Queer Theory and the Jewish Question (60 page)

dearly from the first!” (462; my emphasis). Through these highly unlikely dis- coveries of kinship, Dickens is attempting to resolve the practice of disinter- ested Christian love with Victorian privileging of private family relations. But in doing so he also pulls the rug out from under Christian claims of universal- ist compassion: whether they realize it consciously or not, these Good Samar- itans are assisting Oliver because of his familial resemblance and relatedness to themselves. The very same charge that Webb leveled against Jews—that they care only for their own and will circumvent civic laws to protect their own tribe—can be leveled against Brownlow and the Maylies, who lie to the police about Oliver’s participation in a robbery and allow Oliver’s half-brother Monks, the secret puppet-master behind Fagin’s dirty dealings, to flee the country and avoid trial before the English courts. As D. A. Miller has argued, the family’s exclusion of the police simultaneously marks the middle-class do- mestic space as inviolably private and as a self-policing disciplinary institution: “Despite the half-lights and soft kindly tones,
as well as by means of them
, a technology of discipline constitutes this happy family as a field of power rela- tions.”
37
The discovery that all the novel’s good characters have always already been “family” undermines Dickens’s use of the Good Samaritan parable to ex- emplify their Christian goodness: “Paradoxically,” Dennis Walder remarks, “Dickens seems to endorse Bentham’s view that one will only sacrifice individ- ual interest to others when those others are such with whom one is ‘connected by some domestic or other private and narrow tie of sympathy’ . . . since Brownlow and the Maylies all turn out to be related to Oliver.”
38

Furthermore, this discovery suggests that Dickens is on the verge of pro- posing a racial theory of Anglo-Christian identity centered upon the middle class. Both Cates Baldridge and Catherine Waters have pointed out that by explaining Oliver’s radical goodness, unaffected by the harshness of his early environment, as a property inherited from his blood family, Dickens is draw- ing upon aristocratic notions of identity that constitute “a kind of genial de- terminism”: “positing blood-inheritance as the sole and sufficient explanation of character is,” Baldridge argues, “both anti-novelistic
and
anti-bourgeois.”
39
The whole fabric of Dickens’s middle-class family values polemic threatens to fall apart here, since the upshot of Oliver’s incorruptibility despite his experi- ences as a homeless orphan is a blatant contradiction of bourgeois ideology’s cause-effect relationship between familial domesticity and Christian moral character.

It may certainly be true, as Waters argues, that this appropriation of an “aristocratic conception of the family” is an attempt by Dickens to write “a fable of identity for the newly risen middle classes, a myth of origins that could serve to strengthen their precarious sense of social legitimacy.”
40
But the same

inheritance theory of identity cannot easily accommodate Mr. Brownlow’s ex- planation of the inherent, and ostensibly inherited, viciousness of Oliver’s half- brother “Monks”
41
—unless, of course, like Jewish identity, viciousness is trans- mitted through the
mother
. Brownlow remarks that the hysterical body of Monks, which in the very cradle displayed a “rebellious disposition, vice, mal- ice, and premature bad passions,” now indexes “all evil passions, vice, and profligacy” through “a hideous disease which has made [his] face an index even to [his] mind” (439, 458). Most likely epilepsy, Monks’s physical degeneracy just as easily connotes a venereal disease, shared by his profligate upper-class mother who ultimately succumbs (in France, no less) to “a painful and incur- able disease” associated with her “continental frivolities” (459, 435). Although Monks and Oliver share a father, it would seem that the mother’s genetic trans- mission is key to identity, for, in contrast to his half-brother, Oliver’s truth and purity are marked on his face like easily read characters, and he is the “living copy” of his mother’s portrait (132). If this X-chromosomal theory is the only rational resolution to Dickens’s problematic explanation of the “nature or in- heritance” of character (49), then what we’re faced with is a eugenicist con- ceptualization of Anglo-Christian middle-class identity as a function of blood and “race.” Whether or not his parentage be revealed in the novel’s closing chapters, Oliver is and always has been “a ‘young bourgeois’ from the very mo- ment of his conception both in the genetic and in the literary sense.”
42
Recall- ing Dickens’s letter to Mrs. Davis, we might conclude that Oliver is morally impervertible “not because of his religion, but because of his race”: one of the many patronyms given to the boy over the course of the novel is, in fact, “White” (122).
43

