Urban perception and the Detective figure in Bleak House by Charles Dickens: The Labyrinth

Abstract

Modern critics and theorists on urban vision insist that the city is ‘a text’ that can be read in a variety of ways to represent its complexity and ‘unreadability’1. The city in most theoretical frameworks is explored according to approaches that identify it as a text read by many types of readers. Twentieth-century cultural theorist Michel de Certeau, for instance, tries to use the modernist lens through which the city is viewed as a space that can be interpreted according to two urban subjects: the "voyeur" and the "pedestrian". According to him, as many critics assume, the urban space, particularly the city, can be viewed according to two main positions: ‘views from above’ and ‘views from below’. In the novel under study, Bleak House by Charles Dickens, the detective is represented as ‘the reader’ or producer of the city, the reader whose views of the city from ‘above’ and ‘below’ represent the labyrinthine structure of the Victorian city. The first part of this article attempts to represent the views of the city in two opposite directions: the views ‘from above’ and the views ‘from below’. This paper depends on the figure of the detective who can be categorized as the 'voyeur,' the viewer and 'pedestrian' to map the discourse of the labyrinthine and invisible Victorian city.