CAPTAINS OF DOMESTICITY:
THE INDUSTRIALIZATION OF GENDERED SPACE IN CHARLES DICKENS'S
HARD TIMES
Jennifer J. K. Fletcher
Buena Park High School
Buena Park, CA
NEH Summer Seminar 2000
Historical Interpretations of the Industrial Revolution in Britain
University of Massachusetts Dartmouth at the University of Nottingham
A wealth of feminist scholarship has taught us to examine the cultural and
literary role of women with a fresh critical awareness. However, as the work of several
recent scholars suggests, studies of nineteenth-century gender politics which continue
to foreground a wonwn's subjectivity (especially in the symbolic sense of Every Woman)
can contribute to any one of several naturalized perceptions of women, especially the
view of woman as the domestic or reproductive individual. As Lora Romero argues,'
even studies which seek to recover evidence of women's resistance to Victorian
domestic idealism can reinscribe monolithic understandings of male dominance. One
useful alternative to the reffication of domesticity as a wholly feminine experience is the
examination of men's relationships with their homes. Too often, masculinity and
domesticity carry antonymical connotations not supported by the daily material
2
practice of Victorian men---or by representations of gendered space in Victorian
novels. Although industrialization may have sponsored a vocabulary of gendered
imagery that insisted on idealized divisions of space and place, the pervasive influence
of the nineteenth-century market economy and technological innovations in
transportation and manufacturing ensured the permeability of all aspects of Victorian
life. In many mid-century novels, the isolation of women and the consecrated
femininity of the home decreed by the doctrine of the separate spheres seems not only
impossible but also frequently undesirable--to men as well as to women.
The following paper addresses the relationship between masculinity and
domesticity in the novel Hard Times by Charles Dickens. In choosing to work with this
particular text, I have foregrounded the complicating role of industrialization in
Dickens's representations of Victorian family life. The midcentury fantasy of the
self-made "economic man"--best represented in Hard Times by Josiah Bounderby of
Coketown-serves as a useful figure in destabilizing fictions of gendered space and
binary gender identity. As a man superficially extreme in his masculine characteristics
and fiercely proprietary in his domestic desires, Bounderby sees the world as his oyster
and his house as his castle. Within this characterization, so readily available to
stereotypical inscriptions, lies a vast multiplicity of complex discourses which Dickens
makes simultaneously visible. Thus, my discussion of Hard Times will move
from considerations of the gender imagery made available by industrialization to an
analysis of the way industrial metaphors subvert Victorian fictions of divided space. in
place of binary constructions of gender, I will argue, Dickens offers a multivalent
3
circulation of gender subjectivity which ultimately dislodges the domestic sphere from
ideal and feminine interpretations.
Although family life in pre-industrial England was neither equitable nor ideal,
gender roles were understood in terms different from the dominant discourse of the
industrial age. The sixteenth- and seventeenth-century men who were the predecessors
of the industrial "economic man" more than likely lived in houses in which labor was
shared by all household members through a family economy. ~ As manufacturing
innovations and land enclosures contributed respectively to the factory system and to
displaced laborers, families were less often cooperative economic units in their own
right. Instead, they became wage earners. In poorer families, mothers, fathers, and
children all typically sought wage employment; in more affluent families, only men
were expected to contribute to the family coffers. The emergence in the middle classes
of a male economic head of household resulted in several important changes in gender
ideology. First, as Pat Hudson argues in The Industrial Revolution, "The decline of family
and domestic industry shattered the interdependent relationship between husband and
wife" (Hudson 226). As men increasingly took M responsibility for the financial support
of their families, women of the upper and middle classes retired from commerce, and
wives and husbands were no longer business partners. This concentration of the
man-of-the-family's role into "a fairly remote though often deeply felt set of
breadwinning functions" (Steams 37), fostered a re-visioning of gender identity and
spatial relationships, partly as a response to the competitive stress and moral ambiguity
of the new market place.
4
Yet rather than a revolutionary redistribution of women and men between fixed
boundaries, industrialization seemed to sponsor more new ways of talking about
"home" than new patterns of life within homes. Despite considerable rhetoric to the
contrary, Victorian homes were often as much a combination of public and private
institutions as their proto-industrial predecessors. What changed in the discourse was
the way concepts of public and private space were figured. The pressures of the market
economy and the attendant impulse to create a "market-free" retreat helped create a
discourse on domesticity that sought to erase evidence of trade and labor within the
home. In Interpreting the Industrial Revolution, Peter N. Steams describes the "new"
domestic ideal:
Women were expected to guide families as a counterbalance to the raucous world of industrial
labor, not primarily to engage in this labor themselves. While the ideal of family as moral and
aesthetic haven, under feminine sponsorship, went furthest in the middle class, the working class
also came to rely increasingly on adult women to manage the household and anchor family
networks (Steams 15).
