Queer Dickens: Erotics, Families, Masculinities

by Holly Furneaux

This book offers a radically new reading of Dickens and his major works. It demonstrates that, rather than representing a largely conventional, conservative view of sexuality and gender, he presents a distinctly queer corpus, everywhere fascinated by the diversity of gender roles, the expandability of notions of the family, and the complex multiplicity of sexual desire. The book examines the long overlooked figures of bachelor fathers, maritally resistant men, and male nurses. It explores Dickens's attention to a longing, not to reproduce, but to nurture, his interest in healing touch, and his articulation, over the course of his career, of homoerotic desire.

Holly Furneaux places Dickens's writing in a broad literary and social context, alongside authors including Bulwer-Lytton, Tennyson, Braddon, Collins, and Whitman, to make a case for Dickens's central position in queer literary history. Examining novels, poetry, life-writing, journalism, and legal and political debates, Queer Dickens argues that this eminent Victorian can direct us to the ways in which his culture could, and did, comfortably accommodate homoeroticism and families of choice. Further, it contends that Dickens's portrayals of nurturing masculinity and his concern with touch and affect between men challenge what we have been used to thinking about Victorian ideals of maleness.

Queer Dickens intervenes in current debates about the Victorians (neither so punitive nor so prudish as we once imagined) and about the methodologies of the histories of the family and of sexuality. It makes the case for a more optimistic, nurturing, and life-affirming trajectory in queer theory.

Genres: Nonfiction, Queer, Lit Crit, Victorian, Literary Criticism, Theory, Literature

304 pages, Paperback

First published December 10, 2009

Reviews

[Jasmine · Rating 4 out of 5]

"It is my hope that a broader field of queer interpretation and enquiry will be part of our continuing reinvention of the Victorians, a reinvention that fills in the blind-spots of existing histories of sexuality, extending our appreciation of erotic vitality that exceeds those categories that we now find it difficult to think outside of, and that will help to reclaim the family from its conservative appropriators as a historically valid space of queer possibility." (From the postscript "Doing Dickens: The Queer Politics of Adaptation" p. 253)

[Laura · Rating 5 out of 5]

There's a lot of sincerely really interesting stuff in here about Dickens, his work, and his era, but I think what I most appreciate about this book is the way it uses this to broaden ideas about queerness, family, our contemporary age as well as the Victorian era as it has often been imagined.