An Exploration of Feminine Identifications in Charles Dickens’ Hard Times as Relational to the Shock City
Prepared by Richard Birch
The City in History HIST 3036
For Professor Webb
December 08, 2006
Monique Wittig once wrote that “The category of sex is the political category that founds society as heterosexual” (as cited in Butler, p. 3). This materialist feminist ideology towards sexuality as hegemonically and culturally produced in regards to sexual-political identifications is also hinged tightly to the notion of gender as something quite relative to the same modalities of rationale. Gender as political identity, also is produced reflexively through similar epistemological and ontological formations of social relations. For something as culturally and socially constructed as gender, it is theorized to be performative in the sense as gender is a performance of textualities and meanings, it is contingent on a language, fully or adequately representing a political identification within social relations of power. Whether such social relations are of power, collapsed onto successive binaries of oppression (man / woman; male / female; rich / poor; Dominant / submissive), or whether such binomial determinations set up rationales of different, more abstract patterns (supportive / subversive) to hegemonic social preoccupations of gender, it clearly is still a matter of texts – or to deconstruct and go within further, texts of ontological concerns. In other words, gender as a social construct has a trans-textual historicity. Gender as a problematic is signified by the engines of morality, communicative rationality, cultural determinism, as well as other facticities associated with the shock city of Charles Dickens’ Hard Times. Equally so, the shock city as a problematic, is an engine of repressive ideals of gender. To examine this more closely as an historical text, it would serve to focus on the shock city as repressive of engendered femininity as they play out as social scripts and constructs, as well as to examine this as signifying of constructed femininity in the primary female characters, Louisa Gradgrind, Sissy Jupe, and Rachael. These characters signify the identity “woman” as that of the industrialized woman, the mechanical woman, the über-Victorian-femme through the lens of capitalist communicative rationality.
As Dickens constructed the image of the shock city as a metaphorical contextuality of the mechanization of humanity, he also fetishized the constructivist identification of femininity. In some ways, the shock city is feminine as per hegemonic variables. It is alluring, dangerous, constructive as productive / reproductive, and above all – culturally cultivated. To argue the shock city as culturally cultivated is to say that the city has a dialectical purpose in the historicity of the social. It is an engine of social formation and production, creating economies and political reflexivity, such as the shock city as a formation of the industrialization of human capacity in capitalism. The shock city, as all of this, is also produced through the reflexivity of human capacity-to-do. This capacity or power-to-do, is signified in the text through the feminine characters. It can be said that it is through woman that the arrangement of the city as repressive, as a means to control a population set on conflict and the transactional paradigms of labour, are historically portrayed. The city is not essentialist in origin. There is no orientalism in the conceptual shock city. It is only through the conceptualization of capitalism, that it process further identifications of engendered reflexive ideologies of femininity and oppression; the city constructs the alienated and repressive orientations of people through their social doings. The city is not innate – it is made through the doings of historical meanings and subjectivities. To borrow from Julia Kristeva’s rational of the feminine – the city as well as female characterizations in historical Urbania, cannot be deemed to actually exist. The shock city is not comprised of its buildings, factories, banks, poorhouses, prisons, or institutions. It is a compositional matrix of reflexive doings of class-ified people forced to empower their capacity-to-do / power-to-do, and sell it to survive. Women cannot be said to exist either in the shock city as per Dickens’ text. In the book, the female characterizations deploy a sex, through a set of performative communicative rational establishments, and thus, in the Foucaultian sense, deploy a rationale for repression.