It is more than novelistic coincidence that Oliver’s reunion with his lost family occurs simultaneously with Fagin’s execution in the state prison. Re- peatedly associating the atomistic and morally reprehensible qualities of bour- geois capitalism with the queer figure of “the Jew,”
Oliver Twist
attempts to pu- rify Anglo-Christian culture of its internal demons, much as Jesus exorcised the two men of Gadara by casting off their devilish spirits into a herd of swine (Matthew 8:28–33). Simultaneous with this projection of Christian evils onto Jews, Dickens appropriates the precepts to “love thy neighbor” and also “love thy family” as definitive of Christian virtue rather than Jewish ethics. In both Dickens’s treatment of Fagin and his characterization of the good Christian family, we see the same dynamic of mimetic rivalry that is at work in Luke’s telling of the Good Samaritan parable. Jewish values are at the origin of Chris- tian ideals, but in order to codify Christian identity as superior a sacrificial rit- ual of scapegoating must take place. The admired
model
of identity—and here we’ll recall Dickens’s praise of the “sensible, . . . just, and . . . good-tempered”

Jewish people in his letter to Mrs. Davis—becomes a despised
rival
for identi- ty, for “chosenness”: the Jew in Dickens’s Anglo-Christian myth of middle-class origins is “the one who must be at once beaten and assimilated,”
44
this assim- ilation taking on especial significance given Jews’ efforts to obtain full British citizenship and identity contemporaneously with
Oliver Twist
’s first publica- tion. The queer “Jew” who is executed at the end of
Oliver Twist
is less a Jew than an unflattering reflection of Anglo-Christianity, this ritual murder being a desperate attempt to purify Victorian society of the jarring contradictions constitutive, yet internally deconstructive, of its supposedly pure identity.

Notes

I would like to thank Sarah Chinn, Lisa Lampert, Michael Moon, Chuck Prescott, Christina Henn, and the members of the Queer Studies Workshop at the University of Illinois for sugges- tions they offered during the writing of this essay.

1. Daniel Boyarin and Jonathan Boyarin, “Introduction/So What’s New?”
   Jews and Other Differences: The New Jewish Cultural Studies
   (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1997), xii.
   

2. Eli Zaretsky,
   Capitalism, the Family, and Personal Life
   (New York: Harper Colophon, 1976), 31, 33. See also Raymond Williams,
   Keywords
   (New York: Oxford UP, 1983), 131–34.
   

3. Dror Wahrman,
   Imagining the Middle Class: The Political Representation of Class in Britain, c. 1780–1840
   (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995), 381.
   

4. Qtd. in Catherine Waters,
   Dickens and the Politics of the Family
   (Cambridge: Cam- bridge UP, 1997), 20.
   

5. Weekend World
   , 16 January 1983, qtd. in Eric M. Sigsworth, ed.,
   In Search of Victo- rian Values: Aspects of Nineteenth-Century Thought and Society
   (Manchester: Manchester UP, 1988), 1.
   

6. Proteus, “Cheap Readings,”
   Eliza Cook’s Journal
   (October 1849): 2; qtd. in Waters,
   Dickens and the Politics of the Family
   , 21. On the instrumentality of domestic fiction in the establishment of Victorian family values, also see Nancy Armstrong,
   Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel
   (New York and Oxford: Oxford UP, 1987).
   

7. Michel Foucault,
   The History of Sexuality,
   vol. 1:
   An Introduction
   , trans. Robert Hur- ley (New York: Vintage, 1990), 124.
   

8. Charles Dickens,
   Oliver Twist
   , ed. Peter Fairclough (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966), 48.
   

9. On the significance of the Good Samaritan parable to
   Oliver Twist
   , also see Dennis Walder,
   Dickens and Religion
   (London: Allen and Unwin, 1981), 44ff.; and Janet Larson,
   Dickens and the Broken Scripture
   (Athens: U of Georgia P, 1985), 47–67.
   

10. Mrs. Davis’s letters and Dickens’s reply are printed in Cecil Roth, ed.,
    Anglo-Jewish Letters (1158–1917)
    (London: Soncino, 1938), 304–8, and in Cumberland Clark, ed.,
    Charles Dickens and His Jewish Characters
    (London: Chiswick, 1918).
    

11. See Derek Cohen and Deborah Heller’s “Introduction” to
    Jewish Presences in Eng- lish Literature
    (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s UP, 1990), 6; as well as Heller’s essay in the same volume, “The Outcast as Villain and Victim: Jews in Dickens’
    Oliver Twist
    and
    Our Mu- tual Friend
    ,” pp. 40–60.
    

12. Murray Baumgarten, “Seeing Double: Jews in the Fiction of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Charles Dickens, Anthony Trollope, and George Eliot,” in Bryan Cheyette, ed.,
    Between “Race” and Culture: Representations of “the Jew” in English and American Literature
    (Stan- ford: Stanford UP, 1996), 48.
    

13. Harold Fisch,
    The Dual Image: A Study of the Jew in English and American Litera- ture
    (New York: Ktav, 1971 [1959]) 15; Bryan Cheyette,
    Constructions of “the Jew” in Eng- lish Literature and Society: Racial Representations, 1875–1945
    (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993) 12.
    

