Dickens, Charles Reference library
The Oxford Encyclopedia of British Literature
...in Hard Times . This system of inversions normalizes middle-class gender roles while rendering somewhat suspect whatever agency Dickens's “good” working-class women assume. His narratives also harshly punish socially or politically active middle-class women, such as Mrs. Jellyby and Mrs. Pardiggle of Bleak House . Dickensian women who fail to meet the angelic ideal often function as helpers in the narrative of male desire. David Copperfield's autobiographical story gradually tames his “undisciplined heart,” for example, through the sequence of his romantic...