Civilization is repressive. The city in Hard Times indicates an urban existence quality regulated by work, the uncreative, labourious modality of commodification. Femininity is both indicative and subversive of this existence, both textually as well as historically. Frankfurt social theorist Herbert Marcuse described a platform (an anti-structure as it were in the dialectical sense) of this phenomenon of repression in two ways: as surplus-repression and as a performance principle. Surplus-repression is distinct from basic human repression through a modification of instinct necessary for the perpetuation of a civilized humanity. In other words, social relations negate the capacity for the performative explorative possibilities of engendered subjectivity of creation, as well as gender expressivity, through the modifications of these capacities into reified objectifications. This is then explicated through a performance principle: the prevailing historical shape of a reality principle, which posits that struggle in the social, in capitalism, and in the global processes that construct social marginalization, occurs in a world not set up for the fulfilment of human needs without constant restraint and denial (Marcuse, 1962: p.33). “For the duration of work, which occupies practically the entire existence of the mature individual, pleasure is “suspended” and pain prevails” (33). That is the plight of the shock city – it is the plight of technocapitalism as well. It can also be argued to be the plight of the feminine, as a political identification of the female body politic in early nineteenth century England as indicated in the text. Louisa Gradgrind (-Bounderby) feminises the shock city as she represents the city as repressive to the human condition. The experience of living in the industrial city, repressive, patriarchal, and essentialist, is textually explored through Louisa. Instead of directly stating the organization, decomposition, and recomposition of work-into-labour in the text, Dickens demonstrates this via Louisa more prevalently than with any other character. She is the embodiment of labour-organization through power-over social relations as she is herself decomposed down to a unitary personification of fact and ideals and efficiency. Her capacity for connectivity and creativity is removed from her as the capacity to work is fragmented and destroyed in the city. People do not work in the shock city – they labour. Louisa is not a woman in the text – she is feminine. She is a constructed Victorian über-femme, the embodiment of the precious decay towards a thing-ified human sense of womanly alienation. She is alienated from her womanhood – her femininity through her über-femininity in social relations of power negotiated through her father, her brother, her husband, and ultimately through the ruling relations regulating a shock industrial city. Louisa signifies much of what the poor and impoverished signify as historical: the Marxist theory of the destruction of society, becoming strangely enough its own reproduction (Holloway, 2005: 136).
Class, like people, like money, like state, like gender – must be understood as process. Dickens elaborates on the recursive notion of the shock city as an engine of the ever-renewable regeneration of class and human class-ification. The constitution of class can be seen as the separation of object and subject. The shock city is the definitive social construct of the snatching up of the human subject, the repeated violent fragmentation of the doings of people (social relations) from the object-creation in the social (Louisa). This object-creation is rather a conflict, as well as a signifier of the subordination of social practice – the fetishization of social relations (Holloway, 143). Class struggle occurs not merely inside the constituted formations of capitalist determinism, but rather the constitution of these formations is class struggle. This is grounded in the text when Louisa confronts her father about her childhood development, not into that of a woman of society, but as an automaton of social conformity – unfeeling and unattainable. She is constructed into the Victorian parameters of femininity, a capacity of feminine as “never a mark of the subject; the feminine [as not] an “attribute” of gender” (Butler, 37). Louisa is not a woman existing in Victorian England, but is a feminine object-construct, indicative of women and of class relations in the shock city of early industrialization (not strictly so), signifying the lack of gender, of womanhood, signified by the Symbolic (a set of regulating rules ontologically formulated through language dictated through social texts in ruling relations that create sexual difference). In a form of revolution, she does confront her father:
How could you give me life, and take from me all the inappreciable things that raise it from the state of conscious death? Where are the graces of my soul? Where are the sentiments of my heart? What have you done, O father, what have you done, with the garden that should have bloomed once, in this great wilderness here? (Dickens, p. 236)
Dickens has clearly attuned to the power of language to explicate the subordination of the reified self, the exclusion of subjectivity indicative in industrialization and the mechanization of humanity. It is a materialist positionality. This is an argument of the compulsory proliferation of patriarchal pleasure principles and engendered repression. In this quote, as the first subversively-womanly moment in the book, suggests a specific form of identification-diffusion, counterstrategic to the reproduction of the ‘other’ in patriarchal social relations of power (Butler, p. 41). This is the moment in the text where we hear a revolutionary scream. The scream – from Louisa, but also from the poor, the impoverished, the oppressed, the reified, the commodified, and subjectively repressed. In many ways, the most wealthy of the female characters in Hard Times, primarily serves to act as a metaphor for the working class as well as other socially marginalized groups in industrialization.
