Queer Theory and the Jewish Question (58 page)

With this in mind we should understand why
Oliver Twist
’s structural op- position between Oliver’s “real” family, made up of Mr. Brownlow and the Maylies, and the pseudofamily of Fagin’s gang is also represented as an oppo- sition between Christian and so-called Jewish values. The Jew’s “family” is composed of the most radicalized of individuals—children separated from their birth families—trained as thieves and prostitutes by Fagin, “a very old shrivelled Jew, whose villainous-looking and repulsive face was obscured by a quantity of matted red hair” (105). A perverse parody of the middle-class cap- italist, Fagin promises that should Oliver perfect his trade he’ll soon work his way up to “being a great man” (112). The family is maintained by Fagin’s Benthamite philosophy of “mutual interest” (154): “In a little community like ours,” Fagin explains, “we have a general number one; that is, you can’t con- sider yourself as number one, without considering me too as the same, and all the other young people. . . . We are so mixed up together, and identified in

our interests, that it must be so” (387–88). Through this representation of the pseudofamily headed by “the Jew,” Dickens both critiques the degeneration of familial love into selfish, exchange-based “interest” and “mutual trust” (389), a situation generalized under capitalism, and also defines this rapacious system implicitly as Jewish in its ideology (much as Marx, and later econom- ic theorists, would do).

In opposition to the familial system fostered by the motherless, au- tochthonous Jew, who “seemed like some loathsome reptile, engendered in the slime and darkness through which he moved: crawling forth, by night, in search of some rich offal for a meal” (186), Oliver is introduced to the bless- ings of bourgeois domesticity first in the house of Mr. Brownlow, a model Good Samaritan who rescues the boy who fell in with thieves, removes him from the streets, and sets him up in a well-furnished private home that “seemed like Heaven itself ” (143). Oliver enjoys a similar haven under the roof of Rose Maylie, who typifies the Victorian Angel in the House. Rose is a young woman

at that age, when, if ever angels be for God’s good purposes enthroned in mortal forms, they may be, without impiety, supposed to abide in such as hers. . . .

Cast in so slight and exquisite a mould; so mild and gentle; so pure and beautiful; that earth seemed not her element, nor its rough creatures her fit companions . . . and yet the changing expression of sweetness and good humour . . . [and] above all, the smile, the cheerful, happy smile, were made for Home, and fireside peace and happiness.
(264)

Dickens’s prose here, almost unbearable to twenty-first-century ears, collaps- es Christian conceptions of angelic divinity with a bourgeois idealization of Home with a capital
H
, typing the good family Christian just as he had typed the bad family Jewish. In direct contrast to Fagin, Mr. Brownlow and the Maylies value Oliver’s unshakable goodness and ultimately
give
Oliver money as well as food, shelter, and Christian hospitality. Through their expansive compassion the Maylies enact the story of the Good Samaritan and realize one of the central tenets of Christianity, brotherly love.

This opposition of Christian family values to the pseudofamilial degener- acy of “the Jew” rests as much upon racialized constructs of identity as it does upon Anglo-Christian concepts of morality. In a now famous exchange from 1863, Dickens wrote a letter to Mrs. Eliza Davis, an English Jewess, in re- sponse to her charge “that Charles Dickens, the large hearted, whose works

