SOURCE: "Writing as a Woman: Dickens, Hard Times, and Feminine Discourses," in Dickens Studies Annual, Vol. 18, 1989, pp. 161-78.

[In the essay below, Carr assesses Dickens's "sympathetic identification with feminine discourses in the 1850s" as exemplified in Hard Times.]

In his 1872 retrospective essay on Dickens, George Henry Lewes presents Dickens as an exemplary figure whose career has upset the balance between popular taste and critical judgment. The essay depends on what seems initially an aesthetic opposition between show and Art, between "fanciful flight" and Literature, but these critical terms also demark class and gender boundaries that preserve the dominant literary culture. Dickens becomes "the showman beating on the drum," who appeals to the "savage" not the "educated eye," to "readers to whom all the refinements of Art and Literature are as meaningless hieroglyphs." He works in "delft, not in porcelain," mass producing inexpensive pleasure for the undiscerning reader, but is found wanting by the "cultivated" reader of "fastidious" taste. The essay attempts to contain Dickens' impact by identifying him as lower-class, uneducated, and aligned with feminine discourses, but it also suggests the difficulty of accounting for Dickens' influence and the importance of investigating the "sources of that power." Despite Lewes's isolation of Dickens as a "novelty" or as a madman, he concedes that he "impressed a new direction on popular writing, and modified the Literature of his age, in its spirit no less than in its form."

Dickens' admirers, following John Forster, have responded to the essay as mistaken and insulting. As John Gross wrote, the essay "still has the power to irritate," with its innuendo about hallucinations and lower-class vulgarity, and its casual anecdotes about the author's inadequate library. Lewes's class bias and his narrow definition of education have undermined the influence of his critique of Dickens for modern readers, but his subtle positioning of Dickens in relation to women writers and his articulation of the categories by which novels will be judged has been more durable. When, for example, Gordon Haight concludes that "Dickens was a man of emotion, sentimental throughout; Lewes was a man of intellect, philosophical and scientific," he is echoing the gender-based oppositions of Lewes's argument.

The essay on Dickens is part of the broader attempt begun by Lewes in the 1840s to serve as arbiter of the emergent literary class and of its premier form, the novel. Like Lewes's 1852 essay "The Lady Novelists," it seeks to position those literary newcomers who threaten the status and boundaries of nineteenth-century literary territory, to control the impact of a broader-based literacy and of women's emergence into more public spheres. The critique of Dickens depends on polarities that usually mark gender differences in nineteenth-century criticism, as, for example, the difference between feeling and thinking, between observing details and formulating generalizations. "Dickens sees and feels," Lewes intones,

but the logic of feeling seems the only logic he can manage. Thought is strangely absent from his works. . . . [K]eenly as he observes the objects before him, he never connects his observations into a general expression, never seems interested in general relations of things.

Lewes makes still more explicit his identification of Dickens with this secondary realm of women's writing in this backhanded compliment:

With a fine felicity of instinct he seized upon situations having an irresistible hold over the domestic affections and ordinary sympathies. He spoke in the mother-tongue of the heart, and was always sure of ready listeners.

Dickens is thus identified with the feminine, as instinctual and fortunate, as seizing rather than analyzing, as interested in "domestic affections and ordinary sympathies." He "painted nothing ideal, heroic," Lewes explains. "The world of thought and passion lay beyond his horizon."

Lewes evokes many of the same oppositions when instructing Charlotte Brontë on the "proper" realm for women writers, when cataloguing the "lady novelists" of the day, or when marking the novel as the particular "department" of women, the form that values finesse of detail, . . . pathos and sentiment." His acknowledgment that Dickens is "always sure of ready listeners" rehearses a charge often made against nineteenth-century women writers, that the financial success and popularity of their work, its very attentiveness to audience concerns, marks it as "anti-" or "sub-literary," concerned with sales not posterity. Dickens thus joins the company of writers like Fanny Fern and Mary Elizabeth Braddon who, as one critic put it, discovered: "a profitable market among the half-educated, . . . giving the undiscriminating what they wanted to read." The use of a category like the "subliterary" works to regulate the effects of the novel as a newly-positioned literary discourse that challenges the cultural hegemony of upper-class men of letters.

