THE REPRESSED INDIVIDUAL IN CHARLES DICKENS'S GREAT EXPECTATIONS1

Charles Dickens'ın Great Expectations (Büyük Umutlar) (1861) romanı on dokuzuncu yüzyıl başındaki İngiliz toplumunu yüzyılın ortasındaki bakış açısıyla betimler ve Victoria dönemindeki toplumsal ideallerin saygınlık kavramı aracılığı ile yüzyılın başındaki şekillenme sürecini gösterir. Bu makale, Frankfurt Okulu teorisyenlerinden Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno'nun eleştirel bakış açısı ışığında, Dickens'ın bu romanında betimlenen burjuva toplumunun orta sınıfa ait katı kurallar ile bireyi kontrol altında tuttuğunu ve bununla birlikte aynı toplumsal düzenin yanlış bilinçlendirmeye dayalı bir kimlik oluşturma süreci neticesinde kurulu toplumsal düzeni korumak için bireylerin kimliğini şekillendirdiğini savunmaktadır. Romanın başkahramanı Pip neredeyse tüm hayatı boyunca bir beyefendi olmayı ister ve Londra'daki orta sınıf toplumun beklentilerine uyum sağlamaya çalışır. Pip'e göre sını?ar arasında yukarı doğru hareket etmek, bireylere dayatılan hâkim kurallara uyum sağlaması koşuluyla mümkündür. Romanda birey ile burjuva toplumu arasındaki çatışma özellikle Pip karakterinde gözlenir ve Pip'in karakteri de topluma faydalı olması için baskıcı ve bireyler arasındaki farklılaşmaları reddederek onları aynılaştıran toplumsal düzen tarafından şekillendirilir. Bu makale, Horkheimer ve Adorno'nun burjuva sanayi toplumu eleştirisine uygun olarak, Dickens'ın Great Expectations romanında betimlenen on dokuzuncu yüzyıl İngiliz toplumunun, toplumsal düzene uyum sağlamak üzere baskılanmış bireyler yarattığını ve bireylerin burjuva sanayi toplumu ile çatışma yaşadığını ortaya koyar.

CHARLES DICKENS'IN GREAT EXPECTATIONS ESERİNDE BASKILANAN BİREY

Charles Dickens's Great Expectations (1861) represents the early nineteenth-century English society from a mid-Victorian perspective and demonstrates the process in which Victorian social ideals are formed through respectability at the beginning of the nineteenth century. In the light of the critical perspective of the Frankfurt School theorists Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, this article argues that the bourgeois society in the early nineteenth century represented in Charles Dickens's Great Expectations controls the individuals through normative values of the middle class and a process of identity construction enabled by false consciousness shapes the individuals' identity in order to protect the established social order. Hence, the hegemonic middle-class values in the early nineteenth century are treated as means of subjecting the individuals to social order. The protagonist Pip desires to become a gentleman almost all his life and he tries to adapt himself to the expectations of the middle-class society in London. Pip believes that social mobility is possible if he conforms to dominant norms imposed on the individuals. In Great Expectations, the conict between the individual and the bourgeois society is experienced particularly by Pip whose identity is formed by the normative and homogenous social order to serve society. So, this article argues that, in line with Horkheimer's and Adorno's criticism of the bourgeois industrial society, the early nineteenth-century English society represented in Dickens's Great Expectations creates repressed individuals who conform to the social order, and demonstrates that the individuals are in conict with the bourgeois industrial society

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