Student Question
What is the relationship between Louisa and Tom in Hard Times?
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Louisa and Tom Gradgrind in Charles Dickens's Hard Times are siblings who respond differently to their harsh upbringing. Louisa becomes emotionally detached, while Tom seeks pleasure to escape their cold home environment. Their relationship is authoritative and emotionless, reflecting the damaging effects of their father's utilitarian philosophy. Ultimately, Louisa begins to break free from this emotional suppression, seeking love and emotions.
In Charles Dickens's novel Hard Times, Louisa and Tom Gradgrind are sister and brother. The two siblings have very different responses to their difficult upbringing at the hands of Thomas Gradgrind Sr. and the passive, depressed Mrs. Grandgrind, their mother.
Louisa reacts to their unhappy home life by losing touch with her feelings. In one of the novel's most famous lines, we indirectly get a picture of the muffled, stifled quality of Louisa's emotional life through her comment on an industrial scene:
There seems to be nothing there but languid and monotonous smoke. Yet when the night comes, fire bursts out.
In contrast to Louisa, Tom responds to their cold, chilly home environment by drowning his sorrows in a futile search for pleasure and distraction.
Unfortunately, Tom and Louisa are unable to draw comfort from one another. Dickens's portrayal of the Gradgrind family's relationships reflects his sense that...
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the philosophy of utilitarianism (to which Gradgrind Sr. adheres) has profoundly damaging effects on familial relationships, as well as individual prospects for happiness.
What is the relationship between Louisa and Tom in Hard Times?
Theirs is an authoritative, emotion-less and yet enmeshed relationship in which Tom reigns supreme while Louis, albeit against her inner will, simply obeys conforming to the role that she occupies in the family, and to her role as a woman.
They are each other's mirrors. He is the cold hearted, emotion-less and matter of fact teacher whose job is to live in reality and detach himself from romantic ideals. Likewise, he teaches his children the same pattern of thought, and Louise somehow follows his steps.
When she is asked to marry for convenience, she accepts and, when she became fed up and realized that emotions do exist, she still went back to her father= this shows that, although emotions were not a lesson taught in the family, dignity and sticking to what is propriety definitely was.
In the end, we see that Louise finally detaches from the psychological enmeshment that her father had made of their cold, matter of fact relationship and opens up to love and emotions without looking back.