Dickens Before Modernism

This essay adopts a poststructuralist approach to discuss issues of identity and subjectivity in Dickens's writing, using Bleak House as an example of how the novelist provides a “reassuring scaffolding of a natural social order”; Levin argues that for Dickens writing and individual identity are linked through a naturalized connection, which renders a subjectivity that is abiding and fixed. This differs from Modernist works like Joseph Conrad's Under Western Eyes, in which language is a source of confusion and instability, which evacuates the subject, and renders his/her identity as unstable and in flux, and testifies to the “illusory qualities of agency and freedom.”