Louisa character sketch

“Burying yourself in your feelings leaves you to be a living corpse” and hence Louisa’s lack
of emotions and coldness of her heart led her to her own downfall.
Charles Dickens a famous Victorian author, wrote the play Hard Times to taunt the utilitarian
system of education and industrialisation. He uses the character of Louisa to show the
superiority amongst genders during the era along with breaking the stereotypical idea for
women being gentle and representing traits of femininity. He does this by a befitting use of
characterisation, the theme of mechanical upbringing and the theme of femininity.
Louisa, a silent, cold and seemingly unfeeling woman, was never able to express herself due
to the barrier of her father’s practicality, blocking her way to the fancy world of imagination
and creativity. We first see Louisa as a girl raised on the principles of utilitarianism, but still
trying to fill the empty containers of imagination secretly placed in her heart, which were
always ripped away from her by her extremely practical father, Mr.Gradgrind. As the book
proceeds, we start pitying her as we see her getting emotionally destroyed each and every
day. Louisa was a caring and a compassionate women with the weighs of industrialisation
hanging other delicate shoulders, but this never kept her away from feeling for others. We
see this when Sissy comes in to stay at the Stone Lodge after her father abandons her, and
instead of being a self-centered person, “Louisa saw that she was sobbing; and going to her,
kissed her; took her hand, and sat down beside her”. This shows how emotionally strong and
empathetic Louisa was, that even after not being able to empathise with her own misery, she
had the strength to comfort others. We even get a glance of her tender nature when after
Bounderby fires and humiliates Stephen, Louisa had the kindest to go pay them a visit and
ask them that she “should like to be serviceable” to them if they let her, and handed them a
bag of money. In the end, after all that Louisa had been through in the loveless marriage
with Mr.Bounderby and the affair with Mr. James Harthouse, she finally gathered her guts to
face her father and tell him that she “curses the hour” she was born in which led her to this.
She claimed how could he give her life and take from her “all the inappreciable things that
raise it from the state of conscious death”. She referred to the snatching of imagination from
her, which not only took away all her hope but also the reason to stay happy. Her finally
standing up to her rights, she wins her life back and takes control of it, but most importantly a
little happiness along with fatherly love. Through characterisation, Dickens brings out the
barriers created by the utilitarian system.
Louisa lacks the ability to interact and feel with those cold emotions resting in her. Through
the use of the theme of mechanical upbringing, Dickens shows the cold creatures moulded
by Mr.Gradgrind from his children. Louisa was a product of this system as Mr. Gradgrind
wanted to present her as a model being of this teaching and style of upbringing, as he
judged life with cold calculations and statistical thoughts. For him, “no little Gradgrind the silly
jingle, Twinkle, twinkle little star: how I wonder what you are! No little Gradgrind had ever
known wonder on the subject, each little Gradgrind having at five years old dissected the
Great Bear like a Professor Owen and driven Charles’s Wain like a locomotive engine
driver.” The result of this mechanical and factual upbringing of Louisa creates a barrier
between herself and the world of imagination and fancy, which leads her into an unhappy
marriage with a self-centered man. Louisa’s face has a “light with nothing to rest upon, a fire
with nothing to burn, a starved imagination keeping life in itself somehow, which brightened
its expression”; the spark of imagination and creativity she had within herself was
extinguished by the cold calculation and mathematical thoughts stuffed in her head by her
eminently practical father. Louisa always had the curiosity to know how it feels like when you
are brought up in the world of fiction and fantasy and probably that's what drove her to peek
into the circus and fuel her starving imagination. She even used to have conversations with
her brother saying “Tom, I wonder” where her father would quickly put a stop to her
blossoming imagination by yelling, “Louisa, never wonder”; but this never stopped her to be
inquisitive about it as she still claimed that she has “such unmanageable thoughts, that they
will wonder”. Due to Louisa lacking a friendly father-figure in her life, she was always eager
about what it felt like to have an understanding one. We notice that when we spot her asking
Sissy questions about her father, with a “strong, wild, wandering interest peculiar to her; an
interest gone astray like a banished creature, and hiding in solitary places”. Louisa’s
repressed innate nature keeps coming to surface, again and again, seeking one day it would
be accepted by herself and others around her. Dickens use of the theme of mechanical
upbringing of the Gradgrind children shows how dominated they were, especially Louisa by
the utilitarian system of education, and even more, the ones who nurtured it.

Louisa, although one of the main characters of the novel, is still distinctive from the other
women as she is the complete opposite of what would otherwise have been called,
embodiments of femininity. As the stereotypical women of the Victorian era were, she was
unable to feel and express her emotions. “There seems to be nothing there but languid and
monotonous smoke. Yet when the night comes, Fire bursts out”, this shows her repressed
emotions trying to break free from the cuffs of utilitarianism, but the one holding them
hostage is no one but her own father. Though being incapable to feel anything, Louisa
aways had the decency to never hurt others and distinguish between right and wrong. She
even apologises to Tom by saying “I don’t know what other girls know. I can't play with you
or sing to you. I can’t talk to you as to lighten your mind, for I never seen amusing sights”.
This shows how different she was from other women of that era and couldn’t perform one
single task that was similar to others. Her lack of knowledge as to what girls do, made her
think she was useless and rather a weight on the shoulders of her family, and couldn’t
achieve anything. But with the help of Sissy’s guidance, Louisa stands up to her father by
asking him “where are the graces” of her soul, and “the sentiments” of her heart, that makes
a soul beautiful. The moment she empties her heart to her father, that very moment her life
takes a drastic turn, to what somehow maybe be called happiness, which she finds in Sissy’s
family. Through the theme of femininity, Dickens breaks the stereotypical boundaries of the
Victorian era and portrays its flaws.
Hard Times, a famous novel of the 18th century highlights the miserable conditions of
utilitarianism. Through the character of Louis, Dickens shows the hardships women faces in
their day to day lives. He does this by the apt use of characterisation, the theme of
mechanical upbringing and theme femininity.