B.A .Thesis Chapter 3 Analysis of Fagin
eyes?”. Shylock is clever and cunning, with a talent for imitating the moral axioms of the respectable world, Fagin is wholly a creature of myth. He never rises to Shylock?s tragic height, he never so much as becomes a character at all. Fagin is emblematic, immensely powerful. Having so created him, Dickens had no need to worry about the slight difference of depiction.
3.3 Origin of the ‘Jew’
Fagin?s den, one of the grey-and-black hovels in which he hides out, is reached by a series of stairs, horrible and dark. “The walls and ceilings . . . were perfectly black with age and dirt” (Dickens, 1992:108), but, it?s important to note, there is a fire in the den before which “a very old shrivelled Jew, whose villainous-looking and repulsive face was obscured by a quantity of matted red hair,” stands roasting some meat.
The point is well elaborated by J. Hillis Miller: They have either ignored Dickens? fixed nickname, “the Jew”, as if there were nothing problematic or they have tried to weaken the meaning of Dickens? usage by “explaining” Fagin historically. There is, of course, something to explain. Dickens himself, in a letter to a Jewish woman who had protested the stereotypical treatment of Fagin, sought to solve the problem for the Jewish reader. “Fagin,” he wrote, “is a Jew because it unfortunately was true, of the time to which the story refers, that class of
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B.A .Thesis Chapter 3 Analysis of Fagin
criminal almost invariably was a Jew.”(Peters, 1998:87) Whether this was “almost invariably” so is a question, but that some criminals were Jewish is certainly true. One of these, Ikey Solomons, had been tried and sentenced in a spectacular trial only a few years before Dickens wrote Oliver Twist, and it seems likely that Dickens, with his keen reportorial scent, took use of this case.
And Fagin, we cannot forget, is “the Jew”. Throughout the novel he is called “the Jew”, though in revising for a later edition, especially in the chapter which described Fagin?s last night, Dickens tried to soften the impact by substituting “Fagin” for “the Jew”. It did not help or matter very much: Fagin remains “the Jew” and whoever wants to confront this novel honestly must confront the feeling that becomes visible through Dickens? obsessive repetition of “the Jew”.(Frank & Leaman, 1997)
The spectral image of “the Jew” may indeed be “prehistoric” in the sense that it remains in the timeless spaces of myth, but it is also very much part of a continuous western history. The image of the cruel Jew has survived with remarkable persistence through the Christian centuries. Like Judas, Fagin has red hair, and like Satan, he is compared to a serpent.
I am convinced that, despite some conventionally nasty phrases about Jews in his letters, Dickens was not an anti-Semite—he had neither conscious nor stylistic intent to harm Jews. Indeed, a writer with such
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B.A .Thesis Chapter 3 Analysis of Fagin
intent could not have created a so powerful and impressive figure as Fagin.(开普兰, 2002) For, if the fascination with criminal life that?s evident in Oliver Twist derives in some unusual way from Dickens? childhood traumas, the representative or mythic strength of Fagin comes, I believe, from somewhere else. It comes from the collective folklore. The sentiments and biases rooted in western culture as these have fixed the Jew in the role of villain: thief, fence, corrupter of the young, agent of Satan, legatee of Judas. With Fagin, as Edgard Rosenberg says, “we are thrown back to that anonymous crowd of grinning devils who, in the religious drama of the fourteenth century, danced foully around the Cross and who, in mythology, functioned as bugaboos to frighten little boys”. Dickens has come up with some prehistoric demon, an aging Santan whose depravity explains him wholly.
Novels are composed by individual writers, but in some sense they also derive from the cultures in which these writers live. Collective sentiments and collective stories merged into the body of fiction?s characters. Imagining a world, the writer must use the substance of his culture and thereby, so to say, the culture speaks through and past him. All great writers are in part players of myth—some inferior writers, are nothing else. Fagin the individual figure was conceived by Dickens, but Fagin the archetype comes out of centuries of myth, centuries, too, of hatred and fear.
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B.A .Thesis Chapter 3 Analysis of Fagin
The power of Fagin is a collective, an indefinable power. Once we realize this, the question of what “to do” about Fagin comes to seem hopelessly complicated—as if there were something one could “do” to eliminate the deepest biases of western culture! As if one could somehow cancel out the shadowy archetypes of Satan and Judas, Shylock and the wandering Jew! There is nothing to “do” but confront the historical realities of its culture, and all it has thrown up from its disreputable depths. This can lead to reflections of western culture.
Whenever we encounter such overripe language, Fagin expands into a figure other than human: he becomes a monster drawn from the bad dreams of Christianity.
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B.A .Thesis Chapter 4 Analysis of Nancy
Chapter 4
Analysis of Nancy
4.1 The Portrayal of Nancy
About Nancy?s family, Dickens did not tell us, we can find the information from Dickens? description, at the beginning of Nancy?s first step on stage. She was 18 years old, a girl thief, and belong to Sikes, but, if we are careful, we can find some material of her.
When Oliver was 10 years old, Nancy, she was force to be a thief, that time, she was 5 years old. If not do what Fagin has said to, she will be beat which had 12 years tears and blood to her. So that, where Nancy?s hometown when she was 5 years old? Where her parents? We can guess her parents may be dead or they had no ability to find up her. And she becomes orphan in the street, or like Oliver from the workhouse.
Nancy was shocked very much for she did the things which was herself catch Oliver back after Oliver himself escape from Fagin?s den. In the moment, she can imagine that Jew inflicted club to Oliver. And, Nancy wrested it from his hand. The states made she remember her unfortunate childhood:
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