If one were writing the masturbator’s guide to the English novel, certain correspondences would soon become evident. Like the novel, the discourse that constitutes masturbation (as a medical condition, a moral sin, a personal identity, a psychological stage) first arose early in the eighteenth century; like the novel, too, it achieved full cultural currency by the Victorian period and began its decline early in the present century.¹ By the middle of the nineteenth century, both masturbatory practice and novel-reading were firmly installed in popular imagination and culture. With the cultural designation of these practices as significant, anxieties about an unregulated, excessively productive imagination arose, impelling both anti-onanist doctrine and anti-novel invective.² Through famously repressive techniques, medical authorities sought to control the onanistic vice that, as we now suppose, they thereby invented; the novel, meanwhile, so perilously implicated in encouraging kindred forms of imaginative self-abuse, had to find ways of managing the erotic reveries it was accused of arousing in its readers.

Having been stigmatized for its association with fantasy, the novel eventually internalized and accommodated that charge. By the mid-nineteenth century, fictional narratives were seeking to exonerate themselves from incrimination in readers’ imaginations. Even as the novel strove to redirect its readers away from masturbatory vice, however, this now-dominant form of imaginative literature could hardly cease its sexual provocations. The novel increasingly learned how to perform this simultaneously regulatory and arousing function while having (perhaps until Hardy) ever less to say about sex overtly. Through specifiable narrative techniques, the Victorian novel at once encrypted representations of sexuality and demonstrated a frantic need for managing and redeeming sexual practices.

In the masturbator’s guide to the English novel, at least under the heading “men’s bodies,” Charles Dickens would doubtless merit a good deal of attention. Charley Bates, a character in Oliver Twist (1837-39), first alerts us to the valence of the term in Dickens’s corpus. When, as sometimes happens, he is called “Master Bates,” we are assured of not being able to lose sight of the pun; yet when, more usually, he is referred to as “Master Charles Bates,” we are guaranteed to continue imagining it—like the onanist, always fantasizing about what isn’t at hand in order to keep aroused what is. The volatility of Charley’s name might in itself make us suspicious, for in the mouth of the narrator it constantly shifts toward and away from the little joke. When he first appears, for instance, he is described as “a very sprightly young friend … who was now formally introduced to [Oliver] as Charley Bates.” Further down on the page, he is referred to as “Mr. Charles Bates.” Finally, he delivers the gear for cleaning up whatever mess his name might imply: “’Wipes,’ replied Master Bates; at the same time producing four pocket-handkerchiefs.”³

The peculiar attention to the young scoundrel’s name is dramatically amplified by the following exchange:

Through this, one of the many scenes depicting Oliver’s initiation into the secret community of male adolescence, the term “prig” floats with as much instability as that of “Master Bates.” The gloss on “prig” that Oliver is incapable of uttering is presumably “thief,” yet the persistence with which the term goes undenoted throws us deliberately back upon the signifier—where, with the alacrity of any English schoolboy, we might take the usual phonemic detour from a bilabial to a fricative and detect a “frig” (Victorian slang for manual stimulation of the genitals). If the revelation that Master Bates himself is a “prig” merely establishes a relation of synonymity, the Dodger nonetheless asserts superiority over the smaller boys with his “ferocious cock.”

Dickens’s linguistic attention to the male body and male eroticism compels all his Bildungsromane to trace not only their heroes’ social, emotional, and intellectual development, but their sexual maturation as well. While Oliver Twist confines its fantasies about boys’ budding bodies to closeted puns, Great Expectations (1860-61) refers those same sexual feelings back onto the bodies of its characters. In so doing, however, the later novel relegates sexual sensations to parts of the body different from those in which they are usually imagined to originate; Great Expectations, on this reading, manages to anatomize whole species of erotic dispositions without ever mentioning sex.

Let us look, for example, at a scene in Great Expectations thematically paralleling the one I have discussed in Oliver Twist, in which Dickens raises the issue of masturbation by referencing it in such a way as to announce the impossibility of articulating it as such. The scene that probably constitutes Dickens’s most vivid account of the pleasures and anxieties of autoeroticism occurs just when one would expect it in the maturation of the novel’s prepubescent hero. Soon after the primal scene of his encounter with Magwitch in the graveyard, still stunned by the fear of it, and a long way from knowing what it means, Pip lifts a slice of bread-and-butter from his sister’s table and hides it for later delivery to the convict.⁴ Pip, the Dodger might say, thus becomes a prig. And like Oliver’s truncated definition of “prig,” which in refusing the signified turns us back upon the phoneme (thus stimulating, as Roland Barthes would suggest, the desire to eroticize—if not to frig—the sign), Pip’s language also abjures denotation: “Conscience is a dreadful thing,” he states, “when it accuses man or boy; but when, in the case of a boy, that secret burden co-operates with another secret burden down the leg of his trousers, it is (as I can testify) a great punishment.”⁵ Pip carefully avoids a definition of that “secret burden”; his ambiguity, now semantic instead of phonemic, allows the bread-and-butter to function as an alibi for the arousal that he is—as anyone familiar with the perturbations of male adolescence can attest—at such pains to conceal.

Having secreted the morsel down his pants leg, Pip continues to be harassed by his “wicked secret” (55) through the novel’s early scenes. When he undertakes the chore of stirring the Christmas pudding, he finds himself altogether discomfited: “I tried it with the load upon my leg (and that made me think afresh of the man with the load on his leg), and found the tendency of exercise to bring the bread-and-butter out at my ankle, quite unmanageable. Happily, I slipped away, and deposited that part of my conscience in my garret bedroom” (45). Stealing the meager repast does not merely coincide (“co-operate”) with the primary arousal (“another secret burden down the leg of his trousers”): it literalizes the economic metaphor, by which masturbation is classically imagined, of counterproductive labor. Likewise, while the load of which Pip relieves himself surreptitiously in his bedroom signals the irresistible culmination of such titillation, it also completes the analogy between masturbation and theft through a common charge of wastefulness. The trail of butter down his leg points further toward that scene in which, on his first night in London, a now-idle gentleman—Pip claims to detect in his bed “much of [a boiled fowl’s] parsley and butter in a state of congelation when I retired for the night” (202).⁶ Whether through the profligacy of moneyed leisure or the degeneracy of desperate theft, autoeroticism is figured as wasteful sexual energy.

If the discovery of these suspiciously buttery emissions in Pip’s bedrooms suggests an excessively lubricious reading strategy, disavowal of this discovery would itself partake of the very paranoia that structures Pip’s response. For in the scene we have been examining, Pip is quick to identify himself with the criminal. First, through corporeal metonymy (that oedipal limp) he links himself to the shackled Magwitch. Further, in abetting the convict, Pip fears he may become a convict, by virtue of the paranoiac imagination that affiliates his crime (and his body) with an illegality whose discipline is materialized almost immediately in the soldiers on the doorstep. Victorian proscriptions of self-abuse and the concomitant vigilance in preventing their infringement notoriously inspired the kind of guilt this passage bespeaks among habituated onanists.⁷ Not least in an effort to resist the continuing allure of the prohibitions against a practice otherwise thoroughly banalized today, this reading will insist that Great Expectations is imbued with lessons about the erotic dispositions of bodies. Rather than recapitulate the protagonist’s phobic recoiling against sexual possibilities, I will, in what follows, propose to locate at the very heart of the Victorian literary canon a deeply saturated perversity. One of the nineteenth-century novel’s principal accomplishments is to formulate a literary language that expresses eroticism even as it designates sexuality the supremely unmentionable subject. While the regulatory, often punitive dimension of these articulations cannot be overestimated, there is a comparable danger in recognizing nothing other than their prohibitive aspect, thereby merely relocating the critical institutions that have traditionally prevented readers from identifying erotic pleasures—call them perversions—within so respectable a text as Great Expectations. The novel both arouses and coerces its readers’ desires; tracing the productive interplay of pleasure and power allows not only a reconception of this classic work but a charting of Victorian sexual ideology’s formidable operations.⁸

Thanks to the Victorian novel’s renowned loquaciousness, the subjects it cannot utter generate particularly nagging silences. How can we make these silences speak? Precisely through attention to the rhetoric of unspeakability: such tropes as periphrasis, euphemism, and indirection give rise to signifying practices that fill in these enforced absences.⁹ Even as sexuality is unspeakable, it—or what was, historically, coming to be designated “it”—is everywhere being spoken. The novel, we will see, encrypts sexuality not in its plot or in its announced intentions, but in its margins, at the seemingly incidental moments of its figurative language, where, paradoxically, it is so starkly obvious as to be invisible. The novel directs our attention to its visibly invisible surface with its manifest interest in the materiality of the sign; it offers a model for such reading in, for instance, young Pip’s assumption that “the shape of the letters” (35) on the tombstones conveys the physical appearance of his parents, or in the silenced Mrs. Joe’s ideogram for Orlick—the hammer—which everyone misreads as a letter (150-51).¹⁰ If the very letters that constitute its matter bear meanings beyond the literal, then by analogy we can detect other sorts of hidden information in aspects of the novel’s surface usually considered so conspicuous as to be undeserving of comment. The arena of the unnoticeable (or what it comes down to, the unnoteworthy) shelters what can hardly be thought, much less articulated, in the novel; here instantiated in a specifically literary register is the institutionalization of the unspeakability of sex, which has, as Foucault demonstrates, been generative, not repressive, of discourses on sexuality.

