Jarndyce

I want to touch on John Jarndyce and his issue with the East wind. I've read and reread some parts of the novel in search of his problem with when the wind blows from the East but I can not figure it out, does anyone else remember a part that maybe I don't? while on thsi I want to just talk about Jarndyce in general. In class some people were mentioning that it was creepy when he was proposing to esther and I know that by the end of the novel most everyone had changed their mind about him being creepy but I still want to talk about before everyones mind was changed.

The reason that it was found creepy to begin with had been because he is her guardian but when you go back a little bit to when theya re sitting and talking, I'm pretty sure this is the night that Esther can't sleep at all so she does some work and comes across Jarndyce who can't sleep either because he is "troubled" with his thoughts. When we go back to then he asks her how she thinks of him and when she gives her answer that he is like a father or her guardian he becomes even more troubled even if it's just that flash in his eyes for a moment this is when we get the first sign for how much he cares about Esther.

When he proposes this makes him creepy suddenly because he is her guardian but for me it seems to be less creepy when I remember that it seems like he doesn't even want to be just her guardian or a father figure to her. I feel like for everyone it would seem less creepy if he were younger but this was not an unusual age difference for that time period when girls got married very young anyway and most likely to older men. Maybe an even bigger then the difference between Jarndyce and Esther's age.

By the end of the novel everyone seems to like him again because of what he has done for Esther so my question is would we have adored him if we knew he was as caring and listened and payed more attention than any other man who wanted Esther before she became ill? For me I found him a better man through the novel even when he wasn't exactly the best father figure. But he doesn't want to be her father he wants to be with her it seems. he still doesn't make the best father figure especially to Richard but he tried to get him on the right road it's just unfortunate that Richard got caught up in the case which at that point I don't think that there was anything Jarndyce could have done to get him back.

Narrative Shift

In the third chapter of Bleak House Dickens does a switch from an omniscient narrative to Esther's narrative. I loved the shift because I could understand why Dickens had switched at that time, for the first two chapters Esther wasn't even there and she had no idea what would have been going on so she couldn't have gone into as much detail and background information as the omniscient narrative was able to do. Without this narrative in the story it would have been confusing and we wouldn't have known so much before hand like we did. It would have just been another story about a girl who finds love, loses it, as well as her beauty.

As much as we need the omniscient narrative we also need Esther's narrative because she adds tot eh emotion of the story, we grow to like and someimtes maybe even hate her just a little, this passioante voice, we feel sympathy for her and we wouldn't feel this way necessarily if all we had were the other narrators voice. If we didn't have Esther we'd just have a bunch of characters that we may never really have understood and we never would have gotten to know some other characters at all (even though there are some we probably really wish that we hadn't) which may have ruined the entire story altogether.

This story wouldn't be the same without both these narratives that are given to us. They let us get to know the group of characters that are given to us. Very few stories can pull off switching between perspectives as well as Dickens does in this story so I have to say two thumbs up to Dickens for this accomplishment.

While we're on the topic of Dickens achievements in this novel I'd also like to mention his ability to use so many different characters and still have them seem as realistic as they do or as any other story with far fewer characters would. When I was reading I had to write down each character and a note about who they were or else I would have been completely lost, and even though there are so many characters each of them had something to add to the novel. Such as a personality or an emotional pull, some gave information that we needed, there wasn't a character who didn't have a reason to be there, (yes even Skimpole.)

Esther and Lucy

In the novel Villette our main character is Lucy Snowe, a quiet under spoken character who seems to rely on other characters to tell her own story for her. I think that the opposite can be said for Esther Summerson in Bleak House because she is out spoken, she typically says everything she is thinking and usually if she doesn’t it’s because it doesn’t matter, it’s easier to get to know Esther as a character unlike with Lucy who you have to read in to everything that she says more to find out how she is feeling. They do have many qualities the same though, they are both very intelligent women which they prove through their narrative and Lucy’s ability to teach, they are also both very hard working in everything that they do, such as Esther with her housekeeping, she seems sometimes like a mother in that way.

Another similarity between the two is they are both orphans, or so we are led to believe for half of Bleak House. They are raised by god parents until something happens and they go away. Lucy travels to the school and Esther travels to Bleak House where they find their futures or seem to find their futures. They meet the people that they want to spend their lives with even if it includes losing that same person.

Behind their hard work they are both very passionate people, this is harder to find in Lucy for a while because she isn’t as open in her narrative about herself as Esther is. But we see this passion in both of them when they are doing the things that they love. When Esther is helping the children, or Ada, or Richard she is so passionate about it it fills her narrative.

The last similarity that I find between the two is something that was discussed in class. These two gain their power from the things that are given to them. Lucy is given a school that had to be built by M. Paul and everything was made just for her and she gets her power from this. And Esther got her power her control over her life from Jarndyce with the house that was made with everything that she wanted, everything that she adored was in this house. These two things gave these women power and that power had to come from men the men that they were passionate about.