73 PARENTS AND CHILDREN IN BLEAK HOUSE Dingeman van Wijnen Parents and children, their relationships, or lack of relationships, or distorted and quite often even reversed relationships, seen to be a prominent feature in most of Dickens's novels^. Especially the reversed parent-child relationships are intersting; and'to me Jenny Wren, the little doll's dress-maker in OUR MUTUAL FRIEND who calls her father her 'child', her 'bad boy', remains one of the finest specimens of the class. But the parent-child theme is prominent in many forms, and quite often it is used to illustrate and emphasize the main theme in the novel concerned. These links between subordinate themes in a novel (parent- child relationships) and the main theme in a novel (e.g. the corrupting power of money in OUR MUTUAL FRIEND, so that the child that earns the money through industry becomes the parent of the father that spends it on drink) are characteristic of the narrative method of Dickens. As Robert Donovan says, when he contrasts James ans Dickens, 'the richness and infinite variety of human experience are suggested by the sheer weight 2 of example, by the incredible multiplication of instances this is how Dickens works when he deals with one aspect of human experience in one particular novel as well. We see the vice he wants to expose come back in an infinite variety of forms; it creeps in again and again in many often quite subtle ways. In this essay I want to examine the parent-child theme in BLEAK HOUSE. The prominence of* this theme in the novel has been noted by several critics. Some only make a passing remark on the fact ('one of the novel's major themes, that of parants and children'"^; 'Esther's story is primarily about parents and children and their impoverished relation- 4 ships' Others elaborate upon it and mention examples: Collins talks about characters displaying 'their sense of responsibility, or lack of it, in their relationships with children and young persons', and he mentions several orphans and children with more (or less) satisfactory parents' and he concludes 'that the failures out- weight the successes, both in number and litarary force

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The Dutch Dickensian | 1985 | | pagina 75