The placement of hand on genitals remains a secret in the Victorian novel, but like all secrets it wants to be told. The scene with which we have been concerned, of masturbation’s near exposure, is only the most explicit instance of a pattern that runs throughout Great Expectations, a pattern which figures the sexual caress not in the genitals that are handled but in the hands that do the touching. From this early point, at which the boy’s bulge virtually speaks its own name, the narrative quickly relegates such unutterable instances of provocation and arousal to the commonplace, benign, and unblushing representation of characters’ hands. In a genre that forbids direct observation of genitals in action, this manual code gives voice to what otherwise cannot be spoken. The sexual secrets of the Victorian novel, that is to say, have not been silenced, but are audible instead in a different key.

Why hands? An account of their place in Victorian culture would consider the wealth of tracts on chirology, palmistry, and graphology from the period, as well as such anatomo-spiritual works as Sir Charles Bell’s popular treatise The Hand; Its Mechanism and Vital Endowments, as Evincing Design.¹¹ The fact is not simply that the hand was paid a great deal of attention, but that—given the extent of Victorian self-regulation, both literary and sartorial—it was one of the few anatomical parts regularly available for attention: the usual costume of middle-class English adults in the nineteenth century covered all of the body but the head and the hands. Much has been made of the former body part, the head, both in literary representation and in those famous Victorian pseudo-sciences, phrenology and physiognomy. But critics have had little to say about the other part of the body that could be examined—the hand.¹² Nineteenth-century observers felt the hand to be fully saturated with information about its possessor’s character; a book entitled The Hand Phrenologically Considered: Being a Glimpse at the Relation of the Mind with the Organisation of the Body (1848) exemplifies the Victorian investment in readings of the hand, the technicist discourse of the work enabling it to sidestep the dubiety of palmistry:

Whether through its physiology, the lines that mark it, or the writing with which it is synonymous, the hand is so freighted with significance as to reveal all the vital information about the body and mind behind it.

For the Victorian reader, the hand would immediately be available both as a site of sexual signification and as a dangerous sexual implement. Hands are particularly important to any rendering of masturbation, as the putative etymology of the word suggests: manus (hand) + stuprare (to defile).¹⁴ Preferring a Greek derivation, urologist William Acton suggests “chiromania” as a synonym for onanism, which he states, in The Functions and Disorders of the Reproductive Organs (1857), “can be properly applied, in the case of males, only to emission or ejaculation induced by titillation and friction of the virile member with the hand.” In his account of the usual symptomatology of the onanist, Joseph W. Howe argues in Excessive Venery, Masturbation and Continence (1887) that hands deserve the special attention of “the experienced eye”: “The superficial veins of the integument covering the hands and feet on the dorsal aspect, are very much enlarged or dilated… . The hands are often moist and clammy. While the patient is sitting, his shoulders stoop, and both hands are generally placed on the inside of the thighs.”¹⁵ Despite anti-onanists’ attempts to constrain hands, their resistance to being covered (one can manage, as Miss Skiffins demonstrates, only so far with gloves on) marks their importance: the hand is the only exposed site of sexual communication below the neck.¹⁶

I cite Victorian manual and medical authorities not to establish any specific resonance with Great Expectations but instead to demonstrate the kinds of attention that the hand received in the period. We need not show that, say, Dickens was familiar with Onania in order to prove Pip a masturbator; we hardly want to, in fact, for the novel nowhere delivers the reified identity of “the onanist.” The history of masturbation is both institutional and private (however oblique our access to the latter), and its story is one of both proscription and excitation. Given the novel’s implication in both efforts—warning against and encouraging solitary vice—my interest here is in tracing the enfolding of that erotic/somatic practice in particular literary structures, specifically in linguistic formations of codification, connotation, and euphemism. These rhetorical strategies, it must be emphasized, are not intentional reactions to sexual prohibitions (the result of repression or censorship) but generative possibilities for sexual meanings that cannot yet recognize themselves: within a constellation of broader, including non-literary, discursive systems, such strategies contribute to the production of sexuality as the very category of the unspeakable. Rather than take the novel as a document in the institutional history of masturbation, then, my concern is to consider masturbation as a figure in the history of the novel.

When hands take on a specifically sexual meaning, I have suggested, they speak of masturbation; but their sexual qualities are also generalizable. The metonymic association of hands with autoeroticism functions as a conduit between representation and sexuality, but it does not restrict manual signification to a solitary sexual act. Great Expectations constructs its sexual taxonomy through its representation of hands, and while its master trope is therefore masturbation, the novel oversees a remarkably wide range of what will come—not least through the genre’s own efforts at discriminating types—to be known as sexualities. I will consider the links between the overt representation of the manual, on the one hand, and the mystification of sexuality, on the other, first through the novel’s thematics of male masturbation; I will then proceed to broaden the manual/erotic affiliation and examine the hand’s capacity to signify non-solitary sexuality, specifically through its potential for both inciting and regulating male homoeroticism; finally, I will assess the novel’s efforts at representing and managing women’s sexuality through increasingly phantasmatic conjurations of the female hand. As exemplar, the novel trains the bodies of its characters—as instructor, those of its readers—in exceedingly particular lessons; it becomes, in this peculiar sense, a novel of manners.

* * *

Like many avid masturbators, Pip is deeply ashamed, and, just short of growing hair on his palms, he transfers his generalized sense of guilt onto the hands themselves. Pip is sorely touched by Estella’s disdainful remark upon their first meeting: “’And what coarse hands he has!’” He responds, “I had never thought of being ashamed of my hands before; but I began to consider them a very indifferent pair. Her contempt for me was so strong, that it became infectious, and I caught it” (90). Pip’s hands focus and localize the virulent shame that, articulated here in the register of social class, bears with it all the marks of a sexual embarrassment. What he learns from Estella, that is to say, is that embodied signs of labor are distasteful; the way in which he learns it, though, is through the shaming of a physical exposure, having his vulgar, vulnerable members seen by a girl. The disgrace that attaches to the hand would, to Dickens and his audience, as surely be coded for that other subject routinely repressed—work—as it would be for sex. Humiliation over the laboring (productive) hand converges on shame over the autoerotic (wasteful) one.¹⁷

Pip’s rough appendages perennially trouble him, and the novel meticulously traces the coalescence between the laboring hand and the masturbatory one under the sign of embarrassment. When he tells his family tall tales of his first visit to Satis House—his initial step out of the working class—he strikes the pose of the guilt-ridden onanist: “They both stared at me, and I, with an obtrusive show of artlessness on my countenance, stared at them, and plaited the right leg of my trousers with my right hand” (98). Once he comes into his expectations, Pip’s newfound riches—or is it his newly bulging body?—plague him with another kind of awkwardness: “I went circuitously to Miss Havisham’s by all the back ways, and rang at the bell constrainedly, on account of the stiff long fingers of my gloves” (183). This manual erection coincides with Pip’s rising expectations, as overt anxiety about class again takes the narrative form of a sexualized humiliation. The process of Pip’s Bildung is an aggressive repudiation of the labor inscribed on his body: it tells the story of his refusal to be a hand.¹⁸ Consequently, he takes the rowing master’s compliment that he has “the arm of a blacksmith” (218) as the worst kind of insult.

In the logic of the plot, Pip can finally overcome the blackening of the forge—the shame of the laboring hand—with burns of another sort: after rescuing Miss Havisham, he notes, “When I got up, on the surgeon’s coming to her with other aid, I was astonished to see that both my hands were burnt; for, I had no knowledge of it through the sense of feeling” (414). These burns finally serve as a badge of honor, not shame, for Pip, a mark of adult arrival that overwrites his adolescent humiliation. This trial by fire obliterates at once his infantilized relation to Satis House and the calloused hands of his youth: he is required to pass through it in order to locate the appropriate alloerotic, heterosexual object. In this developmental narrative, which the novel overtly endorses, Pip’s desires are ultimately as self-regulating as the free market that Adam Smith had envisioned as being—or being ruled by—an invisible hand.

