Human Dignity In Hard Times And Night And Day: Personal Freedom, Pride, And Social Pressure

Abstract

Human dignity in realist fiction is often revealed not through heroic triumph but through the everyday struggle to remain a full person under systems that reduce life to utility, reputation, or obedience. This article offers a comparative reading of Charles Dickens’s Hard Times (1854) and Abdulhamid Cho‘lpon’s Kecha va kunduz (Night and Day, first published in 1936) as two realist responses to dehumanizing social orders in different historical and cultural settings. Dickens constructs Coketown as an industrial-ideological environment shaped by “facts,” profit, and disciplinary routine, where personal freedom is narrowed and pride is manipulated into compliance. Cho‘lpon depicts early twentieth-century Turkestan as a space of colonial and local power entanglements, where gendered norms, status hierarchies, and coercive institutions pressure the individual, particularly women, into moral and emotional self-erasure. Using close reading and contextual comparison, the study shows that both novels stage dignity as a fragile balance between inner integrity and external survival demands. In Dickens, dignity is threatened by utilitarian education and market logic but defended through compassion, imagination, and moral refusal. In Cho‘lpon, dignity is contested through shame, surveillance, and patriarchal control, while freedom appears as an ethical aspiration shaped by modernist reform impulses and intimate suffering. The article argues that pride functions ambivalently in both works: it can be a resource of self-respect or a social instrument that disciplines the powerless. By tracing how narrative voice, characterization, and key moral crises dramatize freedom under pressure, the article demonstrates realism’s capacity to become national-cultural heritage precisely through its ethical attention to the person.