Samarkand state institute of foreign languages

THE MINISTRY OF HIGHER AND SECONDARY SPECIAL
EDUCATION OF THE REPUBLIC OF UZBEKISTAN


SAMARKAND STATE INSTITUTE
OF FOREIGN LANGUAGES

COURSE WORK

Theme:
“The problem of environment and heredity in the novel by Charles Dickens' Bleak House”



COMPLIED BY: _______________________________
SUPERVISOR: ________________________________


GULISTAN - 2022
CONTENT
INTRODUCTION ………………………………………………3
I CHAPTERA GREAT WRITER AND SOCIAL CRITIC OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY
1.1 A brief biography of Charles Dickens 5
1.2 Charles’s career and entry into the creative field 14
II CHAPTER: ENVIRONMENT AND PSYCHOANALYSIS AT THE ORIGIN OF THE MOTHER-AND-DAUGHTER PLOT
2.1Lady Dedlock and Chesney Wold: Emotional and Environmental Stillness 22
2.2 Esther’s Perception of the Environment and the Agency of the Urban City 27


CONCLUSION…………………………………………………32
REFERENCES…………………………………………………33




INTRODUCTION


In 1919, Sigmund Freud wrote an essay entitled ‘The Uncanny’, where he traced the etymology of the word unheimlich, analysed some situations where an uncanny feeling may arise, and drew a parallel between the uncanny in real life and the one that can be experienced in fiction. Broadly speaking, the Freudian uncanny relates to the return of something already known, ‘nothing new or strange, but something that was long familiar to the psyche and was estranged from it only through being repressed’, and ‘something that should have remained hidden and has come into the open’ . The uncanny is part of the realm of the frightening, and in fiction it is related to the plausibility of the world the writer presents to his readers. Indeed, the nearest it is to the real world, the more likely the uncanny effect is to arise, because: Whatever has an uncanny effect in real life has the same in literature. But the writer can intensify and multiply this effect far beyond what is feasible in normal experience; in his stories he can make things happen that one would never, or only rarely, experience in real life. He tricksus by promising us everyday reality and then going beyond it. By the time we become aware of the trickery, it is too late: the writer has already done what he set out to do. Bleak House seems to be permeated by this concept from the start. In the Preface to the novel, Dickens underlines two important principles: the first is the realist imprint of the novel, arguing that ‘I mention here that everything set forth in these pages concerning the Court of Chancery is substantially true, and within the truth’ and, in defending the death of Mr Krook by Spontaneous Combustion to the accusations of implausibility by George Henry Lewes, he states that ‘I have no need to observe that I do not wilfully or negligently mislead my readers, and that before I wrote that description I took pains to investigate the subject’ . However, following the defence of the realist principle of the novel, he ends his preface by writing that ‘In Bleak House, I have purposely dwelt upon the romantic side of familiar things’. This is just an example of the Freudian uncanny resonating in Bleak House: for instance, if familiarity is understood as the realist plot which was incredibly popular to nineteenth-century fiction, then, Dickens ‘tricked us’ into disguising the romantic behind a pattern of familiarity, paving the way to the uncanny tension between familiarity and unfamiliarity. At the same time, the Freudian uncanny permeates the mother-and-daughter plot: it is what Esther experiences in the various encounters with Lady Dedlock prior to the discovery of their bond, because she looks familiar to her, albeit she is a stranger. Moreover, the Lady’s past for most of the narrative is canny, in the sense of secret, concealed from others, and by the end of the novel it becomes uncanny, as it has come to the open against the Lady’s wishes, threatening her present and future.


Bleak House is permeated by nonhuman forces, as in the case of environmental agency arising from the impact of by-products and waste products of industrialization, which affect the everyday lives of its characters. The intersection between Freudian and environmental uncanny is the backbone of this dissertation: the encounters between Esther Summerson and Lady Dedlock are uncanny in the Freudian sense, but in those moments Esther is also particularly receptive towards her surroundings: the weather seems to switch from sunny to rainy, and from rainy to sunny, anticipating the uncanny meetings between the two woman. Moreover, environmental agency shapes the motherand-daughter reunion in Chapterby disfiguring Esther’s face, thus adding a further uncanny motif of (un)familiarity between the two.