North and South and Hard Times Essay -- Dickens Hard Times Essays

North and South and operose Times In Industrial H Sussman states that one of the most momentous shifts created by industrialism was that of the separation of the workplace from the home. This shift created new gender roles with the husband as breadwinner and the wife as childcare giver and led at last to the 19th century ideology of the two separate spheres - the mannish public sphere of work and the private female sphere of domesticity. Is, however, this shift one which Elizabeth Gaskell in North and South and Charles Dickens in Hard Times not only reflect but one which they endorse? If the public sphere is masculine then the opening chapters of HardTimes immediately confronts us with this masculinity in the form of Gradgrind. The opening line of the novel, Now what I want is facts, is assertive and authorative, the masculine aspect of public speech. The demand for facts can be articulated by Gradgrind and responded to in the appropriate terms by Bitzer, who to o, is part of this masculine world, and who can therefore clinically define a horse. Sissy Jupe however, in the face of such assertiveness is unable to react in any terms other than being voiceless and alarmed. Dickens however does not share Gradgrinds demands for the masculine fact. In writing Hard Times Dickens drew heavily from the reprimand of industrial society in Thomas Carlyles essay Signs of the Times. In this essay Carlyle condemned a society where Not only the external and physical all is... managed by machinery, but the internal and spiritual also. This is the idea that the competitive, masculine, business sphere has permeated into the private sphere,... ...ard times but reflections of deeply divided ones. BIBLIOGRAPHY North and South, Elizabeth Gaskell, Penguin Classics (1995). Hard Times, Charles Dickens, Oxford World Classics (1998). Signs of the Times, Thomas Carlyle, Thomas Carlyle Selected Writings , Penguin Classics (1971) Industrial, H Sussman in A Companion to Victorian Literature and Culture, ed. Herbet F. Tucker (1999). The Industrial Novels, Raymond Williams in Culture and Society (1958). What must not be said North and South and the problem of womens work, Catherine Barnes Stevenson. The Domestic Sphere in the Victorian get on, Bonnie G. Smith in Changing Lives. Charles Dickens The Critical Heritage ed. Phillip Collins. Elizabeth Gaskell The Critical Heritage ed. Angus Fasson.