Technologies of Power in the Victorian Period Print Culture, Huma ...

engaged texts as authentic representations of society. How working-class readers then reconstructed their personal narratives in actuality suggests the effects of social assimilation upon subjective identity and advances the claim that industrial novels did not provide solutions to the social and economic maladies they reported. Rather, they contextualized social and cultural problems without recognizing the dangers of how the decontextualized imagination of the reader locates placement within the same ontological and epistemological assumptions.

As print culture asserted its representational claims, people who were being disenfranchised and shut out of the dialogue (i.e., the working class) developed new modes of speech through participation within crowd formations. Crowds rivaled the novels’ representational claims by demonstrating their potential for envisioning new and distinct social orders yet to be realized (Plotz 2). Were it not for the aggregation of individual speech, crowds would be nothing more than a sign of themselves, a symbolic representation of speechless masses that inhabit the periphery of industrial novels. The ways in which speech is rendered or withheld within the crowd demonstrate its contradictions as well as its capacity for yielding linguistic exchanges. However, unlike the novel, the crowd's contradictions assume a physical embodiment that makes linguistic power exchanges possible.

Critics such as Nancy Armstrong and Garrett Stewart have considered the ways in which Victorian novelists such as Charlotte Brontë, Charles Dickens, and George Eliot addressed representations of speech in fictional discourse. However, these critics have not thoroughly evidenced “the simple fact that voice persists in the discourse of print culture, where it remains as trace and residue capable of giving rise to inchoate new forms” of speech, forms which might reengage critique of the human condition (Kreilkamp 2). In each of the selected industrial novels,