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Hilary M. Schor. Curious Subjects: Women and the Trials of Realism. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2013. Pp. 288. $65.00.
"Full of curiosity, no doubt, little woman, to know why I have brought you here?"
"Well, guardian," said I, "without considering myself a Fatima or you a Blue Beard, 1 am a little curious about it." (Bleak House, ch. 64)
In the closing chapters of Bleak House, Dickens's evasive heroine Esther Summerson finally admits to being curious. Throughout the novel the reader attempts to piece together what she knows or does not know, and how much she is keeping hidden from us. Her very lack of curiosity about her own parental background is emphasised by the detective plot of the novel, interweaving her narrative with the voice of a third person narrator. If it was left to Esther's curiosity, we may never have had answers to the jumble of relationships buried in the fog of Bleak House.
Yet when Esther is asked to join her guardian in Yorkshire, she not only admits her curiosity, but uses the image of Bluebeard, positioning herself as Fatima. Just as Fatima transgressed, in opening the forbidden, locked door and finding a disturbing secret at the heart of her marriage, Esther knows that this knowledge is dangerous.
The danger of seeking knowledge, particularly knowledge about oneself, is central to Hilary Schor's Curious Subjects. Schor revisits a canonical set of realist novels to look again at female agency, knowledge and choice. In her readings of Dickens's Bleak House, Hard Times and The Old Curiosity Shop, as well as Vanity Fair and Middlemarch, Schor argues that it is through the questions posited by its heroines, "breaking the interdiction against wonder, repeatedly, obsessively, and each time as if it were the first time, that the novel gets its plot"...