Victorian Visual Culture

At a glance, there is nothing especially absurd about this illustration of H.K. Brown’s in Bleak House. A sorrowful, unkempt man stands in shadow during a theater performance, staring up at one of the boxes above. Most of the other figures face the light with pleasant expressions, and few to none of them stand out. There is a genuine sentimentality here, enough that I can’t help but feel…sympathy, perhaps, for the man.

Then again, that man apparently now frequents the theater with the sole purpose of expressing wordless despair to Esther, who turned down his abrupt marriage proposal some time before. It is comically manipulative. Esther “really cannot express how uneasy this made me,” to see him “with his hair straight and flat, hs [sic] shirt-collar turned down, and a general feebleness about him.” Mr. Guppy gazes so persistently, and looks so unkempt, that Esther doesn’t know what to do. She “did not like to laugh at the play, or to cry at it, or to move, or to speak. I seemed to do nothing naturally … thinking of the dreadful expense to which this young man was putting himself.” Yet she also cannot make herself tell anyone, for fear that “I might ruin him” one way or another. In short, Mr. Guppy has used Esther’s sympathy to force a near-deadlock, where Esther can either change her mind about him, or remain uncomfortable, as she does. (Dickens 184)

Brown’s adaptation communicates something else. It takes a moment to locate Esther even knowing where the narration says she sits, and she has few defining features. Instead, Brown draws much of the viewer’s attention to Mr. Guppy himself, a man alone and out of place, his disarray on full display. I would suggest that Brown disguises Mr. Guppy’s manipulation. We see his sad state without his knowledge; he is made a spectacle. Paradoxically, I think this way the viewer is more likely to view him as Esther does, as it masks the discomfort of being seen by him and hides the inadequate reason for his behavior.

The illustration shares its forthright emotion and framing as spectacle with “The visit at the Brickmaker’s.” The image shows the entire room, and all the figures in the house look uncomfortable, many of them hunching in worn clothes, all frowning, none facing the viewer. They must be othered before they can receive sympathy, and indeed they do, as Ada and Esther are greatly moved by “[t]he suffering, quiet, pretty little” baby of one of the women (123). Since the later illustration, “Mr Guppy’s desolation,” shares this quality, it is easy to assume they function the same, but Brown makes this a bait-and-switch by disguising Mr. Guppy’s discomforting gaze. Readers may now wonder: what figures of sympathy are deserved, whatever that means, and what are coercive? What are these sympathetic images hiding about the figures they intend to solicit sympathy for? The suggestion seems to be that if sympathy can be manufactured and forced, especially in images, then what we need to rely on when interacting with potentially sympathetic subjects is some quality besides, or beyond, sympathy.

What quality might that be? I’d need more time to consider that. Perhaps it is something to look out for in the rest of the novel.

Works Cited

Dickens, Charles. Bleak House. Oxford University Press, 2008.