LECTURE 14
Recap: Dysfunctional Workplace and Proposed Reforms
1. Republican Fraternity (no individual Liberty )
2. Social Paternalism
Sleary's Horse-Riding: (I: Chap VI)
Happy family ideal; paternal and maternal care
Disguised problems of gender and class
Problems
Who decides who is a self-governing adult?
1. Women as adults (separate spheres)?
2. Workers as adults (no vote, but well-being is important)?
Dysfunctional Marriage
--Domestic Angels, (Rachel: and Sissy)
--Fallen Wives (Mrs. Blackpool and Louisa)
--woman as moral influence in the domestic sphere (Rachel: 81, 85-86, 147) [Sissy as spiritual resource: 205 below]
--fallen wives: leaving the straight and narrow path of respectability
James Harthouse and Mrs. Sparsit (gentry)
JH = chivalric cynicism (Choice: lacking moral gravitas, manly earnestness) 156-157
vs
LB = distressed indifference (Fate: lacking tools for moral judgment)
JB = bully & hypocrite
MS = resentment & bad faith?
Louisa = Fall as moral collapse
Sissy = Angel as spiritual resource that requires reciprocal acceptance 205
BOOK III: GARNERING
1. Stephen's "muddle"
2. Gradgrind and the End of Fact
261: Tom, self-interest's confession
263-4: Bitzer, fact has "no heart"
266-7: Circus as Imaginative/the public family that helps the private family?
Query: Compassion works for the compassionate, or workers continue to oblige masters?
Bounderby & Comic Farce:
--"Found": the "Bully of Humility" humiliated
--Josiah the self-made spectacle
--Fact exposed as Fiction (JB as storyteller like Scheherazade and the Brothers Grimm p. 50)
--His will? The law takes his money (272-273)
Women's lot: CIX 394-398
Sparsit: condemned to good connections
Rachel: content worker
Sissy: "happy" with "happy children"
Louisa: no re-marriage; good works.
Query: Simplicity and domesticity are rewarded; intelligence and rebellion are punished?
The writer and the reader:
Like happy Sissy, we must do our duty, which is ? (look carefully at the last page of the novel)