Charles Dickens’s Reactionary Reform

Mary L. Mullen
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Abstract

This chapter demonstrates how Charles Dickens’s novels embrace ‘reactionary reform’: a vision of the future that is actually a return to an anachronistic past. Reactionary reform restores origins that institutions erase in their drive towards futurity, whether those origins are Sissy Jupe’s life with her father in Hard Times, Esther Summerson’s parentage in Bleak House or the humble home that Pip mistakenly disavows in Great Expectations. Reactivating origins allows a different stance towards institutions: instead of settling down and accepting their established rhythms, characters inhabit institutions, dwelling temporarily in them without acceding to their terms. But Dickens’s vision of reform does not extend to everyone. He reinforces settler colonialism by representing particular groups of people as outside of history and futurity altogether. Validating anachronisms and criticising them in turn, Dickens imagines progressive change that rejects modern institutionalism but, in the process, shores up the racialised abstractions upon which settler colonial institutions depend.
查尔斯·狄更斯的反动改革
本章展示了查尔斯·狄更斯的小说是如何拥抱“反动改革”的:一种对未来的展望,实际上是对一个不合时宜的过去的回归。反动的改革恢复了那些在追求未来的过程中被制度抹去的起源,无论是《艰难岁月》中娘娘腔朱佩与父亲的生活,《荒凉山庄》中埃斯特·萨默森的父母出身,还是《远大前程》中皮普错误地否认的简陋家庭。重新激活起源允许对制度采取不同的立场:而不是安定下来并接受其既定的节奏,角色居住在制度中,暂时居住在其中而不加入他们的条款。但狄更斯的改革愿景并没有延伸到所有人。他通过将特定人群完全排除在历史和未来之外来强化定居者的殖民主义。狄更斯对时代的错误进行了验证和批判,他想象了一种进步的变革,这种变革拒绝了现代制度主义,但在这个过程中,却支持了殖民制度所依赖的种族化的抽象概念。
本文章由计算机程序翻译,如有差异,请以英文原文为准。
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