plead so eloquently and so nobly for the oppressed of his country . . . has [in
Oliver Twist
] encouraged a vile prejudice against the despised Hebrew.”
10
She does note, with relief, that “we have lived to see the day when Shakespeare’s Shylock receives a very different rendering to that which was given to him fifty years ago”; yet whereas Shylock could, with time, be interpreted sympa- thetically as a victim of Christian society, Mrs. Davis writes that “Fagin, I fear, admits only of one interpretation.” A modern avatar of the “cursed Jewes” typed by Chaucer’s Prioress as kidnappers and murderers of Christian chil- dren, Fagin is repeatedly aligned in Dickens’s novel with the red-bearded stock figure of the Jew-Devil: the innocent young Oliver first sees him standing in front of a blazing fire, brandishing a suggestive toasting fork.
11
Dickens replied to Mrs. Davis in a polite, albeit vaguely insulting, manner, writing that if Jews felt that he had done them “a great wrong,” then “they are far less sensible, a far less just, and a far less good-tempered people than I have always supposed them to be.” His two lines of self-defense warrant our attention: “no sensible man or woman of your persuasion can fail to observe—firstly—that all the rest of the wicked dramatis personae are Christians; and secondly, that [Fagin] is called ‘The Jew’ not because of his religion, but because of his race.” Dickens is, at least technically, correct in his first line of defense: while there are a scant two or three Jewish characters in
Oliver Twist
(all wicked, of course), there are a great many more wicked characters in the novel who are so-called Christians. It is telling, however, that none of these Christian villains has achieved the long-standing cultural infamy attached to Fagin: “the Jew,” in fact, comes to figure the entire London subculture of criminals, displacing even the murderer Bill Sikes or the shadowy figure of Monks as the primary threat to Oliver’s property, propriety, and proper identity. Dickens tried explaining to Mrs. Davis that, during the era in which
Oliver Twist
took place, “the class of criminal” to which Fagin belonged “invariably
was
a Jew,” but even Dickens’s own contemporary, London ethnographer Henry Mayhew, denied the truth of such a supposition.
12
Yet more important than proving or disproving the ty- pology is the ambivalence in Dickens’s letter of explanation: despite claiming that he has always admired and respected the Jewish people, believing them to be “sensible, . . . just, and . . . good-tempered,” he also deems Fagin represen- tative enough of “his race” to warrant his synechdochic nomination as “the Jew” throughout the novel. Harold Fisch pointed out long ago that this type of polarizing “dual image” runs throughout Christian representations of the Jew and, more recently, Bryan Cheyette has argued that “‘The Jew’, like all ‘doubles,’ is inherently ambivalent and can represent both the ‘best’ and the ‘worst’ of selves.”
13
As a Christian Dickens reveres “The Jew” for his religion;

as a xenophobic Anglo-Saxon he derides “‘The Jew’ . . . because of his race.”

Early practitioners of Jewish studies were wont to direct analyses of Fagin toward the question whether Dickens was an antisemitic racist, a necessary starting point for an understanding of Fagin’s purpose within the novel. But no critic that I know of has gone beyond antisemitic finger-pointing to ask why
must
Fagin be “the Jew.” Ultimately the stakes are much more significant than judging the merits or demerits of one particular novel or novelist: we must go beyond the mere cataloguing of antisemitic attitudes and motifs and attempt to elucidate the type of cultural work antisemitic discourse performs within a particular historical moment. I would like to suggest that Fagin is a scapegoat figure whose demonization, expulsion, and execution serve as parts of a complex and highly symptomatic purification ritual that tells a great deal about the Victorian, Anglo-Christian psyche. If Fagin represents the Jewish “race” in Dickens’s novel, we should not be surprised to discover that Oliver, the resolutely good and innocent hero, represents for Dickens the pure racial essence of Anglo-Christianity.
Oliver Twist
reveals in its treatment of Fagin the mechanism of the
codification
of Anglo-Christian identity as well as the in- herent
contradictions
within the ideology of family values upon which Victo- rian Anglo-Christian identity is founded.

While the Christian bourgeois family is marked by both its reverence for the innocent child and its self-policing of any signs of sexual impropriety, its polarized opposite—Fagin’s “family” of boy delinquents, thieves, and prosti- tutes—exemplifies the full range of economic and sexual threats to middle- class stability. In the Victorian imagination the Jew and the “fallen woman” were easily conflated, as Sander Gilman has suggested: “Both Jew and prosti- tute have but one interest, the conversion of sex into money or money into sex. . . . The major relationship is a financial one.”
14
Both Fagin the Jew and Nancy the prostitute symbolize “unnatural” perversions of the reproductive drive; likewise, the member of Fagin’s gang wittily called “Master Bates” some forty-five times in the novel represents the onanistic child, whose prodigal ex- penditure of semen was understood by Victorians as “a violation of the law of nature, a most immoral, and antisocial offence.”
15
These figures depict three of the “four great strategic unities” indicated by Foucault as instrumental to middle-class “mechanisms of knowledge and power centering on sex”—the criminal who obtained “perverse pleasure” through unnatural channels, the hysterical and hypersexual woman, and the masturbating child—while the overly procreative (and tacitly working class) “Malthusian couple,” Foucault’s fourth unity, provides the fodder for
Oliver Twist
’s initial focus on Poor Law legislation (103–5).

