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Perversion is everywhere apparent in Charles Dickens's Barnaby Rudge (1841). The novel evidences an impressive array of perverse desires, relationships, and subject positions. Barnaby Rudge abounds with a sexualized excess that lends itself almost irresistibly to a range of psychoanalytic and queer modes of interpretation. With its melodramatically inflected depictions of violent interfamilial conflict, father–son rivalry, mob violence, mass psychosis, and social collapse, Barnaby Rudge can be aligned with several key elements of Sigmund Freud's account of psychosexual development, including Oedipal rivalry, polymorphous perversity, and civilization's unintentional intensification of perverse desires. In particular, the novel exemplifies Freud's observation, in Civilization and Its Discontents (1930), that perversity is not external and anathema to normality, but is actually fashioned and strengthened by it. For Dickens, as for Freud, the family is the crucible of our perversions, primarily through its functional failures and its counterproductive repression of sexual desire. Dickens depicts desire as potentially disruptive, violent, and anti-social, particularly if left unchecked or, conversely, overly repressed; like Freud, he prescribes the sublimation—not the repression—of libidinal energy, and he regards the bourgeois, heteronormative family and "civilization" as safe containers of erotic excess.Dickens conflates the familial and the political, depicting an interwoven private and public paternalism that violently prohibits sexuality and, thus, ironically generates the libidinal excesses it labours to contain.

DOI: 10.1057/978-1-137-59706-9_3

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