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Abstract
In Charles Dickens’ novel Hard Times (1854), the educational system functions as an overt Ideological State Apparatus, as evidenced in one particular scene between Sissy Jupe and Mr. Gradgrind. This scene reveals Sissy's initial moment of active resistance to the ideological imperatives surrounding her. Yet, contrary to critical consensus, her resistance is only moderately successful, as instead she is forever bound to two irreducible identities. Further, because the novel was initially serialised, the structure necessitates name repetition. Thus, Sissy/Cecelia cannot be, as critics have claimed, the novel's great figure of resistance; instead, she is conditioned by power structures both within the diegesis of the novel, and by the means of production of writing in the mid-nineteenth century.
Notes
1 Charles Dickens, Hard Times (New York: WW Norton and Company, 1990).
2 Louis Althusser, ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,’ in Lenin and Philosophy, and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (London: New Left Books, 1971), 127–88.
3 Michael Kramp, ‘From Race To Lore To Domestic Utility: Sissy Jupe As A Functional Stylized Gypsy,’ VIJ: Victorians Institute Journal 36 (2008): 193–215.
4 Cynthia Northcutt Malone, ‘The Fixed Eye And The Rolling Eye: Surveillance and Discipline in Hard Times,’ Studies In The Novel 21.1 (1989): 14–26.
5 Michel Foucault, ‘Panopticism,’ in Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage Books, 1995), 195–228.
6 Judith Butler, Excitable Speech (New York: Routledge, 1997).
7 J. L. Austin, J. O. Urmson and Marina Sbisà, How to Do Things with Words (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975).
8 Mary Louise Pratt, ‘Arts of the Contact Zone,’ in Ways of Reading, ed. David Bartholomae and Anthony Petrosky (New York: Bedford/St. Martin's, 1999), 73–82.