Thus, what began as a physical division based on changing patterns of work, quickly
became an ideological division between genders that resulted in an imaginary
separation of home ftom work. One of the most significant effects of industrialization
upon nineteenth-century literature is this emergence of a new, economically-based
vocabulary of binary gender imagery."' Of course, the trouble with binary gender
divisions in nineteenth-century British fiction is that the Victorians were as interested in
change and mobility as they were in tradition and stasis. Contemporary commentators
called the nineteenth century "the age of transition"" and later historians confirmed the
century as "an era of change" (Houghton 1). In this light, the sustained multiplicity of
5
discourses in Hard Times represents the complex ambivalence with which Victorians
themselves struggled to articulate cultural change. Like ajuggler who keeps all his pins
in the air at the same time, Dickens allows the simultaneous presence of a nurnber of
competing discourses in Hard Times. This discursive play in Dickens's text produces a
rich nexus of social commentary; the narrative is embedded with rhetorics of sentiment,
politics, domesticity, industry, gender, labor, pedagogy, leisure, and progress, among
many others. Read against the discourse of change, Hard Times is ulfunately about the
necessity and the impossibility of understanding domestic culture in oppositional
terms.' As a result, images of changenotably fire, dust, and trains-work together in
Dickens's text as motifs of domestic instability.
As perhaps the most recognizable symbol of the ideal nineteenth-century home,
the hearth plays an important role in Victorian fiction. Its metonymy for all home
comforts and values is repeated throughout the literature of the period with near
obsessive frequency. Only the "Angel of the House" occupies a higher place of honor in
domestic fiction. Yet in Hard Times, the home fires again and again fail to provide the
peaceful sanctuary promised in popular representations. The fires in Dickens's novel
are more closely associated with the factory furnaces and the flames of hell than with
domestic bliss. In an early scene in the novel, the two oldest Gradgrind children are
portrayed seated by the fire in the nursery "Young Thomas expressed these sentiments
[of displeasure] sitting astride of a chair before the fire, with his arms on the back, and
his sulky face on his arms. His sister sat in the darker comer by the fireside, now
looking at the bright sparks as they dropped upon the hearth" (Dickens 43). The hearth
is one which neither pacifies Thomas's malaise nor illuminates Louisa's darkness;
6
instead the -fire casts "shadows" about the room and on the ceiling which overhung
the brother and sister like a "dark cavem" (Dickens 44). The dropping of the sparks is
moreover an oracular image of the Fall repeated several times in the novel. Louisa, a
girl who can "sit and watch the fire ... for an hour at a stretch" (Dickens 103) but who is
never depicted tending a fire, regards the hearth as more of a dark augurer than the
center of family life. In a conversation with her mother after she has been reprimanded
for watching Sleary's circus, Louisa tells her, " I was encouraged by nothing, mother,
but by looking at the red sparks dropping out of the fire, and whitening and dying. It
made me think, after all, how short my life would be, and how little I could hope to do
in it' " (Dickens 45). To Louisa, the hearth represents something even worse than
discontent and a desire for escape. To her, the flames represent an ominous image of
the void-the utter meaningless of her future as a wife and the emptiness of her role
within the domestic sphere. Her inferno is all the worse for being an indifferent one;
rather than the punishment of a sentient god, these flames are the senseless byproducts
of the industrial age. As she sits looking from her window to the factory chimneys, the
fires of home and industry are conflated in one indiscreet conflagration, creating a
pervasive interpenetration of the public and private spheres in Hard Times.
As the ubiquitous attendant to the fires of factory and home, dust likewise serves
as an image that obscures the distinction between masculine and feminine spaces. The
dusting of ash which enshrouds Coketown blackens its homes and businesses and
creates a sordid uniformity of appearance. Dickens's description of the industrial town
is worth quoting at length:
7
It was a town of red brick, or of brick that would have red if the smoke and ashes had allowed
it; but as matters stood it was a town of unnatural red and black like the painted face of a savage.
