Women, Sexuality and the Family: Feminist Responses to ‘Bleak House’

Abstract

As could be expected from its large measure of overt comment upon the role of women in society, Bleak House has been of particular interest to critics writing during the last decade and a half; when feminist ideas have had such an extensive influence in literary criticism. Many recent critics who are neither women nor feminist have clearly been influenced by feminist ideas in their response to the novel, even if this has been manifest only in a sharpened interest in such matters as the role and nature of women, ‘femininity’ and sexuality, and the family. But Bleak House triggered off what we may quite legitimately call ‘feminist’ responses right from its first publication, even if the best-known of these came from a man. John Stuart Mill, writing to his wife in March 1854, was indignant:

That creature Dickens, whose last story Bleak House, I found accidentally at the London Library the other day and took home and read, much the worst of his things, and the only one of them I altogether dislike, has the vulgar impudence in this thing to ridicule rights of women. It is done too in the very vulgarest way, just the style in which vulgar men used to ridicule ‘learned ladies’ as neglecting their children and household. (1854, p.95)