Bleak House, a novel by the Victorian novelist Charles Dickens, has a number of elements: comedy, tragedy, melodrama, romance and biting social satire. The work also includes at least ten main characters and dozens of minor characters. The novel's complexity and length lend itself quite easily to a range of critical interpretations, including feminist, Marxist, and psychoanalytic theories. In the following article, this topic will focus on a deconstruction of some aspects of the novel, particularly the names of Dickens' characters, and on a new historical literary criticism approach to the satirical attacks on the Chancellery justice system of Dickens's time. Dickens's awareness of the richness and variability of language, and his willingness to question the social institutions and mores of his time, both lead the reader to consider these theoretical approaches. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original EssayDickens uses a variety of musical, comical, eloquent, and baffling names for his characters. A representative list includes Tulkinghorn, Clare, Summerson, Dedlock, Snagsby, Nemo, Krook, Flite, Tangle, Barbary, Rouncewell, Jarndyce, Skimpole, Vholes, Woodcourt, Smallweed, Turveydrop, Guppy, Boythorn, Jellyby, Badger, Bucket and even the minimum name Jo. The names tell a changing and informative story about the characters' personalities, occupations, appearance, mannerisms and what may lie beneath the outward appearance they present to the world. Jacques Derrida, the founder of deconstructive philosophy, thought that "language is not the reliable tool of communication we believe it to be, but rather a fluid and ambiguous domain of complex experience in which ideologies program us without our awareness" (Tyson 249) . So what might these names, and other aspects of Dickens's text, tell us about the novel, perhaps in ways that are not obvious but are nevertheless recognized and internalized by the reader? If the sign is the name of a character in a novel, and the "signifier" is the "letters written or spoken as a unit" of that word, then the "meaning" is the idea the reader has in mind of the character (251). Every reader will have a different idea of ​​the character in a novel, even if they read the exact same words. Take, for example, the first description in the novel of Caddy Jellyby: But what struck us most was a tired and unhealthy-looking, though by no means ordinary, girl sitting at her desk, biting her pen and staring at us. I suppose no one has ever been in such an inky state. And, from her disheveled hair to her beautiful feet, which were disfigured by frayed and broken satin slippers trampled on her heels, she truly seemed to have no article of clothing on her, from a brooch up, that was in its proper condition or place Right. (Dickens 85)This description would undoubtedly create an image of Caddy Jellyby in the reader's mind. The “meaning” would be that image, but, according to Derrida, it is actually “chains of signifiers” (Tyson 252). The description might create an image of a Caucasian English girl for a reader who knows that the vast majority of the inhabitants of 1850s England were Anglo-Saxon. However, a reader of another race or ethnicity, even with the same historical knowledge, might immediately think of a teenage girl of her own ethnicity, especially one she knew who shared characteristics with Caddy Jellyby, such as a downtrodden person or appearance messy. Furthermore, simple phrases like "not a simple girl at all" are value judgments that can inspire very different ideas in the heads ofreaders. A reader's idea of ​​"not at all banal" might mean, according to that person's taste, beautiful; it could also mean, to another reader, an average-looking person in an image created from that reader's experience. Obviously, those tastes and the experience createdpersonal appearance images will vary. And even down to mundane descriptions like “shaggy hair,” even mental images can vary widely. Fallen how? Is it falling off the pins or just disheveled? What color, texture, thickness and length is it? The permutations of the mental image of Caddy Jellyby are almost limitless. The idea in readers' minds is informed not only by the words on the page and the concept those words create (the "signifiers"), but also by the readers' knowledge and experience. Furthermore, those "signified" images can change during the reading of the text, depending on the reader's feelings and perception of the story and characters, and the "chain of signifiers". This too is possible thanks to the evocative images created by proper names. Krook, for example, the owner of a rag shop and landlord of Miss Flite and Mr. Nemo, is described as a repulsive, dirty, elderly and drunken illiterate: ... an old man with glasses and a furry cap he wore around the shop. ... He was short, cadaverous and wizened; with his head sunk sideways between his shoulders, and his breath coming out in visible smoke from his mouth, as if he were on fire inside. His throat, chin, and eyebrows were so covered with white hair, and so knotted with veins and shriveled skin, that from the chest up he looked like an old root in a falling snow. (Dickens 99-100) His name, which openly insults him, implies that he is dishonest in his dealings and perhaps "dishonest" in personal morality as well. But Dickens chose a word so richly descriptive and assigned it to such an enigmatic character that it is possible to have many mental images simply by contemplating the name. “Krook” could be read to mean “to bend the finger,” which might conjure up the idea of ​​a bleary-eyed old man calling menacingly to someone. This may continue the negative imagery started by Dickens. Or "hook" might have the natural connotation of "hook of a tree", as implying "some old root in a snowfall". This implies age, solidity, permanence, and immobility, all of which are amply demonstrated by Krook's character in the novel. Other readings might include “crooked,” meaning