Social Commentary on Physical Attractiveness in Charles Dickens’ Bleak House
Social Commentary on Physical Attractiveness in Charles Dickens’ Bleak House Across cultures and across time, surface beauty has been idealized and integrated into societies to the extent to which it is almost necessary to determine one’s societal rank or role. In many cases, those who are considered more beautiful are given luxuries that those who are less fortunate are kept from. In a time when both looks and money ruled the social scene, Charles Dickens in his novel Bleak House makes an opposing argument. Dickens claims that the preoccupation with physical beauty is trivial and is not as significant as it is believed to be in the time of garish looks and materialism because it does not always guarantee either a secure or happy future. The novel serves as a form of satire for Dickens because he makes a social commentary on the disadvantages of beauty as opposed to the ways in which having good looks can be beneficial. Both Ada and Esther are beautiful, however Ada is conventionally pretty while Esther is relatively plain. Dickens uses examples throughout Bleak House however, in which Esther fairs better than Ada because of the triviality of appearance, even when others exaggerate it’s importance. Readers can benefit from the commentary that Dickens makes because he helps to emphasize that materialistic values such as those placed on the importance of surface beauty are incorrect. As early as the beginning of the novel, Dickens begins arguing that beauty is not as important as people believe it to be. An emphasis for character over a trait as shallow as surface appearance is introduced when the strange old woman outside Bleak House, who the reader later learns is Miss Flite, gives the reader a bit of foreshadowing when she encounters Richard, Ada, and Esther for the first time, “‘I had youth, and hope. I believe, beauty. It matters very little now. Neither of the three served, or saved me’” (Dickens 47). The reader can infer that Miss Flite refers to youth,