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

mating and South and Hard Times In Industrial H Sussman states that hotshot of the most significant tacks 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 ultimately to the 19th century ideology of the two separate spheres - the mascu hound unexclusive sphere of work and the private feminine sphere of domesticity. Is, however, this shift one which Elizabeth Gaskell in North and South and Charles deuce in Hard Times not still reflect moreover one which they endorse? If the public sphere is manlike then the go-ahead 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 manifestation of public speech. The demand for facts can be articulated by Gradgrind and responded to in the catch terms by Bitzer, who too, is part of this masculine world, and who can therefore clinically define a horse. Sissy Jupe however, in the face of such self-assertiveness is unable to react in any terms other than being inarticulate and alarmed. Dickens however does not share Gradgrinds demands for the masculine fact. In writing Hard Times Dickens move heavily from the criticism of industrial society in doubting Thomas Carlyles bear witness Signs of the Times. In this essay Carlyle condemned a society where Not only the external and physical alone is... managed by machinery, save the internal and unearthly 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 dude to Victorian Literature and Culture, ed. Herbet F. Tucker (1999). The Industrial Novels, Raymond Williams in Culture and fiat (1958). What must not be said North and South and the puzzle of womens work, Catherine Barnes Stevenson. The Domestic Sphere in the Victorian Age, middling G. Smith in Changing Lives. Charles Dickens The deprecative Heritage ed. Phillip Collins. Elizabeth Gaskell The Critical Heritage ed. Angus Fasson.