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John O. JordanUniversity of Virginia Press, Charlottesville VA, 2011, 184 pp., $35.00, ISBN-13: 978-0-8139-3074-9
In what is widely considered to be Charles Dickens’s best novel, Bleak House, John Jordan finds, through a narratological lens, iterations of fractured selves and maternal loss before psychoanalysis itself iterated these concepts. This is the greatest achievement of Supposing Bleak House: it carefully investigates the myriad ways in which Victorian literature previewed the language and mechanisms of psychoanalysis.
Granted, to posit Bleak House or any other Victorian novel as groundwork for Freudian psychoanalysis is not entirely new. Carolyn Dever (1998) placed the Victorian novel and family dynamics in conversation much earlier, as Jordan himself acknowledges. Victorian novels are rife with the tropes of orphans and absent family members. Broken or disrupted families drive the plots of Daniel Deronda, Great Expectations, and Jane Eyre, for example, requiring their young protagonists to go about decoding their origins alone. Novels like these reveal the era’s active interest in childhood processes of meaning- and self-making prior to Freud. Dever explains: “[I]n psychoanalysis, maternal loss simply shifts from a representational motif” in Victorian literature “to a psychological mandate, as all permutations of mature subjectivity and sexuality emerge from the negotiation of the predicament of ‘abandonment’” (p. 3). Freud’s basis for normative psychoanalytic development then appears earlier than Freud himself iterated it.
While Dever’s work usefully initiated the reading of Bleak House as psychoanalytic autobiography by tracking protagonist Esther’s recurring fantasies of dead mothers and dead children, Jordan