It was a town of machinery and tall chimneys, out of which interminable serpents of smoke
trailed themselves for ever and ever, and never got uncoiled. It had a black canal in it, and a river
that ran purple with ill-smelling dye, and vast piles of building full of windows where there was
a rattling and a trembling all day long, and where the piston of the steam-engine worked
monotonously up and down like the head of an elephant in a state of melancholy madness. It
contained several large streets all very like one another, and many small streets still more like one
another, inhabited by people equally like one another, who all went in and out at the same hours,
with the same sound upon the same pavements, to do the same work, and to whom every day
was the same as yesterday and to-morrow, and every year the counterpart of the last and the next
(Dickens 22).
Dickens's insistence on the drab obscurity of the Coketown buildings and residents and
the pervasive sameness of all aspects of town life-especially the undifferentiated
architecture-poses a critical obstacle to reading Hard Times through the model of the
separate spheres. The firtigibility of the buildings and people, in which individual
spaces and characters can be exchanged or replaced without any rupture in the social
fabric, argues against the rigid sense of space and place outlined in the doctrine of the
separate spheres, and the scattered ashes present an additional disruption to dyadic
thought.
This literal presence of coal dust is figuratively echoed in Dickens's descriptions
of parliament as "the national cinder-heap." Here Dickens creates an image of political
housekeeping in which members of parliament are types of charwomen or dustmen
scavenging through industrial refuse. Of Mr. Gradgrind's activities as an MP Dickens
writes, "[Louisa's] father was usually sifting and sifting at his parliamentary
cinder-heap in London (without being observed to turn up many precious articles
among the rubbish), and was still hard at it in the national dust-yard" (Dickens 147).
This image of government serves dual purposes. First, the characterization of the MP's
firrictions, as a form of ineffective custodial work serves as a negative domestication of
the public forum of politics. Second, the representation of the actual business of
8
parliament (i.e. the political issues) as dust deflates the presumptive importance of the
masculine sphere. Rather than a grand field of combat for captains of industry and
heads of state, the public forum is a trivial space characterized by drudgery. The
connection of parliamentary dust to domesticity is visible in Dickens's account of Mrs.
Gradgrind's death:
Mr. Gradgrind, apprised of his wife's decease, made an expedition from London, and buried her
in a business-like manner. He then returned with promptitude to the national cinder-heap, and
resumed his siffing for the odds and ends he wanted, and his throwing of the dust about into the
eyes of other people who wanted other odds and ends-in fact resumed his parliamentary duties.
(Dickens 154)
Like Louisa's gaze out the window, the narration of Mrs. Gradgrind's death moves
freely between spheres of public and private concem. Dickens brackets her burial with
descriptions of her husband's political activity and describes the funeral arrangements
as business-like. Her husband's "expedition from London" further suggests a fluid link
between work and home.
To these industrially renovated tropes of fire and ash, Dickens adds an entirely
Victorian image of change: the railroad. Trains frantically whisk characters between
settings and along plot points-a rapidity of motion that contributes to the sense of
temporality and circulation in the text. Characters themselves seem hurried along
unknown trajectories, and men and women alike move through streets, houses, and
railways post-haste. Moreover, both the Gradgrinds and Bounderbys maintain forms of
commuter marriages, while Sissy Jupe--Hard Times's runner-up for the angel in the
house-has her origins in a traveling circus. Even Mrs. Sparsit who voyeuristically
9
anticipates Louisa's sexual fall feels no compunction as she travels train and highway
unescorted during her pursuit of Harthouse and Louisa.
In the context of Victorian prostitution debates, rescue houses, and the
Contagious Diseases Act, the mobility of Dickens's women in Hard Times is somewhat
surprising. Louisa Bounderby, Mrs. Sparsit, and Mrs. Pegler (Bounderby's mother) each
engage in a series ofjourneys from home that disrupts her association with the domestic
sphere. Louisa's marriage both begins and ends with a train ride. Her honeymoon is
actually a business trip to Lyons "in order that Mr. Bounderby might take the
opportunity of seeing how the Hands got on in those parts," and after their nuptial
breakfast the newlyweds immediately "[depart] for the railroad, (Dickens 84). Once
established in Bounderby's country home, Louisa spends more narrative time out in the
estate's grounds and walks than within its parlors. The climatic end of her marriage is
signaled by her choice between two journeys: elopement with Harthouse or a desperate
escape to her father's home.
