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...Esther's reattachment to life after her illness connects individual health to social health by emphasizing her renewed investment in a social world beyond the self. Scholars such as Helena Michie have written compellingly about Esther's illness and scarring as articulations of her female identity. This essay, however, seeks to explore the meaning of Dickens's insistence on the "superfluous health" of George Rouncewell, as well as his pairings with his disfigured assistant Phil Squod and the stricken Sir Leicester Dedlock. George's physical vigor stands in marked contrast to the parade of sick and damaged bodies in Bleak House, and his series of temporary homes--the shooting gallery, the prison, and Chesney Wold--can be s een as versions of the Victorian sickroom space, sites where, in Miriam Bailin's words, "order and stability [are found] not in regained health but in a sustained condition of disability and quarantine" (6). Peter Stallybrass and Allon White have argued that "body-images speak social relations and values with particular force" (10), an idea which my essay investigates, and specifically in conjunction with Bailin's fascinating explanation of how the Victorian sickroom creates "a realm of freedom ... from the materials of restriction" (27).
The image of the body in realist fiction helps construct identity. According to Lawrence Rothfield, a shift occurs from the formal realism of the eighteenth-century novelists often strictly reportorial representation to a nineteenth-century practice of realism called by Lukacs "critical realism" (19). Realist representations of the body change too, as writers provide what Rothfield calls "a consistent medical view of [character], a view which [articulates] ... the developing life of an embodied self" (12). Also writing about realist nineteenth-century fiction, Miriam Bailin describes the fictional sickroom as the "junction-point between private and public worlds," a space that tries to contain the "fear of physical vulnerability," and which serves as a "privileged site of untroubled intimacy while staying within the moderating decorum of social propriety and realist convention" (8, 13, 22). Bailin further characterizes Dickens's unique use of the sickroom as a place which represented the "anxiety of convergen ce" of identities which Victorians sought to keep separate and distinct (81-86).
Just as Harold Skimpole "felt he appreciated health the more when somebody else was ill" (593), so we must first consider Bleak House's exemplar of the diseased male body, Richard Carstone, who lacks the healthy self-discipline of other males such as John Jarndyce, Alan Woodcourt and George Rouncewell. Richard's physical illness is indeterminate, a consumptive degeneration manifested by bleeding from the mouth, followed by death. For much of the novel he seems to suffer from hypochondriasis, a malady Janet Oppenheim writes was in the nineteenth century "long acknowledged a particularly male variety of functional nervous disorder" (142-43). She further...
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