In July 1845, Dickens described the aim and rhetorical stance of a proposed journal, The Cricket: "I would at once sit down upon their very hobs; and take a personal and confidential position with them." In 1850, he finally established a periodical to fulfill the role of domestic comrade, that aspired "to live in the Household affections, and to be numbered among the Household thoughts, of our readers." In establishing a journal to be "familiar in their mouths as Household Words" (as the motto read), Dickens was making use of a feminine guise, privileging the intimate, private, and informal qualities usually associated with women over the social, public, and authoritative powers usually associated with men. But he was also disrupting the conventional wisdom that sharply divided the domestic and public spheres, for his journal insisted on the interpenetration of these realms.

This gesture of cultural cross-dressing is part of a recurring exploration by Dickens in the 1850s of the discourses usually identified as feminine. Michael Slater has argued that in the decade 1847 to 1857 Dickens was "apparently preoccupied with women as the insulted and injured of mid-Victorian England," and that the novels in this period feature more women characters in more prominent positions than do other of his novels. But he also sees Dickens as "voicing no general condemnation of prevailing patriarchal beliefs and attitudes." I do not find it surprising that Dickens did not "voice" a "general condemnation" of the ideology within which he wrote. What I want to investigate is why his interest hovers at the edge of articulation, why it goes so far and then retreats, or goes so far and then is silent. Why is Dickens simultaneously empathetic with oppressed women and insistent on the constraints and stereotypes that restrict them? What does his practice suggest about how women are rendered silent in Victorian culture and novels, how their perspective is undermined or preempted? To use Pierre Macherey's terms, such issues become part of what is "unvoiced," "unspoken" both in the novels and in Dickens' public postures. The issue is not so much, then, whether Dickens crafted complex psychological women characters along the lines of George Eliot or Charlotte Brontë, but how women are positioned in the powerful discourses of the novels as in contemporary social practices. In Dickens' novels, the notion of "writing as a woman" is problematic, as opposed to the confident assumptions Lewes makes of what it means "to write as women," of what the "real office" is that women "have to perform," of the "genuine female experience." Dickens' experimentation suggests that much is unknown, even to the women who "experience" their lives and desires, that there is no ready language for what women wish to "write." Although Dickens himself certainly does not articulate a program of women's liberation, and indeed deploys many cultural tropes that restrict women as "relative creatures," his novels often make the "commonsense" notions of Lewes untenable.

The proliferation of child-wives in his novels and his portrait of Esther Summerson's strained narrative have often been cited by critics as signs of Dickens' preference for coy, idealized, and subservient women. His advocacy of the domestic values of hearth and home has similarly been dismissed as a sign of a peculiar weakness, a bourgeois sentimentality aimed at pleasing or appeasing his readers. Along with his taste for melodrama and Christmas morality, such quirks are explained away as a cultural disguise the master assumed to protect his more radical designs. The more critically acceptable Dickens provides cynical and witty analysis of cultural conventions and hypocrisies from a disengaged position. In other words, Dickens is valued as a prototype of the (male) modern artist as rebel and cultural critic; he is embarrassing in his assumption of what we label (female) "Victorian" values. Like Lewes, then, we perpetuate the stigma of writing as a woman, associating feminine discourse with a lack of analysis and rigor, with pandering to "cheap" tastes. And we resist identifying Dickens with either its problems or its effects.

When Dickens' experimentation with "writing as a woman" is examined within this contest for literary territory and power, it involves more than merely being a woman writer or adopting a feminine persona. By aligning himself with terms and oppositions usually associated with women (for example, fancy vs. reason or fact, the personal vs. the institutional), Dickens, in effect, explores how his own position as a writer of fiction is marked off as suspect or inferior. He experiments with writing that traverses opposed realms and deploys narrative tropes that mark breaks in discursive power—stuttering, deception, metaphor, eccentricity, strain of voice or prose, interruptions. In this context, for example, Dickens' insistence on a linkage between "romance" and familiar things is more than a personal credo or a rehearsal of a romantic ethos. The preference in Hard Times of the devalued term "fancy" over the more culturally respectable term "imagination" locates his argument in a contemporary ideological contest, rather than as a repetition of an earlier aesthetic debate. The problematic position of women characters and writers functions as a figure of Dickens' own position in a culture suspicious of fancy and wary of claims to "domestic" power. Deflecting the unease of his position onto women as an oppressed class allows Dickens to be more extreme and critical than he could if he were evaluating his own position directly.

