The Repressed Individual in Charles Dickens's Great Expectations
Journal Title: Ankara Üniversitesi Dil ve Tarih-Coğrafya Fakültesi Dergisi - Year 2017, Vol 57, Issue 2
Abstract
Charles Dickens's Great Expectations (1861) represents the early nineteenth-century English society from a mid-Victorian perspective and demonstrates the process in which Victorian social ideals are formed through respectability at the beginning of the nineteenth century. In the light of the critical perspective of the Frankfurt School theorists Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, this article argues that the bourgeois society in the early nineteenth century represented in Charles Dickens's Great Expectations controls the individuals through normative values of the middle class and a process of identity construction enabled by false consciousness shapes the individuals' identity in order to protect the established social order. Hence, the hegemonic middle-class values in the early nineteenth century are treated as means of subjecting the individuals to social order. The protagonist Pip desires to become a gentleman almost all his life and he tries to adapt himself to the expectations of the middle-class society in London. Pip believes that social mobility is possible if he conforms to dominant norms imposed on the individuals. In Great Expectations, the conflict between the individual and the bourgeois society is experienced particularly by Pip whose identity is formed by the normative and homogenous social order to serve society. So, this article argues that, in line with Horkheimer's and Adorno's criticism of the bourgeois industrial society, the early nineteenth-century English society represented in Dickens's Great Expectations creates repressed individuals who conform to the social order, and demonstrates that the individuals are in conflict with the bourgeois industrial society.
Authors and Affiliations
Ömer ÖĞÜNÇ
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