The Abject Mother and the Passionless Angel: The Representation of the Domestic Woman in Hard Times

Abstract

The nineteenth-century anesthesia debate points at the contradictory representations of female nature in Victorian England: woman as essentially sexual and reproductive; woman as a moral, spiritual being, the domestic ideal. Focusing on the split in Hard Times between sensual and angelic women, this essay examines how young maidens take over the duties of the domestic angel for which their mothers turn out unfit. This essay begins by looking at the unstable position of the mother in Hard Times. Mother figures fail in performing the role of the domestic angel because they are associated with the body and sexuality. This essay then explores how domestic angels are defined in the novel. Unlike threatening mothers, young maidens are not attached to material bodies and somatic desires, and confine themselves to household management, to the assumed role of the angel. The mother who is defined to embody domestic goodness loses her angelic nature because her sexuality primarily threatens domestic happiness. Instead of the sexualized, abject mother, the passionless maiden comes to perform the role of the domestic angel. In the novel, actual angelic women are socially marginal class characters such as Sissy Jupe and Rachael. These lower-class angels enact happiness and goodness in the household whose rightful residents fail to accomplish, and by doing so, register what constitutes middle-class virtue and morality.