Abstract
A fascination with violence while having a violent reaction to its presence, hostility to surveillance and the carceral while perpetuating it, both a lackeying attitude with regard to the police and a sympathy with the criminal as Abel, a fascination with the transgressive woman while underwriting the doll in the doll’s house, a hatred of middle-class attitudes doubled by a textual punishment of the non-bourgeois, a modernizing attitude that invests in nostalgia. In these contradictory moves in Dickens, presented in a writing marked by carnivalesque excess and proliferation but which also enforces restraint, there is a double attitude to the body which might be discussed by reference to Julia Kristeva on abjection, and which is activated by the drive towards modernity but also by a discursive ressentiment. In this last chapter I want to give space to this which, if named, would make Dickens’s sympathies at some moments near to being proto-fascist.
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Chapter 7 The Scum of Humanity: Our Mutual Friend
See William Oddie, ‘Dickens and the Indian Mutiny’, Dickensian, Vol. 8 (1972), pp. 3–15.
Patrick Brantlinger, Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830–1914 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988), Chapter 7
Lilian Nayder, ‘Class Consciousness and the Indian Mutiny in Dickens’s “The Perils of Certain English Prisoners”’, Studies in English Literature, Vol. 32 (1992), pp. 689–705.
Joseph Schumpeter, quoted in Karl de Schweinitz, Jr, The Rise and Fall of British India: Imperialism as Inequality (London: Methuen, 1983), p. 26.
See Nancy L. Paxton, ‘Mobilizing Chivalry: Rape in British Novels About the Indian Uprising of 1857’, Victorian Studies, Vol. 35 (1992), pp. 5–30.
Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968), p. 148.
See Susan Shatto, The Companion to Bleak House, (London: Unwin Hyman 1988), pp. 251–252.
A. Susan Williams, The Rich Man and the Diseased Poor in Early Victorian Literature (London: Macmillan, 1987)
Bruce Haley, The Healthy Body and Victorian Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1978).
Oliver Twist, p. 382. On the drive within Dickens’s Prefaces to Oliver Twist, see Paul Foss, ‘The Lottery of Life’ in Meaghan Morris and Paul Patton, Michel Foucault: Power, Truth, Strategy (Sydney: Feral Publications, 1979).
See Michael Steig, ‘Dickens’s Excremental Vision’, Victorian Studies, Vol. 13 (1970), pp. 339–354.
Nancy Aycock Metz, ‘The Artistic Reclamation of Waste in Our Mutual Friend’, Nineteenth-Century Fiction, Vol. 34 (1979), pp. 59–72.
See Jonathan Arac, Commissioned Spirits (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1979), p. 182.
Catherine Gallagher, ‘The Bio-Economics of Our Mutual Friend’, Fragments for a History of the Body, (New York: Zone, 1990 p. 361.
Michael Peled Ginsburg, ‘The Case Against Plot in Bleak House and Our Mutual Friend’, English Literary History, Vol. 59 (1992), pp. 175–195.
David Garland, Punishment and Welfare (Aldershot: Gower, 1985), p. 67; compare pp. 38–39, 67.
Pam Morris, Dickens’s Class Consciousness (London: Macmillan, 1991), p. 131ff draws out well the implications of this endstopped language of Headstone’s. On Headstone, see also Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (see chapter 6, note 2).
See Carolyn J. Dean, The Self and Its Pleasures: Bataille, Lacan and the History of the Decentred Subject (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992), p. 203.
Denis Hollier, Against Architecture: The Writings of Georges Bataille (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1989), p. 64.
Jessica Benjamin, The Bonds of Love (New York: Pantheon Books, 1988), p. 52
A. Massé, In the Name of Love: Women, Masochism and the Gothic (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992), p. 45.
See, for example, Leo Bersani, The Freudian Body: Psychoanalysis and Art (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), pp. 38–39.
Gilles Deleuze, Masochism: An Interpretation of Coldness and Cruelty (New York: George Braziller, 1971), p. 83.
Ian Duncan, Modern Romance and Transformations of the Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 215
Carol Hanbery MacKay (ed.), Dramatic Dickens (London: Macmillan, 1990).
See Claire Tomalin, The Invisible Woman: The Story of Nelly Ternan and Charles Dickens (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990), pp. 145ff
Fred Kaplan, Dickens: A Biography (New York: William Morrow, 1988), pp. 458–461.
Barbara Spackman, Decadent Genealogies: The Rhetoric of Sickness from Baudelaire to D’Annunzio (New York: Cornell University Press, 1989).
Quoted, Philip Collins, Dickens: Interviews and Recollections, Vol. 1 (London: Macmillan, 1981), p. 63.
Freud, ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’, The Penguin Freud, Vol. 11 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977), pp. 281–283.
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© 1995 Jeremy Tambling
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Tambling, J. (1995). The Scum of Humanity: Our Mutual Friend. In: Dickens, Violence and the Modern State. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230378322_8
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