Hard Times

determined the future husband, and although parents wanted their daughter to consent to a marriage, women had no real choice. While financial aspects were of great importance in the upper and upper middle classes due to the fact that the husband owned the wife’s property after marriage 8 , this was unimportant to working-class women who had no money but who had to work hard in order to support their family. They married men from the same background for reasons of support and affection 9 and in contrast to the upper classes, marriage normally meant spending your life together. The consequences of women’s submissive position differed: while upper-class women often suffered from mental diseases, the double burden of work inside and outside the house made working-class women physically ill. Although the traditional “unhealthy” role of women was already challenged in the middle of the 19th century 10 , many women still believed in the naturalness of their submission so that changes proceeded only very slowly.

As the novel’s main female character Louisa Gradgrind is, on the one hand, the victim of a dispassionate authoritarian childhood, on the other hand she represents Dickens idea about women in industrial times who should counteract the cold, rational industrial world. The reader is first introduced to Louisa’s earnest father, the head teacher of Coketown who focuses on facts only 11 . Since she is traditionally inferior to her father, Louisa, a pretty girl at the age of fifteen or sixteen, appears later in chapter three of the first book in a circus. Although Louisa is the cold, silent and unfeeling product of a matter-of-fact education, her being in a fanciful surrounding shows that “… there was a light with nothing to rest upon, a fire with nothing to burn, a starved imagination keeping life in itself somehow.” (cf. HT, 11). The symbol of the fire stands here for her femine potential for showing affection, which had been suppressed all her life. Her inability to express the discrepancy between her real life and her personal desire becomes evident when she excuses herself with the words: “I was tired, father. I have been tired a long time.”, and replying to his question of what she was tired: “I don`t know of what - of everything, I think.” (cf. HT, 11). Lousia shows the symptoms of a severe depression already as a young woman due to her repressed personality. The same applies to her mother, Mrs. Gradgrind whose lack of feminity allowed Mr. Gradgrind to overemphazise his factual lifestyle and education. Louisa’s mother “…looked like an indifferently executed transparency of a small female figure, without enough light behind it.” (cf. HT, 14) Later she is compared with a “feminine dormouse” (cf. HT, 8 Perkin, 74.

9 Perkin, 81.

10 John Stuart Mill postulated equal rights for women, e.g. the right to vote, already in the middle of the 19th century in On the subject of women. (Maurer, Michael: Kleine Geschichte Englands, Stuttgart: Reclam, 2002, 385) 11 Dickens, Charles: Hard Times, London: Penguin Popular Classics, 1994, 1. (abbreviated: HT, 1)

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55) -a typical Victorian pet looking cold and death-like. Louisa and her mother represent the mental suffering which had been characteristic for upper middle-class women who often lived as idle prisoners in a golden cage. Only at the end of the 19 th century did doctors realize the connection between women’s frequent ‘breakdowns’ and their social repression 12 . Employing these distinctive elements of Victorian women’s life is part of Dickens attempt to draw a realistic picture of life in the middle of the 19 th century. Similarly, Dickens makes Louisa consent to her father’s proposal of marrying Josiah Bounderby, the self-disciplined business man. Women were not allowed to do courtship of a man on their own, which resulted in many unhappy and unequal marriages 13 . Louisa and Mr. Bounderby make up the mismatched and unloving marriage par excellence. When her father proposes the marriage to Louisa, she is not sure how to handle the situation and asks him for advice. After Mr. Gradgrind had pointed out that “…she should consider this question […] simply as one of tangible Fact.” (cf. HT, 87), Louisa consents in a rational way to marry someone she does not love. When thinking about the proposal and looking at the industrial Coketown, the symbol of fire reappears: ”There seems to be nothing there but languid and monotonous smoke. Yet when the night comes, Fire burst out, father!” (cf. HT, 89). Dickens plays with the ambivalent metaphor of fire as symbol of industrialization on the one hand, and as symbol that opposes Fact and shows Louisa’s suppressed emotions on the other hand. However, Louisa’s love for her brother Tom, which proves that she has an emotional side, is a great incentive to marry Bounderby since Tom works at his bank. Nevertheless, she leads an unhappy life until Mr. Harthouse appears and makes the little fire burning inside her soul explode. The presence of a man caring for an unhappy, depressed wife is not only important for the dramatic development of the novel, but it represents a typical feature of aristocratic and upper middle-class women’s life. While lonliness made many women seek for a loving partner outside their marriage, fear of the consequences of such an illicit companionship led to discrepancies like the one Louisa has to face. Nevertheless, the experience of passionate love opens Louisa’s eyes, but instead of starting a socially ruinous affair with Harthouse she searches for help from her father criticizing his way of education: ”All that I know is, your philosophy and your teaching will not save me. Now, father, you have brought me to this. Save me by some other means!” (cf. HT, 196). Throughout her speech in chapter 12 of the second book she makes clear that his emphasis on rationality destroyed an essential part of herself, her “sensibilities, affections, weaknesses capable of being cherished into strength” (cf. HT, 194). Louisa’s confession leads to the turning point of the novel because she makes her father, a symbol for the factual side of life, recognize that Fact is not everything when he sees “… the triumph of his system, lying, an

