ZhuXiaoling
I. Introduction
As “finest achievements of England’s greatest novelist”, ① Bleak House has its distinction in two aspects: the deion of English society in Victorian period as an organization with all its members unexceptionally connected with each other; and the employment of double narrators to unfold this connection. Within this narrative framework, one thing is obvious: the curiosity with its various forms and functions, that Charles Dickens ingeniously designed and depicted, plays an important role in achieving coherence of narrations of two different narrators and in indicating possibilities of different interpretations of all the narrative details.
II. Three Levels of Curiosity
It is not surprising that a reader, in reading a literary work, keeps asking himself questions and tries to find answers to them when he is curious to know further about the work. It can be argued that it is the curiosity that attracts him to read on. For the part of an author, correspondingly, he should try every means to make readers curious if he wants to enjoy popularity with them. So it is small wonder that Dickens “resorts to a thousand artifices to excite curiosity”. ②
But what is new in Bleak House is not that we constantly encounter occasions on which our curiosity is evinced. For example, Guppy feels confused on seeing the portrait of Lady Dedlock, which, though he has never seen the Lady, impresses him with a resemblance to someone he met before. His confusion is mentioned in such a repeated way that we may feel so curious as to ask why it is so.
The structural origiZhuXiaoling，School of Foreign Languages, Lanzhou Jiaotong University.
nality of Bleak House also lies in the fact that so many curious characters are created in their relation to the two themes of the novel—the Chancery matters and the Dedlock mystery—that satisfying their curiosity becomes the core impetus for the narrative development.
In addition to the above two levels of curiosity, the third one can not be ignored either. The two narrators themselves also keep asking questions. The anonymous narrative’s overt curiosity indicates his incomplete omniscience and his invitation to readers’ active participation in the interpretation of the story, while Esther Summerson, due to her double functions as a narrator and a character, gradually covers her childhood curiosity about her parentage and the alleged disgrace of her birth with her adolescence and adulthood sense of duty for the purpose of transmitting the didactic message that goodness and happiness can be obtained through selfdiscipline and selfperfection.
III. Curiosity of Different Characters in Bleak House
As is discussed in the above, the characters in Bleak House are created in their relation to the Jarndyce suit and the Lady Dedlock mystery, and they form a driving force for the unraveling of the mysteries. Although many of them are more or less curious about either of the mysteries, their curiosity comes out of different motivations, takes on different shapes and heads for different determinations. Judging from the origin, the curiosity of different characters in the novel can be roughly categorized as two types: the curiosity out of calling and the curiosity out of nature, though it is very hard to cut one completely apart from the other.
Curiosity out of Calling
Of the various characters, we can single out Tulkinghorn, the attorney or the legal advisor of the Dedlocks, Guppy, the lawyer or stipendiary in a law office, and Bucket, the inspector or the detective, as examples to illustrate how curiosity can be excited and made to work by their relevant callings.
Mr. Tulkinghorn is described as “the silent depository” of “family confidences”, with numerous “noble secrets shut up in his breast” (ch. 2, p.11). We have enough reason to believe that these family confidences and noble secrets result from his curiosity, initiated and fostered by his calling, because he is “indifferent to everything but his calling” and his calling is “the acquisition of secrets”(ch.36, p.437). On the one hand, the calling he follows requires him to be curious and his curiosity gives rise to his prosperity; but on the other, his evergrowing curiosity also makes him a passionless man of a machine and leads to his ruin in the end. As the attorney, Mr. Tulkinghorn is sensitive enough to find something abnormal from the animation of Lady Dedlock on seeing the handwriting of the papers on the Jarndyce suit. The subsequent investigation also shows his intensified curiosity as well as his shrewdness. Yet as a man, Tulkinghorn seemed to be illnatured. In digging up the secrets of Lady Dedlock to satisfying his curiosity, Tulkinghorn tries every means available and makes use of such people as Snagsby, Krook, Jo, Hortense and even Bucket to his own advantage. His curiosity about Lady Dedlock’s past, not only results in his death and the death of the Lady, but also provides the opportunity for Hortense to commit the murder, bring great misery to the Snagsbys, and has its share of responsibility for Jo’s ruin.
