The Individual vs. Society: Hard Times
through Fact and Fancy
Marly Hazen

What is the role of the individual in society? Should the individual do what pleases the rest of the society? Or should the individual be an innovator, rebelling against the norms of the society? Which is better for the society, and is there any happy solution for the individual? Charles Dickens uses the characters of wistful Louisa Gradgrind and her practical parents to tackle these hard questions in his pertinent novel Hard Times.
Louisa Gradgrind, a child mechanically molded into artificial adulthood, represents the role of an individual in an increasingly industrialized civilization. Societal pressures, namely her family and its unyielding educational methods, forcefully attempt to shape Louisa to fall into her roles as intellectual and future wife without any desire for desire, without any spark of fancy in her forlorn face. Louisa resents these pressures, but she is too downtrodden and inexperienced to rebel effectively from them.

Poor Louisa. Raised (or rather, lowered) into a life of frosty facts, an act as simple as her playfully mischievous glimpse toward a circus evokes her father’s meticulously measured indignation.

Thomas Gradgrind, overly concerned with maintaining predictability, reprimands his daughter with the suggestion that Mr. Bounderby would think little of her curiosity. As Bounderby’s closest acquaintance, Gradgrind should know that Bounderby seems to think little outside himself – truly, he seems to think little at all. Apparently Thomas Gradgrind overlooks this critical fact, and his hollow ignorance peals with a deafening hopelessness around his eldest child.

Louisa is trapped. She is trained to possess qualities that Bounderby would theoretically espouse in himself; practicality, reason, and logic – these are to be the guiding forces of her life. Like the perfect machine, she would be as free as any human could be from the errors of emotion.

Thus, Hard Times suggests that society wields its power of authority over individuals to make them as industrialized and inhuman as possible. The book implies that the industrialized society dictates that a means is naught, and an end is all. In other words, it makes no difference that Louisa is unhappy with her education or her lifestyle – she will be educated, and she will have the lifestyle that society demands. Moreover, she should not wish otherwise because society insists that she not wish at all.

Louisa matures according to schedule. She studies all her “ologies”, as her mother calls them; she discovers the overbearing nature of fact. Soon, the only facts shaping Louisa’s life are her marriageable age and the proposal of her despised admirer, Bounderby. It is clear that even if she were to marry him and distance the society of Fact that her parents hurl at her she would still be barred from expressing her sentiments and desires. Though she may have a new captor, she would continue to be trapped – imprisoned by a man who considers his beloved to be his pet, imprisoned by yet another who sees her as less than fully human.
Desperate, Louisa wants to weep at the feet of her parents. She loses hope at the idea of moving from the familiar home of her cold, but good-intentioned, father to the abode of a miserable braggart of a husband. She fleetingly considers killing her pride, sobbing and begging her parents to realize that she loathes everything about Bounderby and his proposal. Her father notices her flinch before her resignation, but he is now too hardened and unprepared to reach her emotionally. Her mother doesn’t even stop her constant self-lament to notice a change in her daughter. How can Louisa beg her parents to dismiss Bounderby’s proposal, to free her for the possibility of love someday, when her father cannot comprehend sentiment and her mother constantly bemoans creating her?

Louisa cannot explain her feelings; she is too far distanced from her parents. Consequently, she bends to the rule of the masses; she accepts the one she hates to appease the ones she loves. Her father, mother, and brother applaud her rational decision to marry Bounderby, and Louisa forfeits herself to a lifetime of inhumanity – reasoning, but never feeling joy; thinking, but never feeling love.

But society does not always triumph absolutely over the individual, and Louisa indeed learns to care for another. When Harthouse, a younger socialite, stirs her with talks of love, Louisa is torn between thoughts of duty and feelings of passion. Unable to choose, she returns miserably to her father’s house. She blames her father for letting her learn nothing about fancy and for suggesting that she marry a man she hates. She has finally broken down and admitted her possession of a heart, and this desperate action disquiets her father so much that he regrets his entire school of thought. Gradgrind realizes that people are not governed solely by fact, and his attempts to deny his daughter’s humanity have made her helpless to find happiness.

Unfortunately, Louisa’s impact on society is still limited. Rather than an abrupt revolution of all around her, she changes others individually, reshaping them with more compassion than before. Although still powerless to change bombastic Bounderby, Louisa has at least influenced her family. She is home with her family again, but this time she is unrestrained by the failings of fact.

Sissy, the housekeeper Louisa once scorned for being too whimsical, agrees to help teach Louisa what her husband and family cannot – to cultivate the beauty of wonder and fancy. Because of her childlike kindness, Sissy immediately forgets Louisa’s past coldness and makes every effort to help her.

Convinced that the only way to tend Louisa’s troubled heart is to remove the temptation of her new suitor, Sissy confronts Harthouse with the fact that his departure is the only way to provide some peace for Louisa. Though she has now been abandoned by both Bounderby and Harthouse, Louisa is comforted by the fact that she no longer has to conform to either’s inclinations.

Though Sissy was born into the fanciful world of the circus and Louisa was born into the rational world of factory-like education, they both long for freedom and fancy. Furthermore, many individuals in Hard Times make an impression on their immediate society, but few spread such positive reverberations.

The Gradgrinds and Bounderbys of the world may restrain individuals in society for a while, but the dreamers are the ones who break the restrictions. They may not always win the best for themselves – indeed, Louisa is left without someone to love – but they can build toward a more hopeful future for themselves and their society. Perhaps there is little power without fact, but without fancy, there is no growth.n the end, Dickens does not offer a clear solution to the problem of social injustice. The readers are left with the same difficulties as the characters, challenged to nurture dreams of love and possibility with no assurance of a just reward for their courage. The readers are challenged to live their lives with fancy not because living with fancy will change society, but because living with fancy will change the readers. Fancy is the only route to wonder, hope, and love, and Hard Times advocates that individuals must take this route to better themselves, and by doing so, bettering society.

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