When masturbation and labor are supplemented with a third sense of the hand—writing itself—the manual shame embedded in the narrative discloses its profound effects. Unlike most first-person novels, Great Expectations lacks an explicit scene of writing—that scene before the beginning and after the end in which readers are offered an account of the text’s genesis.¹⁹ Like the worker, the writer is ashamed of his hand; he insists upon effacing (though perhaps succeeds only in displacing) the signs of his own manual labor at bringing the novel into being. Though we never witness the inscription of the novel itself, the narrative obsessively renders the exertions of the writing hand: from Pip’s early problems learning to cipher (“getting considerably worried and scratched by every letter” [75]) down to his final scrivening labor for the Firm whose name merely embellishes that of his occupation—“I was clerk to Clarriker and Co.” (489)—the hero writes throughout the story.²⁰ We would expect the writer’s hand, like the productive one of the laborer, to exhibit the telltale marks of its toil (callouses, ink stains, cramps)—to bear witness to the work of what Melville dubs “a poor be-inked galley-slave, toiling with the heavy oar of a quill, to gain something wherewithal to stave off the cravings of nature”—but the narrator never displays his laboring hand.²¹ Only when he lives as a gentleman does Pip have the leisure to read, and he then does little else; writing is thus as much a mark of the protagonist’s class descent (the economic necessity of writing) as of his rise (the intellectual ability to do so). We are prohibited from seeing Pip write this fiction for reasons both economic and sexual: on one side, the writing of this life is itself the signal of a fall in class terms, which must be occluded; on the other, any exposure of himself in the act of imagining his life would violate the autoerotic scene with which the solitary reverie, accompanied by manual manipulation, has already been aligned.²² Writing, like masturbation, cannot be narrated outright—yet it also needn’t be, for it has already left its mark (spilled its ink) everywhere; it too is made shameful, so chastened by that interiorized conduct manual, the conscience, that it is evident only in its traces.²³ Whether it covers work, writing, or sex, the coy hand thus seems to signal displacement itself.

The young Pip conforms most nearly to the identity of the onanist not because, as in some historical narrative, he evinces characteristics typical of the contemporary pathology, but because in his case hands take over the expression of emotions such as shame, self-assurance, arousal, or dejection more usually affiliated with sexuality.²⁴ If Pip’s hands encode certain features of autoeroticism, we might inquire how they became so accomplished. The narrative offers an initial, ontogenetic explanation: from the first, Pip avers that his sister “had established a great reputation with herself and the neighbours because she had brought me up ’by hand,’” and that he knows “her to have a hard and heavy hand, and to be much in the habit of laying it upon her husband as well as upon me” (39). Here is one source, then, for so total a cathexis of the hand: it is both the punished and the punisher, the organ that sins and the one that disciplines. And while Pip’s hands designate him a masturbator, Mrs. Joe’s serve rather unambiguously to phallicize her (particularly through their tool, Tickler)—at least until her penchant for dealing blows is dealt a stronger one and she is silenced “by some unknown hand” (147), which unsurprisingly turns out to be Orlick’s “murderous hand” (438).

To the muscular femininity of his surrogate mother’s “bad cop,” Pip’s father-figure correspondingly exhibits the sentimental masculinity of a “good” one:

The portrayal of Joe is in keeping with the usual representation of male sentimentality; the class signification of bodily attributes provides that the very “muscular blacksmith’s arm” which could so humiliate Pip on the Thames crew team functions, in the forge from which it derives, as the sign of an unimpeachably wholesome and regenerate masculinity. The antithesis of his wife’s hand, the “woman’s touch” that characterizes Joe’s paradoxically serves to fortify, not to destabilize, the edifice of his virility, even as it threatens Pip, the precarious arriviste, whose feminized masculinity has an entirely different class valence. Where Mrs. Joe’s hand trains Pip’s through violence and terror, Joe’s works more subtly, as a nostalgic—but for all that, no less thoroughly repudiated-negative exemplar. The child is always in danger of being slapped by “mother” for touching himself; the gentleman is always in danger of becoming as manly as “father”—and thus losing his class standing—or seeming as womanly as him—and thus losing his manhood.

Though Pip’s body is schooled in a gender curriculum whose first instructors are, by virtue of their class status, comically reversed, the simplicity of this role reversal ensures that the inculcation will do its work all the same. It might be imagined that in such a scheme, Pip’s early assimilation to a masturbatory erotics functions in keeping with a developmental narrative, so that his discovery of an interest in Estella can sweep over the adolescent vice and mature heterosexuality install itself. In fact, the presence in the novel of several other immature male characters with a predilection for self-abuse suggests the very normality of Pip’s habit, if not of its persistence in his story. Instances of what teenage boys still term pocket-pool abound: young Pip “religiously entertained” the belief that his deceased “five little brothers … had all been born on their backs with their hands in their trousers-pockets, and had never taken them out in this state of existence” (35); Orlick typically “would come slouching from his hermitage, with his hands in his pockets” (140); and Bentley Drummle “sat laughing in our faces, with his hands in his pockets” (238). The model of normative development we will wish to call seriously into question, but for now we shall consider the challenge offered by the fact that the behavior of at least one adult character in the novel is equally, though in different ways, coded for autoeroticism.

The characteristics we associate most with the body of Pip’s guardian, Jaggers, are those of touching himself—his trademark “biting the side of his great forefinger”—and otherwise drawing attention to his unaccountably large hands (Pip notes the solicitor has “an exceedingly large head and a corresponding large hand” [111-12]). His classic pose: “The strange gentleman … with a manner expressive of knowing something secret about every one of us … remained standing: his left hand in his pocket, and he biting the forefinger of his right” (163). Even if we overlooked the finger he keeps in his mouth, we could hardly avoid noticing the one stashed in his pocket—for Pip’s isn’t the only pants leg found bulging with secret burdens. “[Jaggers] pushed Miss Havisham in her chair before him, with one of his large hands, and put the other in his trousers-pocket as if the pocket were full of secrets” (262). Jaggers’s case is somewhat more profound than that of the boys who pocket their hands, both because he is the only adult to do so and because the secrets in his pockets connote the other reason for keeping one’s hands there: to lay hold of money. Both Pip (309) and Drummle (238) keep their wealth so concealed, and, as Pip executes the pun on the family name, he relies on our knowledge that while money is kept in pockets, it is not in the Pockets: “Both Mr. and Mrs. Pocket had such a noticeable air of being in somebody else’s hands, that I wondered who really was in possession of the house and let them live there, until I found this unknown power to be the servants” (213). Jaggers is famous for ensuring that, as he says, “the secret was still a secret” (425), and it is his skill at keeping secrets in his pocket that makes him so adept at getting money (even if not spending) there as well.²⁵ Through Jaggers, the novel lends vivid materiality to the familiar Victorian analogy—condensed in the theory of “spermatic economy”—between male sexuality and a money economy.²⁶

If Jaggers’s version of autoeroticism functions in one sense as that which is sublimated by his acquisitiveness and in another as, say, the bodily inscription of his propensity for taking charge of others’ secrets, in a third sense it registers the consistent pattern of his solipsistic withdrawal from scenes of potential erotic engagement. Again taking hands as our clue, we first recognize his distaste for human contact in his Pilate-like hygiene mania:

Jaggers’s approach is often signaled by the advance guard of this scented soap (112, 261)—a redolence perhaps attributable to the massive surface area of the organs in question. Jaggers’s attention to others’ hands amounts to no less a form of self-involvement than his fastidiousness about his own. In one instance, he takes a peculiar interest in Bentley Drummle: before the dinner party he throws for Pip and his “intimate associates” (227), Jaggers remarks, upon first laying eyes on Drummle’s form, “’I like the look of that fellow’” (234); “’I like the fellow, Pip; he is one of the true sort’” (239), he repeats after dinner. In an effort to get a better look at the body of “the Spider,” Jaggers stages a competition among the boys by provoking Pip’s future rival to demonstrate the strength of his arm:

Like the comparison of equipment usual in any high-school boys’ locker room, this scene belies the pretense of romantic rivalry (it predates Bentley’s interest in Estella) with its own gleeful erotics. Yet for all the zeal of his “invisible agency,” Jaggers’s taste for Drummle—and in particular, for his arm—is “quite inexplicable” (236). The plot never sufficiently rationalizes it, except through some vague notions of the solicitor’s perverse contrariety. Likewise, the occasion that this arm-wrestling provides for showing off Molly’s superior strength—“’Very few men have the power of wrist that this woman has’” (237)—remains largely unexplained, as does the sadomasochistic dramatization of this master/servant relationship. Wemmick’s later explanation—“’She went into his service immediately after her acquittal, tamed as she is now’” (406)—merely asserts its own insufficiency; surely if all Jaggers wanted was a domestic servant he needn’t have taken in “a wild beast tamed” (224). Though they work according to the novel’s usual manual semiotics, these sites of Jaggers’s prospective erotic interest rapidly lose their motivation; the plot abandons them as false leads, and Jaggers seems finally more interested in keeping his hands to himself than in pursuing others’.

