From English Literature in Transition

Patricia Johnson the danger-working women posed to the middle class. They become signposts for violence, harassment, and weakness in the Victorian social model. Johnson resurrects the image of the factory girl, juxtaposing weak, helpless victims with a “larger pattern that uses monstrous, sexualized working-class women as emblems of ultimate social chaos.’ She carefully deconstructs the power structure between class and gender and cautions readers that the representations of the working-class women in any capacity threatened to reveal working women’s true role as tools for middle-class men and women. She particularly positions working-class women as isolated cultural pariahs, victimized by all other women, and depicted as immoral deviants and political symbols. The first section of the text, “Industrial Fictions,” addresses the conflict between Victorian ideology, and the real dangers and difficulties faced by working women as an unusual category of “public women.” In the second section, “Women, Class, and Politics,” Johnson explores women’s troubled political representation in Disraeli’s Sybil. She reflects “Harriet is the concluding sign that just manages to hint at the need for women to connect with specific class and gender experiences in order to represent her own interests, rather than those of men.” Domesticity for the working-class woman was not the same domestic life of other women, and Johnson explores how working-class women negotiated those limits through religion and perseverance. Johnson concludes with the violence women suffered and inflicted as public violence was transferred to a private space. This section, “Class Relations”, and the epilogue invite readers to contextualize Hidden Hands as a new portal of discovery rather than a definitive catalogue.

English Literature in Transition