Bill Sikes is the most brutal villain in Oliver Twist: a violent thief whose companion, Nancy, loves him with a loyalty he does not deserve —she defends him, protects him, risks her life to help Oliver without betraying Sikes—. When Sikes wrongly suspects that Nancy has informed on him, he beats her to death. For the theory of the patriarchy, Sikes has a historical value: he shows a femicide in an era when domestic violence was so normal that it barely pricked anyone’s conscience.
// The theoryNormalised violence
The theory of patriarchy stresses that violence against women was not always seen as a crime: for centuries it was a tacit right of the man over «his» woman. In Dickens’s Victorian England, beating one’s wife or partner was so common that the language itself softened it, and the law barely intervened in the «private sphere». Sikes kills Nancy within that normality: he is not an isolated monster who scandalises his world, he is an extreme product of a culture that considered woman the man’s property and her physical correction a domestic matter. The theory reads his crime not as an exception, but as the tip of a tolerated iceberg.
Dickens, it must be said, wrote Nancy’s death as an indictment —one of the most striking scenes in nineteenth-century literature, which he himself read aloud in public until he was ready to collapse—. His horror at what he portrayed was, in his day, almost avant-garde: naming as an atrocity what society preferred not to look at.
Loyalty punished with death
The case of Nancy and Sikes illustrates a cruelty specific to patriarchy: the woman who sacrifices herself most for the man is murdered by him at the mere suspicion of disloyalty. Nancy does not betray Sikes; her «crime» is to have shown a gesture of her own humanity (helping Oliver) without permission. For Sikes, that minimal autonomy is already a betrayal that his dominion will not tolerate. The theory frames it: under patriarchy, a woman’s loyalty does not protect her, because what is punished is not real disloyalty, but any sign that she has a will escaping the man’s control. Nancy’s devotion counted for nothing against the logic of possession.
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// The subjectThe brute and the structure
Sikes is, yes, a brutal man of low character —Dickens does not draw him as a corrupt gentleman, but as a thug—. But the theory of patriarchy warns against the comfort of reducing femicide to «low-class brutes». Sexist violence runs through every class; what varies is its visibility and its impunity. Sikes exercises it in a crude, visible way; a Burney exercises it refined and invisible. Patriarchy is not the business of one class: it is a structure that grants men of every stratum the same implicit permission over «his» woman. Sikes is only its crudest version.
Bill Sikes
// The crackNeither "another era", nor a monster without context
The crack with Sikes is to file him away as a thing «of another era». The normalisation of domestic violence that Dickens portrays is not closed history: in many places and homes the «don’t get involved, it’s a couple’s business» still holds, the same social indifference that surrounded Nancy. The other crack is the usual one: explaining Sikes by his era and his class does not exonerate him. That Victorian society tolerated domestic violence explains why there were so many unpunished Sikeses; it absolves none of them of the murder of a woman. Context illuminates the structure; responsibility for the blow is individual and total.
Dickens’s greatness was his refusal of the indifference of his time: he made Nancy’s death a scandal when his society would have overlooked it. That refusal to normalise is, at bottom, the same thing the theory of patriarchy does —naming as a crime what the culture preferred to call custom—.
De-normalising what was taken as normal
Sikes matters because he measures how much —and how little— we have advanced. The horror we feel today at Nancy’s death was not universal in 1838; it took more than a century of struggle for domestic violence to stop being «a private matter» and become a prosecutable crime. The theory of patriarchy reminds us that this advance is recent, fragile and uneven, and that the task continues: to de-normalise every trace of the old tolerance —the joke, the «she must have done something», the shelved complaint—. Each time a society stops looking the other way at a Sikes, it honours all the Nancys its indifference failed to protect.
«Nobody tells me what to do with what is mine», Sikes growls before killing the woman who loved him. That phrase —the woman as «what is mine»— is the one patriarchy whispered for centuries, and the one that Dickens, ahead of his time, turned into the cry of a victim his society preferred not to hear.
Three key takeaways
- Sikes is historical femicide: he murders Nancy —the woman who loves and protects him— in an era when domestic violence was so normal that it barely caused a scandal. An extreme product of that tolerance.
- Loyalty does not protect: he kills Nancy over mere suspicion, because what patriarchy punishes is not real disloyalty, but any sign of a will of her own in the woman.
- Neither "another era" nor an isolated brute: the normalisation is still alive and sexist violence runs through every class. Context explains the impunity; it does not exonerate the murder.
Sources · further reading
- Dickens, C. (1838). Oliver Twist. Richard Bentley.
- Dobash, R. E. & Dobash, R. P. (1979). Violence Against Wives. Free Press.
- Walby, S. (1990). Theorizing Patriarchy. Blackwell.
Case-file questionsFrequently asked questions
¿Quién es Bill Sikes?
Bill Sikes («Sikes») es un villano de Oliver Twist, analizado en KRIMINIS con la lente de la criminología. Nancy loves him, defends him, saves him.
¿Por qué Bill Sikes se convierte en villano?
Bill Sikes and the theory of patriarchy: the abuser who murders the woman who loves him. A violence so ordinary in Dickens’s England that it was almost part of the scenery.
¿Qué teoría criminológica explica a Bill Sikes?
El caso de Bill Sikes se analiza desde la Teoría del patriarcado y el delito. The theory of patriarchy sees violence against women as part of a structure, not as an anomaly. Bill Sikes, from Oliver Twist, is its historical example: a criminal who murders Nancy —the woman who loves and protects him— over a supposed betrayal, in an era when domestic violence was so normal that it barely caused a scandal. It shows how patriarchy normalised femicide for centuries.