Mrs. Pegler-the humble country mother of the fraudulently "self-made'
Bounderby-represents another type of displaced women whose domestic functions are
dislodged by industrial metaphors of mobility. When she meets Stephen Blackpool
outside of Bounderby's townhouse, Mrs. Pegler tells Stephen, "I come forty mile by
Parliamentary this morning, and I'm going back the same forty mile this afternoon. I
walked nine mile to the station this morning, and if I find nobody on the road to give
me a lift, I shall walk the nine mile back tonight" (Dickens 63). Both the "upward
10
mobility" of her son and the literal distance between his home and hers serve to make
Mrs. Pegler effectively a "homeless" mother. In Victorian terms, her association with the
streets puts Mrs. Pegler in dangerously close proximity with prostitution, an association
reinforced by Bounderby's fictional stories of her degeneracy and her own comment
about finding someone "on the road." Banished and disowned by her child, she
becomes merely a maternal voyeur whose annual train trip to Coketown results in the
street-side surveillance of her son's home. She quite literally is a mobile and exterior
character who must be forced by Mrs. Sparsit to enter Bounderby's house-a disastrous
confrontation which hardly serves as a reintegration of the mother within her proper
domestic sphere.
Although women are repeatedly associated with motion and displacement in
Hard Times, their activity seems more a sign of the times than a transgression of gender
codes. Mrs. Sparsit, who enjoys playing the "Angel" to Bounderby's "Lord," prides
herself on her gentile decorum, yet she is described by Dickens as "a most wonderful
woman for prowling" with an "extraordinary facility of locomotion" (Dickens 144). She
becomes a very model of speed and urban modernity in her resolution to discover
Louisa's supposed infidelity:
It was the conception of an inspired moment, and she shot off with the utmost swiftness to work
it out. The station for the country house was at the opposite end of the town, the time was short,
the road not easy; but she was so quick in pouncing on a disengaged coach, so quick in darting
out of it, producing her money, seizing her ticket, and diving into the train, that she was bome
along the arches spanning the land of coal-pits past and present, as if she had been caught up in a
cloud and whirled away. (Dickens 156)
Later, the narrative takes on Carlylean tones of gloom as the chase leads Mrs. Sparsit
and Louisa to yet another journey by train. As the two women wait alone in their
11
separate comers of the station, the arrival of the train signals an emotional crisis for
the characters:
The seizure of the station with a fit of trembling, gradually deepening to a complaint of
the heart, announced the train. Fire and steam, and smoke, and red light; a hiss, a crash, a
bell, and a shriek; Louisa put into one carriage, Mrs. Sparsit put into another: the little
station a desert speck in the thunderstorm. (Dickens 159)
After Louisa's return to town, the affair ends with her disappointed lover "in a railway
carriage, tearing and glaring over the dark landscape" (Dickens 175). The emotionally
explosive descriptions of the train heightens its function as an industrial metaphor that
knits together functional, imaginative, and personal
meanings. The railroad becomes a pulsing network of interconnected desires, a
dominant ir nage of social and emotional mobility that severely undercuts notions of
divided space. As a result, the capillary function of the railroad further suggests the
impossibility of maintaining a separate and idealized feminine sphere-especially one
untouched by industrialization.
The material change represented by Dickens's images of fire, dust, and trains,
presages an ideological change in the construction of gender and domesticity. The
absence of nurturing home fires and of women from homes are indications of
considerable domestic trouble in Dickens's novel. To borrow a phrase from James
Harthouse-marriage in Hard Times is an institution "not perfectly reconcilable with ...
the domestic hearth7' (Dickens 172). Harthouse, as the attempted seducer of Louisa
Bounderby, is certainly one -figure of matrimonial contention in the text. But he is
hardly the only one. While equally self-interested and disreputable characters, such as
12
Mrs. Sparsit and the young Tom Gradgrind, likewise subvert marital relations, the
admirable Stephen Blackpool also speaks against the tyranny of wedlock. Tom shows
his contempt for affection and discretion between wife and husband when he
pompously declares, "Why, you won't tell me, Mr. Harthouse, that you really suppose
my sister Loo does care for old Bounderby" (Dickens 102), thus paving the way for
Louisa's breach of confidence. Mrs. Sparsit goes Tom one further; she refuses to
acknowledge the existence of Louisa's marriage to Bounderby. Her own discursive
protest against the union takes the form of her inability to call Louisa "Mrs.