On such a paradigm, capital as a logic of domination is not left unchallenged. The philosophical epitomization of antagonistic relations between object and subject (patriarchy; capitalism; ruling relations; textual dictators; Gradgrind > Louisa; über-Victorian-femme; subversive female), also has the capacity to retain its image and reproduction (Marcuse, p. 101). To exist in the shock city as working class, as female, as subjective to pyramidal structures of power is of the restless labour of the transcending subject, terminating in the unity of subject-object. Meaning, to exist in marginalization as poor and impoverished, or as the über-Victorian-femme characterized by Louisa, is the “being-in-and-for-itself”, or existing in its own fulfillment as a reified object. That is Louisa’s realization when she breaks down to her father; that is the scream of those who struggle; that is the moment in a social time-space historicity when struggle becomes apparent and conscious. Louisa is, in this sense, more metaphorically indicative of the capacity to take power-to-do from a power-over social relational matrix. Dickens’ perspective on the industrial city is dialectically charged in the capacity of power-to-do. Post-Hegelian views of the city is exhaustingly built on a Logos of domination, whereas the city, the social, and social relations of power are regulated by social texts such as gender subjectivities and objectifications. The city for Dickens is declared through this reality principle. The breakdown of the über-Victorian-femme is a literary, phenomenological account of the very progress of civilization – the performance principle of gender and of a power-to-do social identity. His text declares a recognition of those who struggle in a constructed city that has attained a level of productivity in which the social demands upon instinctual energy and creative work is spent in alienating labour and people, from their own ‘doings’ and subjectivities (p. 117). Gender, as freedom, is taboo in Victorian Europe. Dickens utilizes this as taboo-power to show the historicity of this as also indicative of class struggle. Gender is saturated with power.
When we examine how Dickens criticises this power relation as social relation, more clearly with Louisa’s relationship with her father and her husband Josiah Bounderby, he does contextualize a sexual discontinuity to hegemonic principles of identification. He does so through his breaking down and the deconstruction of the über-Victorian-femme personified in Louisa, and collapsing this grounded concept into Sissy Jupe. Sissy is the collapsed form of Louisa – meaning, she is recursively reflexive with the ruling relations of her sexual-social regime. Sissy is, for Dickens, the textual opponent to the processes of oppression and social repression he criticizes. Louisa and Sissy open up a discursive signification of “sex” as subversive; Louisa through her breakdown, and Sissy through her heroic actions. Again in the Foucaultian sense, gender is coexistent with power. The über-Victorian-femme, as subordinate and as repressive, indicates the refusal of Dickens to romanticize this culturally determined text. It is, alternatively, deterministically historical. Industrialization essential-izes constructs of marginalization, and the shock city is a generator of such essentialism. It relies on the marginalization of identity, and through its fragmentational nature, provides the basis for surplus labour – a surplus population of struggle (Butler, p. 121). Dickens made use, acting as a literary historian, of the ability to invert the representations of the relationships of power, causing subversive bodily acts or identification and reflexivity to emerge in gender constructs. To return to Wittig, one is not born a woman, nor a man, nor with gender – but one is born inside the struggle of capitalism and industrialization. The category of woman is not essentialist. It is a gendered category of feminine texts that serve the capacity to permeate and reproduce the essentialist notions of the industrial city: fully politically invested, naturalized but not naturally feminine. It is natural to struggle. It is not natural to struggle in industrialized modes of production. Liberalism is culturally determined. Neo-liberalism is social imposed.
Dickens in his text, as his post-Hegelian criticism of the gendered über-Victorian-femme, can be argued to be a call for the reorganization of the description of identifications in power relations. To be ascribed ‘female’ is a discursive categorization of ‘sex’, much like ‘worker’ is a discursive categorization of ‘class’. These are abstractions, which Dickens was clearly aware of in his writing. Louisa actively reclaims a power-to-do (for a moment) and Sissy Jupe embodies this throughout. Dickens posits both an epistemological and ontological shift in thinking about social relations. The shock city is not only an engine of capitalist repression, but it is also a representation of the reflexivity of social doings. Linguistic categories forwarded through ruling relations have shaped social realities in industrialization in “violent” ways. The social fiction of the über-Victorian-femme is created by Dickens, as it has been by social relations of power historically – to appear to be a true reality against the ontological field of unity that could otherwise usurp and rise against those relations that create the social fiction. Hard Times as a body of work that establishes a critique on the industrialization of society and does so with the utilization of a critique on gender political identifications. This also serves to be a feminist text through an elaboration and comparative critique of gender and class subjectivities in the shock city. It is Sissy who facilitates the escape of Thomas Gradgrind at the end of the story. It is Rachael who embodies the salvation of the working class through her relationship to Stephen. In this relationship Rachael is that which attempts to safeguard Stephen from his own oppression which eventually destroys him; she is the light in his struggle, the meaning behind his identification; his textuality; as he states,
“Thou changest me from bad to good. Thou mak’st me humbly wishfo’ to be more like thee, and fearfo’ to lose thee when this life is ower, and a’ muddle cleared awa’. Thou’rt an Angel; it may be, thou hast saved y soul alive!” (Dickens, p. 99)
Lastly, it is Louisa who embodies the breakdown of social relations of power in capital and the capacity for class identifications to recognize their plight as oppressed, and to challenge that oppression. The female characters are representational of the division of being in struggle.
