Originally Posted by
Pompey Bum
I first read Bleak House years ago, and found myself of two minds about it. It was structurally stunning, devastating in its satire, frequently hilarious, and had the power to shock after all the years. On the other hand--and I kept it a secret at the time--there was, well, Esther. I didn't so much find her boring and priggish as irritating as hell with all her "I'm-not-a clever-persons" and "Oh-he-derseves-someone-betters," and "A-disfiguring-skin-disease-sort-of-suit-mes." It wasn't that she was too good to be likable, it was just that she was just such a victim, and such a limp rag about it, too. Yes, there was the psychological development from a childhood in which she was repeatedly told that she was worthless, but there seemed to be something a little unsavory going on, too--as if Dickens saw Esther as being so good specifically because she was such a victim. Worse yet, there was an erotic quality to her that made the character seem especially unhealthy to me. Her relationship with John Jarndyce in particular gave me the creeps.
Quite a few years later I watched a BBC production of Bleak House on television (at least I think it was from BBC--I was living in America at the time, so I actually saw it on PBS). The actress who played Esther, in my opinion, did a brilliant job. She gave the character a quasi-feminist interpretation (the last thing I would have expected) in which Esther's words and manners were subtly belied by her eyes and facial expressions, as if the things she said were a kind of code for the things she actually believed or wanted to achieve. (The parts with Jarndyce in the growelry still made me want to wash).
I was so intrigued by this interpretation that I reread the book to see if the problem had been me all along. (I'm an old coot now, and I tend to be as critical of younger versions of myself as Esther was of her intellect and looks). Bleak House, of course, was greater than I could have appreciated when I was an idiot kid, and Esther now seemed more gentle, plain, and virtuous to me than just annoyingly useless. And though the feminist interpretation was not unambiguously evident on a second reading (Esther can be a bit of a limp rag at times), for one of Dickens' "suffering virgins" she has more control over her happiness than some.
I wonder if Donna Tartt could have been referring to something along those lines. Esther could be taken as a subjective narrator simply because her statements do not always reflect her real motives, views, or modus operandi. In that reading, the real Esther knew her worth from the start and beat the system at its own game--because how else would a woman like Esther get what she wanted in Victorian England? (And get it, of course, she did).