Bounderby." In feigned embarrassment, Mrs. Sparsit apologizes for addressing
Bounderby's wife as "Miss Gradgrind" and says, "I really cannot call her Mrs.
Bounderby" (Dickens 145), her aversion to the title being "excessively difficult to
conquer" (Dickens 140). Less humorously satirical in its attack on marriage is Stephen
Blackpool's impassioned plea to be relieved of his dissolute wife. Desperate for release
from his unhappy marriage, Stephen seeks advice from his employer, Josiah
Bounderby, saying,
I ha' read I' th' papers that great fok ... are not bonded together for better or worse so fast, but that
they can be set free fro' their misfortnet marriages, an' many ower agen. When they dunnot agree,
for that their tempers is ill-sorted, they has rooms o' one kind an another in their houses, above a
bit, and they can live asunders. We fok ha' only one room, and we can't. (Dickens 59)
It is significant that Stephen's plea takes an architectural form; although the
management of interior space is certainly accompanied by many more alternatives for
the wealthy, Stephen's complaint works contrary to the ideal of the separate spheres.
According to this model, a man's home is his castle only in that he is lord and master of
it; the physical environment of the home is entirely administrated by the woman. Not
13
content with the standard that sees the home as his wife's domain, Stephen wistfully
desires a room of his own.
Indeed, the absence of model marriages in Hard Times is closely related to the
absence of model women. While Mrs. Sparsit's self-congratulatory beneficence is easily
punctured by Dickens's satire, even the characters who most sincerely embody
feminine ideals are problematic figures in the text. Sissy and Rachel are the only truly
nurturing and self-sacrificing individuals in the novel, and there are moments when
each acts as a ministering angel to her loved ones. However, -neither marries nor has
children within the main narrative (Sissy's marriage is mentioned as a postscript in the
final chapter) and both are dangerously associated with the behaviors of "fallen"
women. Sissy is the daughter of a dancer and a member of a traveling circus; when
Gradgrind becomes her guardian he ensures that Sissy understands the disreputable
nature of her origin with its promiscuous living arrangements and scantily-clad
performers. More serious still, is Rachel's position as the love interest of a married man.
Although she is careful not to be seen too frequently with Stephen Blackpool, it is clear
Stephen and Rachel share an exclusive confidence not unlike that between Louisa and
Harthouse. Dreading his return home while his drunken wife is there, Stephen
fantasizes about "the home he might at that moment have been seeking with pleasure
and pride" if he had married Rachel instead. In a odd tableaux, Stephen returns to find
Rachelthe "other woman'~-tending his unconscious wife: "She turned her head, and the
light of her face shone in upon the midnight of his mind. She sat by the bed, watching
and tending his wift" (Dickens 66). Here Dickens uses the familiar iconography of moral
14
idealism-light and darkness-and Stephen indeed tells Rachel, "Thou art an Angel"
(Dickens 70). Yet the triangle of estranged spouses and thwarted lovers is hardly an
exemplary model of Victorian domesticity. Despite Stephen's desire for the ideal as
represented by Rachel, the text fails to make a convincing argument for the angel's
indispensability to the house. While Sissy significantly enhances the Gradgrinds' home
life and Rachel provides comfort for Stephen, their function is not central to the novel
and their warmth and aff~ction can also be found in the decidedly non-ideal domestic
arrangement of Sleary's Circus-a community more representative of workers' solidarity
than a nuclear family.
Consequently, the absence or ineffectiveness of women in Hard Times means that
whatever gendering of domestic space occurs in the novel occurs mostly under the
influence of men. While it is arguable how domestic the Coketown homes are-indeed
my thesis is predicated on the mutual permeability of commercial and domestic
spaces-the houses are clearly not feminine in the Victorian sense of the term.
