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Homoeroticism in the Novels of Charles Dickens Holly Furneaux Birkbeck College, University of London PhD 2005 UMI Number: U591994 All rights reserved INFORMATION TO ALL USERS The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. In the unlikely event that the author did not send a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. Dissertation Publishing UMI U591994 Published by ProQuest LLC 2013. Copyright in the Dissertation held by the Author. Microform Edition © ProQuest LLC. All rights reserved. This work is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code. ProQuest LLC 789 East Eisenhower Parkway P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, Ml 48106-1346 Homoeroticism in the Novels of Charles Dickens Abstract This thesis examines the wealth of representations of same-sex desire throughout Dickens’s literary career, deploying a combination of historicist, feminist and queer theory approaches to challenge the continued silencing of sexually subversive material in current Dickens studies. Without eliding their important differences the project explores both male and female homoeroticism, recognising such articulations as part of Dickens’s wider exploration of the socially and sexually disenfranchised who could not be accommodated within the rigid parameters of a respectability exemplified by the institution of marriage. This thesis positions Dickens’s fiction as central to queer literary history. Identifying key literary, historical and experiential sources for Dickens’s acquisition of sexual knowledge, it is demonstrated that Dickens adapted culturally available representations of same-sex desire to develop influential strategies of homoerotic articulation. Chapter one explores factors that contribute to the received reading of Dickens’s work as deeply conservative in terms of gender and sexuality through the case study of Miss Wade. She is retextualised through a recognition of the character’s debt to existing models of female same-sex desire and analysis of her relationships’ resonance with other female couples in the Dickens canon. The second chapter focuses on the idealisation of alternative patterns of living in Dickens’s fiction. The celebration of male bachelorhood and attention to female resistances to marriage militate against critical conceptions of the Dickensian domestic ideal. Chapter three continues the interrogation of the familial ideal, contending that ‘in-lawing’ (the male homoerotic strategy of marrying a sister of the male favourite) was one of the major strategies through which Dickens and his contemporaries articulated, mediated and transferred same-sex desire. This identification of homocentric strategies demonstrates the fallacy of the dominant critical assumption that the homoerotic emerges most strongly in Dickens’s work through violence. Instead, this thesis demonstrates that malevolent manifestations of same-sex desire are part of a wider spectrum of homoerotic representation that also includes highly positive depictions. The final chapters extend the examination of Dickens’s career-long commitment to developing pioneering strategies for the positive articulation of same-sex desire. Through attention to Dickens’s deployment of homotropical relocation, chapter four argues that Dickens drew upon those sites that were imaginatively sexualised in contemporary culture to re-negotiate the erotically unsatisfying conventional model of domesticity. Chapter five uncovers the highly erotic connotations of gentler ways of touching during the period of Dickens’s career, focusing on the Victorian sexualisation of nursing to argue that Dickens deploys this eroticising of nurse/patient roles to develop more affirmative, tender strategies for articulating same-sex desire. 2 Contents Acknowlegements Introduction Chapter One “No Lesbians Please, We’re Dickensians”: Miss Wade and the Anxieties of Anachronism Chapter Two Marriage and Its Discontents Chapter Three Families of Choice: Erotic Triangulation and Bodily Substitution Chapter Four Homotropics Chapter Five “It is impossible to be Gentler”: The Homoerotics of Nursing Conclusions Bibliography Acknowledgements My greatest thanks to my supervisor and friend Dr Sally Ledger, who has been the perfect advisor, inspiring and tirelessly encouraging me throughout. I am also indebted to the School of English and Humanities at Birkbeck, for providing such a vibrant and supportive intellectual community. Particular thanks go to members of the Centre for Nineteenth-Century Studies and participants in the Nineteenth-Century Reading Group, Queer Theory Reading Group and Graduate Research Group. I am grateful for the formative feedback that I received from delegates at conferences where sections of this work were presented. I especially value the academic kinship of all those involved in the ‘Dickens and Sex’ conference, with particular thanks to Vybarr Cregan-Reid and Andrew Mangham for sharing their queer Dickens readings without reserve, and to Anne Schwan, my co-organiser, who I esteem for her organisational skills as much as for her intellectual rigour and friendship. I would like to thank all those who helped to invigorate and flesh the project by discussing, reading and commenting on parts of it; especially Marie Banfield, Laura Coffey, Ella Dzelzainis, Eli Dryden, Sunie Fletcher, Robert Maidens, Reina van der Wiel and Shelley Trower. The project was made possible by funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council and enhanced by conference support from Birkbeck College and the British Association of Victorian Studies. I thank my family for welcoming Dickens into our family of choice. This thesis is for Adam, “theguidingstarofmyexist ence.” 4 Introduction In November 1835 Charles Dickens visited Newgate’s condemned cell, coming face to face with James Pratt and John Smith who were convicted under a sodomy law only fully repealed in England in 1967.1 Dickens recounted this encounter in a short sketch, ‘A Visit to Newgate’: [These] two had nothing to expect from the mercy of the crown; their doom was sealed; no plea could be urged in extenuation of their crime, and they well knew that for them there was no hope in this world. ‘The two short ones’, the turnkey whispered, ‘were dead men.’2 As Dickens anticipated, the turnkey’s prediction was dead right. Pratt and Smith became the last men to receive the death penalty for what was termed the “abominable vice of buggery”; they were hanged in front of the prison on 27 November 1835. As The Times reports, every other capital convict of the September and October sessions was reprieved except these two men. The Times reportage infers the justness of this treatment by repeatedly invoking the derogatory contemporary euphemisms “abominable offence” and “unnatural crime” for Smith and Pratt’s infringement.3 A similarly pejorative attitude is expressed by Magistrate Hesney Wedgwood, who described the accused in a private letter as “degraded creatures.”4 Dickens’s account however, is notably free of such vitriol, avoiding such popular descriptions in favour of the neutral term “crime”. Indeed, Dickens extends to Pratt and Smith the sympathy that at this point in his life he felt particularly strongly for all victims of capital punishment. In the carefully phrased observation that “for them there was no hope in this world”, Dickens even implies the possibility of salvation for 1 Under a Tudor act of 1533 all acts of sodomy were punishable by death in England until 1861, when sentences were reduced to penal servitude of between ten years and life. The death penalty for sodomy was abandoned in practice after 1836, but convictions continued throughout