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Criticism has difficulty reconciling a writer’s interest in death with the categories of literary analyses. Death interest is rejected as orgiastic or treated reductively. The Old Curiosity Shop is used to show how a novelist’s staging of death expresses desires for radical authenticity, in Bataille’s sense of death as an authenticating violation of human limits, and how those desires are legitimated—since death also horrifies—by fusing with positive cultural ideals. Dickens employs a Victorian trope, grounding culture in death: a reverence for death generates brotherhood. The apparent regression or death wish so common to the endings of Victorian novels can be seen, not as a wish for stasis, but as the projection of desires for an authenticity that might be fulfilled within culture. Though art may not always find a social solution, when it dramatizes conflicts of limitation and limitlessness, the negation of death is a central reference point.
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