ABSTRACT
Dickens’ problems with male sexuality and with work lead him to idealize women and to see them as separated from both work and sex. The same kind of anxiety, that women working would somehow become sexualized, as was betrayed in the 1842 Mines Act, informs Dickens’ representation of women and work in these novels. The smoke serpents of Coketown seem an odd feature of industrialization initially; the smoke is a sign of industrial work, but this smoke is connected with sexual transgression. While Dickens may make appeals for the plight of the worker, on a symbolic level the text suggests that work is an unavoidable consequence of a general human fall from grace. The contradiction for literary men who worked at home contributed to their fear of ‘effeminization’ within a society that conflated ‘public’ with masculine for the middle class and differentiated the competitive marketplace from the private ‘feminine’ space of the home.
