This is not a mistake. Esther was the original odd girl out.
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Second, Esther's looks…in the beginning, she bears such a strong resemblance to Lady Dedlock that Mr. Guppy and Jo both notice. Lady Dedlock and Esther probably have the most tender hearts among the female characters in the story, so Esther's physical kinship with her mother is thematically sound. Lady Dedlock also has a connection to the child theme: in the beginning, though a refined middle-aged leader of fashion and mistress of a grand estate, she is still rather a child. She is self-centered and has lived her life in childish pursuits of money and power, and her abandoning her daughter and trying to erase that period from her mind, although it caused her pain, reflects a childish evasion of responsibility. As Esther's looks fade—symbolic aging—Lady Dedlock feels the weight of the adult world press on her still beautiful frame. She fully matures when she owns up to her connection with Esther, then performs a self-sacrificing act of altruism in blessing Rosa and Watt's union over the objections of Mr. Tulkinghorn…only a grown-up mind can fully understand and perform such a sacrifice. When Lady Dedlock dies, her progression complete and having traveled the same road as her daughter, Esther's looks may return. More on that later.
In Chapter 31, Esther has a foreboding when Jo falls ill which proves prescient. Jo is the great victim of unfeeling adult society, to the extent that he is a harbinger of death and decay. Dickens uses him to symbolize the spread of our thoughtless evils into the world of their perpetrators, as Jo returns the pains wrought on him back to the class who devised their causes. He is the only friend of Captain Hawdon, who dies. He becomes a key player in Mr. Tulkinghorn's stratagem to find Lady Dedlock's true identity…both die. And he rouses the compassion of Esther and Charley…both still childish to a degree but rapidly reaching adulthood, they do not die, but are similarly afflicted by the metaphorical disaster of childhood by suffering from the smallpox, which of course takes away Esther's looks.
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Esther keeps Woodcourt's dried flowers as a reminder of what in her life has gone…by the same turn, she rejects Woodcourt and is ready to later accept Mr. Jarndyce's proposal. Once beautiful flowers have shriveled. Esther's lovely face has sunken into illness-laden ruin. She now believes she is unsuitable for a handsome, superior (in her eyes) man like Woodcourt…but will accept Mr. Jarndyce, who, though superior, is in the same exterior class as herself, being an old man. What this says about Esther: she sees herself in a way that she cannot accept that anyone is inferior to her, which means she will have to marry a man with better intellect and sentiment, but she can still have some self-denying control over the situation by refusing to marry above her station appearance-wise. Woodcourt was a possibility ONLY AS LONG AS she could put them side-by-side and they physically seemed compatible. How Mr. Jarndyce feels about this is another matter.
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The reader never sees what Esther sees in the mirror, "nor are details provided at any later time." Esther does point out that she now no longer resembles Lady Dedlock (though this may be scientifically unlikely) and that Mr. Guppy only renounces his love for her after seeing her new appearance, but eventually Esther emphatically chooses not to mention her appearance again. She later refers to herself as "plain," and at the end of the novel, when Woodcourt tells her she is more lovely than ever, it may be that at age twenty-eight Esther's scars have faded. Nabokov uses the expression "fed up" to describe Dickens's impatience with Esther's focusing on her lost beauty. If the theory of Dickens as an orator/social historian editing Esther's narrative is true, than the gradual excising of references to her looks makes sense since it distracts from the main concerns of his story and only plays into them in a metaphorical manner (the mutual paths of her looks, Lady Dedlock, and Jo). In the final chapter, Esther may insist that her appearance is unchanged since her illness, but again, she has such a slanted self-concept that she may have trained herself to only view her ugliness and not her virtues.
Esther's horrible sense of self-worth, then, might be best explored through this theme of her lost (but are they) and returned (if ever left) looks. This lack on her part may be a deeper explanation of Dickens's themes of empathy and social change. After the reunion with Lady Dedlock, Esther expresses gratitude that no one can now tell they are family. If her illness had never happened and Lady Dedlock had made the recognition, eventually Esther may have been put in a position where she would have to acknowledge herself. Knowing Sir Leicester's forgiving nature, this could theoretically have led to Esther becoming a woman of wealth and power and have averted many of the tragedies which accompany the happy ending. Instead, Esther's demur personality results in her doing nothing, gives her the freedom to keep doing nothing, and the situation is resolved due to the mechanisms of Chancery and Mr. Bucket. Thus, we might be able to condemn Esther, in spite of all her goodness. She is not a cold, acting-without-thinking busybody like the philanthropists or a schemer like the attorneys, but in contrast to their resolution and action her actual works are of little value outside her domestic sphere, and thus to society at large. She knows what is right and always acts rightly, but never goes out of her way to do right acts which do not automatically present themselves to her (her kindness to the Necketts and Jo and Caddy). She lacks initiative. The only characters who have initiative but use it for positive ends are Mr. Bucket and Allan Woodcourt, the latter of whom is absent for most of the story and has no power over the areas which persecute the world…can Woodcourt sort out the muddles of Chancery and finance as Mr. Bucket does? Dickens never precisely advocated a social program, more interested as he was in exposing problems than coming up with tangible solutions, but he knew it took action by knowing people to make a difference at all. Esther's failings as a figure of initiative thus put her on the opposite side of the villains: she is able but does not act.