crippled or deformed in some way. Since his "head sank sideways between his shoulders," it could mean he was suffering from some type of physical impairment. This might spark sympathy for the character where none previously existed. It must be remembered, however, that this would probably have been different from the reaction of contemporary readers of Bleak House, as attitudes towards physical disability have changed dramatically. In Dickens's time, crippled individuals were often mocked and feared, or used as an object of ridicule, as is the semi-comic figure of Phil Squod in this same novel. Once again, the “chain of signifiers” is not only continuous but mutable, depending on time and place. Further reading abounds in this single word for this relatively minor, though pivotal, character. Both the shepherd and the bishop carry a staff, a stick with a curved end intended for the defense and enclosure of the flock, literally in the first case and symbolically in the second. This usually implies a kind or gentle person, a reference cemented in English-speaking Christians (who were the majority of Dickens' readers) with the 23rd Psalm "The Lord is myshepherd... your rod and your staff comfort me" (Bible Gateway, italics mine). Krook is certainly not a pastoral or gentle figure, so this belies the reality of the characterization. But the "mental trace left by the play of signifiers ” (Tyson 253) cannot help but suggest this reading, if only unconsciously, in the reader's mind. Just because the meaning does not coordinate exactly with the nature of the character does not mean that the image of the shepherd's crook (or any other meaning of the word) is not, even fleetingly, suggested. Perhaps it could also be seen as a sort of ironic dignomen, since this illiterate loner was hardly the leader of some group of people or animals. Yet it could also be a comment on what Krook could have been if someone had "guided" him more carefully. Maybe he wouldn't have become the lonely and slightly crazy owner of a rag shop who died of spontaneous human combustion while storing an extremely important document, without ever knowing. what it meant. The irony of that possession is that Krook, who hoarded and hid the will for so long, caused the destruction of people's lives. It could be argued that if someone had paid him a little more attention, "guided" him into a more social existence, the will would have been discovered years earlier. There is also another reading of "crook", the "device on some wind musical instruments for changing the pitch, consisting of a piece of tubing inserted into the main tube" (Dictionary.com). A musician familiar with this instrument might use it every day and immediately think of it when he first reads about Krook. The fact that this small object can dramatically change the tone of an instrument might suggest to the reader that this character, although seemingly unimportant, could influence all the characters in the novel. That reading would make especially sense in terms of plot resolution. After all, Krook held the key (or "con") to changing the status of most of the novel's main characters (Ada, Richard, Mr. Jarndyce, Esther, and even Lady Dedlock). This reading, if the deconstruction of the name occurred at the beginning of the novel, would substantially change the tone of the reading as a whole. The reader might immediately pay more attention to Krook's peculiarities, and might guess his secret long before it is revealed at the end of the novel. Likewise, reading his name as "crook on the street" could mean that Krook was the means by which the plot changes, and if that "crook" had been caught before, rather than after, Krook's death, then the cause Jarndyce would have been resolved even earlier. This brings us to another reading of “Krook.” Of course there is the metal hook called a hook. This is an obvious reference to Krook's deformity and subhuman nature. Despite living in the teeming metropolis of London, he lives a life apart. He is separated: unloved, neglected, friendless. He can't even read the words around him, despite living among documents piled up like waste paper throughout his shop. The trickster, or hook, could have been a reference to his mental disability (as in his illiteracy), and also to the menacing nature of his appearance. Yet the idea that he was dishonest, a "crook" in the slang term, is never suggested in Bleak House. Krook was simply peculiar, perhaps repugnant, but certainly not criminal. It is simply outside the usual ideas of what is socially acceptable. Therefore, the name Krook, immediately evocative of several different and sometimes contradictory meanings, can lead toseveral “fleeting and ever-changing games of signifiers” (Tyson 252). . This range of meanings is just the beginning of what might be suggested by simply deconstructing a character's name. Individual experience, the “flowing accumulation of meanings” (Tyson 252) that could create another set of completely different meanings comes into play every time the name is read. If the text is “truly an indefinite, undecidable, plural, contrasting set of possible meanings” (259), then all of these readings are valid and useful. A new historical approach to a satirical novel like Bleak House offers the critic two fertile fields of inquiry. First there is the nature of the institutions, people and events of the Dickensian era. There is also an opportunity to analyze what Dickens thought of these institutions and social customs. Not only is our approach an attempt to uncover hidden, previously forgotten, repressed or underrepresented versions of reality, but also It is possible to examine the views of a prominent satirist of the time to show what he thought about what was happening in his time, including its ideologies, prejudices, errors, distortions, hopes and desires. We will now focus briefly on what Dickens thought was wrong with the Court of Chancery and how this affected the society in which he lived. Considering