Femininity in Hard Times serves to act as a construct of identity, as the point of epistemic departure from which theory and praxis emerge, and subversion and political identify is shaped (Butler, p. 164; Marcuse, 1962). There is a political shape to the women of this book as it relates to the industrial city. Their identity is shaped by the city, but not as something outside the city, but reflexively determined through their own struggle as a ‘class’ onto themselves in this historical period. Forces of subversive thought and reflexivity, as multi-dimensional texts both literary and historically (always conflated) are specifically that which history both eradicates and preserves through historical events, or the inscription of objectivity. As Michel Foucault wrote, the body, the person is not “sufficiently stable to serve as the basis for self-recognition or for understanding other men” (as cited in Butler from Foucault’s History of Sexuality; p. 165). This does signify the constancy of culturally ascribed objectifications of the ‘body’ and a unitary component in capital, in labour, and in reification. Though in view of this, Dickens provides a social agency to the discussed female characters, as primarily represented by Louisa as transitional from the über-Victorian-femme to a subversive self-awareness in reification, for the subject of woman and class is understood through a political critique to possess some form of vested agency within its socially constructed existence.
References:
Butler, J. (1999). Gender Trouble. New York, NY: Routledge.
Dickens, C. (1854/2001). Hard Times. Toronto, ON: Random House.
Holloway, J. (2005) Change the world without Taking Power: The meaning of revolution today. Ann Arbor, MI: Pluto Press
Marcuse. H. (1962/1955). Eros and Civilization. New York, NY: Random House.
The City in History HIST 3036
For Professor Webb
December 08, 2006
Monique Wittig once wrote that “The category of sex is the political category that founds society as heterosexual” (as cited in Butler, p. 3). This materialist feminist ideology towards sexuality as hegemonically and culturally produced in regards to sexual-political identifications is also hinged tightly to the notion of gender as something quite relative to the same modalities of rationale. Gender as political identity, also is produced reflexively through similar epistemological and ontological formations of social relations. For something as culturally and socially constructed as gender, it is theorized to be performative in the sense as gender is a performance of textualities and meanings, it is contingent on a language, fully or adequately representing a political identification within social relations of power. Whether such social relations are of power, collapsed onto successive binaries of oppression (man / woman; male / female; rich / poor; Dominant / submissive), or whether such binomial determinations set up rationales of different, more abstract patterns (supportive / subversive) to hegemonic social preoccupations of gender, it clearly is still a matter of texts – or to deconstruct and go within further, texts of ontological concerns. In other words, gender as a social construct has a trans-textual historicity. Gender as a problematic is signified by the engines of morality, communicative rationality, cultural determinism, as well as other facticities associated with the shock city of Charles Dickens’ Hard Times. Equally so, the shock city as a problematic, is an engine of repressive ideals of gender. To examine this more closely as an historical text, it would serve to focus on the shock city as repressive of engendered femininity as they play out as social scripts and constructs, as well as to examine this as signifying of constructed femininity in the primary female characters, Louisa Gradgrind, Sissy Jupe, and Rachael. These characters signify the identity “woman” as that of the industrialized woman, the mechanical woman, the über-Victorian-femme through the lens of capitalist communicative rationality.