Bounderby's and Gradgrind's homes are exclusively masculine edifices. Built,
flu-nished, and managed under the "manly" principles of power, austerity, and
industry, these two structures stand as symbols of their owners' prestige within an
anti-Tomantic market economy. Gradgrind's Stone Lodge-the name alone invokes
masculine rigidity and fortitude-is the most elaborately described residence in Hard
Times:
A very regular feature on the face of the country, Stone Lodge was. Not the least disguise toned
down or shaded off that uncompromising fact in the landscape. A great square house, with heavy
portico darkening the principal windows, as its master's heavy brows overshadowed his eyes. A
calculated, cast up, balanced, and proved house. Six windows on this side of the door, six on that
15
side; a total of twelve in this wing, a total of twelve in the other wing; four-and-twenty carried
over to the back wings. A lawn and garden and an infant avenue, all ruled straight like a
botanical account-book. Gas and ventilation, drainage and water-service, all of the primest
quality. Iron clamps and girders, fireproof from top to bottom; mechanical lifts for the
housemaids, with all their brushes and brooms, everything that heart could desire. (Dickens 13)
All order and mechanization, Gradgrind's home is an applied exercise in utilitarian
architecture and industrial engineering. In his intense anti-sentimentality, Gradgrind's
"heart's desire" is not narrated without irony. Yet the home has much emotional power
for the man; he is clearly fond of it and is as pleased with its design as he is with
himself. The house may be a "Jaundiced Jair' (Dickens 43) to his son, but to Gradgrind,
Stone Lodge is the embodiment of his most cherished plans. From its observatory filled
with parliamentary reports to the business-like atmosphere of the children's nursery,
Stone Lodge fully implements its master's personal philosophy, and life within its stem
walls proceeds "monotonously round like a piece of machinery which discourage[s]
human interference" (Dickens 47).
No less iniportant than Gradgrind's Stone Lodge are the three residences of
Bounderby-if the bank can be considered a residence. Bounderby's townhouse, like his
friend's home, is a bastion of male pride and consequence. Harthouse's visit to the
Bounderby home provides the following description:
There was no mute sign of a woman in the room. No graceful little adornment, no fanciful little
device, however trivial, anywhere expressed her influence. Cheerless and comfortless, boastfully
and doggedly rich, there the room stared at its present occupants, unsoftened and unrelieved by
the least trace of any womanly occupation. As Mr. Bounderby stood in the midst of his
household gods, so those unrelenting divinities occupied their place around Mr. Bounderby, and
they were worthy ofone another, and well matched (Dickens 97-98) (my emphasis).
The same metonymical relationship exists between Bounderby and his home as
between Gradgrind and Stone Lodge. More telling still is Dickens's use metaphors of
16
domestic space, rather than market space, to represent the utilitarian characters of
both men. Indeed, there is no more proper sphere in the novel for showcasing
GTadgrind's and Bounderby's material and economic complacency than in their own
homes.
Moreover Bounderby's country estate furthers the sense of domesticity as an
exclusively masculine enterprise in Hard Times. Purchased after a bank foreclosure,
Bounderby's country house represents more of an economic and personal exchange
between men than a family seat or idyllic sanctuary. After telling Harthouse that
"there's not a completer place of its size in this kingdom or elsewhere," Bounderby
proudly says of his new home that "here, got into the middle of it, like a maggot into a
nut, is Josiah Bounderby" (Dickens 127). His sense of infiltration or even penetration of
another man's personal space seems to give Bounderby especial pleasure, while his
knowledge of the previous owner's displacement heightens Bounderby's enjoyment of
his expropriated property. Bounderby eagerly tells his visitor how "Nickits [the
previous owner], who used to act in Latin, in the Westminster School plays, with the
chief-justices and nobility of this country applauding him till they were black in the
face, is driveling at this minute---drivelling, Sir! --in a fifffi floor, up a narrow dark back
street in Antwerp" (Dickens 127). In a sort of Girardian~ triangle, the country house
stands in as the feminine body which permits intimate transactions between male
rivals. Bounderby derives his greatest satisfaction in his new property from his sense of
the ruined man's presence; throughout the house and the landscape he delights in the
traces of his predecessor as evidence of Nickits's failure to maintain what Bounderby
17
now possesses. This fantasy of perpetual market conquest displaces other domestic
fictions, namely those centered on the erotic seclusion and idealization of women.
Bounderby's bank serves as an additional masculine "house" which disrupts the
doctrine of the separate spheres. Although Harthouse may facetiously presume "that
Mr. Bounderby the Banker does not reside in [that] edifice' (Dickens 93), if Bounderby
actually lived in the bank-as in fact do Mrs. Sparsit and Bitzer, the light porter-it would
hardly be -unusual in the context of Hard Times. In a text without divided space, it is of
little consequence whether or not a home is actually a house. The initial description of
Coketown as a community radically indistinct in its architecture anticipates the
characters' later movement among residences. Dickens's description of the bank
furthers its sense of finigibility as no distinct features mark its function as any different
from the other buildings:
The bank offered no violence to the wholesome monotony of the town. It was another red brick
house, with black outside shutters, green inside blinds, a black street-door up two white steps, a
brazen doorplate, and a brazen doorhandle full stop. It was a size larger than Mr. Bounderby's
house, as other houses were from a size to half-a-dozen sizes smaller; in all other particulars, it
was strictly according to pattern. (Dickens 86)
Just as in the earlier descriptions of homes whose windows seem always to look out on
the factory chimneys, the combined domestic and commercial functions of the bank
support the industrial uniformity of Coketown.
