Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- PART ONE OPENING THE CONVERSATION
- PART TWO HOLMES IN THE CONVERSATION OF HIS CULTURE
- PART THREE THE TWO POLES OF CONVERSATION
- 8 THE BIPOLAR DYNAMICS OF HOLMES' HOUSEHOLD DIALOGUES: levity and gravity
- 9 HOLMES' HOUSE DIVIDED: house-keeping and house-breaking
- 10 “CUTTING OFF THE COMMUNICATION”: fixations and falls for the walled-in self – Holmes in dialogue with Sterne, Dickens, and Melville
- 11 BREAKING THE HOUSE OF ROMANCE: Holmes in dialogue with Hawthorne
- PART FOUR CLOSING THE CONVERSATION
- Notes
- Index
10 - “CUTTING OFF THE COMMUNICATION”: fixations and falls for the walled-in self – Holmes in dialogue with Sterne, Dickens, and Melville
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- PART ONE OPENING THE CONVERSATION
- PART TWO HOLMES IN THE CONVERSATION OF HIS CULTURE
- PART THREE THE TWO POLES OF CONVERSATION
- 8 THE BIPOLAR DYNAMICS OF HOLMES' HOUSEHOLD DIALOGUES: levity and gravity
- 9 HOLMES' HOUSE DIVIDED: house-keeping and house-breaking
- 10 “CUTTING OFF THE COMMUNICATION”: fixations and falls for the walled-in self – Holmes in dialogue with Sterne, Dickens, and Melville
- 11 BREAKING THE HOUSE OF ROMANCE: Holmes in dialogue with Hawthorne
- PART FOUR CLOSING THE CONVERSATION
- Notes
- Index
Summary
Wemmick's house was a little wooden cottage in the midst of plots of garden, and the top of it was cut out and painted like a battery mounted with guns.
“That's a real flagstaff, you see,” said Wemmick, “and on Sundays I run up a real flag. Then look here. After I have crossed this bridge, I hoist it up – so – and cut off the communication.”
Charles Dickens, Great ExpectationsHolmes' vision of this fundamental process of dialogic alternations between impulses of “house-keeping” and “house-breaking” did not arise solely out of his private preoccupations and personal history; on the contrary, it was developed quite self-consciously as a pointed elaboration upon habits of thought widely shared in mid-century culture. Indeed, the Doctor's interest in the wall-breaking powers of levity can be seen to have emerged out of and been shaped by his desire to open up a dialogue with the works of a line of English comic writers – most notably Sterne and Dickens – who had explored in classic, caricatural form the implications of the contemporary urge to “fortification” of the self or of the domestic sphere.
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- Oliver Wendell Holmes and the Culture of Conversation , pp. 280 - 288Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2001