I would like to focus on what has usually been cited as a negative portrait of women, the failure to create a strong, likable heroine or a credible mother figure in Hard Times (1854). The novel itself is an instance of the conditions of feminine discourse, written not in any expansive artistic mode, but under the urgency of periodical publishing, as a project his printers hoped would attract readers to Household Words. Dickens disliked the conditions of weekly publication and deplored as "CRUSHING" the consequent lack of "elbow-room" and "open places in perspective." But the process must have underscored the constraints embedded in the social and material production of discourse. Indeed much of the novel explores what cannot be said or explained, what cannot be portrayed. The women of this fictional world in particular are restricted by and to their social positions, defined within narrow ideological bounds that afford little relief. The characters do not operate primarily in personal relationships to each other, nor do they "forget" their social positioning, or the polarities that operate in Coketown. They are constructed in oppositions, as women and men, mothers and daughters, middle-class thinkers and lower-class workers. The usual cultural positions for women remain curiously unpopulated, incomplete, present but not functioning as they ought. This schematic underdevelopment need not be explained away as a technological effect of the novel's weekly form, or as a style of abstraction. The ideological and technical constraints also create the possibility for Dickens to write as if from within the realm that Lewes marks off for women writers—a realm of fancy, romance, ordinary events, and mass production; a realm that remains apart from what fastidious or learned readers will value.

The novel is constrained from the beginning by the powerful social discourse of the Gradgrind system, which exists in the novel as what Bakhtin called "the word of the fathers." Bakhtin argues that such a word need not be repeated or reinforced or even made persuasive, but has "its authority already fused to it":

The authoritative word demands that we acknowledge it, that we make it our own; it binds us, quite independent of any power it might have to persuade us internally; we encounter it with its authority already fused to it. . . . It is, so to speak, the word of the fathers. Its authority was already acknowledged in the past. It is a prior discourse. It is therefore not a question of choosing it from among other possible discourses that are its equal.

Against such a word, opposition or argument is already preempted, made secondary or unhearable. Unlike the opposing terms of "wonder" and "fancy," which require constant justification in the novel, the simplest reference to "fact" evokes the authority of learning and scientific knowledge. The effect of such an authority is to make all private exchanges in the book dependent on arguments that cannot be imagined within the novel's authorized categories, so that the characters speak a kind of shadow dialogue.

The effect of this social construction is especially destructive to the transparent figure who serves as the heroine's mother. In a more self-consciously "feminist" novel, Mrs. Gradgrind might be expected to suggest the alternative to patriarchal discourses. In Hard Times, the mother is comically ineffectual and trivial, represented not as a person but as an object, as a "feminine dormouse," and a "bundle of shawls." Yet she is not even a particularly satisfactory object. Her central representation, repeated three times, is as a "faint transparency" that is "presented" to its audience in various unimpressive attitudes:

Mrs Gradgrind, weakly smiling and giving no other sign of vitality, looked (as she always did) like an indifferently executed transparency of a small female figure, without enough light behind it.

A transparency is an art form popularized by the dioramas in which a translucent image painted on cloth is made visible by backlighting. Its fragility and potential for varying production make the transparency a felicitous medium to suggest Mrs. Gradgrind's ambivalent positioning. The failure of the transparency renders her almost invisible in the novel, making her neither a pleasing image nor one that is easily readable. But the particularity of the image insists on a producer as well as a product, raising the issue of what painter "executes" her so indifferently, what producer withholds the light that might have made her more substantial, in other words, why she has been neglected as a cultural formation. Vaguely discernible through the translucent object, the producer remains a shadowy, unnamed, prior force, whom we know by traces and effects. At Mrs. Gradgrind's death, for example, we are told of an effect, but not of a cause—"the light that had always been feeble and dim behind the weak transparency, went out." And the physical depiction of her as recumbent, "stunned by some weighty piece of fact tumbling on her" leaves unnamed the force that stuns her with its weight and carelessness. We are left with an authorless piece of evidence, a "piece of fact"; but in Hard Times "fact" is easily traced back to the Gradgrind system. When we are told that finding herself alone with Gradgrind and Mr. Bounderby is "sufficient to stun this admirable lady again, without collision between herself and any other fact," we know what constitutes her as an object of its gaze. It is under her husband's "wintry" eye that Mrs. Gradgrind becomes "torpid again"; under Sissy Jupe's care or even in Louisa's presence, she can be "rendered almost energetic." Both fact and its proponents are equally capable of rendering Mrs. Gradgrind nonexistent, a product of a careless fancy: "So, she once more died away, and nobody minded her."