If the lawyer appears to suffer from an unaccountable withholding, he can at least be said to have made professional use of this attribute, as Pip testifies in describing one of his most effective litigious techniques:

Jaggers’s large-handed handkerchief trick gives bodily, objective form to the particular erotic disposition we have identified with him: autoeroticism as a mode of refusing alloeroticism. Not unlike the flirtation between “prig” and “Master Bates” in Oliver Twist, this spectacle—in the context of Jaggers’s finger-biting and pocketed secrets—textually codes the sexualization of refusal that it cannot name. And while Pip’s frigs result in sticky messes (butter down the pants leg, butter in the bed), Jaggers turns refusal—here, to allow the phlegm to come—into ars erotica. Through the representation of an adult character coded for onanistic behavior, Dickens gives literary form not so much to a Victorian pathology or sexual identity as to a particular “perverse” sexual practice. Though Pip and Jaggers both bespeak autoeroticism, they personify two very different modalities of it, neither in an especially proximate relation to the classic onanist of Tissot or Acton: Pip’s practice is guilty, excessive, uncontrolled, a sexualized strategy for repudiating the manual labor he abhors; Jaggers’s is manipulative, parsimonious, recoiling, a performance and extension of his economic motivations. To insist upon the conformity of literary characters to the genuinely repressive models of medical authorities may itself be to fall victim to a coercively normative, normalizing sexuality; instead, without obliging ourselves to abandon the postulate that all sexuality is shot through with ideology, can we imagine that the novel engages sexualities unaccounted for by official pathologies?

* * *

The solitary hands we have observed thus far in Great Expectations are marked, via a metonymic connection, for male masturbation: when hand and genital organ touch, the former (speakable) can connote the latter (unspeakable). The novel’s erotic investment in hands is so general, however, as to allow for metaphoric links as well, so that sexual practices less directly managed by the hand may nonetheless be imagined as manual. We now shift our attention from singular hands to redoubled ones in order to read sexuality: the moments at which two men’s hands are engaged arise first, in the most highly socialized form of male hand-holding—the handshake—and then, in the other shape they principally assume in the novel, pugilism. Returning to Jaggers, we again find his mode of refusal striking. While he is frequently “throwing his finger at [one] sideways” (165), and is quick to lay a hand on Pip’s shoulder or arm (163, 190-91, 424), he rarely takes the young man in hand. Indeed, Jaggers is all but unwilling to extend his hand—and the largeness of his endowment makes the fact of his withholding all the more disappointing:

A man who has so noticeably large a hand and yet is such a “remarkably short shaker” will always fail to satisfy.²⁷ As Pip comes to learn, however, handshaking in the world of this novel has a curiously negative valence in any case.

The handshake is the one social ritual by which men—most especially those who are strangers—routinely touch each other. It functions to draw people together by holding them apart: it interposes hands between other body parts as a safe form of contact. Why, then, this shortness on the part of Jaggers’s shaker? Why, even more pertinently, the castigation of this ritual in the form of Pumblechook’s unctuous insistence on it? One recalls how the seedsman, after learning that Pip has come into his expectations, clings to the boy with an obsequiousness as oppressive as the proverbial cheap suit that Pip has just come from being fitted for by Trabb.

Pumblechook’s sycophancy is insatiable, at least so long as Pip stays in the money; once Pip is “brought low,” however, the hand is extended “with a magnificently forgiving air,” and Pip notes “the wonderful difference between the servile manner in which he had offered his hand in my new prosperity, saying, ’May I?’ and the ostentatious clemency with which he had just now exhibited the same fat five fingers” (483). Here is the novel’s signal instance of a hand freighted with meaning, yet what it bespeaks is not the efficacy of gestural communication. Instead, at the moment it raises the possibility that in the most familiar code of manual conduct—the handshake—something might supervene upon the literal, the narrative can be nothing but derisive (as if to confirm that hands are evocative only where they are not, in the novel’s conscious terms, meant to be so). At the point where connotations of the manual—including but not limited to the erotic—seem most likely to proliferate, the mode of parodic excess preempts all meanings but the most repugnant hypocrisy.²⁸

Though Pip’s hand may remain insufficiently chafed by Pumblechook’s grip, in the progressive tale of his body’s schooling it receives a final chastening lesson. Jaggers’s second, Wemmick, is noted for parodically representing the schizophrenic divide between the office persona of the bureaucratic modern man and his home life (“’the office is one thing, and private life is another’” [231]). While on the job, Wemmick faithfully emulates the withholding posture of his employer: “Something of the state of Mr. Jaggers hung about him too, forbidding approach beyond certain limits” (281). And like Jaggers, Wemmick finds distasteful Pip’s provincial penchant for handshaking:

The perplexity that Wemmick evinces at Pip’s quaint amiability here is only elucidated later. For the man of business, handshaking is shown to have practical purposes: besides the exhibition of the “portable property” (224) he has acquired from condemned prisoners (“he wore at least four mourning rings” [195]), he reserves demonstrative use of his hands for its utility as a sign. As he leads Pip on a tour of Newgate prison, the narrator notes: “He turned to me and said, ’Notice the man I shall shake hands with.’ I should have done so, without the preparation, as he had shaken hands with no one yet.” After the brief conversation between Wemmick and the designated man, “They shook hands again, and as we walked away Wemmick said to me, ’A Coiner, a very good workman. The Recorder’s report is made to-day, and he is sure to be executed on Monday’” (281-82). Wemmick hopes to land a bit of portable property from the condemned man, and reserves his embrace to satisfy this materialistic impulse. His handshake, like Pumblechook’s, foregrounds its own function as coded behavior; divested of any erotic significance, Wemmick’s secret handshake holds no secret (except so far as the unwitting Coiner is concerned) because its code is transparent. No wonder he is so reluctant to take up Pip’s hand when they first meet: to do so would, in Wemmick’s bodily lexicon, be tantamount to marking him for the gallows.

While the handshake routinizes and sublates manual contact among characters, the other context in which hands regularly meet—fisticuffs—tends in a rather different direction. Unlike the ostentatious signification with which the text loads handshaking (a system of meaning, I have argued, so manifest that it paradoxically empties itself out), the novel’s most fully embodied moments of physical violence are either so curiously undermotivated or so thoroughly overdetermined as to proliferate the meanings available to a manual semiotics. Although in the logic of the novel’s plot, fights interpose at junctures of fierce romantic rivalry, the narration of the battles consistently provides the occasion for the playing out of erotic contact, both homo- and heterosexual, between combatants.²⁹ Insofar as this precipitate collapse of the pugilistic into the erotic becomes a problem for Victorian masculinity, we might take John Sholto Douglas, Marquess of Queensberry, as the figure effectively to drive a wedge between them. By dint of historical “accident,” the very man who, in 1867, codified the rules of “fair play” in boxing—thereby regulating and legitimating the procedures for homosocial sparring—was destined to initiate the century’s most notorious legal proceedings for homoerotic touching—thereby taking the lead in the fin-de-siècle anathematization of homosexuals.³⁰

At Pip’s first encounter with Herbert Pocket, for instance, the relationship is one of immediate and unmediated physical aggression: “’Come and fight,’ said the pale young gentleman.” As Herbert’s provocation appears wholly unmotivated, he soon supplies the incitement it is felt to require: “’I ought to give you a reason for fighting, too. There it is!’ In a most irritating manner he instantly slapped his hands against one another, daintily flung one of his legs up behind him, pulled my hair, slapped his hands again, dipped his head, and butted it into my stomach” (119). To such ungentlemanly conduct the gentleman’s reaction—that is, the bellicosity Herbert desires—itself must be reconfigured, albeit in hindsight, as a form of chivalrous combat for feminine affections. Thus, Pip’s payoff for sparring with Herbert is the opportunity to kiss Estella, the scene’s unseen observer. Yet even if this putative erotic aim were capable of sustaining a state of arousal, it would nonetheless function only retrospectively and defensively as the alibi for the more provoking touches elaborated in the battle with Herbert. In fact, Pip feels as a result that he has prostituted himself, “that the kiss was given to the coarse common boy as a piece of money might have been, and that it was worth nothing” (121). In compensation for the tussle’s lack of motivation, then, the text supplies a series of rationales—ranging from insult to romance to monetary recompense—whose insufficiency is demonstrated by the very rapidity of their deployment.