12 Simpson, 116.

13 Hill, Bridget: Eighteenth-Century Women: An Anthology, Boston: George Aleen & Unwin, 1984, 69.

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insensible heap, at his feet.” (cf. HT, 196) Through this picture Dickens conveys the classical idea of superiority of men over women on the one hand, the need for female compassionate influence on the cold industrial world on the other hand. Louisa who undergoes a fundamental change is the most complex and influential female character exercising this positive influence on men.

In contrast to the daughter of the most matter-of-fact father in Coketown, the female characters who come from the lower classes embody ideal Victorian feminity with their sensivity, compassion, and gentleness. While Louisa lacks recognition of her own feelings, Sissy Jupe coming from the irrational circus world and having experienced love is the first who brings affection and love to the Gradgrind family. She is not very good at acquiring factual knowledge and developing judgment based on statistics (cf. Book I, ch. IX), but she helps Louisa to realize her emotions. After their first conversation at Stone Lodge long after Sissy’s arrival, which reflects the usual separation of girls from different strata at that time, Louisa is associated with a real emotion for the first time: ”[…] and her eyes would follow Sissy with compassion to the door.” (cf. HT, 55). However, the fanciful Sissy represents the opposite of Gradgrind’s factual world throughout the novel. Her inability to measure human life in terms of statistics shows Dickens satirical critique on the working-class education in political economy as an instrument of control 14 and on the Benthamite ´greatest happiness principle`. Moreover, Sissy’s “absurd

answer” to the question what the first principle of Political Economy is, refers back to the answer to the Catechism in Matthew 7.12 15 and reminds the reader of John Stuart Mill’s idea of Utilitarianism as “the ideal perfection of Utilitarian morality.” 16 According to Dickens, the

contemporary Utilitarian world lacks humanity. It is remarkable that he chooses the female character of Sissy Jupe to directly suggest a middle road between rationality and humanity. Similar to Sissy who would not have survived without the help of the rational Gradgrind, the rational world will not survive without irrational humanity which can be seen later in the dysfunctional behaviour of Tom, for instance, the male product of Gradgrind’s matter-of-fact upbringing.

Apart from Sissy, Rachael and Mrs. Pegler who all had no factual education due to their class 17 are loving and emotional women. Rachael inspires the desperate Stephen to go on and 14 Simpson, 116.

15 Simpson, 117.

16 Simpson, 118.

17 Full-time schooling was only for males of the elite groups. Sunday schools were wide-spread among the lower classes in the beginning of the 19th century. However, since 1840 the percentage of women unable to sign their name fell under 50 per cent, of men to 33 per cent. In 1910 all men and women were literate in Great Britain. (Sutherland, Gillian: Education, in: The Cambridge Social History of Britain 1750-1950, vol.3, ed. F.M.C. Thompson, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990, 123.)

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