Mrs. Gradgrind has been so slighted as a "subject" that she is surprised when Louisa asks about her: "You want to hear of me, my dear? That's something new, I am sure, when anybody wants to hear of me." And the outcome of such a lifetime of being constituted by others is that she cannot even claim to feel her own pain; when Louisa asks after her health, she answers with what the narrator calls "this strange speech": "I think there's a pain somewhere in the room . . ., but I couldn't positively say that I have got it." She is certainly slighted by Dickens, appearing in only five of the novel's thirty-seven chapters, and then usually in the final pages or paragraphs. Even her introduction seems almost an afterthought, located not in the chapter with Mr. Gradgrind, the children, or even the house, but in a parenthetical position as audience for Mr. Bounderby (ch. 4). But if Dickens is cavalier about her presence, he strongly marks her absence from that nineteenth-century site for Mother, as idealized figure in her children's memories or in their imaginative dreams of virtue. Mrs. Gradgrind's expected place as her children's earliest memory has been usurped by the father who appears as a "dry Ogre chalking ghastly white figures" on a "large black board." Louisa's return "home" for her mother's death evokes none of the "dreams of childhood—its airy fables" and "impossible adornments" that Dickens describes as "the best influences of old home"; such dreams are only evoked as a lengthy litany of what her mother has not provided for her child.

Mrs. Gradgrind does not offer a counter position—covert or otherwise—to the world of fact and ashes. She cannot overtly defy her husband, nor can she save herself from her daughter's scorn. Her advice to Louisa reflects this helplessness, and its incomprehension of the accepted referents makes her ridiculous in her child's eyes: "Go and be somethingological directly," she says, and "turn all your ological studies to good account." When she is dying, Mrs. Gradgrind tries to express her loss—of something and of words with which to articulate it—to her daughter:

But there is something—not an Ology at all—that your father has missed, or forgotten, Louisa. I don't know what it is. . . . I shall never get its name now. But your father may. It makes me restless. I want to write to him, to find out for God's sake, what it is. Give me a pen, give me a pen.

To the transparent Mrs. Gradgrind, all authoritative knowledge must come from the father, yet she worries mat he has missed or forgotten something. She does not imagine herself finding or naming it, but remembers it as unsaid. The outcome of this "insight" is invisible to the patriarchal eye; it disappears as "figures of wonderful no-meaning she began to trace upon her wrappers." When Louisa tries to fashion a meaning of her mother's words, her aim is to "link such faint and broken sounds into any chain of connexion," in other words, to translate her mother into the Gradgrind discourse. Mrs. Gradgrind emerges "from the shadow" and takes "upon her the dread solemnity of the sages and patriarchs"—she "hears the last of it"—only by dying, not as a living speaker addressing her daughter knowingly and directly. She remains stubbornly unincorporated by the novel's powerful discourses, a no-meaning that can be neither heard nor reformed.

But the mother is ridiculous, rather than tragic, only within the father's terms of judgment—terms which a society divided into opposites cannot unimagine or unspeak, and against which the lower-class opposition of fancy and heart will have little impact. The mother's very imprecision undercuts the authority of the father's discourses, making them a lesson imperfectly learned and badly recited. The novel cannot construct an imagined alternate culture, in which Mrs. Gradgrind would "discover" the language to define the "something missing," in which "ological" would not be required as an ending that validates an object's existence. Instead it unfolds the boundaries and effects of such a system. Louisa learns painfully that Mrs. Gradgrind's point-of-view has been confined to its position of "no-meaning" by concerted efforts by her father and his system of definition. Towards the end of the novel, Louisa reverses the charge of "no-meaning" and demands that her father justify instead what his "meaning" has produced: "Where are the graces of my soul? Where are the sentiments of my heart? What have you done, O father, what have you done, with the garden that should have bloomed once, in this great wilderness here!" In this confrontation, Louisa recognizes the contest her father has suppressed and her mother has barely suggested, a contest for how to determine the shape and value of the social realms:

I have grown up, battling every inch of my way. . . . What I have learned has left me doubting, misbelieving, despising, regretting, what I have not learned; and my dismal resource has been to think that life would soon go by, and that nothing in it could be worth the pain and trouble of a contest.

