Queer Theory and the Jewish Question (57 page)

1. Hawkins, “Chaucer’s Prioress,” 615.
   

Dickens’s Queer “Jew” and Anglo-Christian Identity Politics: The Contradictions of Victorian Family Values

DAVID A. H. HIRSCH

If the Jews have not felt towards England like children, it is because she has treated them like a step-mother.

—Thomas Babington Macaulay, “Statement of the Civil Disabilities and Privations Affecting

Jews in England”

In assessing the mutual interests of Jewish studies and queer theory, one of the central sites of “common discourse between Jews and others who share a crit- ical approach to the politics of culture” might be the role of the family in the construction of individual and national identity.
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Given that both Jewish and “queer” identity are defined primarily with relation to “the family,” and that political discourse has frequently centered upon the relationship between family and nation when debating the civic status of Jews and (other) queers, it is crucial for both Jewish studies and queer theory to interrogate the relat- ed issues of the family’s role in individual subject identification and the fam- ily’s politicized position vis-à-vis national order. The potency of citing “the family” as the primary basis of national, political order should be obvious to anyone living in the late twenty-first-century U.S. and Britain, especially since the right ascended to power under Reagan and Thatcher around 1980, and it is indicative of the success of middle-class hegemony that nuclear family val- ues have come to be understood as a moral absolute with no history. Scholars continue to push back the genealogy of the modern nuclear family, yet it was not until the early decades of the nineteenth century, in Europe and Ameri- ca, that middle-class “family values” became a fundamental cornerstone in cultural politics. During the same period the definition of who constituted a true family member was progressively narrowed: whereas under earlier modes of production this definition included apprentices, servants, tenants, and oth- ers tied to the familial
economia
(the very term
family
is derived from the Latin

word for servant,
famulus
), the “rise of capitalism isolated the family from so- cialized production as it created a historically new sphere of personal life. . . . Based upon private productive property, the ideology of the family as an ‘in- dependent’ or ‘private’ institution is the counterpart to the idea of the ‘econ- omy’ as a separate realm.”
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Since the family has perennially served as the “nat- ural” ground upon which models of social and political order are grounded, it is no surprise that “family” also came to play an increasingly important role during the nineteenth century in the conjoined discourses on sexual, nation- al and racial identities.

In England, particularly, the political significance of modern familial ide- ology seems to have begun in the wake of the 1832 Reform Act, which ex- tended the franchise to men of the Christian middle class: as Dror Wahrman has shown, “The aftermath of the Reform Act witnessed not only the deci- sive proclamation of the ‘middle class’ as a powerfully rising social con- stituency at the core of the ‘public’; it also witnessed a complementary proclamation of the ‘middle class’ as the epitome of hearth and home, at the core of the ‘private.’”
3
The stability of the familial sphere was understood by the mid-thirties to be fundamental to social order on the national scale: the
Magazine of Domestic Economy
, for example, in an 1836 article entitled “Home,” stated unequivocally that “if men are without the principle of at- traction and union in society, which is attainable only by the proper feeling and possession of home, all the Solons and Lycurguses that ever lived might legislate in vain for the promotion of their greatness and happiness in com- munities and nations.”
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Far from being a timeless centerpiece of social order, modern-day politics of family values began in the early years of the nine- teenth century, as even Margaret Thatcher admitted when accused of want- ing to take England back a century in her promotion of Victorian values: “Oh exactly,” she said. “Very much so. Those were the values when our country became great.”
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Popular literature, particularly the domestic novel, was crucial to the in- stitutionalization of family values, and, as indicated in an 1849 essay titled “Cheap Readings,” literature was understood as a necessary link between fa- milial and national cohesion:

