless you are as quiet and composed for me, as you always were for yourself, you can never fulfill it, Charley’” (496; ch. 31). Both had the advantage of delivering and receiving maternal nurturing, and, more importantly, both were objects of concern and affection outside of the internalized space that they were forced to occupy. Esther tends to Charley with the complete admiration of those not granted admission into the sickroom, and, in return, she is showered with love from Ana, John Jarndyce, and even Richard in her own illness. Jo, however, died because he did not receive medical care (the clinical/societal response to infection) or maternalized affection (a spiritual slave; psychosomatic/mystic treatment to counter the unconscious death drive) in time. Woodcourt and George rally to the cause, but they, in and of themselves, cannot counter the destructive process that had begun long before their tardy arrival. The configuration of time again appears as an integral component of illness: Jo, sadly, never had enough time—to move on or to complete the Lord's Prayer.

Although a strong case can be made that Esther survived, or was allowed to survive, because of the purity of character instilled in those aiding her, a more disturbing significance relating to her recovery soon appears. In order for one to overcome a contagious disease, one must build up internal antibodies in order to become immune to the infection. If the affliction that has attacked Esther can be constructed as a metaphor for broader social ills, what does it mean for Esther eventually to display an immunity to such an affliction? If she is “struck down” by what is wrong with society, the only way to improve, or to “fight back,” is to harbor that evil to the point to which it no longer entails a threat to one's personal bodily existence. In this reading, rather than accepting Esther's convalescence as an instance of her triumphant compassion and courage in the face of a diseased and uncaring society, we must view her recovery as an acceptance of societal inequities. She figures as a survivor who has been isolated and stigmatized, but also as an individual who has been re-accepted into the world of the healthy: she is amalgamated into that same society that had originally set her apart for introspection and contamination.

Although the disease is never specifically named, the reader is left to infer that smallpox has disfigured Esther's face, while the actual description of such a scarring escapes explicit explication: “I had thought of this very often. I was now certain of it. I could thank God that it was not a shock to me now … ‘It matters very little, Charley’” (546; ch. 35, emphasis mine). And although Esther tries to reassure Charley that the disfiguration is of no importance, it in fact remains a serious concern to Esther, and alters the way she interacts with other, unmarked members of society. Esther feels damaged, and is unable to keep her fantasies intact: “What should I have suffered, if I had had to write to him, and tell him that the poor face he had known as mine was quite gone from me” (557; ch. 35). Thus, her illness works in two contradictory ways: she is at once “purged” of infection by harboring it and developing a system of immunity towards the death-driving contagion, and at the same time she is physically marked as a carrier and survivor of the disease. She rejoins the corps of the healthy, but she must wear her badges of contamination visibly, as a pre-verbal signifier to all those who come into contact with her. At the close of the narrative, this latter, physically manifested demarcation evidently disappears: we are told, in a rather cursory manner, that she has regained her looks. While the exterior marks may be gone, they persist internally. She acknowledges that the scars perhaps have been erased, but this does not imply that the destructive nature of the illness has been reversed. As Woodcourt forces her to accept her “prettiness,” she still hedges in regards to her own appearance: “I did not know that; I am not certain that I know it now” (935; ch. 67). The “beauty” of Esther ultimately rests in her ability to help those around her; and while the other characters in the narrative recognize this trait and continually comment upon it, Esther forces herself to externalize conceptions of beauty: to equate physical attractiveness with moral compassion. Esther claims: “They can very well do without much beauty in me,” implying that she has “given enough” (935; ch. 67). Perhaps this is the point at which her immunity to social pestilence reveals itself: Esther is content to be “the good doctor's wife.” She has effectively retired from her long crusade to aid others, and becomes objectified and muted in the process.⁴

