Bleak House by Charles Dickens (Pt. 1)

Dickens' works are always meatier than most and, as I was reading yesterday, I thought I should break Bleak House up ten chapters at a time to do some of his messages justice. There have been a slew of authors willing to write for a crowd - sticking to the sellable plot, the carefully trimmed story that is sure to bring in cash. But, there are others, who write what needs to be written so that it can finally be seen, acknowledged, and reformed. Dickens was one of the latter.

Dickens' very decided opinion about the most beneficial position for women at a time when women were maneuvering their way into the business of philanthropy and charity work is plainly presented between the tangled mess of the Chancery court. In this first 100 pages, he has chosen three female characters to make his point. Two are mothers. One is not. Esther Summerson (our narrator) is a single woman who has, in these chapters, been sandwiched between two mothers ...Mrs. Pardiggle - a mother of five miserable sons, and Mrs. Jellyby - who, much like the woman in the shoe, has so many children she doesn't know what to do!
Both women are busy making a "good" impression in the professional world that they cannot see what it is doing to their homes. The first keeps her children too closely in check - so closely that they are suffocating for it and are ready to rebel. The second doesn't keep her children at all. They are dirty, hungry, neglected and have no hopes of becoming educated or refined enough to carry on her chosen work or any work of their own.

As a woman and mother in modern times, it was strange to me to read of a man, Mr. Jarndyce, who genuinely honored and appreciated the role of a woman in the home. He dubs Esther the "Little Woman" and entrusts her with the keys and keeping of Bleak House telling her that she will be of such influence in her "sweep[ing of cobwebs] so neatly out of [their] sky... that one of these days, [he] should abandon the Growlery, and nail up the door." The Growlery was Mr. Jarndyce's place of worry, fretting, anger, and frustration. It is a rare person to keep all of these emotions tethered to one room, true. But, for me, the thing that stood out was having that role of housekeeper and caretaker so cherished. There are many things about our culture that insist that a wife and mother is neither important to the ones being served or fulfilling to the one giving the service.

While I am so thankful that my daughters are no longer required to fall into an adulthood of being "barefoot and in the kitchen" without an educated opinion or aspirations of their own. I also want them to know that, should motherhood be their choice, it is a valid and valuable one to make and to do with your whole heart. We live in a time when we are told that we can "have it all." But, I must interject that, while you can have it all - you can not have it all well and at the same time. What a difference it would make to the children of the world if the mothers and fathers were patient enough to live in the season at hand, cherishing their little ones while they were yet young.