Manliness in the Age of the Anthropocene: Unsustainalbe Ecologies of Masculinity in Hard Times

Abstract

Studies of Victorian work, political economy, industrialism, and realism in Hard Times have taken for granted Charles Dickens’s broad range of masculine figures represented in the text. Dickens’s novel explores the environmental costs of masculine ideologies conceived as endless struggle and competition. The novel’s depiction of an ecological crisis in Coketown functions as an ideological critique of Victorian toxic masculinity in a double sense: as a form of masculinity that harms both women and men socially, physically, and psychologically and as a pandemic deeply linked to a larger environmental crisis caused by unsustainable forms of economic expansion. All masculine characters in Coketown embody toxic forms of masculinity that cause suffering for others and for themselves. Toxic masculinity represents both a symptom of environmental disaster in the novel and a great facilitator of climate change denial. To think ecologically in the novel entails an implicit challenge to masculinist ideologies predicated on the subordination of women and the exploitation of the environment.