By Joseph Ziesing
The breadth of social and political discourse resulting from Charles Dickens’s novels often reaches beyond the Victorian era and anticipates questions raised by contemporary theorists. Likewise, Dickens’s Hard Times seemingly anticipates psychoanalytic, feminist theory by producing the characteristics of the “male gaze” through the eyes of Stephen Blackpool. Laura Mulvey first postulated the idea of the male gaze in her essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” exposing classical Hollywood’s tendency to reduce women to visually pleasing objects—victims of scopophilia. Dickens anticipates the male gaze’s fetishistic and voyeuristic impulses; and, subsequently, uses Stephen’s gaze to demonstrate the relationship between desire and the male gaze, so that the novel’s later elimination of this gaze reveals the Lacanian “asymptotic distance” between the individual and desire.
Critics tend to analyze Dickens’s Hard Times with capitalist and Marxist lenses in mind, but Stephen Blackpool’s gaze moves past this framework and examines the desires that these systems create and the ultimate fallibility of these desires. Two primary perspectives surround Stephen. The first places Stephen between the opposing philosophies of Slackbridge’s workers union and Mr. Bounderby’s industry. He acts as a passive participant—a bystander—demonstrating incapability and lack of virtue or “over-idealized” virtue (Dereli 102). The second view emphasizes Stephen’s importance to the novel’s idea of “fancy” or imagination—viewing Stephen as a sort of saint or martyr who imbues the story with a romantic vision of the world (Smith 169). In either case, these views attribute Stephen’s peculiarities to Dickens’s attempt to caricature the alienation of the worker within capitalism.
However, the explanations for these characteristics have varied wildly over time. The theorists of fancy disagree on Dickens’s use of imagination. Some believe it restores the meaning “once offered in religious faith” (Higbie 91), while others believe that imagination ultimately fails to offer hope to a working-class world (Barnes 252). The economists instead note Dickens’s use of power structures—“the named” and “the namers” or the employed and the employers—as a means of identifying the unescapable weakness that Stephen inhabits (Rounds 39-40). However, a more nuanced understanding of the relationship between imagination and reality in Hard Times comes from critic David Wilkes: “Dickens gives his readers both a working-class hero and a societal monster, a martyr and an idle man” (156). Wilkes dissects Hard Times and finds complexity embedded into the desires of the working class—a desire epitomized by Stephen’s gaze. Ultimately, these theories situate the text within a conversation of imagination and reality, framing the novel around the search for fulfillment through desire and its attainability.
To best understand the influence of desire in Hard Times, the narrative between Stephen, Rachael, and Mrs. Blackpool must be unraveled. Thus, the male gaze becomes crucial to defining the interplay between Stephen’s desires and his projected gaze on these women. Mulvey explains two primary manifestations of scopophilia (the pleasure in looking). There is voyeuristic scopophilia: “[the] pleasure in looking at another person as object [unbeknownst to them]” (Mulvey 1174), and narcissistic scopophilia—wherein the viewer “[identifies] with the image seen” within a story (Mulvey 1175). For Mulvey, both are crucial to the male gaze, as oftentimes women are subjected to voyeuristic scopophilia as “image” while men become “bearer of the look” by lending their gaze to the viewer. In either case, Mulvey argues that the gaze causes the audience to oscillate between two modes of spectating: voyeuristic sadism and fetishistic scopophilia. Through the lens of Stephen’s gaze that demonstrates the eternal denial of desire, Dickens seemingly anticipates Mulvey’s theory—namely that such a prolonged gaze produces extreme responses to scopophilia.
In his debut chapter, entitled “Stephen Blackpool,” Stephen is not introduced until the end of the second paragraph: both paragraphs are more concerned with describing Coketown and its inhabitants than Stephen. Consequently, the novel characterizes him as an onlooker. Smith similarly recognizes that Stephen’s sense of identity is folded into his own view of the world. “[T]he reader is to see Stephen in terms of his environment” (162). Rather than developing Stephen with an identity—a fulfilled individual—he is epitomized by his perception. It is not accidental that Stephen’s first words in the novel are “[y]et, I don’t see Rachael still” (67). Not only does this statement develop Stephen’s gaze as an onlooker, but also Rachael’s priority within it and his deferred sense of desire. He is unable to inhabit reality without becoming a gazer. However, rather than improving Stephen, this gaze hollows him out. He is left empty and indecisive. He defers his confusion to “a muddle” (Dickens 68). Accordingly, the audience inhabits this sense of narcissistic scopophilia through Stephen’s gaze—further inducing a sense of voyeuristic pleasure for the viewer while separating Stephen from a real sense of fulfilled existence.