However persuasive the pretext for pugnacity in the novel may be (in this case, hardly at all), it thus functions primarily as the occasion for physical contact between adversaries—contact whose cathexes evince a logic quite different from the plot’s. And while the sensory modality of the novel’s eroticism is primarily tactile, there is a peculiarly embodied form of the visual—an assaultive kind of looking—which also partakes of these haptic significations. In the present scene, the bout between Herbert and Pip is preceded by both narrator-Pip’s account of Herbert’s awkward frame (he later discreetly terms it “a little ungainly” [201]) and Herbert’s somewhat more suspect examination of Pip’s physique. In a remarkable description of his adversary’s seminudity, Pip recounts:

The investment of Pip’s narration in looking at and rendering the repulsive particulars of his antagonist’s body is strangely at odds with the character’s professed distaste for the figure that Herbert cuts.³¹ And at the moment that Pip, almost despite himself, catalogues the corners of the pale young gentleman’s frame, Herbert returns the gaze. The fight then proceeds from this curiously cruising scrutiny; from sizing up to feeling up, we will see, the novel’s pattern is here established.

The striptease that Pip witnesses at his introduction to Herbert enacts a form of male-male perusal not uncommon in Dickens’s work. Such an androphilic once-over is most fully elaborated in the following passage in The Old Curiosity Shop (1840-41):

The point at which one man can no longer anatomize another’s body—“and so on very gradually”—is always telling. But as if to rectify Herbert’s enticing literalization of that familiar gaze (“he undressed me with his eyes”), the revelation moves in the opposite direction when the two meet again, now grown up. As Pip first espies the mature Herbert mounting the stairs, he reverses the striptease both by clothing his friend and by moving this time from the head downward: “Gradually there arose before me the hat, head, neckcloth, waistcoat, trousers, boots, of a member of society of about my own standing” (198). Here the progressive dressing (of a nude ascending a staircase) ensures their rivalry is at an end; proleptically asserting a Freudian developmental mythology, it insists that a more happily socialized and sublimated relation will ensue.³³

The relationship most thoroughly structured around hand-to-hand combat, of course, is not finally Pip’s friendship with Herbert but his enmity with Orlick. This conflict too originates in an aggressive looking: “I had leisure to entertain the retort in my mind, while [Orlick] slowly lifted his heavy glance from the pavement, up my legs and arms, to my face” (254). Even in the midst of Orlick’s climactic attack on Pip, he pauses for a leisurely gander at his victim—a glance that can afford to be less furtive than earlier: “’Now,’ said he, when we had surveyed one another for some time, ’I’ve got you.’ … ’Now, wolf,’ said he,’afore I kill you like any other beast—which is wot I mean to do and wot I have tied you up for—I’ll have a good look at you and a good goad at you. Oh, you enemy!’ … Then, he took up the candle, and shading it with his murderous hand so as to throw its light on me, stood before me, looking at me and enjoying the sight” (435-38).

Violence is visualized before it is actualized; but Orlick’s is of a specially ferocious variety, requiring not only specular conjuration but verbal confirmation as well. For however violating this staring-down may be, its narration is always coy in the elision of certain body parts. The linguistic analogue to the so-far-and-no-farther gaze is a device (comparable to the “prig” from Oliver Twist, the “secret burden” from Pip’s childhood) by which the novel evokes, while still refusing to denote, terms for male sexuality around Orlick. “He pretended that his christian name was Dolge—a clear impossibility—but he was a fellow of that obstinate disposition that I believe him to have been the prey of no delusion in this particular, but wilfully to have imposed that name upon the village as an affront to its understanding” (139-40). With no other objection than this—that in its inscrutability the name simply feels obscene—Pip implies that a lack of definition itself signifies a transgression against propriety. Pip’s assertion of this name’s “impossibility” aims to bolster the straightness and clarity of his own narrative, a species purportedly remote from the obscenity of Orlick’s indirection; yet the proximate impossibility of his own name belies this effort, as the novel’s opening words attest: “My father’s family name being Pirrip, and my christian name Philip, my infant tongue could make of both names nothing longer or more explicit than Pip. So, I called myself Pip, and came to be called Pip” (35). The case for the perversity of connotation becomes unequivocal in the next instance:

Here the insistent non-meaning of the word redounds upon the victimized body with a sexual signification that cannot otherwise be uttered. The denotative refusal entailed in the “supposititious case” functions as a place-holder for sexual meanings, not simply by obliterating some other, straightforward language (as in this example, by eliding the term “buggered”), but by producing those meanings as inarticulable.

Orlick’s visual and verbal pugnacity toward Pip issues in the inevitable corporal confrontation between them, at the sluice-house by the limekiln at novel’s end. In returning to characters’ bodies, the scene naturally refers us, through its usual synecdochal route, to their hands. Throughout the final chapters Pip is sorely disabled by the burns his arms received at Satis House; Orlick’s attack is so effective in part because it exacerbates Pip’s condition. As the lights go down Pip finds himself pinned to the wall:

If the hand of Pip’s that touches his own body is regularly subject to rebuke, the one that feels (and is felt by) other men is even more thoroughly penalized. Yet here the brutal ferocity of “a strong man’s hand” and its arousing caress are absolutely coterminous. Fearsomely violent as this assault is, its erotic sensations are manifest: the “strong man’s breast” set against Pip’s mouth, and, in return, the attacker’s own “hot breath” against him, serve to literalize the lickerish “kiss” inhering in Orlick’s surname.³⁴ As if to draw on Pip’s youthful training matches with Herbert and Bentley—as if to dramatize the tantalizing prospect of being “jiggered”—this serious adult business with Orlick enacts all the erotic potential of murderous male combat. The particular correspondence that the novel has established between the manual and the genital only barely prepares us for the scene’s concatenation of terror and tenderness, of the one hand that savors to inflict pain and the other that anguishes to endure it.³⁵

At this point we can identify—though, as I will suggest, only prematurely—what might be termed the novel’s homophobia. On the one hand, it denies the handshake any of the erotic valence we might well expect to attend this ritual: either because of the refusal of others (Jaggers or Wemmick) or because of Pip’s own repulsion (at Pumblechook), this manual contact is insufficient to bring men together. On the other hand, Pip’s pugilistics with Herbert, Drummle, and Orlick (as well as Magwitch’s with Compeyson) represent a form of contact too close for comfort: however ecstatically and erotically charged one may suspect these passages of being, the form they take—of increasingly savage violence—must sit uneasily with any gleefully homotropic reading. If, that is to say, the cost of men touching men is that one of them be pummeled, we must recognize a certain ideological resistance in the text to such an erotics. To this apparent dead end, however, the novel proposes several alternate routes. Thanks largely to the fluidity with which Great Expectations structures the thematic of hands, we are left not with an antithesis between homophobic and homophilic, but rather with an apparatus that ultimately brings these two terms—not to mention their hetero counterparts—into a relatively stable and consolatory relation of mutually reinforcing regulation.

For one instance, let us, in pursuing our investigation of pugilism, witness the novel’s strenuous effort to redeem it for normative heterosexuality. Earlier I ascribed Wemmick’s refusal to shake Pip’s hand as much to the single-mindedness of his economic motives in the workaday world as to any phobic pathology. When turning to his erotic interests at home, however, we find Wemmick himself must overcome another’s refusal, in the resistance of his fiancée, Miss Skiffins, to yield to his hands. Upon meeting her, Pip “might have pronounced her gown a little too decidedly orange, and her gloves a little too intensely green”; he notes further that “Miss Skiffins … retained her green gloves during the evening as an outward and visible sign that there was company” (313).³⁶ Like her suitor, Miss Skiffins knows full well the hand’s capability to signify: these gloves ensure her genteel incapacity for domestic labor as much as they conceal her dishpan hands (she “washed up the tea-things, in a trifling lady-like amateur manner that compromised none of us. Then, she put on her gloves again” [315]). But while the gloves afford Miss Skiffins an “outward and visible sign” of class propriety, their verdancy promises a sexual steaminess as surely as her unwillingness to remove them withholds it.