The province of the literary philanthropist is clear—to circulate widely, under every shape, elements of truth; to strengthen the bands of society by instruction, and to cement a national union by social and domestic recreation. The love of families engendered by this potent, but quiet in- fluence, extends and evolves itself into patriotism, and a correct sense of social and political freedom.
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Foremost among English “literary philanthropists” during the period was Charles Dickens, whose name has become synonymous with sentimental tableaux of home and family life, but Dickens scholars rarely interrogate the ways in which his depiction of the “love of families” extends itself quietly and subtly into a nationalist and even racist ideology. My focus here will be on the ways that Dickens’s novel
Oliver Twist
(1837–39) is involved in the early Vic- torian development of a racialized definition of the Christian family as
the
central site of healthy English subject formation. This story of an orphan’s dis- covery of familial identity serves as an allegorical history of the ascendant middle class in England, which is defined not only through opposition to the deviant familial orders of the working and upper classes but also through a racial-religious opposition to the queerly atomized familial order of Fagin “the Jew.” Inasmuch as the Anglo-Christian family was defined by the purity of its insular domesticity, it was equally defined by those it excludes. The same can be said regarding the definition of the “true Englishman” in wake of the 1832 Reform Act and the extension of political rights to Protestant Dissenters and Roman Catholics in 1828–29, not to mention ongoing attempts by Jews to achieve the same civic status. Only by situating Dickens’s novel within the mutually informing politics of Home, Church, and Nation can we approach an understanding of how modern English identity was constructed upon the basis of middle-class family values. And it is only by tracing the genealogy of “family values” as a political touchstone that contemporary scholars and ac- tivists can come to terms with continuing efforts to deny civil rights to indi- viduals and groups defined as “queer” (in the broadest sense of the word) in relation to the nation as family.

As Michel Foucault and other cultural theorists have shown, the middle class’s ascendancy to moral and political power in the eighteenth and nine- teenth centuries was marked by the bourgeoisie’s “transposition into different forms of the methods employed by the nobility for marking and maintaining its caste distinction.”
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Where aristocratic hegemony was maintained through “a
deployment of alliance
: a system of marriage, of fixation and development of kinship ties, of transmission of names and possessions” (106), the middle class transformed this concern with the purity of blue blood and “the antiquity of

. . . ancestry” into a form of power established on a deployment of sexuality centered upon the bourgeois family:

This class must be seen rather as being occupied, from the mid-eighteenth century on, with creating its own sexuality and forming a specific body based on it, a “class” body with its health, hygiene, descent, and race. . . . The bourgeoisie’s “blood” was its sex. And this is more than a play on

words; many of the themes characteristic of the caste manners of the no- bility reappeared in the nineteenth-century bourgeoisie, but in the guise of biological, medical, or eugenic precepts.
(124)

The deployment of alliance was not supplanted by the deployment of sexual- ity, but the two were merged instead into the developing ideology of middle- class familial domesticity. “The family cell, in the form in which it came to be valued in the course of the eighteenth century, made it possible for the main elements of the deployment of sexuality . . . to develop along its two primary dimensions: the husband-wife axis and the parents-children axis. . . . The fam- ily is the interchange of sexuality and alliance” (108). Surprisingly absent from Foucault’s analysis is attention to the mutually empowering intersection of this deployment of sexuality, centered upon the family, and nineteenth- century discourses of nationalism and racism, which were equally concerned with issues of caste and descent. If we understand family, nation, and race to be contiguously interconnected constructs central to modern politics of iden- tification, Foucault’s analysis of the deployment of sexuality can be extended to account for the larger stakes involved in the Victorian dissemination of family values.

Key to the establishment of middle-class family values through the de- ployment of sexuality was the notion that children’s purity and sexual inno- cence must be protected, if not forcibly established, through the loving care of the private nuclear family: without proper parental supervision the child’s physical and moral integrity was subject to degeneracy. In this light it is telling that
Oliver Twist
is the story of the purest child imaginable, who must escape the dangers attendant to his orphan status by discovering his lost identity as part of a respectable, middle-class family. The novel begins with Oliver’s birth in a poorhouse and tenure in the parish orphanage, his apprenticeship with a foster family who treat him worse than their dog, and his adoption into Fagin’s gang of pickpockets, murderers, and prostitutes. The bulk of the nar- rative pursues the contest between Fagin and the novel’s good characters for possession of Oliver, concluding with Fagin’s execution and Oliver’s restora- tion to his blood relatives and recovery of his inheritance.

