Charles Dickens’ Bleak House: How the Complexities of Disgust Lead to Elevation

The subject of disgust in Dickens’ work has been thoroughly explored for decades by literary scholars who discuss everything from disease, abject poverty, and death, to the filthy, unsanitary conditions of Victorian era London. However, more recent research conducted by psychologists has shed light on the ways in which the understanding and expanding definitions of disgust elicitors have evolved, how people are affected by different types of disgust elicitors, how people react to those elicitors, and the importance of understanding elevation, which is the opposite of disgust. While disgust elicitors motivate people to close themselves up, avoid, or expel substances or people who elicit disgust, elevation motivates people to open up, draw closer, and to be associated with places and people who elicit elevation by exhibiting beauty, kindness, charity, compassion, and other prosocial behaviors. This thesis explains the complexities of these universal emotions of disgust and elevation from a psychological perspective, and then uses that lens to analyze the ways in which all of these complexities are manifest in Bleak House, and how Bleak House—along with other great works of literature—illustrates profound elevation in the midst of disgust, and ultimately serves as an elicitor of elevation for the reader. This thesis is also a defense of great literature in general because of its power to elevate humankind.