Another crucial paradigm for Stephen’s sense of fulfillment is his repeated glorifying of Rachael’s appearance. The audience gazes upon Rachael with a fetishistic scopophilia—even when pursuing Stephen, a married man—thus she remains blameless. Stephen beholds her. While Rachael becomes the bearer of the look, she is known foremost by her appearance: “She went, with her neat figure and her sober womanly step, down the dark street, and he stood looking [… T]here was not a flutter of her coarse shawl, perhaps, but had its interest in this man’s eyes” (Dickens 69). This is a common occurrence, with all but one of their interactions marked by his captive eye. As each appraisal of Rachael builds off the last, she becomes a fetishized object. There is no avenue for Stephen to enact his desire without discoloring the saintliness of the image he has constructed: “fetishistic scopophilia, builds up the physical beauty of the object, transforming it into something satisfying in itself” (Mulvey 1177). Rachael inhabits the fetishized object, reflecting a beautified icon that can distract Stephen’s unsatisfied desires while never moving closer to fulfilling them.
Furthermore, Stephen imposes the male gaze on his wife as a means of justifying his gaze upon Rachael. Mrs. Blackpool is never given a moment to defend herself because at every avenue she is stained by Stephen’s perception of her: “A creature so fowl to look at, in her tatters, stains, and splashes, but so much fouler than that in her moral infamy, that it was a shameful thing even to see her” (Dickens 70). The gaze becomes sadistic as she is abhorred, yet the audience accepts it because of the sense of voyeuristic justice. Mrs. Blackpool is made into a repulsive hindrance to Stephen’s desire for Rachael. Even in his kindest moments towards his wife, Stephen clearly acts out of selfish interest rather than goodwill: “[He] moved but once all that night. It was to throw a covering over her; as if his hands were not enough to hide her, even in the darkness” (Dickens 70). She becomes a stain to his gaze, a reminder that he cannot have Rachael. No law exists to free him. Therefore, he covers her as an act of sadism. He casts guilt at her own inability to meet her needs and dissuades his own inability to fulfill his desires.
Subsequently, Stephen goes astray from his gaze in the Old Hell shaft, which isolates him from his desires and leaves him in inky darkness. The momentum of Stephen’s gaze is shattered as he comes to terms with a sightless reality—except a piercing light that cuts through his muddle and reveals his inability to meet his desires. It is when he is furthest from desire that he sees it was never attainable: “this form situates the agency of the ego […] which will always remain irreducible for the individual alone, or rather, which will only rejoin the coming-into-being of the subject asymptotically” (Lacan 1124). In this moment, his sense of desire is at its lowest. He is cut off from everything except the star, and he recognizes his own deep-seated imperfection. He cannot fulfill his desires, and he recognizes that living for his desires has left him hollowed out. It has not gotten him closer to meaning because his desires cannot give him meaning. They are eternally distant from him.
Thus, he lies in the shaft, contemplating the muddle of desire and pain he has lived through. He reaches a moment of transparency: “It ha’ shined upon me,’ he said reverently, ‘in my pain and trouble down below. It ha’ shined into my mind. I ha’ look’n at ’t and thowt o’ thee, Rachael, till the muddle in my mind have cleared awa, above a bit, I hope” (Dickens 264). Stephen gazes into the star, and the many nights in the shaft teach him the truth: Rachael is “fu’ of faults” (Dickens 89). She cannot live up to his gaze, and he cannot fetishize her anymore. He must give up on the gaze altogether. Finally, his imagination makes him a martyr as the laying aside of his desire leaves him to accept of his lack of fulfillment.
Consequently, Stephen grasps at the hope of a diminished depravity, but he again realizes he cannot improve the human condition: “I ha’ seen more clear, and ha’ made it my dyin prayer that aw th’ world may on’y coom toogether more, an’ get a better unnerstan’in o’ one another, than when I were in ’t my own weak seln” (Dickens 264). His eyes avoid Rachael—recognizing that she will never embody his conceived desire, and he fixes his gaze upon the star above him. But even this gaze is cut off, as Stephen chooses to completely “coover [his] face” (Dickens 265). Ultimately, this allows Stephen to reject his desire by eliminating his gaze. This covering severs the icon of his desire, cutting through the fetish, the sadist, and the muddle.
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