The ‘Other White’ Woman and the Anxiety at the Foreign: Studying Charles Dickens’ Bleak House

Abstract

Nineteenth century English fiction displayed a unique tendency to project the foreigner with all the potential to commit crime. The woman foreigner seemed to be doubly potent in this regard. The paper intends to analyze the historical conditions that were responsible behind the evil and miscreant representation of the French governess, Hortense in Charles Dickens’ Bleak House. Her propensity to passionate rage and consequent crime is projected by the novelist as a trait typical to her race that makes her stand apart from the famed British sense of equilibrium. The othering of her would be established as distinct from colonial racism as Hortense is a fellow Caucasian to the native English. The genesis of this cross-channel othering would be searched in the structural Francophobia through literary and cultural evidences. The paper would further deal with the case of feminine agency and the issue of removal of the active woman and how the pretext of foreignness has to do with both.