Hard Times and Our Collaborative Writing Project

I've started re-reading Hard Times by Dickens.  Some of the main issues I'm finding in the book are mechanization, the loss of imagination, and the loss of identity. 

First, in the second chapter, we see the idea of mechanized humans.  The schoolmaster, Mr. MChoakumchild, is introduced in this way: "He and some one hundred and forty other schoolmasters, had been lately turned at the same time, in the same factory, on the same principles, like so many pianoforte legs."  He has become the product of a factory, churned out to act just the same as all the other products, and to raise up and make more products just like himself.  The reasoning adults see this as a good thing; making everything standardized, including people, is efficient.

However, the individual is lost in this standardization, along with imagination. For example, after giving her name, Sissy Jupe is told she shouldn't go by Sissy because it isn't a name, and she should call herself Cecilia.  Later, Mr. Bounderby asks if Sissy would carpet a room with pictures of flowers on it, and she says she would.  He asks why and she says, "If you please, sir, I am very fond of flowers."  Mr. Bounderby asks, "And is that why you would put tables and chairs upon them, and have people walking over them with heavy boots?"  She says, "It wouldn't hurt them sir.  They wouldn't crush and wither if you please, sir.  They would be the pictures of what was very pretty and pleasant, and I would fancy--" "Ay, ay, ay!  But you mustn't fancy."  Not only is Sissy renamed, she is told she must not imagine things.  The name of this chapter is Murdering the Innocents.  Of course the adults are not literally killing the children, but they are destroying their individualism.  They are making them into mechanized products without identity, and without imagination.


In our digital culture, we similarly have a crisis of identity.  Our education doesn't center on destroying fancy, but online avatars and the way we interact in social media do not necessarily reflect who we are in real life.  The anonymity we find online allows us to act differently than we normally would. 

While I am reading Hard Times, I'm also starting a collaborative writing project.  Several other students and I are going to write a book based on a plot outline.  So far, the main idea of our book centers around a Second Life kind of social networking site that is modeled to look like the world of Jane Austen.  Also, when you enter this world, you are completely immersed in it, like in The Matrix.  Our main character is a spy, and is constantly having to changer her identity, but online she actually feels like herself.  Her real life and her virtual life will collide when she discovers the man she's fallen in love with online is the man she's been hunting for years.  She will have to find a balance between what she wants, and what is right.

In Hard Times, everyone is standardized and losing themselves to industrialization.  In the book we'll be writing, our main character is trying to find out who she really is and who everyone else is, too.