Discussion Topic
Sissy Jupe's Symbolism and Significance in Hard Times
Summary:
Sissy Jupe in Charles Dickens' Hard Times symbolizes imagination, compassion, and individuality, contrasting the utilitarianism of Gradgrind's world. As a circus performer's daughter, Sissy embodies creativity and empathy, challenging the fact-based ideology of Coketown. Despite being deemed an educational failure, she retains her humane values, influencing characters like Louisa Gradgrind. Sissy's presence highlights the importance of emotional intelligence and underscores the novel's critique of industrial society's dehumanizing focus on facts over feelings.
What is the role of Sissy Jupe in Hard Times?
Sissy Jupe brings a ray of light and life into the serious and rationalistic world of the Gradgrinds and Coketown. The daughter of circus worker, she represents poetry, imagination, and pleasure. Mr. Gradgrind views circuses as a shameful and ridiculous waste of time and resources. They have no use value in his number-crunching and utilitarian view of the universe—but they are the culture from which this caring girl springs.
Dickens uses the young and innocent Sissy to articulate humane values that treat human beings as individuals rather than numbers. She gets in trouble at school for these views. For example, when she is supposed to be impressed by the reduction in the aggregate number of fatalities in street accidents, she insists on worrying about the grief and suffering of those who still do die. She therefore raises important questions about the utilitarian philosophy of the greatest good for the greatest...
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number. What is good for most people doesn't negate the suffering of the few.
Through Sissy, Dickens points out an alternative perspective to the grim factory and productivity ethos that prevails in Coketown. Love, creativity, and individual human lives matter to Sissy, and since she is a character we like and identify with, we see the wisdom in her worldview.
How does Charles Dickens make Sissy Jupe significant in Hard Times?
Sissy Jupe from the start lights up the cold, fact-based world of the Grandgrinds, Mr. M'Choakumchild, and Coketown. The child of a circus clown, Sissy is the only person in the Gradgrind world, once her father abandons her, who fully embodies imagination, empathy, and common sense. All of this adds up to goodness: she is a central figure of importance because she represents a humane outlook in a world that has gone mad in its reliance on facts and figures and has lost sight of people.
When we first meet Sissy in the utilitarian schoolroom, she is described as being bathed in light, symbolizing that she is lit up by her imaginative center. This foreshadows that she will be a figure of light in the novel:
Sissy, being at the corner of a row on the sunny side, came in for the beginning of a sunbeam . . . the girl was so dark-eyed and dark-haired, that she seemed to receive a deeper and more lustrous colour from the sun, when it shone upon her.
Sissy counters and punctures the utilitarian philosophy of the "greatest good for the greatest number" when she shows empathy for those who are ground up by the system. She stands up for the idea that every life has value. In the classroom, Mr. M'Choakumchild means for his students to think highly of the fact that, out of a million, "only five- and-twenty are starved to death in the streets, in the course of a year," and asks, "What is your remark on that proportion?" Sissy gets in trouble for saying:
And my remark was—for I couldn't think of a better one—that I thought it must be just as hard upon those who were starved, whether the others were a million, or a million million.
She also gets in trouble for saying she reads fairy stories to her father:
"About the Fairies, sir, and the Dwarf, and the Hunchback, and the Genies," she sobbed out; "and about—"
"Hush!" said Mr. Gradgrind, "that is enough. Never breathe a word of such destructive nonsense any more."
Because of her caring nature, Sissy befriends and helps a large number of characters in the novel, showing the positive side of having an imaginative nature. She helps her father before he leaves her and then helps Mrs. Gradgrind. She sides with and supports Louisa against Mr. Gradgrind, and she befriends Rachel. Because Sissy takes a walk with Rachel, they are able to find Stephen.
Sissy illustrates Dickens's idea that imagination and compassion are good character traits, not traits that need to be eradicated.
What does Sissy Jupe symbolize in Hard Times?
Sissy Jupe represents all the magic, compassion, and creativity that has been sucked out of life by Gradgrind's fact-focused utilitarian philosophy. She is the abandoned daughter of a circus performer, and her roots in that imaginative world form who she is. To people like Gradgrind, the wonder and artistry of a circus is a waste of time and effort, as all it produces is joy. To Sissy, such joy is at the heart of life.
Sissy never takes to utilitarian philosophy, and some of the novel's comedy arises by her inability to understand how she is supposed to view life. When school teaches her that it is a great happiness that only a few thousand people have been killed, a reduction in overall numbers, she wonders about the grief of the families of the dead. When Gradgrind tells her that she has been an educational failure, she agrees—but goes on being the compassionate, caring, and sensible person she is.
Sissy symbolizes that kind of grounding Tom and Louisa lack, as feeling and imagination are integrated into who she is. She symbolizes a whole person, while Tom and Louisa represent people left full of fatal holes because they have been educated to value money over all else. She can end up happy and fulfilled because of her expansive ability to care and feel for others.
Comment on Sissy Jupe's education in Hard Times.
It is important to identify Sissy Jupe's function in this tremendous novel concerning Victorian industrialisation and utilitarianism. Cecilia Jupe is the daughter of a clown in Sleary's circus, and as such, becomes the representative of "Fancy" and the imagination and operates as a foil to Louisa. Sissy shows that she has a great imagination and is compassionate, whereas Louisa is strictly rational and mostly is unable to express her feelings. Their friendship as the novel progresses allows Louisa to explore and gradually express her own sensitivity.
In Chapter Two, however, we see Sissy bearing the brunt of Mr. Gradgrind's full educational prowess. Under his system of education, Sissy is a complete failure. She is unable to "define" a horse, even though she has lived and worked with them all of her life in the circus. Then she says she would carpet her room with representations of flowers because she is "very fond of flowers," because "they would be pictures of what was very pretty and pleasant." However, in response to this "fancy," she is told by both her teachers:
"Ay, ay, ay! But you mustn't fancy," cried the gentleman, quite elated by coming so happily to his point. "That's it! You are never to fancy."
"You are not, Cecilia Jupe," Thomas Gradgrind solemnly repeated, "to do anything of that kind."
"Fact, fact, fact!" said the gentleman. And "Fact, fact, fact!" repeated Thomas Gradgrind.
Clearly, in response to the foundational importance of fact and the complete extinction of fancy that Gradgrind's education requires, Sissy Jupe is never going to succeed. However, in spite of this education, it is important to note that Sissy develops into a young woman who is able to maintain her own principles and beliefs, as opposed to Bitzer or Louisa, who become warped as a result of their education.