The novel presents several scenes between Louisa and her father in which this authority is examined and questioned, scenes which pointedly exclude Mrs. Gradgrind, as someone whose objections or interests are irrelevant. The chapter "Father and Daughter" opens with an oblique questioning of the absolute value of such authority, but only once the "business" is resolved does Gradgrind suggest, "now, let us go and find your mother." Yet the exploration of Gradgrind's power makes an obscure and unacknowledged connection between his power and her mother's "death" from the novel. By what seems a frivolous word-game on the part of the narrator, Gradgrind's governmental blue books (the emblem of his power) are associated with an infamous wife-killer: "Although Mr Gradgrind did not take after Blue Beard, his room was quite a blue chamber in its abundance of blue books." The narrator denies that this "error" has any meaning, thus resisting the implication that Gradgrind's intellectual system of power has something to do with the oppressed status of his wife. The blue books are accorded the power of fact, which is to prove "usually anything you like," but the narrator's flight of fancy is not to prove anything. It refers, not to the authoritative realms of statistics and science, but to fairy-tales; it is not a "fact" derived from texts, but is "something missing," an association produced by the unconscious. It remains, at best, as a kind of insider's joke, in which readers can remember that its "power" derives from texts with which Dickens was aligned, both in general (Action and fairy tale), and explicitly (Blue Beard is the basis for Dickens' Captain Murderer, whose tale he published in 1860 as one of his "Nurse's Stories").

The reference to the wife-killer, Blue Beard, who charms all with his show of courtesy and devotion before devouring his wives in the privacy of their home, is an "error" that suggests the gap between public and private, between acknowledged power and covert violence. Like the marginalized tensions created by Mrs. Gradgrind throughout the novel, this slip of the pen provokes despite its claim to marginality. The error is allowed to stand, thereby suggesting what would otherwise be too bizarre to consider. It reminds us that Gradgrind has been a social "wife-killer," obliterating his wife's role as mother to her daughter and keeping her from fuller participation in the daughter's narrative. He has "formed his daughter on his own model," and she is known to all as "Tom Gradgrind's daughter." He has isolated Louisa in his masculine realm, depriving her of any of the usual female resources with which to oppose his power; as Tom mentions with devastating casualness, Louisa "used to complain to me that she had nothing to fall back upon, that girls usually fall back upon." The reference to Blue Beard reminds us that Gradgrind's realm is not absolute except by force and mystification, that his "charmed apartment" depends on the exclusion of a more powerful, more resistant "other." The rest of the chapter teases out the possibilities that his power can be questioned. Through a series of fanciful images—that make the narrator not an unworthy companion of Mrs. Gradgrind—the absolute value of his authority is obliquely undermined. Gradgrind is presented as needing to enforce his positions with military might, relying on his books as an "army constantly strengthening by the arrival of new recruits." His solutions persist because they are isolated within a necromancer's circle, protected from critique or even outside knowledge. From his enclosed, abstracted fortress, he orders the world as if "the astronomer within should arrange the starry universe solely by pen, ink and paper, . . . could settle all their destinies on a slate, and wipe out all their tears with one dirty little bit of sponge." All these questions about Gradgrind's power are delivered as amusing details, as arguments the novelist is not able to give serious articulation. Yet the details attack not the effect of Gradgrind's power, as Louisa does with hopeless inertia, but the claim to power, its genealogy and maintenance.

It is not surprising that Louisa and her mother, and even Dickens, cannot find words for what is missing from their lives, words having been usurped as the tools of the Gradgrind system, defined and delimited by male authority. Mrs. Gradgrind does not articulate an opposition, nor does the novel openly pursue the traces of her petulant complaints. She remains unaware that her headaches and worries are symptoms of a cultural dissatisfaction, although she knows that her head began "to split" as soon as she was married. She complains to Louisa about the trouble that comes from speaking—"You must remember, my dear, that whenever I have said anything, on any subject, I have never heard the last of it; and consequently, that I have long left off saying anything," but the ideological implications of diese remarks are shortcircuited by the personal contexts in which she declines to speak. These scenes do not transform Mrs. Gradgrind into a covert rebel, but represent her as willful and self-absorbed, betraying Sissy and Louisa by her silence and diverting attention from their more pressing needs.