Although Esther figures as nurse and spiritual counselor to Charley, Richard, and Ada, among others, Allan Woodcourt assumes the role as the authoritative healer; he is the licensed practitioner who administers to the sick. The physician is invested with a powerful and significant force, for always “the form of health is contained in the physician's mind” (Burton, qtd. by S. Poirer in Literature and Medicine, vol 2, p. 21). Continuously dedicated to the ill and the underprivileged, Woodcourt's unrelentingly positive portrayal ultimately projects a contrived and artificial representation of “goodness” in constant battle with “evil,” as embodied by disease. Woodcourt shows bravery in the face of catastrophe (in the troped shipwreck narrative), shows compassion for the poor (in his travels through Tom-All-Alone's and his subsequent treatment of Jo), and shows sympathy for his fellow “man” (his relationship with Richard, and his sorrow at the death of Nemo). For all his benevolent qualities, however, he remains a plastic and unemotive character. He courts Esther in a somnambulant state, and never expresses an opinion unless it is voiced through someone else (his mother, Richard, Esther). This characterization may at first seem problematic, but as viewed in the context of a world-as-diseased institution, one soon realizes that Woodcourt can be no more than an inflated construction of personified Remedy. His position complements that position held by disease, and as disease synecdochically reflects all that is wrong or misguided or mismanaged in society, so too does the character of Woodcourt offer all that is “right” in this world. If the antidote for contagious disease rests in the ability to isolate and inoculate the infected individuals, Woodcourt acts as the societal mechanism equipped to achieve such a goal. Just as disease remains amorphous, so does Woodcourt remain uncategorizable. He exhibits no traits or characteristics that would allow him to be placed on the same level of the other, more “human” individuals, for that would subject him to the same dangers and temptations and effectively shut down all options for societal salvation. As disease exists above society, Woodcourt exists above society, unable to participate in the actions and unable to appropriate the discernible features available to others.

Disease infects all who come into contact with it: it circulates in and above society and is spread by social intercourse. It is in the wind, specifically, the “East Wind.” It is an apparatus that isolates individuals from society at the same time as it thrives on the interaction of individuals through society. Ultimately, disease, in Bleak House, transcends the boundaries of its significations to encompass the textual representation of society. The characters who fall to disease do so because they cannot successfully defend themselves against the societal barriers imposed upon them: the bodies of Jo, Richard, Nemo, and Lady Dedlock are ravaged by forces which they have little or no control over. Whether these forces act as isolating and depriving mechanisms, or as enclosing and consumptive mechanisms remains of little consequence. Those that do survive do so with internal scars which they will never be able to shed. Esther, despite, and perhaps because of her own good nature, has been contaminated, and the recognition and acceptance of such a marking remains—not on her body, but in her personal conception of selfhood. Although illness and disease cannot be completely associated with some sort of divine, individualized punishment for one's sins, it also cannot be romanticized as a poetic or noble process of passing into “that world that sets this right.” Disease and the manifestations of disease in the novel are undecipherable, except in that they are always perceived of as impersonable, generative, and malevolent forces. Such an uninterpretability not only allows for a plurality of meanings to surface and collide, but also allows for an alignment with the many other floating and multi-tiered signifiers that operate within the text. To comprehend the bleakness of the house is to recognize the diseased nature of the world: challenged but not conquered, disease is a force to be negotiated. It must be driven out, but not at the expense of losing the patient. The cure will not come about through a Jellybean desire to look around the problem, and it will not be found in the legislative reforms of Coodle, Doodle, and company. Disease must be cornered—in Tom-All-Alone's, in Chancery, in Nemo's lodgings, and in Chesney Wold. It must be faced directly, and the antidote must be taken internally.

Notes

1. Many excellent studies on mental illness and Victorian literature have been written in recent years, including, but of course not limited to, Felman (1985), Graham (1985), and Feder (1980).

2. Although Dickens never explicitly “names” the disease, the symptoms would easily be read by Victorian readers as the result of a smallpox infection. Shatto (1988) and Hill (1989) suggest that Jo has (or had) small pox, and his weakened condition has left him vulnerable to other infections, perhaps pneumonia. The fact that the word “smallpox” is never used contributes, I believe, to the overall function of the disease as that which is “everywhere” and can “strike” at anytime. This quality of “invisibility” grants potency not only on a textual level, but also on a symbolic level in which disease works as a metaphor for the larger social “ills” that the novel critiques.

3. “So the Lord sent a pestilence upon Israel from the morning until the appointed time; and there died of the people from Dan to Be-er-she-ba seventy thousand men” (Bible, 2 Samuel 15). Disease (or pestilence) has thus been figured as an act of God meant to punish those who have transgressed His law. This perception of disease has been refigured in various sermons and tracts to construct a ideologico-religious explanation of disease, and still persists in certain Judao-Christian theories today. “Throughout the country, particularly among fundamentalist Christians, the disease called AIDS is presented as God's scourge levied against homosexuals, drug users, and prostitutes. Various references to the old Testament support this view” (Fulton and Owen 240).

4. Alex Zwerdling comments upon the change of Esther at the end as a condition of paralysis brought on by a “selfish impulse” which is translated into a compulsion for duty. Zwerdling views the conclusion as a “tragic ending,” in which Esther is denied a certain subjectivity by easily submitting to Jarndyce and to Woodcourt (37-56).

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