@article{oai:nagoya.repo.nii.ac.jp:00027991,
 author = {Nonomura, Sakiko},
 journal = {IVY},
 month = {Oct},
 note = {This paper focuses on how maternity is narrated and defined in Dickens's Bleak House and how its representation is related to the male-dominant society of mid-Victorian England. In the text, Dickens deals with the newly advanced theory of physiological psychology and illustrates the interplay between body and mind in the character of nervously suffering mother, Lady Dedlock, and her illegitimate daughter, Esther Summerson. The novel challenges the conventional, dominant alliance of patriarchy and medicine, uncovering the secret maternity which is represented as "morbid" by the male and medical gaze. My project is twofold: to analyse the complex interaction between nineteenth-century medical theory and Dickens's narrative discourse, and to determine how his representations of health and illness functioned as imaginative creations of medical spheres, both challenging and reinforcing stereotypes of class and gender. Before discussing the relationship between the novel and the scientific arguments, I take up Dickens's edited periodical Household Words and explore how articles in it respectively deal with scientific and medical controversies and how the periodical, on the whole, represents the new concept of physiological psychology. Diversified with medical discourses， Bleak House is a challenge to the prevalent assumptions of femininity and maternity. The concept of disease in the Victorian era drew directly on notions of polluted internal space. The theme of fallen woman, then, is directly connected with the contaminated female body. Furthermore, from the perspective of physiological psychology, maternity itself is defined to be a phenomenon of physical disorder. In the characterisation of Lady Dedlock, Dickens illustrates morbid maternity from the perspectives of physiological psychology and gradually deepens the understanding of it by using the perspective of her daughter, Esther. Esther Summerson, the novel's heroine and one of its two narrators, attempts to reconstruct the story of her own life. Her story culminates in her discovery of her parentage, and in her marriage to a hardworking man of reforming persuasion. In the process she discovers her illegitimate origin; her mother is Lady Dedlock, an influential aristocratic Sir Leicester Dedlock's wife, who has given birth to Esther by Captain Hawdon (now known as his pseudonym, Nemo). Whilst Lady Dedlock is a merely passive victim of others' surveillance, Esther enters with zest into the project of interpretative penetration. In the characterisation of Esther, the text explores a new perspective on femininity and maternity. The novel demonstrates the interconnections between family and nation and warns the risk of spreading the personal, sexual morbidity in the national level. Through the Foucauldian analysis of surveillance and interpretation, I explore how the power system based on knowledge is embedded in the detective paradigm. In this paradigm, the middle classes gain power by following the downfall of the upper classes. After all, women play strikingly oppositional roles to the established power. The exposure of Lady Dedlock's secret spurs on the shift of control from the upper classes to the middle classes.  Esther's mission is to illustrate the efficacy of the approved model of female reform in which domestic order expands from a well-managed domestic sphere. She eradicates the bad examples of the eroded motherhood and suggests new models of the female self and of the family order which are differentiated from the male and medical gaze.},
 pages = {19--43},
 title = {Physiological Psychology and Dickens's Bleak House},
 volume = {36},
 year = {2003}
}