A Tale of Two Dwarfs: Sex, Size and the Erotics of Transcendence

Dickens’s portrayal of romantic relationships in his novels is notoriously unsatisfying. John Carey puts it best in The Violent Effigy when he writes that “the biggest gap in [Dickens’s] achievement consists in his failure to portray even once, with any kind of fullness or understanding, a normal sexual relationship” (154). It is only when he is depicting relationships of eccentric passion, weird infatuation or murderous obsession that Dickens can create the requisite dramatic tension to truly engage the reader’s attention. And it is then that he has something of interest to say about the dynamics of passionate attraction between men and women. In other words, the only way to understand Dickens’s conception of sexual love is to view it through the prism of the unusual, the out-of-the-ordinary and the pathological. This kind of presentation also allows Dickens to evade the Victorian taboo against writing directly about sexuality – as does his habit of diminishing adult sexual passion to the harmless playfulness of children.

Nowhere is Dickens’s fascination with the extraordinary and the grotesque more evident than in his depiction of the two most prominent dwarfs in his fiction: Quilp in The Old Curiosity Shop and Miss Mowcher in David Copperfield. Both of these characters are portrayed negatively – although in the case of Miss Mowcher, Dickens was forced to change the initial thrust of his portrayal, because of a letter from a Mrs. Seymour Hill, an actual dwarf, who recognized herself in the December 1849 number of David Copperfield and threatened legal action. What interests me here, however, is Dickens’s original conception of Miss Mowcher as the procuress who will help Steerforth in the abduction of Little Emily. My argument is that in the case of both Quilp and Miss Mowcher, Dickens locates the negative associations that cling to these characters within the realm of a perverse and malevolent sexuality. And my question is: why should this be so?

What is it about abnormal lack of size – which today we associate with disability – that leads the novelist to imagine his dwarfs as capable of the worst kinds of sexual corruption and exploitation, especially given the fact that, according to Gareth Cordery, the Victorians refused to accept that the disabled might have sexual lives, “an attitude informed by the fear that disabilities would be transmitted to the next generation” (“Mowcher” 20).

I would like to approach this topic obliquely through a look at sexual transcendence in folklore. By sexual transcendence I am referring to the physical union of an otherworldly, supernatural being with a human. This motif, which is a staple of most world mythologies and plays a prominent role in the Christian belief in the divine provenance of Jesus as the Son of God, can be found in profusion in English folk tales, ballads and common lore. Often, such unions do not end well for the human partner, as Keats demonstrates in his ballad, “La Belle Dame Sans Merci.” But they are not always harmful either and the medieval ballad of “Thomas the Rhymer” suggests that Thomas returns with the gift of poetry from his abduction to fairyland by the Fairy Queen. Another example of supernatural and human sexual interaction occurs in the medieval folk motif of the loathly lady, a motif that Chaucer exploits in “The Wife of Bath’s Tale.” In this motif, the monstrous deformation of the loathly lady is magically reversed when the male protagonist overcomes his aversion and agrees to have intercourse with her. The same plot, with the sexes reversed, occurs in the eighteenth-century fairy tale, “Beauty and the Beast.” In all narratives that contain this motif, it is human love as expressed through sexuality that overcomes the horrific effects of deformity.

Thus, narratives that describe the sexual union of the human with the otherworldly often suggest the possibility of transcendence, the mystical translation from one sphere into another that can result in ecstasy and the suspension of reality. Such unions also suggest that there is no barrier between different states of being; that the human can cohabit...