The trajectory of this development indicates the supreme importance of “family” as a determinant of identity, and each of the social units into which Oliver moves is characterized in terms of family. With extreme irony, Dickens refers to the “parental superintendence” and motherly feelings of the poor- house director, Mrs. Mann, “who received the culprits at and for the consid- eration of sevenpence-halfpenny per small head per week,” the greater part of which she pockets for her own use.
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A bit later, after Oliver asks for a bit more

gruel at supper, the overseeing board of the orphanage decides that he is too great an “expenditure” and offers “a reward of five pounds to anybody who would take [him] off the hands of the parish” (61, 58): as Mr. Bumble explains, “The kind and blessed gentlemen which is so many parents to you, Oliver, when you have none of your own, are a going to ‘prentice you, and to set you up in life, and make a man of you: although the expense to the parish is 3 pounds ten . . . all for a naughty orphan which nobody can’t love” (63). Sold off to a gravedigger’s family, Oliver is subsequently bullied by his coworker Noah Claypole, who feels infinitely superior to the “workhouse orphan” of un- known parentage: “No chance-child was [Noah],” the narrator explains,

for he could trace his genealogy all the way back to his parents. . . . The shop-boys in the neighbourhood had long been in the habit of branding Noah, in the public streets, with the ignominious epithets of ‘leathers,’ ‘charity,’ and the like. . . . But, now that fortune had cast in his way a nameless orphan, at whom even the meanest could point the finger of scorn, he retorted on him with interest.
(78)

Again and again, Oliver’s worth is calculated in monetary terms by the pseu- dofamilies with which he is living, and ultimately his lack of worth is a func- tion of his lack of a clear genealogy. “He comes of a bad family,” Bumble ex- plains (96). False families see the worth of an individual in terms of the money that individual requires or can bring into the family coffers, literally putting a price on Oliver’s head.

That the parish administrators practice a twisted form of Christian love is emphasized in Mr. Bumble’s official coat, which has gilt-edged lapels and large brass buttons embellished with “the parochial seal—the Good Samari- tan healing the sick and bruised man” (70). This parable of the Good Samar- itan quietly underwrites the entire novel: a man on the road from Jerusalem to Jericho happened to fall among thieves, who took all he had, beat him, and left him for dead. Two men traveling down the same road saw the man, but crossed to the other side and continued walking. But a Samaritan traveler was moved with compassion, bandaged his wounds, lifted him onto his horse, brought him to a hostel, and paid for his room. In Dickens’s novel, the parental representatives of the parish who should be Good Samaritans are no better than thieves who take Oliver for all he’s worth, and Mr. Bumble’s gilt- edged lapels and brass button are a damning indictment of Christian parochialism.
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This button marks a fundamental opposition between the ethics of Christian charity upon which Victorian society was based in theory and the capitalist ethos upon which Victorian society was based in practice. A

religion defined by self-abnegating compassion and disdain for worldly wealth is incompatible with a system structured upon the model of the competitive, materialist “rugged individual.” In the parable the thieves and the Good Samaritan occupy antagonistic ideological positions; but as Dickens’s novel il- lustrates, Victorian culture supported both Christian and capitalist ideologies despite their inherent contradiction.

This capitalist ethic was instrumental to the rising middle-class’s self- definition, because one of its key features was the belief that honest labor, rather than genealogy, should be the primary determinant of an individual’s status. In contrast to aristocratic systems’ determination of status on birth and blood family, bourgeois capitalism held that any radical individual could be- come “someone” in the world regardless of familial origin, and it is partly be- cause the traditional novel traces the
Bildung
of such rugged individuals, thereby confirming bourgeois capitalism’s theory of identity formation, that it became far and away the primary literary genre of the nineteenth century. Yet again we run into an ideological contradiction: Oliver’s superintendents are the staunchest upholders of the capitalist ethic, yet, rather than see this boy without a family as the epitome of rugged individualism, they embrace a con- tradictory ideology that calculates the worth of an individual upon his famil- ial heritage. This contradiction between a capitalist belief in the autonomous self-production of an individual’s “worth” and the bourgeois privileging of family life as the primary determinant of identity is as central to Victorian cul- ture as the contradiction between capitalism and Christianity. By merging these two sets of contradictions, we arrive at the pivotal ideological dichoto- my in
Oliver Twist
: the ethics of capitalist individualism versus Christian fam- ily values.