Bleak Houses. Lisa Surridge
for not testifying was that when the husband got out of jail he might seek revenge. As Tomes points out, going to the police or testifying against an abusive husband could be extremely dangerous: she cites several cases in which women were killed or had acid thrown at them because they sought legal redress (Tomes, 333). As John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor observe, the abuser’s few months of imprisonment were followed “by a resumption of all his former power, and [the wife’s] imagination can well suggest with what consequences to her” (CW, 24:919). Yet despite such obvious reasons why women might not have testified against their husbands, Dickens consistently idealizes this decision. “The Hospital Patient” sketch is interesting because the woman’s dying state removes her from any such practical considerations. Her decision about whether to testify or not can be taken without any fear of consequences whatsoever. It is also without legal significance. What matters culturally and ideologically is that in her final moments, in a highly public institution, the hospital patient insists on the inviolability of the private sphere.
Dickens’s sketch ends with the patient’s death, which transforms the assault charge into manslaughter or murder, and is thus far more powerful legally than any testimony. But by refusing to indict her lover, by maintaining the privacy of their relationship, the hospital patient gains the reader’s sympathy. She epitomizes the loyal battered woman who at once deserves the protection of the journalist and the courts, and at the same time refuses this protection in the name of the companionate marriage. The tension between these two impulses is resolved by her death; the involuntary testimony of her dead body gives the courts full power to regulate her abuser.
Over Her Dead Body: Nancy as Passive Victim
As Michael Slater notes in his headnote to “The Hospital Patient,” this sketch looks forward in “a number of ways … to the character of Nancy in Oliver Twist” (SB, 236). Like both “The Pawnbroker’s Shop” and “The Hospital Patient,” Oliver Twist pits the intrusive eyes of journalist, novelist, and the courts against the values of marital privacy and loyalty. Ironically, then, in a novel that “features a massive thematization of social discipline” (Miller, Novel, ix), Nancy is positioned both as a subject of regulation (as prostitute and battered woman) and as epitomizing those values of domesticity and family that Dickens almost obsessively excluded from such regulation.
Initially, the novel associates Nancy with the streets, thus opposing her with Rose Maylie. Virginal and domestic, the middle-class Rose represents “the lovely bloom and spring-time of womanhood,” and seems “made for Home, and fireside peace and happiness” (OT, 264). In contrast, Nancy belongs to the lower classes, the streets, and—as she herself predicts—to a violent and premature death. But the relationship is not finally one of contrast. For the fascinating thing that Dickens does with the character of Nancy is to make the prostitute the epitome of womanly virtues (maternal nurturance, marital loyalty, and domestic privacy) as conceived by the Victorian middle class. Tromp, as well as Lawson and Shakinovsky, argues that Oliver Twist and other novels by Dickens work to fix domestic abuse in the lower classes (Tromp, 24–25; Lawson and Shakinovsky, 10); I would argue that while Oliver Twist does so, it also, and very significantly, works to apply to those classes the ideological values of the emergent middle class.
But Nancy applies these middle-class values in a lower-class setting in which they are impractical, unrecognized, and ultimately fatal. Like the police court reports in the Times and the Morning Chronicle, Oliver Twist thus depicts a collision between two different ideals of femininity. An example of this collision between passive and combative femininity occurs when Nancy imagines what she would do if Bill were condemned to death. She envisages a performance of masochistic loyalty: “I’d walk round and round the [prison] till I dropped, if the snow was on the ground, and I hadn’t a shawl to cover me” (OT, 160). Bill’s response is scathing: “And what good would that do? … Unless you could pitch over a file and twenty yards of good stout rope” (OT, 160). The supreme example of Nancy’s passivity occurs when she refuses to leave Sikes. When Rose offers to get Nancy to a “place of safety,” (OT, 364), Nancy refuses: “I must go back.… I am drawn back to him through every suffering and ill-usage; and I should be, I believe, if I knew that I was to die by his hand at last” (OT, 365). Very significantly, Nancy points out that this fidelity identifies her with “ladies” of the middle class:
“When ladies as young, and good, and beautiful as you are,” replied [Nancy] steadily [to Rose], “give away your hearts, love will carry you all lengths—even such as you, who have home, friends, other admirers, everything, to fill them. When such as I, who have no certain roof but the coffin-lid, and no friend in sickness or death but the hospital nurse, set our rotten hearts on any man, and let him fill the place that has been a blank through all our wretched lives, who can hope to cure us? Pity us, lady—pity us for having only one feeling of the woman left, and for having that turned, by a heavy judgement, from a comfort and a pride, into a new means of violence and suffering.” (OT, 366)
Nancy thus exemplifies a middle-class ethos in a working-class relationship. It is one of the novel’s central ironies that the impulses making Nancy refuse middle-class assistance to leave Bill are precisely those “feeling[s] of the woman” that she shares with the middle class. Nancy’s loyalty to Bill thus promotes the emergent middle-class ideal of selfless femininity. In contrast, the fights between Sikes and his dog parody the combative marriage commonly associated with the “brutal” classes to which Nancy belongs. It has frequently been noted that Nancy is paralleled with Sikes’s dog, Bull’s-eye: Fagin says explicitly that Sikes treats Nancy “like a dog” (OT, 401), and Tromp rightly points out that “Bull’s-eye, like the target after which he is named, takes Bill’s hits just as Nancy does” (Tromp, 36). Significantly, the fight between Sikes and Bull’s-eye features a poker, a stereotypical instrument of working-class domestic abuse (see fig. 1.4, “The Gin Drop,” Punch, 25 November 1843, 221). Moreover, Tromp notes that when Fagin interrupts a fight between Bill and the dog, Bill turns on Fagin, asking, “What the devil do you come between me and my dog for?” (OT, 153), echoing the common phrasing “me and my wife” (Tromp, 36). But whereas Tromp argues that “this parallel points up Nancy’s animalistic qualities” (Tromp, 35–6), I would argue the reverse. In my view the text distinguishes between Nancy and the dog in their response to this shared violence. Crucially, Nancy remains passive toward her abuser, whereas Bull’s-eye aggressively resists Sikes’s beatings, responding to violence with violence:
[A] kick and a curse, [were] bestowed upon the dog simultaneously.
Dogs are not generally apt to revenge injuries inflicted upon them by their masters; but Mr Sikes’s dog, having faults of temper in common with his owner, and labouring, perhaps, at this moment, under a powerful sense of injury, made no more ado but at once fixed his teeth in one of the half-boots.…
Figure 1.4. “The Gin Drop,” Punch 5 (1843): 221.
“You would, would you?” said Sikes, seizing the poker in one hand, and deliberately opening with the other a large clasp knife, which he drew from his pocket. “Come here, you born devil! Come here! D’ye hear?”
The dog no doubt heard; … but, appearing to entertain some unaccountable objection to having his throat cut, he remained where he was, and growled more fiercely than before: at the same time grasping the end of the poker between his teeth, and biting at it like a wild beast. (OT, 153)
The symbol of the dog thus identifies the combative relationship as brutal and animalistic, while the narrator consistently guides the reader to revere Nancy’s passive loyalty. Moreover, the text also includes another negative example of the combative relationship, ironically embodied in the union of parish beadle and workhouse matron: these representatives of the law show themselves to be lawless in their domestic conduct, as Mrs. Bumble inflicts “a shower of blows” on her husband’s head (OT, 325). I see a significant contrast between