The elaborate charade by which Wemmick makes a pass at his inamorata confirms this dynamic; it is his hands now that her gloves must peel off:

By contrast with the performances of sexual excitation we’ve previously observed, this one can afford to be frankly erotic. Yet even as this pantomime of heterosexual courtship struggles to establish a relation to the normative, it repeatedly collapses into the realm of proscribed sexuality. Even—perhaps especially—when the flavor of eroticism is most vanilla (heterosexual, monogamous, genital), its pungency does not diminish against the palate; through the very nearness of its exposure in the narration, the representation of sexuality here continues to sting the readerly tongue. The “slow and gradual elongation of Mr. Wemmick’s mouth” and the collateral distention of his arm, for example, only barely keep under wraps the other turgidity to which they give rise. The “mechanical” procedure of Miss Skiffins’s resistance itself is metaphorized as déshabillement (she “unwound his arm again as if it were an article of dress, and … took off that girdle”), as though to confirm that so hot a refusal functions as an enticement to arousal. Furthermore, however superficially normative this passage’s sexual thematics may be, the mise en scène returns us to a spectacle of sexual impropriety: unusual in the novel, Pip is here positioned as observer of others’ erotic play, and his “interval of suspense … that was quite enthralling and almost painful” bespeaks a more-than-passive relation to the scene. Indeed, the pas de deux between Wemmick’s arm and Miss Skiffins’s gloves titillates Pip into a state of voyeuristic autoeroticism no different from that which novels themselves had been accused of arousing.

Finally, the contest between “his hand” and her “green glove” drifts irresistibly toward an allegory of fisticuffs. The narrative alignment of the modest maiden to “a placid boxer” installs the scene among those of intermasculine, androphilic pugilism; at its most explicit moment of heterosexual pursuit, then, the novel’s erotic language modulates into the definitionally male and homosocial. For all that Miss Skiffins boxes with kid gloves on, it seems to say, she throws her punches with determination. Yet if in one sense the current of fistic homoeroticism unsettles the characters most preoccupied with bourgeois propriety, the Wemmick-Skiffins match, as we’ll see, also works in the other direction (not unlike the Marquess of Queensberry) toward the reform and sanitization of boxing itself.

Indeed, the novel works arduously to redirect the erotic divagations set loose here. Lest the state of premarital arousal prove unsustainable, Miss Skiffins eventually removes her green gloves (still fully cognizant of their utility as signifiers) as a means of marking a new order of conjugally sanctioned eroticism. Arriving at church with Wemmick, Pip observes: “That discreet damsel was attired as usual, except that she was now engaged in substituting for her green kid gloves, a pair of white” (463).³⁷ Refusal having been abandoned as an erotic mode, domesticity triumphs in the Castle at Walworth: “It was pleasant to observe that Mrs. Wemmick no longer unwound Wemmick’s arm when it adapted itself to her figure, but sat in a high-backed chair against the wall, like a violoncello in its case, and submitted to be embraced as that melodious instrument might have done” (464). The spur to desire is now so fully normalized by the institution of marriage that it loses its edge: although Wemmick evinces no sign of disappointment, one need only set an ungirdled boxer beside an encased cello to determine which woman—Miss Skiffins or Mrs. Wemmick—is the more enticing. In the miniature, mechanical, businesslike form that the Wemmicks lend it, the marriage plot’s usual propensity for damage is made starkly evident: characters’ bodies are disciplined into conformity, domesticity cancels eros, married life instantly obliterates memories of the prior excitation requisite for having brought it about. Here proven in its punishing aspect is a cardinal rule of the novel genre: that nuptials represent the end, not the beginning of things.

The fights we have examined illustrate different modes of repression, in varying degrees of punitiveness, for managing and disciplining the play of hands. In each instance, the sexual possibilities generated by hands are expunged from the plot—from the register of articulated representation—by means of violence, only to resurface in the contours of the narrative voice, where they can pass by virtue of going unheard inside the novel. Male homosocial desire is expressed as brutality, while premarital sex is narratable only insofar as it fuels the hegemony of matrimony. But in addition to these transformations of errant manual desire accomplished through battle, the novel manages other, less violently chastening ones. As against the compulsions of the handshake and the fistfight, we will want now to consider the consensual modality of male manual regulation in the novel.

Through the shift from denuding to redressing, I have suggested, Herbert’s youthful belligerence is rehabilitated as properly sublimated, adult male homosociality. Following his adolescent ineptitude in the boxing ring, moreover, Herbert’s mastery of the hand correspondingly matures as well. Although we learn surprisingly little about his grown-up appendages, this lack is more than compensated by the peculiar knack he develops for tending to Pip’s hands—a taste initiated, perhaps, in those first moments of “eyeing [Pip’s] anatomy as if he were minutely choosing his bone” (120). Indeed, Herbert’s proclivity is confirmed both by his impulse, almost immediately upon becoming reacquainted with Pip, to christen him “Handel” and by his own surname, Pocket, the usual receptacle for hands in the novel. At their first dinner in town, Herbert interlards his conversation with a course in table manners for the newly arrived Pip, instructing him in the proper handling of utensils and other matters of the body’s polite disposition at table (“’the spoon is not generally used over-hand, but under,’” etc. [203-6]). Herbert interjaculates this manual conduct lesson (as if to literalize a parody of the silver-fork novel) through his recounting of Miss Havisham’s history. In the second installment of this tale—when Pip realizes that Magwitch is Estella’s father—Herbert is again preoccupied with the condition of his friend’s hands, this time changing the bandages that cover Pip’s burns (“’Lay your arm out upon the back of the sofa, my dear boy, and I’ll sit down here, and get the bandage off so gradually that you shall not know when it comes’” [416-19]). Through both stories, then, the narrative interpolates information about Pip’s hands, as though, at these crucial moments of the protagonist’s overt erotic interest, the novel’s encrypted sign of that desire need literally be close at hand.

The story that Herbert tells in the midst of his bodywork on Pip is not merely incidental: significantly, this narrative concerns the conspiracy of Miss Havisham’s half-brother, Arthur, with her fiancé, Compeyson, to defraud her:

The implication of a debased, presumably homosexual criminality in this last line derives its force from contrast with the scene of its narration. Compeyson’s story functions as a cautionary tale about the dangers of excessive intimacy between two young men; conversely, Pip’s and Herbert’s is the comfortably homosocialized relation, where eros is sublimated as pugilism, camaraderie, bachelor-marriage, and eventually marriage brokering. While in the boys’ earlier encounter (the adolescent sparring match) eroticism was registered only as a “supposititious case,” their newfound intimacy (the now far gentler touching) can be more frankly denoted. In forming the frame of an interpolated tale (which itself has an antithetical disciplinary moral) the hand-holding dispersed throughout the present scenes is rendered explicitly—it is the scene of narration—by virtue of being more highly socialized.

For Magwitch, the other figure given to excessive handling of Pip, socialization again requires a transposition of eros from narrative discourse to plot, though in his case the change is accomplished through more radical means. From the first, Magwitch embodies a certain pedophilia: the novel’s opening, showing his combined aggression and affection for Pip, suggests a species of man-boy love, and it is primarily through his man-handling of Pip that we come to register such pederastic impulses. At their initial encounter, “The man, after looking at me for a moment, turned me upside down, and emptied my pockets” (36); and, “After darkly looking at his leg and me several times, he came closer … took me by both arms, and tilted me back as far as he could hold me” (37). The recognition scene between patron and protégé stages the climax of the touching here initiated, in the form of an erotic ballet performed by the hands:

This narration has a perilously overt sexual charge: one need hardly cite the bended knee, the kissing of hands, the prostration on the couch, the insistent caresses, to locate the courtship conventions of which it partakes. Pip’s gag reflex serves to bolster, not to diminish the eroticism of the episode, for it demonstrates his revulsion to be as highly cathected as the convict’s attraction. The narrative attention to Magwitch’s manipulation, in its root sense, empowers his cataclysmic revelation even as it threatens to run out of control through a homoeroticism we are made to feel and, through Pip, to feel repulsed by.³⁸ But like his former partner, Molly, this “terrible beast” must be tamed as well.

