As in the sketch “The Hospital Patient,” the major issue in the relationship of Sikes and Nancy is middle-class intervention in domestic assault cases. Both texts create a space between the assault and the death of the battered woman. In this gap, intervention by the middle class is offered and refused: the hospital patient refuses to testify and, similarly, Nancy refuses to take help from Rose Maylie. Both texts culminate in the death of the battered woman, which brings this intervention down in full force. Finally, in both texts, middle-class intervention—the impulse to take on the role of woman’s “natural protector,” which the abuser has violated—is refused in terms that appeal to the companionate ideal on which the impulse to intervene is based. Ironically, therefore, while Nancy’s loyalty traps her in delinquency and removes her from the protection of middle-class reformers such as Mr. Brownlow, Rose Maylie, and Mr. Losberne, at the same time it appeals powerfully to the values they cherish most. Like the magistrate in “The Hospital Patient,” they are forced to admire Nancy’s resistance to their own intervention. Nancy’s perfect loyalty is exemplified in her death, when she shows no resistance to Bill’s assault. This contrasts with her defense of Oliver, when she struggles “violently” (OT, 164) to save the child from “being ill-used” by Sikes (OT, 198). We realize that Nancy is capable of resistance, but will not exercise it in her own defense. She responds to Bill’s murderous assault with an embrace. As he beats her to death, she clings to him. Her perfect passivity to Sikes exemplifies the female loyalty that Dickens so revered:
“Bill, dear Bill, you cannot have the heart to kill me. Oh! think of all I have given up, only this one night, for you. You shall have time to think, and save yourself this crime; I will not loose my hold, you cannot throw me off. Bill, Bill, for dear God’s sake, for your own, for mine, stop before you spill my blood! …”
The man struggled violently to release his arms; but those of the girl were clasped round his, and tear as he would, he could not tear them away. (OT 422)
As Tromp notes, this scene generates a huge amount of sympathy for the abused woman (Tromp, 41–2); however, this sympathy is ideologically loaded. Tromp interprets Nancy’s death as insulating the middle class from spousal abuse, locating that violence in the pure physicality of the working-class woman (Tromp, 29). I agree that Nancy might temporarily play such an insulating role—but such insulation was short-lived at best, since by the 1840s, Dickens himself would portray domestic assault in the middle-class Dombey home. What is more important, in my view, is that Nancy represents a projection of emergent middle-class domestic ideology onto a working-class character.
Nancy’s death is crucial because it unleashes the public intervention that she has so signally resisted. Like the death of the hospital patient, her murder produces an almost excessive degree of public scrutiny. In “The Hospital Patient,” this is implicit; Dickens would have expected his readers to know that Jack now faces charges of manslaughter or murder rather than assault. In Nancy’s case, the intervention is immediate and explicit. Morning brings the symbolic gaze of the sun, which “light[s] up the room where the murdered woman lay” (OT, 423). The sun suggests the impossibility of concealment: “[Sikes] tried to shut it out, but it would stream in” (OT, 423). Moreover, as the sun rises, Bill starts to undertake the first acts of subterfuge, which the text suggests are futile. He burns the club and tries to rub blood off his trousers. Finding this impossible, he cuts the stained pieces out of his trousers, and burns them. Finally, he washes Bull’s-eye’s feet, finding that “The very feet of the dog were bloody” (OT, 424). The bloody feet of the dog as well as the permanent stains on Sikes’s clothing are highly significant. They both point to the fact that Nancy’s death is not a private event. Her blood moves the evidence of Sikes’s crime outside the walls of the private home. The traces of his violence ineluctably move his crime into the public eye.
The death of the prostitute in Oliver Twist spurs an excess of public scrutiny and intervention—pursuit by the mob, by police, by concerned middle-class citizens, and by the justice system. This wave of retributive justice seems to resolve the dilemma that Nancy’s own refusal of intervention posed. While Nancy is alive, the privacy of her relationship is respected. Once she is dead, that privacy is waived absolutely. Even the dead woman seems to partake in the ensuing scrutiny, as her “eyes” (OT, 428) represent the most powerful symbol of the forces that pursue Sikes to his death. As Armstrong observes, “As she comes back to haunt the criminal, … the figure of the prostitute works on the side of legitimate authority” (Armstrong, 184).
Indeed, the dead woman is omnipresent to Sikes as he tries to elude pursuit. Her presence is most tangibly represented by Bull’s-eye, for in the final scenes of the novel, the dog becomes unexpectedly like Nancy, displaying her illogical and pathetic devotion to an abusive owner/master. Although Bull’s-eye does resist Sikes’s attempt to drown him, he appears in Cruikshank’s illustration (fig. 1.5) as cowed, tail between his legs and back curved in a posture of submission—indeed, one is hard pressed to recognize the aggressive creature from the earlier illustrations. After he runs away from Sikes, his aggression seems to diminish further: he is portrayed as injured (bruised and lame); moreover, like the faithful Nancy, he seems unable to leave Sikes, as even his running away reunites them. Whereas in the early part of the text the identification of Nancy with the dog is attained metonymically through their common position as Sikes’s victims, in the final scenes Dickens makes this identification grotesquely concrete: Sikes sees Nancy’s eyes looking out of the dog’s body. This has the uncanny and morally satisfying effect of enabling Nancy to avenge her own murder, as Sikes slips into his own noose at the sight of “the eyes” (OT, 453). However, this effect—which might seem to mitigate Dickens’s earlier glorification of Nancy’s passivity—is almost immediately obliterated by the subsequent behavior of the dog, who lets out “a dismal howl” (OT, 453) and plunges after his (her?) master. Like Nancy’s, his skull is crushed, perfecting the identification between them (Tromp, 36). The victim’s passivity—even suicidal self-immolation—was thus necessary to Dickens’s conclusion after all.
Figure 1.5. George Cruikshank, “Sikes attempting to destroy his dog,” illustration for Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist (1837–39).
The deaths of Nancy and Sikes, which represent, respectively, the glorification of the loyal passive woman and the drive toward public intervention in marital violence, thus embody the contradictory impulses of the 1830s regarding wife assault. At this key moment in early nineteenth-century culture, the emergent ideal of marital privacy was pitted against the impulse to intervene in wife-beating cases. Nancy, then, stands on the fault line of early Victorian views on the regulation of marital violence. In her loyalty to Bill, she exemplifies the middle-class value of marital privacy; in her death, she brings down the full force of public intervention. This powerful literary figure thus emerged from the newfound visibility of wife assault in the print culture of the 1830s and, through her enormous popularity throughout the century, worked to consolidate the feminine ideal of passive