The Woman Detective and Hysteria in Charles Dickens’s Bleak House

This chapter explores how Dickens’s Bleak House fits into the “mental emotion” plot, which claimed women’s inability to process stimuli led to morbid emotions and hysterical fits. This plot was also linked to concerns over working women’s health in a period when many working-class and lower-middle-class women had to work but were expected to maintain women’s gentility. Esther Summerson’s fainting fits would have been attributed to her inability to handle exposure to the city environment, and the cure would be for her to return to her domestic duties and leave detective work to men. I argue that Dickens uses the detective figure in Bleak House in the context of the detective genre and the mental-emotion narrative. By foregrounding Inspector Bucket’s stimuli- and environment-dependent detective process and extending it to his amateur women detectives, Dickens offers an image of women using what I term bodily knowing for the betterment of the community with no risk to their own health or domestic roles. By locating much of Esther’s hysteria within personal and domestic concerns, Dickens challenges the sanctity of the home as a guarantee of women’s health and suggests that negotiating the tension between women’s work and health can start within the home.