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‘All Wrong in Point of Political Economy’: Attempting to Salvage the Oikos from the Polis in Bleak House

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Abstract

This paper proposes that Dickens’s Bleak House is symptomatic of a so-called social realm, in which neither oikos nor polis exists as a distinct, autonomous entity; therefore, neither can offer sanctuary or adequately discharge the historical role of the household – maintaining life. In this zone of indistinction, the symbolic structures of London’s law have become the city’s physical structures, leading to symptoms like Jo the outlaw, whose illness and death is attributed to the failure of both the polis and the oikos – the city’s legal housekeeping and the law-as-house, respectively – to maintain life. London’s law has become so immanent that it takes on the role of religion, thus precluding God’s transcendence. Ultimately, the novel recoils from London’s threatening presence and attempts to inter the nineteenth-century anxieties associated with the city – anxieties centering around the law both as structure and religion – through redemptive repetition: Bleak House attempts to wrest the oikos from the clutches of the polis. But despite the novel’s efforts, as the divisions between oikos and polis collapse, it is ultimately impossible for either sphere to retain any semblance of itself. As a result, retreat from the polis to the oikos is impossible: there are no longer well-defined domains – of oikos or polis – into which to retreat in the growing indistinction of the social realm.

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Notes

  1. The resident child and succubus of the novel.

  2. All subsequent references to this edition appear in the text as page numbers only.

  3. One of the characters in Bleak House, an unhoused street-sweep.

  4. The notions of the ‘home’ and domesticity in Bleak House have been thoroughly explored by critics. For powerful accounts of the ‘national home’ in Bleak House, particularly in relation to colonialism, see Lorentzen (2004) and Carens (1998). For an account of the gendering of the home, see Danahay (1991).

  5. See, too, Sally Ledger’s chapter which nods toward law as the ‘mechanism of the state’ (2007, p. 201).

  6. Anna Kornbluh, theorizing Bleak House through the concept of the limit, describes the link between the home and the law as one of formalization and social structuration: the house gives form to the ‘impossible function’ of law. The house, then, is the limit which both constructs social space, making it legible, and reveals that political formalism thrives not on formlessness but on the forms which enable life (2019, p. 87). ‘When the elemental structuration troped by the house breaks down’, Kornbluh argues, ‘the law is exposed in its disorder, the social in its injustice’ (2019, p. 94). I take a different approach. Rather than the decaying house exposing law, I argue for a house that is law – in the sense that it is charged with housing life. The tragedy of the novel lies in the house of law’s inability to perform that very task.

  7. Nemo (meaning “no one”) is a shadowy law-writer in the novel who falls on hard, opium-ridden times––and is also Esther’s father, as readers later discover.

  8. Jo’s life is what Agamben might call ‘bare life’ – the ‘natural life’ that, in the classical world, was ‘politically neutral and belonged to God as “creaturely life”’. Bare life, as distinct from politically qualified life, is that which is only included in the polis through its exclusion from the polis – that is, by excluding its zoē (natural or bare life) in the figure of the politically qualified citizen. Jo has no such claim to citizenship – his bare life lingers in the polis as sympom of the decaying house of law which cannot maintain life (Agamben 2013a, p. 153).

  9. Agamben writes that politicizing one’s life renders one ‘self-sufficient’, that is, ‘capable of taking part in the polis’. Yet in Bleak House, ‘self-sufficiency’ takes on an elusive and unattainable quality. The tragedy of Jo’s bare life – included in the polis only through its exclusion from the polis – is that it is only ‘politicized’ in the sense of being subject to the institutions which should, ideally, house his life. Yet in the zone of indistinction created by Bleak House’s social realm, self-sufficiency is merely the fantasy, rather than the reality, of political life (2015, p. 203).

  10. Kantian thought is being invoked by Miller, here. Thanks to Carolyn Dever for this point.

  11. Miss Flite goes on to describe how her father was drawn into the case, and how, significantly, ‘home was drawn with him’ (p. 523). After home had been displaced by the law, both her father and brother died, her sister became involved, presumably, in prostitution, and Miss Flite herself became ill.

  12. Roberto Esposito’s description of secularization is also helpful in discussing law’s religious function. The political structure of the West, Esposito argues, has excluded that which it is not (the pagan, the Christian, etc.) and proceeds to incorporate that which it excludes in its new ‘secular’ structure. In other words, it secularizes (and brings inward) its sacred outside. The law of Bleak House constantly brings the sacred origin of societal institutions to the fore (2015, p. 29).

  13. A character in Bleak House who is a rag and bottle merchant, as well as a collector of papers and other detritus.

  14. In a slightly different vein, Gordon Bigelow reads Bleak House as a book fundamentally about systems and circulation – be that semiotic, economic, or domestic (the private space being that which, according to Bigelow, pins down public circulation) – and alleges that Krook’s death is due to the fact that ‘the market-system loathes a hoarder. Stoppage of circulation creates build-up, friction, heat’ (2000, p. 596). Jeremy Tambling, too, provides an insightful reading of Krook’s spontaneous combustion in relation to the Benjaminian concept of allegory (1995).

  15. Andrew Sanders notes the way in which urban environments become the locus of anxieties relating to capitalism in Dickensian literature: ‘Engels, and later Marx, came to recognize an inevitable political logic in the fragmenting social situation they observed; alienation was the result of human relations determined exclusively by the cash nexus imposed by the development of modern capitalism. Dickens, by contrast, saw the fragments as held together in a dynamic context which is at once geographical and imaginative’ – the Dickensian city (1999, p. 70).

  16. Here I take a different approach from Raymond Williams, who, when looking at cities, asks if ‘This is what men have built, so often magnificently…is not everything then possible?’ (1973, p. 6). Rather than looking at cities’ accumulated might, I choose to look at the ways in which cities elude – and exclude – certain lives.

  17. A ‘theme of uncanniness’, Freud describes, is often the ‘same name recurring though several generations’ (1919, p. 9).

  18. My argument here is indebted to Slavoj Žižek’s The Sublime Object of Ideology, particularly the chapter ‘You Only Die Twice’ (2008).

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Acknowledgements

I cannot thank Professor George Edmondson enough for his brilliant academic guidance and kind mentorship. It is no exaggeration to say that this paper would not have been possible without him. Thanks, additionally, to Professors Andrew McCann and Carolyn Dever for their generous help with revisions, as well as the anonymous reviewers at Law and Critique. And thanks, most importantly, to my parents.

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This research was not funded by any entity or entities, academic or otherwise.

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Casey, L. ‘All Wrong in Point of Political Economy’: Attempting to Salvage the Oikos from the Polis in Bleak House. Law Critique 33, 215–235 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10978-021-09297-9

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