It also may be that this is not condemnation but sympathy: battered from an early age by an institution, organized religion, Esther is so oppressed by a society which keeps her in a place that she never gains a will to fight.
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Third, Allan Woodcourt is used in the plot as a coincidental figure –he pops up without warning but in plausible places, and always in terms of advancing Structure and theme. First, he attends Captain Hawdon on his deathbed, then appears as a dinner party guest. In between, Ada and Richard's love becomes evident. So Woodcourt first emerges to close the door on the chronological first love story in the book, ending any chance of a reunion between Lady Dedlock and Hawdon. The chapter ends with him catching Esther's eye at the party. And in the middle, another romance begins. If we look at this in terms of how the story works out, Lady Dedlock and Hawdon's love is destructive, resulting in a child out of wedlock, their own heartbreak, his despair and death, and a chain of ensuing circumstances ending in her and others' deaths. Esther and Woodcourt's love is constructive, ending in their marriage, a family, and prosperity. Ada and Richard, falling in the middle, are constructive and destructive, she being sensible, he being impetuous and plunging into situations which are no good for him, but ultimately redeemed by her love and perseverance. This may be a little too Structuralist even for my way of thinking, but there is a development.
Esther meets Woodcourt at the docks of Deal when he returns from India. Her face is scarred by now, but she realizes he has not forgotten her with wistfulness. Nabokov compares Esther's attitude to the lyricism of Fanny Price's self-denying pinings for Edmund Bertram. Esther and Fanny are both in love with men who they see as better than them, both are wooed and nearly won by others, both end up with their most suitable mates in the end through no action on their own part. The quiet, retiring Austen and the vigorous, masculine Dickens both appear to be commenting on the structure of courtship, for most women in their characters' positions would NOT be so lucky.
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Woodcourt is used as a perry so someone can be present at Jo's death. Woodcourt, by virtue of his profession, becomes a fall-back perry for Dickens to use to work in description and plot. Nabokov, greedy aesthete that he is, excuses Dickens in these cases because the scenes Woodcourt perries for us are so movingly written and evocative: the description of the free, untamed sea at Deal which contrasts to the thick, smothering fog of Chancery, and of course, Jo's pathetic death.
Chapter 51: In this chapter, narrated by Esther, Woodcourt visits Vholes and Richard on a vain effort to change their minds. Esther is NOT present, as she is for every other scene she narrates, so how did she know what happened? "The bright reader must inevitably conclude that she got all these details from Woodcourt after she became his wife" for only with "sufficient intimacy" could he have told her of such delicate matters. This again supports the theory of Dickens editing Esther's saga: the curious reader, me for instance, can picture Esther relaying her story to "Dickens," who wants to know exactly what happened to keep Vholes and Richard moving forward with the suit. Esther does not ask questions or demand anything of anyone, details included, unless sufficiently emotionally prompted. At "Dickens's" urging, Esther makes her inquiry and Woodcourt spills the beans. As to the matter of predicting the outcome of Esther's matrimonial situation, Chapter 51 occurred in the middle of the sixteenth serial installment in 1853. Esther had accepted Mr. Jarndyce's proposal in Chapter 44, the middle of the fourteenth installment. In between these chapters, Woodcourt returns from India in Chapter 45, immediately following the proposal), Jo dies and Mr. Tulkinghorn is murdered (in consecutive chapters in the fifteenth installment). The reader has thus become focused on matters far away from Esther, but is also more intellectually engaged than ever thanks to the murder and the false arrest of George, and with the plots moving so rapidly forward a good reader would know the end of the book was rapidly approaching. Dickens foreshadowing an outcome which would not occur until installment nineteen (the last one) and doing so in between the thrilling excitement of the murder-mystery chapters thus would have depended on a sophisticated populace who could keep track of everything…including a clue for a completely different mystery. This is a testament to the intelligence of the Victorian reader.
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