that Bleak House is a "continuum with other historical and cultural texts of the same period" (Tyson 299), we might assume several things: the Court of Chancery was almost as corrupt and inefficient as Dickens's grotesque depiction; there was an audience for this kind of satire, and therefore the people of his time knew something of the inefficiency of the Court and detested it; that there were victims of the court, such as Mr. Gridley, Miss Flite, and Richard Carstone, who, perhaps not so brazenly as Dickens painted them, yet wasted their lives "in Chancery"; and there was no hope, at least not directly, of changing the system in any rapid way. Dickens creates a subversive atmosphere in the novel, continually recording the Chancery's excesses but constantly mocking them. This is the Court of Chancery; which has its decaying houses and waste lands in every county; which has its exhausted madman in every asylum, and its dead in every cemetery; who has her ruined suitor, with shabby heels and shabby dress, who borrows and begs through every man's circle of acquaintance; which gives the monetary power abundant means to wear down the law; which so exhausts finances, patience, courage, hope; so it overturns the brain and breaks the heart; that there is not an honorable man among its practitioners who would not give - who does not often give - the warning: 'Suffer any wrong that may be done to you, rather than come here!' (Dickens 51) Looking at this passage, one must ask: how much did Dickens really speak in a subversive voice? Did the oppressed, the “ruined suitors” agree with him? Did he really attack an institution that caused widespread pain and poverty ("decaying houses and degraded lands"), or was this only the concern of a few landowners? It would seem that, in a society where financial mobility was not as easy as it is in contemporary America, hereditary customs regarding property and money would be very important. This was a society that valued money passed down and people's entire lives and fortunes were often decided by their birth. Thus, the malfunction of a body like the Court of Chancery, which decided (among other things) difficult cases of what Americans call probate, would cause consternation among people who had property to pass down. Perhaps Dickens exaggerates in defining the "landsdesolate", since certainly many probate cases must have been handled properly, in or out of the Chancery. Furthermore, the Chancery would only concern the middle and upper classes. The consumption of an estate in legal fees would not concern a homeless orphan like Jo, for example. Yet Dickens claims that this influenced him, as he provided Tom-all-alone, who Jo used as a dump and where he contracted the disease that killed him and scarred Esther. Therefore, Dickens paints the Chancellery as something important for the entire country. He may have gone too far in sustaining the comical and satirical effect, but he also shows his prejudices as a middle-class man worried about passing his money on to his heirs. Women, the homeless, the working poor, the illiterates, tenants, servants and anyone else who did not own property would probably not be as interested in the workings of the Court of Chancery as Charles Dickens, the house-owning bourgeois author, was. Rather, it was an example of Dickens's prejudices. Through Jo, Jenny, and other working-class characters, he argues as best he can that the malfunctioning of the Court of Chancery is bad for the whole of England, not just the United Kingdom.The few owned it. The very title of the novel, Bleak House, is intended as a metaphor for the Chancellery. Although it is the name of not just one but two houses (the Jarndyce house and the new house built for Esther and Doctor Woodcourt), the houses so named are not shabby. They are happy family homes. The Bleak House could be that of Tom-all-Alone (a "decaying house" left by John Jarndyce's dead relative, Tom Jarndyce, in which the miserable homeless of London congregate), or it could be the Court of Chancery. Of course, this metaphor could be extended to the whole of England, as Dickens has many more satirical targets in this novel than just the Court. Even so, it is clear that the squalid houses are not Jarndyce's or Esther's homes. Therefore, Dickens once again shows his own prejudices. He is willing to think that the experience of the literate, middle- and upper-class people of a country is an experience shared by everyone else in that country. Even the individual identity of some people in Bleak House is completely tied to what the social customs of their time dictated. “Personal identity – like historical events, texts, and artifacts – is shaped by and shapes the culture in which it emerges” (Tyson 290). Miss Flite, for example, is completely controlled by her Chancery case (never resolved). He has mortgaged his entire life – his youth, his possible family, his future – on the gamble of the Court of Chancery. She says, keenly aware of her fate: "I was a protégé, too. I wasn't crazy at the time... I had youth and hope. I believe, beauty. It matters very little now. None of the three served, or saved me ” (Dickens 81). Miss Flite, who considers it "an honor" to attend court regularly, has completely tied her sense of self to the Court of Chancery. In this he adheres to two contemporary ideas. First, she believes that women from "good" families (meaning middle or upper class) should not have a profession of their own; secondly, he thinks that the money inherited from the family was the best kind of money. Miss Flite later says that her brother and sister were also ruined by the lawsuit, but she persevered. She considers it not only her duty and "honour" to plead her case to the Chancellery "with her documents", but she has gone so far as to "wafer" (i.e. use a legal seal to adhere) to the walls of her poor room "some prints ancient books, clerks and lawyers" (103) as the only decoration. Miss Flite believes her unique, 2006.