The Restraints of Political Economy and Perverse Libido in Charles Dickens’s Hard Times

Abstract

This essay purports to examine how Charles Dickens’s Hard Times depicts the unnatural and tragicrelationships between utilitarian political economy and the individuals who are affected by the economic principlein both the private sphere and the public one. Special attention must be paid to the adverse impact of thenovel’s character Thomas Gradgrind’s principle of utilitarian education on his children Louisa and Tom in thehousehold. Under the influence of her father’s dogmatic rules, Louisa develops her perverse libido toward herbrother Tom as a way of escaping from the restraints and repression imposed upon her, which can be explicatedby the Freudian theory of the pleasure principle and perversion. The Gradgrind-Louisa-Bounderby triangularmodel can elucidate the operation of sexual exchange of Louisa as an economic property negotiated betweenher father and the industrialist, which can be theoretically supported by Eve Sedgwick’s arguments about triangulartransactions between men. The tension between Stephen and Bounderby in the public realm also testifiesto the domination of the economic logics of self-help and self-interest over the working-class people, which canbe examined through the lens of the Foucauldian theory of governmentality. In contrast, Sissy Jupe’s adherenceto fancy and her affectionate sympathy for the few ignored by and alienated from the arithmetic calculation ofutilitarianism can serve as an antidote to the ideologies of male-centered political economy.