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Social Bodies: Dickens and the Disabled Narrator in Bleak House

Dickens makes disability central to his social condition novel Bleak House (1851–53) by revealing exactly midway through its serial publication that Esther Summerson, one of its two narrators, has disfiguring facial scars. This chapter argues that splitting narration between Esther and a disembodied third-person voice throws into relief the dissimilarities between external and internal focalization and their articulation of disability. Notably, while Bleak House’s externally focalized third-person narration usually marginalizes disability and illness by making them symbolize social corruption through humour and sentimentality, when focalizing through disabled narrators and characters, the novel repositions disability and disease as ordinary aspects of the body’s normal instability and uses humour to criticize sentimental metaphorization of disability. Both attitudes towards disability simultaneously exist in the novel through its hybrid form that lacks full narrative closure.