Something Covered with an Old Blanket”: Nancy and other Dead Mothers in Oliver Twist

In Powers of Horror. An Essay on Abjection, Julia Kristeva outlines her theory of abjection as a simultaneous fascination and horror stemming from sensorial reminders of the subject's primal, psychological relation to the mother. In this essay, I show how these psychological perspectives can potentially result in acts of physical violence, which I call the “abject response.” Applied to literature, a study of the abject response explains why sexually active female characters, such as Nancy, the prostitute, in Oliver Twist, suffer extreme acts of physical violence: not simply because they are sexual, as critics of Victorian domestic ideology most often argue, but rather because their particularly female bodies give them an agency which threatens to destroy the mastery of women on which Victorian male identity is based. Reading Oliver Twist through the lens of Kristeva reveals the ways in which Sikes, Nancy's murderer, psychically links her sexuality to the fatal potential he perceives in her body. This threatening construction of women's sexuality derives from an imbalanced focus in the male psyche on the repulsion aspect of abjection, a focus socially inscribed as a threatening power, which is used to justify violent usurpations of the feminine in masculine constructions of gender.