I would like to extend to you a quote from Hard times that i feel is beautiful and yet seems to portray a message: Mama knows best.
In this part of the novel, Mrs. Gradgrind is in her death bed, weak and brittle. Louisa has come back home since many a long days and is going to see her mother before she passes away. As conversation begins Louisa says, " Are you in pain, dear mother?" and Mrs. Gradgrind replies with "I think there's a pain somewhere in the room" (193). If any of you have a close relationship with your parents and your mother specifically, it always seems that there is this telepathy that circulates between you and your mother. They sense things that you normally wouldn't even think possible. Now this isn't the case all the time but I feel as though we can all in some way relate to this situation where that someone, that mother knows whats wrong or that something is bugging you without you even giving way to it. When Mrs. Gradgrind says " There's a pain in the room" she refers to Louisa. Knowing how Louisa has developed as a character in the novel, she is a Mess, shes reached bottom. Marrying a man she despises, Supporting a Jackass of a Brother, being Suppressed by her father, and finally nearly seduced by Harthouse, Louisa has a lot of internal pain. The question that remains is how does she know all of this? how can her mother comprehend the pain that is invested in her daughter? who knows and that is what to this day some of us ask ourselves and that's what i think Dickens portrays in this quote, whether intentionally or not, his decision to put this in his novel greatly amplifies the scene and at the same time grabs and tie's you into the story, sending you off with Mama knows best.
Another way to take this quote when Mrs. Gradgrind says "I think there's a pain somewhere in the room"(193) is if we look at the fact-based perspective of Mrs. Gradgrind. She is "free from any alloy of that nature" (24), "that nature" being the nature of fancy. And although she does easily get stunned by facts, she does support the fact-based education of the book. Due to this nature, she may be following through to the end, for pain is a feeling, and by saying the room had that feeling instead of her, Dickens may be showing how she dehumanizes herself and is supporting factual-views despite the circumstances she is in (which are the signs of her death).
ReplyDelete-Jessica K.