ABSTRACT
Rose Maylie shows instinctive sympathy for Nancy; but Brownlow, the representative of patriarchal authority, can encounter her only liminally on London Bridge at midnight. It is his cleansing instinct to despatch her to 'some foreign country' (46.414), but she is not so easily to be expunged from the middle-class consciousness. The prostitute perversely chooses to go back to her pimp and be murdered; and the murder of Nancy obsessed the Victorians with all the 'fascination of repulsion'.9 The horror of the scene challenged the assurance of elitist insulation from human brutality; but the scene was more insidiously
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disturbing. Dickens laboured to invest the murder with pathos and with the 'moral intensity' Peter Brooks sees as marking the attempt of nineteenth-century melodrama to deliver a 'clear nomination of the moral universe'.10 Hence the stagy palaver whereby Rose's handkerchief is exalted by allusions to Othello, and wielded by Nancy before Sikes as a talisman of grace and compassion. One side of Dickens would have applauded the contemporary reaction of J. Hain Friswell who observed that the murder 'teaches u s . . . to pity the guilty while we hate the guilt'.11 But Friswell's insistence on Nancy's sexual guilt makes the encounter in effect the climax to a line of illicit liaisons; and his defensiveness highlights the erotic implications in the image of the male clubbing down on the contaminated body of the half-dressed and drowsy woman. Nancy's continuing loyalty to Sikes muddies the waters further with the disturbing reminder that there are girls who choose to go to the bad. Dickens tries to key Nancy's death to the reassuring image of the female martyr with upturned eyes, but that itself is a motif whose ecstatic erotic charge Bernini has sculpted in our consciousness. It is not, however, only the horror and the eroticism that is so disquieting. Nancy's choice of victimhood suggests the intricacies of need and desire inherent in female subm issiveness, but she has previously dared to show physical aggression towards the male, crossing gender barriers by deploying a masculine strength in her protection of Oliver. The book begins and ends by disciplining female transgressiveness, its last words recalling Agnes Fleming as 'weak and erring' (53.480); and the valencies of Sikes's aggression seem to offer the grotesque mirroring of a displaced disciplining, whereby a hatred of 'the guilt' might be acted out by a patriarchal moral authority. If Nancy is disturbing because in her the female body resists moralisation, Sikes is disturbing because his male aggression is too extreme to allow for moral identification: the scene thus has the most disconcerting ability to suggest the patrolling of defensive boundaries, only to breach them and confound the hierarchies of morality and feeling.
