What happens to Louisa in Hard Times?
Louisa ends up a good student of the hard-headed, money-oriented utilitarian education that her father provides for her. She marries Josiah Bounderby, another hardheaded individual, for his money and influence, despite his being thirty years her senior. She is not in love with him, but as she has been taught all her life to put aside all feelings as sentimental and impractical, this does not, at first, matter to her.
Louisa ends up unhappy in her loveless marriage and becomes easy prey for Harthouse, who convinces her to run off with him. In the end, however, she lacks the courage to do so and returns to her father's house. Gradgrind is shocked and saddened at the results of his upbringing and repents of how he has raised Louisa.
When Mrs. Sparsit reveals to Bounderby Louisa's intended elopement, he is angry and sends Louisa an ultimatum that she must return to...
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him by a certain time. Louisa cannot bear to do so, and so she remains at her father's house.
Louisa is depicted by Dickens as a victim of a misguided education and a false set of values that puts money and pragmatism ahead of love, compassion, creativity, and wonder. Despite Sissy's attempts to help her, Louisa sadly ends up trapped in a world in which she doesn't know how to understand her feelings or experience real joy. At the end of the novel, the narrator speaks of Louisa's future, relating that she will never again marry or have children, but Sissy's children will love her, and Louisa will, seeing it "as a duty to be done," try to "beautify their lives of machinery and reality."
What went wrong with Louisa in Hard Times?
The chapter that you need to focus on is Chapter Twelve of Book the Second, entitled "Down." It is in this Chapter that Louisa, having said to James Harthouse that she will run away with him, runs instead to her father and, using very harsh words that cannot be misinterpreted, curses the way she was brought up and blames it for the emotional confusion she is experiencing at this stage of her life. Note what she declares to her father about James Harthouse and her relationship with him, and how she comments upon her upbringing:
"This night, my husband being away, he has been with me, declaring himself my lover. This minute he expects me, for I could release myself of his presence by no other means. I do not know that I am sorry, I do not know that I am ashamed, I do not know that I am degraded in my own esteem. All that I know is, your philosophy and your teaching will not save me. Now, father, you have brought me to this. Save me by some other means!"
Thus it is that Louisa's breakdown comes as a result of recognising the complete inability of a fact-based upbringing to save her from a situation which has arisen in her feelings that she does not know how to handle because she never was aware that she had those feelings in the first place. The facts of her father have resulted in her emotional stunting in her adulthood, and the attentions of James Harthouse have exploited this.