The ejection of women from the domestic sphere (by death or invisibility in
Gradgrind's house and exile in Bounderby's ) is one example of the way Dickens uses
the discourse of domesticity against itself. After his separation from Louisa, Bounderby
establishes a reign of male domestic rule by evicting Mrs. Sparsit as well. He tells the
18
dismissed housekeeper that "under my hwnble roof, there's hardly opening enough
for a lady of your genius in other people's aftairs" (Dickens 2116). In fact, it seems there
is hardly an opening for any lady m Bounderby's house, his wife, mother, and
housekeeper having each been summarily exiled from its walls. This example illustrates
a key stumbling block to representations of domestic men; the trouble Victorians
encountered in imagining women's role as exclusively domestic and reproductive is
that such a model likewise limited options for men. The domestic containment of
women inevitably meant restrictions on male behavior, since what was proper for a
woman, by definition was improper for a man. Hence, we find in Hard Times, men like
Gradgrind and Bounderby who must eliminate all things that are ideologically
feminine (i.e. fantasy and sentiment) even as they engage in materially feminine
practices (i.e. interior design and entertaining). However, Gradgrind's "reform" and
Bounderby's description as "a commercial wonder more admirable than Venus"
(Dickens 18 1) (my emphasis) indicate that in their drive to be master of both house and
factory, both men must compete for domestic supremacy in a woman's idiom.
What then is unarticulated in the conduct books-and what emerges in Hard
Times-is the ideological power a manly home holds for men, even as it complicates their
own gender subjectivity. Masculine domesticity thereby becomes a lived contradiction
to gender ideals-one which unconsciously subverts doctrines of gender difference while
consciously making claims for greater male dominance. As a result, we see domestic
arrangements throughout Hard Times that are neither feminine nor private. The bank,
the circus, the factory, and even the railroad become alternative spaces to domesticity.
19
Thus, Hard Times is not merely a novel about domesticity gone wrong; more
importantly, it is a novel about the way in which industrialization made greater
material and ideological movement between spaces possible even as it articulated
increasingly separate roles for women and men.
'See Home Fronts: Domesticity and its Critics in the Antebellum United States (Durham and
London: Duke UP,
1997).
" In Women, Work, and Family (New York: Routledge, 1987) Louise A. Tilly and Joan W.
Scott describe a pre
industrial household:
"Families were productive and reproductive units, centered on economic activity and
creators of
new life" (44).
iii Steams writes of this reconceptualization of gender difference that "industrialization
mainly served to initiate over a century of widening differences in gender imagery and
experience" and adds that the industrial revolution "increased the domestic focus [for
women], particularly in contrast to men's new work roles in factories and offices"
(Steams 15).
iv The Progress and Spirit of Physical Science," Edinburgh Review, 108 (1858), 71. This
quotation by Sir Henry Holland was sited by Walter E. Houghton in 7he Victorian Frame
ofMind, 1830-1870. '
v Jacques Derrida writes of "the opposition between nature and culture" that
"Levi-Strauss has experienced simultaneously the necessity of utilizing this opposition
and the impossibility of accepting it" (Derrida 283). "
v See Between Men: English Literature andMale Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia
UP, 1985) by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick for a more detailed discussion of the work of Rene
Girard and the Girardian triangle.
Works Cited
Dickens, Charles. HardTimes. New York: Norton, 1990, ed.
Houghton, Walter E. The Victorian Frame of Mind, 1830-1870. New Haven and London:
Yale UP, 1957.
20
Hudson, Pat. The Industrial Revolution. New York: Arnold, 1992.
Romero, Lora. Home Fronts: Qomesticijy and Its Critics in the Antebellum United
States. Durham and London: Duke UP, 1997.
Steams, Peter N. InteWreting the Industrial Revolution. Washington, D.C.: American
Historical Association, 1991.
Tilly, Louise A. and Joan W. Scott. Women, Work, and Family. New York and London:
Routledge, 1978.