"No Certain Roof but the Coffin Lid": The Melodramatic Body and the Semiotics of Syphilis in Oliver Twist

Publisher： American Mathematical Society

ISSN： 0084-9812

Source： Dickens Studies Annual: Essays on Victorian Fiction, Vol.44, Iss.1, 2013-07, pp. : 29-42

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Abstract

This essay centers on Oliver Twist's Nancy, considering her development as a collaboration of the "melodramatic body," as theorized by Martha Stoddard Holmes and others, and the medical body. It is my contention that Dickens composes Nancy in a manner that suggests, without stating outright, that she is suffering from late-stage syphilis and I further contend that this apparent affliction performs crucial political and formal work in the space of the novel. The essay traces the pervasive discourses surrounding venereal disease and the body of the prostitute in the nineteenth century, indicating that Dickens's treatment of Nancy vividly deviates from those popular conceptions. The essay goes on to suggest that Dickens's ability to manipulate the paradox of the melodramatic body, specifically the tension between hyper-visibility and invisibility, allows him to generate a realistic pathological narrative that intersects with and fundamentally alters the primary narrative. It is the final assertion of the essay that the novel's resolution, often noted for its adherence to melodramatic tropes, is hosted in medical realism via the case study of Nancy's symptomatolgy and her physical deterioration.