Institutional Evil - Dickens, Bleak House

"Desolate Hills", as Dickens's mid-term masterpiece, marks the novelist's efforts to explore and seek transcendence on his own creative path. The most comprehensive and profound revelation of real society; in terms of ideas and techniques, this novel can be called a model of Di's work.

"Desolate Hills" as a whole, it is a story that wraps the horror legend in a dense network of moral and human care, so that people can see the evil manipulation domination, the revenge mentality and other forces and the innocence of the upward ascension, the good fight against each other, and finally the good wins.

In detail, the novel has more to offer: it talks about love, oppression, unrealistic fantasies, changes in the structure and values of an era, institutional injustice.

It is a kaleidoscopic portrait of all beings, and its narrative of the ruins prepares Eliot's Wasteland in the best possible way; its exposure to the profession of the court and the lawyer not only enlightens the Castle and the Judgment, but also surfaces the question of the "evil of the system."

Even its brushwork of stripping away the cocoon and revealing the truth also influenced the later popular detective thriller novels. Of course, this novel is also the most important work in Dickens's "Urban Trilogy".

Its most central part is the ancient "Court of Justice" in Britain, which is a symbol of the corruption, evil and incompetence of the judicial system, and has made a comprehensive exposure of the false injustice of the legal system and the blackmail and deception of lawyers in the name of justice.

At the beginning of the novel, Dickens describes the fog of London in detail, which is a kind of darkness that penetrates the depths of the human heart, an atmosphere that covers the earth, and the fog is the symbol of justice.

In the novel, the British "Court of Justices" accepts a lawsuit for inheritance, and the judges and lawyers around the case, like vultures, use sophistry, delay and other various ways to share the benefits of the case, and finally entangled for decades, expecting to get the benefits of the inheritance from this case, dead death, crazy madness, the case after exhausting the inheritance, it automatically "ends forever".

The judicial power, after constantly producing itself, has automatically become an evil monster. It devours all people and things associated with it with impunity, and it is a source of institutionalized violence and evil.

It is no longer about the kindness of the individual, but has become an automated mechanism. Dickens's precise description of the evil lawyer, and the "institutional evil" that extends from it, is enough to make the work intolerable or forgettable.

What is even more unique is the novel's "ruin writing" of London's slums, which is a kind of initiative, the corruption of morality and human relations, the oppression of society, making it a dark center in the black fog, giving people an incomparable sense of fear.

But at the same time as seeing the decline of the nobility and the decay of the city, Dickens also saw the new rationality of the capital industrial civilization, and this new rationality, coupled with the goodness and innocence of the book, became the starting point for saving the sinking.

Of course, not to mention the presentation of noble values in the novel about innocent love, self-sacrificing love, and so on.

"Desolate Hills" is wonderful and beautiful, it has all the best elements of the novel, whether it is the value vision, the plot of the novel, and the details of the literary style, let people hold this huge work of more than 600,000 words, but there is no sense of heaviness.

That's why when we read and talk about Dickens, don't neglect "Desolate Hills" without evasion!