Dickens 2: What's in a Name?
''My name's Bucket. Ain't that a funny name?''--Bleak House, page 760
During our last class discussion of Bleak House, I came to a sudden (and what I then thought to be brilliant) realization about the name Dedlock. Not only does Dedlock provide an aura of entrapment and being closed in, it actually rhymes with 'wedlock'--a possibly interesting connection if one considers the illegitimate child narrative which pervades the novel. I wrote down ''Dedlock rhymes with wedlock'' on my notebook and showed it to Sara, who was sitting next to me at the time. She replied with her inclination toward reading it more as a homophonic play on ''dead-lock'' which I had already considered, but in a brief moment of embarrassment, I non-sensically replied with ''and Tulkinghorn rhymes with Mulkinghorn.''
While I do know (tragically) that Mulkinghorn is in fact, not a word, it was not until I decided to make fun of the name in itself that I fully recognized the ridiculousness (and concomitant cleverness) of many of the names of the novel's featured characters. I had made casual observations about the character's names throughout the entire reading process, but had never devoted any time to specifically reflecting upon their names.
Esther. Jellyby. Woodcourt. Mr. Bucket. Dedlock. Jarndyce (and Jarndyce). All of these names (and many of the others) are so incredibly fitting in their extremity and theatricality; appropriateness perhaps derived from the melodramatic structure of the text. As someone who reads plays with a much greater frequency than he reads novels (and thus finds it much more difficult to distinguish the genre of a novel than the genre of a dramatic text), the character names actually played a large role in establishing these characters as characters, and thus influenced my ability to read the novel as a melodramatic text. The heightened nature of the names made it easier to type the characters into the certain carefully chiseled ‘stock’ roles for which they were designed.
I do not wish to simply offer an array of different observations about the names, but I will try to do a condensed version with great brevity just to make my argument a bit more lucid. ‘Woodcourt’ lends itself to several readings—as an overall stoically solid name; as a name in which the strength and sturdiness of ‘wood’ balance the instability of the ‘court’; or as an indication of Alan as the would-be (will be) love interest --he is someone that Esther would court (my preferred reading). The name ‘Mr. Bucket’ has, over the past ten or so years entered popular imagination as a children’s toy that independently scoots around living rooms across America, spewing the contents from its bucket head while children attempt to throw them back in the bucket (only to be taunted by the vengeful bucket immediately popping the toys back out). Despite the ridiculousness of this image, the idea of this more recent Mr. Bucket helped illustrate Dickens’ Mr. Bucket as relentless but nevertheless amiable, which I feel are incredibly important characteristics we must acknowledge in our reading of this inspector. While the name Jarndyce did not do anything spectacular for me when reading the text silently, reading it aloud (especially in a British accent) might allow for the name to be pronounced something similar to jaundice (which is, incidentally, Microsoft Word’s preferred spelling of the name). While I am certainly not offering any sort of interchangeability of the two words or further reading into of the Jarndyce/Jaundice idea, I am certainly interested in the ways different names play themselves out when repeated (and replicated) in a contemporary context. How did the Victorian connotation of the name Esther compare to its contemporary sitcom-esque old-woman stereotype it has enjoyed over the past couple of decades?
Like many of my street and museum posts, I would like to conclude this one with a series of questions. These questions are simply things I’d like to ask myself in future readings of texts because of my new interest in them at this time. While my knowledge of melodrama is relatively limited (other than its level of heightened theatricality and use of stock characters), I’d like to further pursue an analysis of the relationship between character name and genre. To what extent does a melodramatic text call for names of a certain theatricality? What is the connection between character names in other genres?
posted by PatrickMcKelvey @ 1:28 PM
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