How does the novel recuperate Magwitch’s erotic palpation and Pip’s corresponding palpitation? For Pip, the immediate antidote to the fearsome caress of the grizzled convict’s “large brown veinous hands” (333) arrives in the form of his companion’s reassuring embrace: “Herbert received me with open arms … got up, and linked his arm in mine” (356-58). Through the developments of the plot, moreover, Pip is capable of turning Magwitch’s lecherous pawing back upon him, lending it a normalized, moralized signification. On his deathbed, Magwitch again feels Pip’s hands, now silently communicating through a sentimentalized hand-holding. “He had spoken his last words. He smiled, and I understood his touch to mean that he wished to lift my hand, and lay it on his breast. I laid it there, and he smiled again, and put both his hands upon it” (469). Then, as if to repay Magwitch for the earlier episode, Pip makes his own revelation:

Pip is at last able to translate his benefactor’s uncomfortable stroking into heterosexual terms, now giving that touch a proper meaning in the plot: he transposes it onto the heterosexual economy by lending it the valence of the “consent of a beloved’s father to a suitor’s entreaty.” Much as he has had to endure Magwitch’s caress, that is to say, the hand he now can own to wanting is Estella’s, in marriage. Those earlier, less fully accountable hand-squeezings are now available to him reworked retrospectively as the beneficence of a future father-in-law. Pip can afford to be “yielding” and “assisting” to the old man’s supplications by virtue of his knowledge that whatever homoerotic force they might once have had has been defused and rewritten—written into the story proper—as straight desire.

Both Magwitch and Herbert partake of a homoerotic handling of Pip and both must be retrofitted in order to discipline those desires. Whether through visceral repugnance or progressive socialization, the novel attempts to school the men’s bodies in normative heterosexual touching. It is not only through other men that Pip learns these lessons, however, for the women in his story must also undergo dramatic transformations in order to rectify the manual problems they present. The two modes of regulating sexuality that we have identified for the men—the violently coercive and the consensual—also structure female eroticism. While Biddy submits to her training for respectable femininity, Molly resists domestication to the utmost; Estella, meanwhile, never has the option of choosing because she never properly has any desires that require management. The novel, moreover, makes a distinction between male and female sexuality broadly conceived, through its phantasmatic construction of the latter, which functions largely in the service of a solitary male dream of its own sexual capacity. In situating erotic subject and object in the same body, autoeroticism, as we have seen, alienates the onanist from himself, thereby paradoxically constituting him as a subject.³⁹ Rarely more than fantasy objects, the female characters buttress the narrative’s masturbatory mode, for the novel’s sexual architectonics bars them from sustaining a position as desiring subjects.

Biddy and Pip start out as perfect counterparts, their as-yet ungendered identities equally oriented around the manual. “She was an orphan like myself,” says Pip; “like me, too, had been brought up by hand” (74). Also like Pip, Biddy exhibits a hand replete with the dirtying signs of both manual labor and onanistic indulgence: “Her hands always wanted washing” (74), Pip notes early on; and at one point, to reassure him, “she put her hand, which was a comfortable hand though roughened by work, upon my hands, one after another” (156). For all their youthful likeness, however, the specter that Biddy presents of female masturbation and of an affirmative female desire is more than Pip can abide. The novel manages the anxiety Biddy inspires by ascribing to her all the dreariness of provincial working-class life, the ignominy of which is routed specifically through the femininity of her touch. The uncleanliness of her hands distresses Pip rather vividly at the point he repudiates her: while they converse, Biddy is shown “plucking a black-currant leaf,” “looking closely at the leaf in her hand,” and “having rubbed the leaf to pieces between her hands—and the smell of a black-currant bush has ever since recalled to me that evening in the little garden by the side of the lane” (175). Like Jaggers’s, Biddy’s hands generate a characteristic aroma; but where “scented soap” indicates a fastidious mysophobia, the provocative image of Biddy’s “black-currant bush” bespeaks an odor di femina that sends Pip running. If we didn’t already suspect this hedge of signaling a demonstrative and menacing female sexuality, two other references would ensure that we do so. One: the alibi that Jaggers provides for Molly’s wrist (“much disfigured—deeply scarred and scarred across and across” [236]), the sign of a more fearsome—and therefore more severely chastised—feminine sexuality: “She had struggled through a great lot of brambles which were not as high as her face; but which she could not have got through and kept her hands out of; and bits of those brambles were actually found in her skin and … the brambles in question were found on examination to have been broken through, and to have little shreds of her dress and little spots of blood upon them here and there” (406). Two: the image Pip conjures up for his youthful acquiescence to Biddy’s guidance through the thicket of language: “By the help of Biddy … I struggled through the alphabet as if it had been a bramble-bush; getting considerably worried and scratched by every letter” (75). The women who navigate these pungent, puncturing bushes offer more of an affront to male sexuality and authority than the novel cares to sustain.

If in Pip’s imagination Biddy represents a distressing (all too available, all too appropriate) sexual possibility, whatever desires she herself can be said to express finally appear thoroughly managed and manageable. Her feminine pliancy is evident from the first in her concern for others’ hands: when they are children, Biddy tutors Pip, remedying his early orthographic troubles (75); when, with no apparent discomposure, she eventually transfers her affections from nephew to uncle, she also trains Joe’s maladroit hand (473-74). Through a disturbing but not unfamiliar bit of Dickensian sleight of hand, the minimal degree of erotic errancy that Biddy has displayed is fully recuperated in the redirection of her interest toward Joe. He, for one, can identify with having dirt under the nails (“’No, don’t wipe it off—for God’s sake, give me your blackened hand!’” Pip cries to him [304]), though upon moving into the Gargery household, Biddy concomitantly improves her personal hygiene: “I became conscious of a change in Biddy … her hands were always clean” (152). Ultimately the new Mrs. Joe exhibits a hand fully accommodated to matrimonial-maternal orthodoxy: “Biddy looked down at her child, and put its little hand to her lips, and then put the good matronly hand with which she had touched it, into mine. There was something in the action and in the light pressure of Biddy’s wedding-ring, that had a very pretty eloquence in it” (490). Light though it may be, the wedding ring exerts sufficient pressure to remind Pip of the female trajectory parallel to, but divergent from, his own.

Unlike Miss Skiffins, who requires combat—however figurative—to bring about the bliss of connubial sterility, Biddy accedes willingly to marital hegemony. Molly, by contrast with both, perpetrates the story’s only interfemale bout, and she is consequently subject to an even more violent form of correction. Intervening in the boys’ dilettantish display of arm-wrestling aptitude, Jaggers reveals Molly to be the real heavyweight among the novel’s prize-fighters: “’There’s power here,’ said Mr. Jaggers, coolly tracing out the sinews with his forefinger. ’Very few men have the power of wrist that this woman has. It’s remarkable what mere force of grip there is in these hands. I have had occasion to notice many hands; but I never saw stronger in that respect, man’s or woman’s, than these’” (237). While the boys’ sparring connotes a certain homoeroticism, the sexual provocation of Molly’s violence is identifiable only through the extraordinary means requisite to its suppression. Even the titillating gaze we’ve come to associate with such manual displays is here rendered paralyzing, as the Medusa one cannot but look upon: “We all stopped in our foolish contention… . When she held her hands out, she took her eyes from Mr. Jaggers, and turned them watchfully on every one of the rest of us in succession” (236). Seduction here amounts to a rage kept in check by its ritual humiliation. No mere “placid boxer” in drag (unlike Miss Skiffins’s, these hands are always available for viewing), Molly exhibits a savagery that the narrative’s libidinal economy can barely contain.

Wemmick later comes to narrate Molly’s story, explaining the source of those mysterious scars and that “force of grip”:

In form, Molly’s battle with her rival differs little from the other bouts of jealousy in the novel; the fact, however, of the players’ gender-reversal (here two women fight for the love of a man), as well as the fight’s more serious consequences (the death of one combatant, the other’s loss of her child), makes a difference. Pugilism, as we’ve seen, even when heterosexual, relies on intermasculine codes of conduct to generate its eroticism; when two women fight, crossing the border to sexuality is a more perilous prospect. To fight as a woman, this narrative suggests, is a deadly undertaking, because it threatens normative femininity so radically: the possibility of an avant la lettre lesbian eroticism here is rapidly chastened and expunged, for female sexuality undergoes the most rigorous surveillance.

Instead of demonstrating pure animus, then, Molly represents so high-voltage a current of sexual violence that its erotic charge must be defused through the most repressive means conceivable. The punishment she suffers for her manual conduct is a life-sentence of “taming” at Jaggers’s hands, but more is at stake in her representation than a wholesale denial of female eroticism: she exemplifies the way in which repression functions as a vigilant and perpetual management of eros. Jaggers, as we’ve noted, exhibits a sadistic pleasure in displaying and exercising the “wild beast tamed” (224) to the cohort of young men he gathers for dinner:

This sadomasochistic tableau is the taming technique to which Wemmick has alluded—a performance Jaggers clearly must stage with some regularity in order to keep his handmaid in line. The sheer power of Molly’s hands requires the sheer coercion of Jaggers’s discipline; his delight at showing her off derives not from admiration of her strength but from pride in having controlled it.

