“Why, He Formed Me That Way”: Patriarchy, Pedagogy, Capitalism, and (False) Consciousness in Charles Dickens’ Hard Times.

Abstract

Through the use of Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, bell hooks’ Teaching to Transgress, and Erich Fromm’s Marx’s Concept of Man, amongst other works, this analysis will attempt to analyze the subject/object, public/private, and the masculine/feminine dichotomies that arise in nineteenth-century England. Using Charles Dickens’ Hard Times as a basis for this discourse analysis, I will explore the following: Patriarchy and capitalism as interconnected systems of domination that (re)produce and purposefully instill Marx’s concept of false consciousness and alienation in an attempt to train, as Victorian economist Andrew Ure explains in his Philosophy of Manufactures, “human beings to renounce their desultory habits of work and to identity themselves with the unvarying regulatory of the complex automaton” (Ure 15).

Works Cited

Ure, Andrew. The Philosophy of Manufactures; Or, An Exposition of the Scientific, Moral, and Commercial Economy of the Factory System of Great Britain. London: C. Knight, 1835. Google Books. Google, 28 June 2007. Web. 2 Apr. 2015.