As Dickens constructed the image of the shock city as a metaphorical contextuality of the mechanization of humanity, he also fetishized the constructivist identification of femininity. In some ways, the shock city is feminine as per hegemonic variables. It is alluring, dangerous, constructive as productive / reproductive, and above all – culturally cultivated. To argue the shock city as culturally cultivated is to say that the city has a dialectical purpose in the historicity of the social. It is an engine of social formation and production, creating economies and political reflexivity, such as the shock city as a formation of the industrialization of human capacity in capitalism. The shock city, as all of this, is also produced through the reflexivity of human capacity-to-do. This capacity or power-to-do, is signified in the text through the feminine characters. It can be said that it is through woman that the arrangement of the city as repressive, as a means to control a population set on conflict and the transactional paradigms of labour, are historically portrayed. The city is not essentialist in origin. There is no orientalism in the conceptual shock city. It is only through the conceptualization of capitalism, that it process further identifications of engendered reflexive ideologies of femininity and oppression; the city constructs the alienated and repressive orientations of people through their social doings. The city is not innate – it is made through the doings of historical meanings and subjectivities. To borrow from Julia Kristeva’s rational of the feminine – the city as well as female characterizations in historical Urbania, cannot be deemed to actually exist. The shock city is not comprised of its buildings, factories, banks, poorhouses, prisons, or institutions. It is a compositional matrix of reflexive doings of class-ified people forced to empower their capacity-to-do / power-to-do, and sell it to survive. Women cannot be said to exist either in the shock city as per Dickens’ text. In the book, the female characterizations deploy a sex, through a set of performative communicative rational establishments, and thus, in the Foucaultian sense, deploy a rationale for repression.
Civilization is repressive. The city in Hard Times indicates an urban existence quality regulated by work, the uncreative, labourious modality of commodification. Femininity is both indicative and subversive of this existence, both textually as well as historically. Frankfurt social theorist Herbert Marcuse described a platform (an anti-structure as it were in the dialectical sense) of this phenomenon of repression in two ways: as surplus-repression and as a performance principle. Surplus-repression is distinct from basic human repression through a modification of instinct necessary for the perpetuation of a civilized humanity. In other words, social relations negate the capacity for the performative explorative possibilities of engendered subjectivity of creation, as well as gender expressivity, through the modifications of these capacities into reified objectifications. This is then explicated through a performance principle: the prevailing historical shape of a reality principle, which posits that struggle in the social, in capitalism, and in the global processes that construct social marginalization, occurs in a world not set up for the fulfilment of human needs without constant restraint and denial (Marcuse, 1962: p.33). “For the duration of work, which occupies practically the entire existence of the mature individual, pleasure is “suspended” and pain prevails” (33). That is the plight of the shock city – it is the plight of technocapitalism as well. It can also be argued to be the plight of the feminine, as a political identification of the female body politic in early nineteenth century England as indicated in the text. Louisa Gradgrind (-Bounderby) feminises the shock city as she represents the city as repressive to the human condition. The experience of living in the industrial city, repressive, patriarchal, and essentialist, is textually explored through Louisa. Instead of directly stating the organization, decomposition, and recomposition of work-into-labour in the text, Dickens demonstrates this via Louisa more prevalently than with any other character. She is the embodiment of labour-organization through power-over social relations as she is herself decomposed down to a unitary personification of fact and ideals and efficiency. Her capacity for connectivity and creativity is removed from her as the capacity to work is fragmented and destroyed in the city. People do not work in the shock city – they labour. Louisa is not a woman in the text – she is feminine. She is a constructed Victorian über-femme, the embodiment of the precious decay towards a thing-ified human sense of womanly alienation. She is alienated from her womanhood – her femininity through her über-femininity in social relations of power negotiated through her father, her brother, her husband, and ultimately through the ruling relations regulating a shock industrial city. Louisa signifies much of what the poor and impoverished signify as historical: the Marxist theory of the destruction of society, becoming strangely enough its own reproduction (Holloway, 2005: 136).