In the magnetic field of the novel’s eroticism, Molly occupies the negative pole; what, then, ought we to make of the connection between her and Estella, so clearly designated the protagonist’s sexual cathode? Pip first suspects their relationship when, shortly after Jaggers’s exhibition of Molly, he has an uncanny feeling upon meeting the grown-up Estella:

Pip regards Estella’s pointing finger and, following the novel’s usual exchange, his inability literally to “grasp” his feeling is transferred onto, and compensated by, Estella’s laying her hand on him. At their next meeting, Estella’s hand again disturbs him: as he sees “her face at the coach window and her hand waving,” he is once more startled by an ineffable likeness: “What was the nameless shadow which again in that one instant had passed?” (284). In being designated “nameless,” this relation—unlike those other terms (“secret burden,” “jiggered”) whose namelessness remains implicit—ceases to be so: the novel of course finally can name it, denominating this uncanniness maternity. And as soon as namelessness is articulable, it has consequences in the plot.

Pip at last lights upon the “one link of association” (403) that confirms the affiliation he suspects: having witnessed “the action of Estella’s fingers as they worked” (373) at knitting, he then finds “a certain action of [Molly’s] fingers as she spoke arrested my attention… . The action of her fingers was like the action of knitting… . Surely, I had seen exactly such eyes and such hands, on a memorable occasion very lately! … I had passed by a chance swift from Estella’s name to the fingers with their knitting action, and the attentive eyes. And I felt absolutely certain that this woman was Estella’s mother” (403). More surprising than the revelation of Molly as Estella’s mother is the suggestion that Pip could establish that relationship based on the appearance of their hands—for other than this “action of knitting,” they have nothing in common. The very attempt to align these two sets of hands by force of uncanny conjunction only points up the antithesis between them: Molly’s are marked while Estella’s are blank; Molly’s signify (even if what they designate is sexuality held in check) while Estella’s do not. For Estella is so insistently the object of erotic denotation that her depiction virtually evacuates the connotative register in which we have located sexuality elsewhere in the novel.

The link to Molly persists in interfering with Estella’s appropriateness as Pip’s amorous desideratum, but the novel sufficiently manages this taint to keep it from tarnishing the daughter even as it continually condemns the mother. In a rare moment of offering advice, Jaggers discourages Pip from revealing Estella’s pedigree, arguing, “’Add the case that you had loved her, Pip, and had made her the subject of those “poor dreams” … then I tell you that you had better—and would much sooner when you had thought well of it—chop off that bandaged left hand of yours with your bandaged right hand, and then pass the chopper on to Wemmick there, to cut that off, too’” (426). For Pip “to establish her parentage” would be “to drag her back to disgrace,” and consequently to annihilate his own “dreams”; in Jaggers’s image, it would amount to amputation—or, by the logic of hands in the novel, castration. This exposure would associate Estella with Molly, whose brutally inscribed flesh has always engendered castration anxiety; the Estella whom Jaggers counsels Pip not to reveal is thus in a true sense Molly’s daughter—one with fantastically disabling sexual powers.

Pip of course resists the impulse to disclose Estella’s origins, and in so doing he both protects her from “disgrace” and saves himself from the threat of dismemberment. In fact, Estella has never seemed particularly dangerous, for while her mother is perpetually and actively tamed, Estella is so almost by definition. Her irascible demeanor, and the sexual frigidity that accompanies it, have less to do with serving her own desires than with her fashioning as a suitably impossible object for the male characters captivated by her looks. To the extent that Estella appears as a desiring subject, she does so as the “mere puppet” (288) of her guardian, Miss Havisham; and as if to ensure that the willfulness evident in her aggressive passivity will be utterly disarmed, she receives a decisive pummeling at the hands of her husband, Drummle (490-91). Unlike those of the other female characters we have considered, Estella’s hands are virtually maintenance-free; there is little of interest to say about them, except that little is said of them. Since she signals the overt representation of the subject’s desire, Estella’s appearances in the narrative obviate the necessity for sex appeal to reside wholly in the linguistic timbre.⁴⁰ As if to amplify the silence of her own desire, Estella is shown simply to have a “white hand” (259); and although Pip can fondle it, hers is possibly the least erogenous hand in the book:

Estella succeeds as Pip’s proper erotic object by the very thoroughness of her de-eroticization in the narrative; she does not simply represent the refusal ordinarily requisite to provoke desire but is constitutively phantasmatic. Though we are meant to register Pip’s arousal at the alluring sight of her, the narrative voice—otherwise so rich in provocative periphrasis—becomes laryngitic around her “beauty,” relying on such tropes as “indescribable majesty and … indescribable charm” (491). While the novel elsewhere registers eroticism in a combination of denotative refusal and connotative titillation, at the points of Pip’s greatest official erotic interest, these strategies are reversed: in asserting fortissimo Pip’s desire for Estella, the narrative need no longer marshal its battery of sotto voce techniques. At the moment desire’s tale can be told, the narrative modulates into abstract diction, abandoning all of its prior engagement with corporeality: “She was so much changed, was so much more beautiful, so much more womanly, in all things winning admiration had made such wonderful advance, that I seemed to have made none” (256).⁴¹

For those who take the singular voicing in the plot of Pip’s feelings for Estella to indicate the text’s only genuine eroticism, the novel reads as a conventional romance. Such readers, however, are obliged to account for the fact that, even in its famously revised ending, Great Expectations resists bringing about the usual novelistic resolution in matrimony. As though to clear the space necessary for sanctioned, sanctified heterosexual romance, male homoeroticism is finally repudiated and female subjectivity thoroughly thwarted; yet we are left wondering why, despite these preparations, the romance plot is not more emphatically accomplished. One might, of course, point to the final version of the novel’s ending, where Pip records the sensation of “what [he] had never felt before … the friendly touch of the once insensible hand” (491). If the novel does, as Bulwer-Lytton wished, conclude in happy domesticity, then its last sentence—“I took her hand in mine, and we went out of the ruined place… .” (493)—would provide a coherent resolution for its manual thematics. Yet the suspended animation entailed not only by the preservation of the original ending but by the ambiguity of the final version itself (“I saw no shadow of another parting from her”) makes so smug a termination precarious.⁴² Despite critical attestations of its plot’s “perfection,” the fact that the story is waylaid before the threshold has left readers notoriously unsettled about its ultimate outcome.⁴³

Why should a novel with such copious erotic investments finally fail to resolve the most basic romance plot? One answer is that its strategies for regulating the vagaries of sexual desire simply prove too effective: they discipline all sexuality, even the most orthodox, quite out of existence. Not only are female domination, male homosexuality, onanism, and sadomasochism eliminated, but genitally oriented, maritally legitimated heterosexual monogamy itself comes to seem impossible.⁴⁴ Though the novel entertains a range of sexual designations, exchanges, developments, and diffusions, the sexual hegemony in which it issues becomes so powerful as finally to suspend not only that order’s own ideal—institutionalized heterosexual monogamy—but anything that exceeds the fantasy of the solitary subject.

Yet despite the apparent elimination of all erotic possibilities, this sole remainder—the solitary imagination—suggests that bodily self-regulation may generate its own rewards. For even as the novel inculcates lessons about sexual continence in its audience, it agitates and incorporates the erotogenic pleasures of solitary reading. Indeed, the very irresolution of the ending offers an alternative to erotic abjuration, one that animates the oscillation between the hegemony of the marriage plot and the violence of its refusal. Rather than resolving all the previous travails of hands through the story, the novel’s ultimate ambivalence may instead reinscribe the mode of sexual deferral by which it has operated from the first: in the manner of an imaginary object held perpetually at bay by autoerotic reverie, its eroticism can persist precisely by being suspended as undecidable. Just as Estella can never be more to Pip than a “poor dream”—the object of solitary sexual fantasy—so the residuum of the novel’s ending finally demonstrates the sustainability, rather than the complete evacuation, of the masturbatory thematic that has mobilized its eroticism throughout. The ambiguity of the ending thus accomplishes a shift in the location of the novel’s erotics that I have already suggested: in its finality it extinguishes the evocative narration through which sexuality has been connoted; but in the irresolution of its plot—its denotative practice—it now preserves those concerns as strictly undecidable. Even as it draws to an end, the novel resituates masturbation—sustains it, that is to say, by refusing closure.⁴⁵ The originary sexuality that enables the novel’s flood of erotic potentials, masturbation also serves as the remainder left behind when all other possibilities have been forsworn.

Source

From English Literary History 60, no. 1 (1993): 217-259. Copyright © 1993 by The Johns Hopkins University Press. Reprinted with permission of The Johns Hopkins University Press.

Notes