The view from my Lady Dedlock’s own windows is alternately a lead-coloured view and a view in Indian ink. The vases on the stone terrace in the foreground catch the rain all day; and the heavy drops fall–drip,
drip, drip–upon the broad flagged pavement, called from old time
the Ghost’s Walk, all night. On Sundays the little church in the
park is mouldy; the oaken pulpit breaks out into a cold sweat; and
there is a general smell and taste as of the ancient Dedlocks in
their graves. My Lady Dedlock (who is childless), looking out in
the early twilight from her boudoir at a keeper’s lodge and seeing
the light of a fire upon the latticed panes, and smoke rising from
the chimney, and a child, chased by a woman, running out into the
rain to meet the shining figure of a wrapped-up man coming through
the gate, has been put quite out of temper. My Lady Dedlock says
she has been “bored to death.”
Therefore my Lady Dedlock has come away from the place in
Lincolnshire and has left it to the rain, and the crows, and the
rabbits, and the deer, and the partridges and pheasants…
Lady Dedlock’s mask of permanent , wandering ennui and boredom protects her from the violation of curiosity. She is a woman with a past, with a secret she can never speak of for fear of ruination and scorn and the novel supports her viewpoint in that her secret leads to her own squalid death pursued by Victorian convention masquerading as the machinations of the plot. Yet when I read this pasage in chapter two of Bleak House I am surprised to find so arch a sense of humour, so gentle a tone of irony as we gaze supposedly over Lady Dedlock’s shoulder looking in Indian sepia ink on the landscape outside. And then when we turn to share the irony of the endless damp, mouldy aspect with Lady Dedlock we find she is not there at all. She has quit the damp for the city and we are left ’empty handed’ somehow gazing at a space where we thought a character might live.
But the trace of Lady Dedlock’s musing remains. It is as if she has left a narrative trail of impressions each adding to the overiding sense of repetition. And I cannot decide whether this is a brilliant representation of Lady Dedlock’s disassociated consciousness or if it is so strongly anchored to her mind’s focus that all the vocabulary supports her loaded gaze. Everything connotes her depression. She sees everything according to a particular filter and this filter deletes anything which would challenge or lift the impression of time laden dullness. And yet perhaps not so. For there is humour here too and the final list of the animals left to govern this sodden world in the absence of human governance seems too arch to be flattening. It is a cultivated ‘bon mot’ but nonetheless amusing for that and of course such rehearsed witticism also serves to protect Lady Dedlock wherever she may travel. It is a beatifully ironic from of poetry providing amusement safely for the secretive Lady Dedlock whose later moment of unguarded animation is recognised by the predatory Lawyer Tulkinghorn and ultimately brings about her ruination. Association therefore brings about her downfall. Disassociation keeps her alive and her fragile reputation intact!