In fact, Mrs. Gradgrind seems to exist primarily as the cautionary exemplum of the Gradgrind system, having been married for the "purity" of being as free from nonsense "as any human being not arrived at the perfection of an absolute idiot, ever was." She proves her usefulness to the system, admirably serving as the negative against which the father seems more caring, more responsive than he seems in isolation. Her mother seems unsympathetic to Louisa's discontent, worrying over it as "one of those subjects I shall never hear the last of." And she serves as the agent who reinscribes the ideological positions of the Gradgrind system, who insists on reality being defined as what is kept "in cabinets" or about which one can "attend lectures." Louisa is scolded for running off to look at the forbidden circus by her mother, not by the father whose prohibition it is and who has caught her in the crime. The hapless Mrs. Gradgrind "whimpers" to her daughter; "I wonder at you. I declare you're enough to make one regret ever having had a family at all. I have a great mind to say I wish I hadn't. Then what would you have done, I should like to know." Yet in this pathetic effort to enforce her husband's laws, Mrs. Gradgrind has unknowingly allied herself with her child's rebellion. Her words give her away: she has "wondered" (a crime against reason), she has "regretted" (a crime against fact), and she has "wished" (a crime against her husband). Dickens notes that "Mr. Gradgrind did not seem favourably impressed by these cogent remarks." Yet what seems initially a silly, self-indulgent speech has deflected the father's wrath from his daughter and has suggested the terms for opposition—wonder, regret, desire.

Hard Times appears to authorize an oppositional discourse of fancy, which is lisped by the circus-master Sleary and represented in Sissy Jupe, the substitute mother whom Gradgrind praises as the "good fairy in his house" who can "effect" what 10,000 pounds cannot. Gradgrind's approval, and the conventionality of Sissy's depiction as a house fairy, devalues her status as an opposition figure. Indeed Sissy rarely speaks in opposition, or at all. Her power is cited by men like Harthouse and Gradgrind, and by the narrator. Unlike Mrs. Gradgrind, Sissy cannot be mocked for "cogent remarks," but simply looks at Louisa "in wonder, in pity, in sorrow, in doubt, in a multitude of emotions." Her effect is largely due to the novelty of her discourse, a novelty produced by her status as an outsider who does not understand the conventions of the system. "Possessed of no facts," girl number twenty does not recognize that "fancy" is a significant term, but uses it unthinkingly. She silences the cynical Harthouse by presenting "something in which he was so inexperienced, and against which he knew any of his usual weapons would fall so powerless; that not a word could he rally to his relief." Sissy insists on her words to Harthouse remaining a "secret" and relies on a "child-like ingenuousness" to sway her listener. And what Harthouse notices is her "most confiding eyes" and her "most earnest (though so quiet)" voice. Sissy's "wonder" is powerful only as long as she does not "speak" it in her own right, but presents it in her disengaged role as go-between. Her "power" depends on "her entire forgetfulness of herself in her earnest quiet holding to the object"—depends, in other words, on a strenuous denial of herself as a contestant for power. The narrator comments that "if she had shown, or felt the slightest trace of any sensitiveness to his ridicule or astonishment, or any remonstrance he might offer; he would have carried it against her at this point."

Sissy's discourse derives its power, not from any essential woman's knowledge that Louisa and her mother could share, but from her experience as a working-class child who knows counter examples and a different word than "fact." Louisa acquires from Sissy not the power to be "a mother—lovingly watchful of her children" but to be "learned in childish lore; thinking no innocent and pretty fancy ever to be despised." The opposition Sissy seems to represent—of imagination, emotion, questioning of patriarchal discourses—stands like the circus-master's fancy, a fantastic dream that amuses children but does not displace Gradgrindian fact. It has no ability to construct a shared feminine discourse that can alter the rigid polarities of fact and fancy, meaning and no-meaning. When Louisa tries to inquire about such forbidden topics as love, she is on her own, pursuing a "strong, wild, wandering interest peculiar to her; an interest gone astray like a banished creature, and hiding in solitary places."

