Women and Romance by Laurie Langbauer

Author:Laurie Langbauer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Published: 2017-12-27T00:00:00+00:00

The erring woman, alone in her carriage, emphasizes the inherently sexual nature that Dickens’s work accords to woman’s independent motion, but the distinctive suggestion of this tableau is this woman’s responsibility for her fortune. She has not been acted on so much as she herself has acted, as the other ladies, ignoring her but gazing approvingly at the young men, suggest; their desire for the men highlights and repeats what they profess to condemn, what once must have been the fallen woman’s own favorable glances, her active desire. Nell, as passive and innocent mirror of male desire, is not the only model for female sexuality in the book. Moreover, Nell’s innocence is in question: that this strayed woman is the only one who understands Nell, and that her plea to her is so desperate, suggest a greater identification than that she was once penniless too; there is more of a similarity between them as fellow travelers. Nell’s very agitation (she trembles), given its context, heightens the identification. It is a gesture drawn from the Victorian stock of conventional sexual markers—trembling can signal desirability and desire.

Nell’s death demonstrates that the male order needs a category of female sexuality because it needs to project and drive out its own ultimately unsatisfied (because unsatisfiable) desires. Quilp’s death marks the violent extinction of just such desires. Projecting sexuality onto Nell, and then killing her, is a way of leaving men with only diffused and negotiated desires, purged of all the insurgent force this text characterizes as monstrous—Quilp-like—and, hence, needing to be conquered. The erotic recompense of Nell’s death scene (and critics have long pointed to its sexual charge) is denied to the malcontent, Quilp, but is, telling, given to a boy and a group of old men, as if a reward for their very powerlessness. They are reanimated by it, but not threateningly, just as are the group of living dead who gather at Nell’s graveside (72.657–58).

The single gentleman’s unmasking at the end of the book seems to emphasize that Nell’s sacrifice is meant to profit the world of men, for her deathbed gathering brings about the reunion of the younger and elder brothers. But that reunion is an empty one; the reader is told the grandfather never does actually acknowledge his brother (72.660). Similarly, it is hard to accept that that brother is also Master Humphrey, an identification that is not so much a failed overelaboration of the story as it is a reiteration of the impossibility of the very identifications—bonds—Dickens’s story tries to foster. The conventional climactic recognition scene never comes off, disturbing the closure of the novel, and upsetting both the identification of the male order with such regulating novelistic desires and its identification of such devices with power. Overturning closure or putting it into question does not provide a realm of freedom in The Old Curiosity Shop; the only realm Dickens can imagine for that is death, a pyrrhic victory indeed, for he fails to imbue Nell’s death with any transcendent meaning, as he was the first to admit.

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