'It is impossible to be gentler': The Homoerotics of Male Nursing in Dickens's Fiction

Abstract

Eve Sedgwick's Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (1985) has had a hugely enabling impact on gay, lesbian and queer studies, and its two chapters on Dickens do the initially useful work of recognising the existence of alternative sexualities within his work. Yet, Sedgwick insists that Dickens always offers such representations from an inherently homophobic perspective. Though recognising a debt to Sedgwick, this article is strongly committed to demonstrating the fallacy of her influential paradigm that the homoerotic emerges most strongly in Dickens's work through violence. Sedgwickian readings privilege the cultural currency of sexual violence, built up through contemporary modes such as flagellatory pornography. However, other, gentler ways of touching also had highly erotic connotations during the period of Dickens's career. This paper focuses on the Victorian sexualisation of nursing, arguing that Dickens deploys the eroticising of nurse/patient roles in Martin Chuzzlewit and Great Expectations to develop more affirmative, tender strategies for articulating desire between men.