A Judgement in Stone

Ruth Rendell's A Judgement in Stone (1977) came up during interviews, so I decided to load it up on the handy Kindle on my way home.  I was initially startled by the brutality with which the narrator treated our murderer's illiteracy, which is the crux of the plot--"Literacy is one of the cornerstones of civilisation.  To be illiterate is to be deformed.  And the derision that was once directed at the physical freak may, perhaps more justly, descend upon the illiterate" (ch. 1)--but perhaps should not have been.  After all, Rendell's narrative personae are usually distinguished by their utter lack of charity.  But it soon became clear that this harshness derives not from Rendell, but from the novel with which A Judgement in Stone is in dialogue: Charles Dickens' Bleak House.  Eunice Parchman, our protagonist, crosses Jo and Esther Summerson, with deadly results--and yet, what is "killed" over the course of the plot is Dickensian sentimentality as much as several other characters.

Although Rendell's novel is about 1/5 the length of Dickens', the plots do manage to cross.  Like Jo and, to a lesser extent, Krook, Eunice is illiterate--in her case, by sheer inattention during WWII-era schooling.  Like Esther, she proves to be a fanatical housekeeper, preferring nothing more than to polish dishes and iron the clothes.  And like various people over the course of Bleak House, she's a blackmailer.   Rendell signals her indebtedness to Dickens more explicitly, however.  Lowfield Hall, where Eunice manages to get herself employed (with the coaching of one of her blackmailees), has, we're told, been transformed into a "bleak house," figuratively occupied for Miss Flite's birds (ch. 2), and we find out eventually that the murders precipitate the descendants into a Jarndyce vs. Jarndyce-type lawsuit.  (The names of Miss Flite's birds are also the final words of the novel.)  Similarly, when it comes to the question of class, we're told that, according to George Coverdale, "[b]etween the Coverdales and the Parchmans a great gulf is fixed" (ch. 4), much as Dickens' narrator marvels at "[w]hat connexion can there have been between many people in the innumerable history of the world, who, from opposite sides of great gulfs, have been very curiously brought together!" (I'll return to Rendell's ironic reworking of this quotation in just a moment.) Esther's inner moan of "too late" when Woodcourt proposes comes back in the "too late" of Eunice's refusal to learn to read in prison (ch. 25), while Esther's self-sacrificing nature is darkly parodied in Eunice's apparent "devotion" to her ill parents--which climaxes with the murder of her father when he cracks a bad joke once too often. And when Eunice fails to appropriately appreciate a baby, her disinterest contrasts starkly with Ada's spontaneous response to the bricklayer's wife and her dead child, which prompts a moment of mutual weeping.  Perhaps most importantly, the narrator's cold assessment of Eunice's "deformity" derives from Dickens' account of Jo, who is in "utter darkness" when it comes to the written word (Eunice lives in a "narrow twilight world" [ch. 4]) and is more like the "horses, dogs, and cattle" than the human beings. 

The narrator's clinical contempt for Eunice thus derives directly from Bleak House's anonymous narrator and his far more emotionally-charged representation of Jo, whose degradation is meant to excite the reader's righteous charity (precisely the thing that Rendell's narrator neither offers nor requests).  In fact, the charitable act that brings a badly-ill Jo to Bleak House, only to infect Charley and Esther, repeats itself in A Judgement in Stone.  "The Coverdales," the narrator informs us, "were interferers.  They interfered with the best intentions, of making people happy" (ch. 6).   In that sense, they're actually closer to Dickens' Jarndyce and company than any of his "bad" charity workers (Mrs. Jellyby or Mrs. Pardiggle).   Each charitable or sympathetic act, whether George offering to teach Eunice how to drive or his daughter Melinda, after catching on to Eunice's secret, promising reading lessons (ch. 18), merely turns one more screw in their ultimate fate.  Where Bleak House's narrative logic invites readers to contemplate an intimately interconnected world, one in which "great gulfs" are repeatedly crossed and recrossed through historical accident, A Judgement in Stone splits physical and subjective "crossings."  The Coverdales both assume Eunice's otherness (the fixed gulf) and seek, through charitable or sympathetic acts, to offer her their own pleasures.   Eunice's straitened subjectivity, however, lacks "sympathy," "imagination," and "what psychologists call affect, the ability to care about the feelings of others" (ch. 6); unlike Jo, who on his deathbed acknowledges and rejoices in the kindness of those who have taken pity on him "on accounts of their being ser good and my having been s' unfortnet," Eunice lacks the ability to recognize other people's moral or mental states.   More to the point, Jo's witness to everyone's "goodness" also justifies their charity as the "right" sort, one that recognizes the selfhood and agency of even the lowest sufferer, whereas the Coverdale's liberalism turns out to be a form of higher snobbery.   Melinda, a vague young lefty, keeps engaging in the sort of spontaneous sympathy that Dickens praises, but without being able to grasp that sympathy is the last thing that Eunice is capable of understanding, let alone appreciating   As the narrator remarks, "[t]hey were afraid of being selfish, for they had never understood what Giles [George's stepson] knew instinctively, that selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live" (ch. 6).   Jo's tear-jerking celebration of forgiveness and charity is simply impossible in this novel,  where illiteracy produces someone so truly Other that she cannot be reclaimed by the rhetoric of sentiment.  Not only can Eunice not read, she turns out to be unreadable. 

What Rendell does, then, is charge Dickens with narrative cowardice.  Eunice Parchman is Jo not merely de-sentimentalized, but also taken to an extreme that Bleak House first hints at, then undercuts.  Jo's Carlylean infectiousness explodes here into gunshots, as Eunice and her sole friend (or what passes for such), the mad (and Chadbandish) Joan Smith, murder the entire Coverdale household.  So much for sentimentalism's potential! The cheerful Jarndyces and sunny Summersons, kindly identifying with the downtrodden yet remaining genteel themselves, do not fare quite so well at Rendell's hands...