Class, like people, like money, like state, like gender – must be understood as process. Dickens elaborates on the recursive notion of the shock city as an engine of the ever-renewable regeneration of class and human class-ification. The constitution of class can be seen as the separation of object and subject. The shock city is the definitive social construct of the snatching up of the human subject, the repeated violent fragmentation of the doings of people (social relations) from the object-creation in the social (Louisa). This object-creation is rather a conflict, as well as a signifier of the subordination of social practice – the fetishization of social relations (Holloway, 143). Class struggle occurs not merely inside the constituted formations of capitalist determinism, but rather the constitution of these formations is class struggle. This is grounded in the text when Louisa confronts her father about her childhood development, not into that of a woman of society, but as an automaton of social conformity – unfeeling and unattainable. She is constructed into the Victorian parameters of femininity, a capacity of feminine as “never a mark of the subject; the feminine [as not] an “attribute” of gender” (Butler, 37). Louisa is not a woman existing in Victorian England, but is a feminine object-construct, indicative of women and of class relations in the shock city of early industrialization (not strictly so), signifying the lack of gender, of womanhood, signified by the Symbolic (a set of regulating rules ontologically formulated through language dictated through social texts in ruling relations that create sexual difference). In a form of revolution, she does confront her father:
How could you give me life, and take from me all the inappreciable things that raise it from the state of conscious death? Where are the graces of my soul? Where are the sentiments of my heart? What have you done, O father, what have you done, with the garden that should have bloomed once, in this great wilderness here? (Dickens, p. 236)
Dickens has clearly attuned to the power of language to explicate the subordination of the reified self, the exclusion of subjectivity indicative in industrialization and the mechanization of humanity. It is a materialist positionality. This is an argument of the compulsory proliferation of patriarchal pleasure principles and engendered repression. In this quote, as the first subversively-womanly moment in the book, suggests a specific form of identification-diffusion, counterstrategic to the reproduction of the ‘other’ in patriarchal social relations of power (Butler, p. 41). This is the moment in the text where we hear a revolutionary scream. The scream – from Louisa, but also from the poor, the impoverished, the oppressed, the reified, the commodified, and subjectively repressed. In many ways, the most wealthy of the female characters in Hard Times, primarily serves to act as a metaphor for the working class as well as other socially marginalized groups in industrialization.
On such a paradigm, capital as a logic of domination is not left unchallenged. The philosophical epitomization of antagonistic relations between object and subject (patriarchy; capitalism; ruling relations; textual dictators; Gradgrind > Louisa; über-Victorian-femme; subversive female), also has the capacity to retain its image and reproduction (Marcuse, p. 101). To exist in the shock city as working class, as female, as subjective to pyramidal structures of power is of the restless labour of the transcending subject, terminating in the unity of subject-object. Meaning, to exist in marginalization as poor and impoverished, or as the über-Victorian-femme characterized by Louisa, is the “being-in-and-for-itself”, or existing in its own fulfillment as a reified object. That is Louisa’s realization when she breaks down to her father; that is the scream of those who struggle; that is the moment in a social time-space historicity when struggle becomes apparent and conscious. Louisa is, in this sense, more metaphorically indicative of the capacity to take power-to-do from a power-over social relational matrix. Dickens’ perspective on the industrial city is dialectically charged in the capacity of power-to-do. Post-Hegelian views of the city is exhaustingly built on a Logos of domination, whereas the city, the social, and social relations of power are regulated by social texts such as gender subjectivities and objectifications. The city for Dickens is declared through this reality principle. The breakdown of the über-Victorian-femme is a literary, phenomenological account of the very progress of civilization – the performance principle of gender and of a power-to-do social identity. His text declares a recognition of those who struggle in a constructed city that has attained a level of productivity in which the social demands upon instinctual energy and creative work is spent in alienating labour and people, from their own ‘doings’ and subjectivities (p. 117). Gender, as freedom, is taboo in Victorian Europe. Dickens utilizes this as taboo-power to show the historicity of this as also indicative of class struggle. Gender is saturated with power.
When we examine how Dickens criticises this power relation as social relation, more clearly with Louisa’s relationship with her father and her husband Josiah Bounderby, he does contextualize a sexual discontinuity to hegemonic principles of identification. He does so through his breaking down and the deconstruction of the über-Victorian-femme personified in Louisa, and collapsing this grounded concept into Sissy Jupe. Sissy is the collapsed form of Louisa – meaning, she is recursively reflexive with the ruling relations of her sexual-social regime. Sissy is, for Dickens, the textual opponent to the processes of oppression and social repression he criticizes. Louisa and Sissy open up a discursive signification of “sex” as subversive; Louisa through her breakdown, and Sissy through her heroic actions. Again in the Foucaultian sense, gender is coexistent with power. The über-Victorian-femme, as subordinate and as repressive, indicates the refusal of Dickens to romanticize this culturally determined text. It is, alternatively, deterministically historical. Industrialization essential-izes constructs of marginalization, and the shock city is a generator of such essentialism. It relies on the marginalization of identity, and through its fragmentational nature, provides the basis for surplus labour – a surplus population of struggle (Butler, p. 121). Dickens made use, acting as a literary historian, of the ability to invert the representations of the relationships of power, causing subversive bodily acts or identification and reflexivity to emerge in gender constructs. To return to Wittig, one is not born a woman, nor a man, nor with gender – but one is born inside the struggle of capitalism and industrialization. The category of woman is not essentialist. It is a gendered category of feminine texts that serve the capacity to permeate and reproduce the essentialist notions of the industrial city: fully politically invested, naturalized but not naturally feminine. It is natural to struggle. It is not natural to struggle in industrialized modes of production. Liberalism is culturally determined. Neo-liberalism is social imposed.
