“Ideological fabrications”: Charles Dickens and Michel Foucault

Barry Stiltner, Purdue University

Abstract

In my project, I attempt to extend the theoretical connections between Dickens and Foucault established by D. A. Miller, Jeremy Tambling and Cynthia Northcutt Malone (among others). Specifically, I argue that Dickens's novels are not only sites of such Foucauldian thematics as the culture of “discipline,” the carceral society, and the institutional construction of “individuals,” but that Dickens theoretically prefigures, if not precedes, Foucault in recognizing the disciplinary machinery that insinuated itself into Western culture in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. For example, I argue that in Hard Times, Bounderby's textile mills and Gradgrind's school go beyond defining roles for people within the Victorian social contract; they are agents of a “disciplinary society” that is focused on the refashioning of the “self” into a docile institutional appendage. Gradgrind's school is, in effect, a disciplinary rookery. I also try to establish how such institutional critiques connect to my other concern in Dickens's novels: his ideological structure. For it seems that Dickens's novels are so replete with ideological ruptures and contradictions that any political reading ultimately confronts a decentered terrain as it attempts an ideological taxonomy. As oppositional sites interact with the more conservative resonances in Dickens, an ideological destabilization occurs. That is, an ideological flux, a mixture of vitriol and compromise, permeates the novels. Dickens, I argue, is a novelist whose radical voice is constantly attempting to emerge amid such a dialogism. This ideological tension, like the collision of submerged tectonic plates, vibrates throughout Dickens's novels. The decentering one encounters in his novels is its epicenter. Such a thematic torsion spins out into the conservative and radical ideologies in Dickens's novels. Both of these “Dickenses” can occur in many sites within the same novel, with political registers often breaking down and overarching ideological perspectives losing continuity. I also look at how “identity” is inflected, especially institutionally, in various novels. I look at received critical conceptions of the “self” and attempt to trace out how the Dickens world is populated not only with exemplars of stability such as David Copperfield, but also institutional victims (such as Bleak House's Guster) and disciplinary products (such as Hard Times's Bitzer). In the final chapter, I examine how identity, discipline, confession, and institutional networks intersect in the thematics of Great Expectations .

Degree

Ph.D.

Advisors

Palmer, Purdue University.

Subject Area

British and Irish literature

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