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

the printed word does “turn on itself and invest extraordinary value in an idealized version of the speech community it had relegated to the past, a community for which the novel offered itself as both substitute and cultural memory” (Kreilkamp 3). It is this same community that has been either displaced by technical progress or relocated to the periphery of Victorian society as an anomaly, such as Sleary's circus in Hard Times. At the circus, the performers’ manipulation of speech through creative uses of gesture, intonation, and other visual and auditory cues demonstrates how language games may be used as techniques of resistance to cultural narratives. It is through language games that Sleary's performers revalue how power is made equitable through linguistic exchanges. By allocating social spaces within society for anomalies like Sleary's circus, society becomes aware of its own structural deficiencies and falsely represents those deficiencies, a process that begins through the recognition of anomalous cultural formations that cannot ever be fully purged from within dominant culture and ends with the creation of fictional representations that prevent full ideological disclosure.

Each of the industrial novelists employs speech in different ways. Brontë uses speech as a signifier of individuality and collectivity within distinct types of crowd formations (i.e., passive or aggressive). Dickens stresses speech's potential for reconstituting ethical language and moral consciousness, for expressing alteration and contextuality, for exercising free will, and for making choices of accountability. And finally, Eliot offers speech as a reminder of preindustrial society, in which customs, traditions, and rituals were orally performed as a means for reaffirming one's sense of belonging. In each case, there is a common theme of how linguistic power exchanges had been either altered or inhibited by technical progress and the diffusion of print culture. This alteration is further demonstrated by the ways