Dickens in his text, as his post-Hegelian criticism of the gendered über-Victorian-femme, can be argued to be a call for the reorganization of the description of identifications in power relations. To be ascribed ‘female’ is a discursive categorization of ‘sex’, much like ‘worker’ is a discursive categorization of ‘class’. These are abstractions, which Dickens was clearly aware of in his writing. Louisa actively reclaims a power-to-do (for a moment) and Sissy Jupe embodies this throughout. Dickens posits both an epistemological and ontological shift in thinking about social relations. The shock city is not only an engine of capitalist repression, but it is also a representation of the reflexivity of social doings. Linguistic categories forwarded through ruling relations have shaped social realities in industrialization in “violent” ways. The social fiction of the über-Victorian-femme is created by Dickens, as it has been by social relations of power historically – to appear to be a true reality against the ontological field of unity that could otherwise usurp and rise against those relations that create the social fiction. Hard Times as a body of work that establishes a critique on the industrialization of society and does so with the utilization of a critique on gender political identifications. This also serves to be a feminist text through an elaboration and comparative critique of gender and class subjectivities in the shock city. It is Sissy who facilitates the escape of Thomas Gradgrind at the end of the story. It is Rachael who embodies the salvation of the working class through her relationship to Stephen. In this relationship Rachael is that which attempts to safeguard Stephen from his own oppression which eventually destroys him; she is the light in his struggle, the meaning behind his identification; his textuality; as he states,
“Thou changest me from bad to good. Thou mak’st me humbly wishfo’ to be more like thee, and fearfo’ to lose thee when this life is ower, and a’ muddle cleared awa’. Thou’rt an Angel; it may be, thou hast saved y soul alive!” (Dickens, p. 99)
Lastly, it is Louisa who embodies the breakdown of social relations of power in capital and the capacity for class identifications to recognize their plight as oppressed, and to challenge that oppression. The female characters are representational of the division of being in struggle.
Femininity in Hard Times serves to act as a construct of identity, as the point of epistemic departure from which theory and praxis emerge, and subversion and political identify is shaped (Butler, p. 164; Marcuse, 1962). There is a political shape to the women of this book as it relates to the industrial city. Their identity is shaped by the city, but not as something outside the city, but reflexively determined through their own struggle as a ‘class’ onto themselves in this historical period. Forces of subversive thought and reflexivity, as multi-dimensional texts both literary and historically (always conflated) are specifically that which history both eradicates and preserves through historical events, or the inscription of objectivity. As Michel Foucault wrote, the body, the person is not “sufficiently stable to serve as the basis for self-recognition or for understanding other men” (as cited in Butler from Foucault’s History of Sexuality; p. 165). This does signify the constancy of culturally ascribed objectifications of the ‘body’ and a unitary component in capital, in labour, and in reification. Though in view of this, Dickens provides a social agency to the discussed female characters, as primarily represented by Louisa as transitional from the über-Victorian-femme to a subversive self-awareness in reification, for the subject of woman and class is understood through a political critique to possess some form of vested agency within its socially constructed existence.
References:
Butler, J. (1999). Gender Trouble. New York, NY: Routledge.
Dickens, C. (1854/2001). Hard Times. Toronto, ON: Random House.
Holloway, J. (2005) Change the world without Taking Power: The meaning of revolution today. Ann Arbor, MI: Pluto Press
Marcuse. H. (1962/1955). Eros and Civilization. New York, NY: Random House.
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