Fagin’s representation deserves special attention here, since he not only prefigures later stereotypes of the pederast child molester, but also engages

with age-old mythologies of the Jewish “blood libel” that continued to affect nineteenth-century attitudes toward the Jews.
16
Garry Wills points out that although Dickens never explicitly types Fagin as a pederast, “as he nowhere calls Nancy a prostitute,” nevertheless “Nancy’s prostitution clearly underlies all her outbursts of grievance against Fagin, who put her on the streets; and Fagin’s pederasty as clearly underlies much of Oliver’s fear and fascination.”
17
Furthermore, as Larry Wolff has shown, the slippage between (female) pros- titution and pederasty was common, if not typically stated explicitly, during Dickens’s time; in the same year that
Oliver Twist
was first published, the Lon- don Society for the Protection of Young Females and Prevention of Juvenile Prostitution was busily uncovering and closing down brothels run predomi- nantly (or at least supposedly) by Jews and Jewesses, including one notorious establishment in which some “twelve or fourteen boys, from ten to fifteen years of age, have been congregated there on the Sabbath, and the most dread- ful scenes of depravity—scenes at which human nature shudders—were con- stantly enacted.”
18
It is not inappropriate, in this regard, that the most recent film adaptation of Dickens’s novel,
Twisted
, represents Fagin as the “madame” of a brothel of boy prostitutes.

So suggestive is the relationship between Fagin and Oliver that James Kin- caid has recently taken the novel as the exemplary Victorian fable of pederasty in
Child-Loving: The Erotic Child and Victorian Culture:

Here’s how it goes, this story of O: Oliver is born, like all children we love, without encumbrances: no parents, no name, no being apart from what we put into him. This is not, however, a fable of bliss, for once the empty child is before us it becomes the target not only of desire but of anxiety, of passion entwined cruelly with panic and dread. In this case, we use Oliver to dramatize our concurrent need for and horror of the urban nightmare, the criminal poor, unchartered sexuality, the dissolu- tion of the family, the innocent child. . . .

So we fling our child out of that anxiety and into . . . the criminal world of child-molesting, Fagin’s world. Fagin isn’t given a world, of course, but a “den,” a Satanic/bestial crawling place where kidnapped children are bludgeoned, used, twisted into enemies of people like us. On the other hand, Oliver and the others seem not to be kidnapped but rescued, not used but loved, not twisted but allowed to play lustily. There’s food there and plenty of gin, laughter and games, and sex too. This is what we want so badly for the child and for us that we need to make it unthinkable—

just so we can never stop thinking about it. We only fake killing off Fagin in this fable, knowing how vital he is within us.
19

Along similar lines, Catherine Waters points out that

Fagin combines his exercise of paternal discipline with the maternal du- ties of the home-maker. He is the one who cooks meals, arranges accom- modation, educates his “pupils” and “plays” with them. . . . This tenden- cy to combine aspects of the maternal and paternal roles defined by the middle-class ideology of the family contributes to the suggestions of sex- ual perversion involved in Fagin’s portrayal. As a grotesque embodiment of mixed gender positions, Fagin emerges as a sinister figure whose “care” of his boys is shaded by obscure hints of pædophilia.
20

Fagin’s family is thus not only the perversion upon which definition of the “normal” family depends; it is also a titillating image of domesticity that read- ers may vicariously indulge in while simultaneously deeming that image un- christian, unhealthy, and foreignly improper. “The criminal and the normal, the pedophile and the rest of us, the outlaw and the inlaw: if such distinctions were serving us well,” Kincaid writes, “we would not need to assert them so brutally and heedlessly. We so fear defilement from the forms we have in- vented to cleanse ourselves that we are compelled to have their names always on our tongues, the bodies of these Others (the sick, the monstrous, the per- verted) always before us, on trial or on stage.”
21

So is Fagin a
faygelah
? Denotative textual proof is lacking in
Oliver Twist
(as in most popular literature of the time period), but ultimately such “proof ” is both telling in its absence as well as unnecessary, given the connotative web of associations between prostitution, “deviant” familial order, and perennial cul- tural fantasies of the pathologically sexualized Jewish body. Regardless of his ar- gument’s daring, Garry Wills is mistaken in his contention that Fagin’s Jewish- ness is merely a ruse and that the “popular anti-Semitism [Dickens] assumed in his audience, and shared with it, in the 1830s was one of the ‘covers’ for the ped- erastic story he was telling” (603). The relationship between sexual queerness and Jewish identity in the popular imagination is more complex than Wills would suggest. As Daniel Itzkovitz has argued, “Separating homophobia and anti-Semitism does not fully account for the ways that anti-Semitism and ho- mophobia are infl by one another, and the ways discourses of Jewishness and queerness speak through one another. The language of anti-Semitism uti- lizes and is bound up with the discourse of homophobia in particularly resonant