In her dramatic confrontation with her father, Louisa tries to construct a realm outside the powerful sway of reason and logic. Yet she can imagine this realm only as the "immaterial part of my life," marking it as that which has no material existence or is irrelevant. She thereby perpetuates the construction of her world as absolute in its polarities—as world that is either material or immaterial, fact or fancy, reason or nonsense. To use Bakhtin's terms, she remains "bound" to "the authoritative word" in its totality; she cannot "divide it up," or "play with the context framing it" or "play with its borders." She suggests she might have come closer to a desired end "if I had been stone blind; if I had groped my way by my sense of touch, and had been free, while I knew the shapes and surfaces of things, to exercise my fancy somewhat, in regard to them." Passionate as this scene is, Louisa's specific argument shows the difficulty of evading the power of patriarchal discourse; she can only "prove" the worth of an oppositional realm by the tools she has learned from her father. Her vision remains defined as "no-meaning," as existing only in opposition to what persists as "meaning." Louisa tries to imagine a realm "defying all the calculations ever made by man, and no more known to his arithmetic than his Creator is," but ends up describing herself as "a million times wiser, happier." Like her mother, her power lies in speaking the father's word imperfectly, making her father's statistical practices meaningless by her exaggerated application. Like her mother, Louisa's complaints refer only to "something" missing; there are no words for what might be gained. The Gradgrind system is too powerful to allow Louisa or her mother to break away or to communicate very well with each other. All they can do, in their separate ways and unbeknownst to each other, is to disrupt the functioning of the father's word, and to indicate a lack, an incompleteness.

The schematic quality of Hard Times indicates a broader lack or incompleteness in the authoritative discourses of Dickens' social and literary world. Like Louisa and Mrs. Gradgrind, Dickens must articulate his valuing of "fancy" and his concern about crossing proscribed boundaries in language devalued by the patriarchal discourses of reason and fact. That Lewes sees him as hallucinating a world no wise man would recognize indicates the disturbing effect of this crossing of boundaries. Both Lewes and Dickens identify the disturbance as somehow connected with women, seeing women as touched by issues that more successfully acculturated males do not notice. Lewes saw much of Dickens' power—and what made him a disturbing novelist—as the ability to represent something that could not otherwise be acknowledged. "What seems preposterous, impossible to us," he wrote in 1872, "seemed to him simple fact of observation." Writing as a woman places Dickens in a position to observe what seems "preposterous, impossible."

At the same time, of course, for a powerful male novelist like Dickens, the position of outsider is exaggerated. Dickens can be seen as exploiting the exclusion and material oppression of women and the poor when they serve as analogies for his own more temperate marginality as a lower-middle class writer of fiction in a literary culture that preferred educated reason over experienced fancy. For male writers like Dickens and Trollope, writing "as a woman" brought literary respect and considerable financial return, whereas a writer like Charlotte Brontë was censured for her unwomanly productions and underpaid by her publisher. Unlike women who transgress the boundaries of the literary establishment, Dickens could signal his difference as significant rather than ridiculous. Unlike the poor with whom he was so closely identified, Dickens had access to the means of publication; he had the influence and position to pressure contemporary methods of production and dissemination of literary and social discourse. Such was his influence as spokesman of social discontent, that women writers of the nineteenth century, in both England and America, had to come to terms with his boundaries and codes, with his literary conventions for observing the social world and its institutions. Writers like Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Elizabeth Gaskell, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, and Rebecca Harding Davis both quote and revise his portrayal of women's writing and social position. Their attempts to write as women are circumscribed within Dickens' example and within the audience that he so powerfully swayed.

This assessment of Dickens' sympathetic identification with feminine discourses in the 1850s returns to the intertwined, ideological interests involved in any attempt to write "as a woman," in any project that assumes the position of an outsider, of an other. Dickens' experimentation with excluded positions of women and the poor provided him with a way of disrupting the status quo of the literary establishment. But, ironically, his experimentation also helped him capitalize on his status as an outsider in that literary realm. The inarticulate masses became, in effect, his constituency and his subject matter, supporting his powerful position within the literary and social establishment as arbiter of how to write about cultural exclusion. Dickens' growing influence as an editor and public spokesman for the literary world make his representations of women's writing dominate the literary scene. His example carves out a possible space for women writers in his culture, but it also takes over mat space as its own. His assumed position as outsider complicates assumptions about gender difference in writing and problematizes what Lewes so confidently called "genuine female experience." It disrupts and forces out into the open the literary establishment's defensive cultural narratives, and, in the process, constructs its own protective practices and standards. In writing as a woman, in speaking for a silenced group, Dickens both makes possible and makes complicated a challenge to "the father's word" by those who use "the mother-tongue."