MANAGER OF THE HOUSE 149passageways in Bleak House has engendered a range of critical readings so
various as to suggest some interesting instability in the text. The layout of
Bleak House evades interpretation: “you come upon more rooms when you
think you have seen all there are”; Esther’s room “had more corners in it than
I ever counted afterwards”; if you take “crooked steps that branched off in an
unexpected manner from the stairs, you lost yourself in passages, with man-
gles in them, and three-cornered tables, and a Native-Hindoo chair, which
was also a sofa, a box, and a bedstead, and looked, in every form, something
between a bamboo skeleton and a great bird-cage, and had been brought
from India nobody knew by whom or when.” This collection of oddities
does not sound like anything Dickens would have allowed in a house of his
own. Every room “had at least two doors,” and the sentences themselves get
the reader successfully lost as Esther works to set in narrative order a situation
that defies straight lines or architecturally plausible floor levels (BH 6).
Allegorical readings come to mind: Bleak House is like Bleak House, a
very surprising and intricately related set of plots and passages. Or, Bleak
House is an image of Esther’s story, clogged by obscure remnants of other
lives, never to be fully sorted out or brought to the light of day. Less alle-
gorically, it seems that something is wrong with Esther’s initial rapture. In
her eagerness to take her place as the little housekeeper, she praises the per-
fect order of the household and its organized system of drawers, but does
not quite register the potential connection between forgotten objects in
odd passageways and the grotesque disorder of Krook’s shop. Bleak House
has been brought back to life, but Jarndyce has not thrown out either
the “exposed sound” of its name or remnants of its history (BH 6). Nor
has Dickens forgotten Frank Stone’s birdcage-like broken furniture, or the
deceptive door he made in Tavistock House.
Like Dickens, and like Dombey, Jarndyce occupies “male” spaces that
set him apart from the rest of the house. His bedroom is a “plain room”
that suggests Dickens’s own health regimes: he sleeps with his window open
on a “bedstead without any furniture standing in the middle of the room
for more air, and his cold bath gaping for him in a smaller room adjoining”
(BH 6). The Growlery adjoining the bedchamber is another mix of study,
library, and dressing room to which Jarndyce repairs when he is “deceived
or disappointed” by the objects of his charity, and where he is willing to
talk or think about things he will not otherwise mention (BH 8). Though
Dickens relied on a split between his writing space and the positive role he
tried to project in his family life, his representation of Jarndyce critiques the
effort of walled-off negative feeling. Jarndyce is apparently the “good phi-
lanthropist” of the novel: his hatred of being thanked and his close-to-home