14. Sander Gilman,
    The Jew’s Body
    (New York: Routledge, 1991), 122.
    

15. See David Paroissien,
    The Companion to Oliver Twist
    (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 1992), 105–6; and J. Don Vann, “Dickens and Charley Bates,” in Fred Tarpley and Anne Mosely, eds.,
    Of Edsels and Marauders
    (Commerce, Texas: Names Institute, 1970), 117–21.
    

16. On the connection between blood libel myths and
    Oliver Twist
    , see Frank Felsenstein,
    Anti-Semitic Stereotypes: A Paradigm of Otherness in English Popular Culture, 1660–1830
    (Bal- timore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1995), esp. 32–35 and 148ff.
    

17. Garry Wills, “Love in the Lower Depths,”
    New York Review of Books
    36.16 (26 October 1989): 60–67; rpr. “The Loves of
    Oliver Twist
    ,” in Fred Kaplan, ed.,
    Oliver Twist : Authoritative Text, Reviews, and Essays in Criticism
    (New York: Norton, 1993), 593–608; 598.
    

18. Michael Ryan,
    Prostitution in London
    (London, 1839), 193–94, 148–49; qtd. in Larry Wolff, “‘The Boys Are Pickpockets, and the Girl Is a Prostitute’: Gender and Juve- nile Criminality in Early Victorian England from
    Oliver Twist
    to
    London Labour
    ,”
    New Literary History
    27.3 (Spring 1996): 236–37.
    

19. James R. Kincaid,
    Child-Loving: The Erotic Child and Victorian Culture
    (New York: Routledge, 1992), 389–90.
    

20. Waters,
    Dickens and the Politics of the Family
    , 35.
    

21. Kincaid,
    Child-Loving
    , 389.
    

22. Daniel Itzkovitz, “Secret Temples,” in Boyarin and Boyarin,
    Jews and Other Differ- ences
    , 193. Also see Joseph Litvak, “Bad Scene:
    Oliver Twist
    and the Pathology of Enter- tainment,”
    Dickens Studies Annual
    26 (New York: AMS, 1998): “Most criticism, and even as self-consciously hip a reinterpretation as the recent film
    Twisted
    , shown in 1996 at Gay and Lesbian Film Festivals in New York and Boston, seems unable to conceptualize Fagin as Jewish and pederastic at once” (43).
    

23. Joseph Jacobs,
    Jewish Ideals and Other Essays
    (London: David Nutt, 1896), 197.
    

24. See Hermann L. Strack,
    The Jew and Human Sacrifice
    , trans. Henry Blanchamp (New York: Bloch, 1909), esp. pp. 280–86.
    

25. Strack’s invaluable analysis of the history of the ritual murder charge suggests that such accusations were common in Europe between the late twelfth century and the early sixteenth century and then regained strength during the nineteenth century. For examples of recent versions of this myth, see the following websites: www
    .factsofisrael.com/ load.php?p=/blog/archives/000044.html; www.je
    wishpost.com/jp0807/jpn0807c.htm (Saudi government news article claiming “Special Ingredient for Jewish Holidays Is Human Blood from Non-Jewish Youth”); www
    .adl.org/egyptian_media/media_2002/ blood.asp (Egyptian newspaper claiming that Jewish matza must contain the blood of raped non-Jewish youth); www.jta.org/page_view_story
    .asp?intarticleid=3182&intcatego- ryid=6 (Belorussian television viewers’ belief that Jews perform ritual murder on Chris-
    

    tians); resistance.jeeran.com/judaism/ritual/chicago.htm (antisemitic site detailing sup- posed ritual murders in Chicago in 1955); www.jta.org/page_view_story
    .asp?intarti- cleid=3231&intcategoryid=6 (the Austrian right’s recent use of the blood libel). Also see a book by the Syrian minister of defense, Mustafa Tlas,
    The Matzoh of Zion
    (n.p., 1983). The book was recently republished abroad, as indicated at the following website: www
    .wiesenthal.com/social/press/pr_item.cfm?ItemId=6707. One might speculate on the ways this myth resonated during the infamous Leopold and Loeb trial (despite their vic- tim’s being a Jewish boy) and on the ways this myth has been appropriated in modern ho- mophobic discourse, from the sensational accounts of the serial killer of boys in Weimar Düsseldorf in 1930 (transformed by Fritz Lang into his classic film
    M
    , starring the eastern European Jewish actor Peter Lorre) to more recent public fascination with gay serial killers like John Wayne Gacy and Jeffrey Dahmer.
    

26. Charles Lamb,
    The Essays of Elia
    , vol. 7 in
    Life and Works
    (Boston: Brainard, 1912),