A TALE OF TWO CITIES
| A TALE OF TWO CITIES |
Themes
The Ever-Present Possibility of Resurrection
With A Tale of Two Cities, Dickens asserts his belief in the possibility of resurrection and transformation, both on a personal level and on a societal level. The narrative suggests that Sydney Carton’s death secures a new, peaceful life for Lucie Manette, Charles Darnay, and even Carton himself. By delivering himself to the guillotine, Carton ascends to the plane of heroism, becoming a Christ-like figure whose death serves to save the lives of others. His own life thus gains meaning and value. Moreover, the final pages of the novel suggest that, like Christ, Carton will be resurrected—Carton is reborn in the hearts of those he has died to save. Similarly, the text implies that the death of the old regime in France prepares the way for the beautiful and renewed Paris that Carton supposedly envisions from the guillotine. Although Carton spends most of the novel in a life of indolence and apathy, the supreme selflessness of his final act speaks to a human capacity for change. Although the novel dedicates much time to describing the atrocities committed both by the aristocracy and by the outraged peasants, it ultimately expresses the belief that this violence will give way to a new and better society.
Dickens elaborates his theme with the character of Doctor Manette. Early on in the novel, Lorry holds an imaginary conversation with him in which he says that Manette has been “recalled to life.” As this statement implies, the doctor’s eighteen-year imprisonment has constituted a death of sorts. Lucie’s love enables Manette’s spiritual renewal, and her maternal cradling of him on her breast reinforces this notion of rebirth.
The Necessity of Sacrifice
Connected to the theme of the possibility of resurrection is the notion that sacrifice is necessary to achieve happiness. Dickens examines this second theme, again, on both a national and personal level. For example, the revolutionaries prove that a new, egalitarian French republic can come about only with a heavy and terrible cost—personal loves and loyalties must be sacrificed for the good of the nation. Also, when Darnay is arrested for the second time, in Book the Third, Chapter 7, the guard who seizes him reminds Manette of the primacy of state interests over personal loyalties. Moreover, Madame Defarge gives her husband a similar lesson when she chastises him for his devotion to Manette—an emotion that, in her opinion, only clouds his obligation to the revolutionary cause. Most important, Carton’s transformation into a man of moral worth depends upon his sacrificing of his former self. In choosing to die for his friends, Carton not only enables their happiness but also ensures his spiritual rebirth.
The Tendency Toward Violence and Oppression in Revolutionaries
Throughout the novel, Dickens approaches his historical subject with some ambivalence. While he supports the revolutionary cause, he often points to the evil of the revolutionaries themselves. Dickens deeply sympathizes with the plight of the French peasantry and emphasizes their need for liberation. The several chapters that deal with the Marquis Evrémonde successfully paint a picture of a vicious aristocracy that shamelessly exploits and oppresses the nation’s poor. Although Dickens condemns this oppression, however, he also condemns the peasants’ strategies in overcoming it. For in fighting cruelty with cruelty, the peasants effect no true revolution; rather, they only perpetuate the violence that they themselves have suffered. Dickens makes his stance clear in his suspicious and cautionary depictions of the mobs. The scenes in which the people sharpen their weapons at the grindstone and dance the grisly Carmagnole come across as deeply macabre. Dickens’s most concise and relevant view of revolution comes in the final chapter, in which he notes the slippery slope down from the oppressed to the oppressor: “Sow the same seed of rapacious license and oppression over again, and it will surely yield the same fruit according to its kind.” Though Dickens sees the French Revolution as a great symbol of transformation and resurrection, he emphasizes that its violent means were ultimately antithetical to its end.
Sacrifice
The theme of sacrifice is most strongly apparent in Sydney Carton’s decision to take Charles Darnay’s place, even though doing so means being executed. When the seamstress asks Carton if he is dying for the sake of Darnay, Carton agrees, and adds “And his wife and child”. Carton’s love for Lucie and her daughter encourages him to sacrifice himself because her happiness is more important than anything else. As a man who does not have a family of his own, he places more value on Darnay’s life than on his own. Carton is also aware that he has lived an unproductive and dissolute life, and that he has not offered much to the world. Carton believes that his act of sacrifice will redeem everything that has come before, and make his life meaningful. As he reflects to himself, “It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done before”.
Class
Social inequality and class conflict are sources of violent disruption and revolution in France. For generations, aristocrats like Monseigneur have thought of nothing else except their own pleasure and luxury. The narrator sarcastically parodies the pretentions of the upper-classes by describing how four servants are involved in serving an aristocrat his morning cup of chocolate, and noting that “Deep would have been the blot upon his escutcheon if his chocolate had been ignobly waited on by only three men”. Not only are the French aristocrats presented as spoiled and lazy, but they are also shown to be heartless and lacking in any regard for the lives of the lower-classes. Monseigneur cruelly tells the working class Parisians that “I would ride over any of you very willingly, and exterminate you from the earth”. The theme of class adds an important element of moral complexity to the novel because Dickens presents both the cruelty of the upper-classes and the brute violence of the lower-classes in equally damning terms.
Justice
Justice appears in the novel both in terms of the institutions that are supposed to serve it (courts and so on) as well as something that individuals struggle to achieve outside of those institutions. Justice is represented literally by the series of trials and imprisonments interwoven through the plot, including Doctor Manette’s lengthy imprisonment, Darney’s trial in London, and then his additional imprisonment and trial in France. While these plot episodes feature legal structures that are designed to bring individuals to justice, the courts and prisons largely subject innocent people to suffering. Perhaps because legal forms of justice so often prove incompetent, characters are also very invested in taking justice into their own hands. After Gaspard’s son is killed by the Marquis’s carriage, he knows he will never receive legal justice against a powerful man so he kills the Marquis himself. Likewise, Madame Defarge has been plotting revenge against the Evremonde family for decades because their wealth and status allowed them to commit terrible crimes against her family and evade legal repercussions.
Symbols
The Broken Wine Cask
With his depiction of a broken wine cask outside Defarge’s wine shop, and with his portrayal of the passing peasants’ scrambles to lap up the spilling wine, Dickens creates a symbol for the desperate quality of the people’s hunger. This hunger is both the literal hunger for food—the French peasants were starving in their poverty—and the metaphorical hunger for political freedoms. On the surface, the scene shows the peasants in their desperation to satiate the first of these hungers. But it also evokes the violent measures that the peasants take in striving to satisfy their more metaphorical cravings. For instance, the narrative directly associates the wine with blood, noting that some of the peasants have acquired “a tigerish smear about the mouth” and portraying a drunken figure scrawling the word “blood” on the wall with a wine-dipped finger. Indeed, the blood of aristocrats later spills at the hands of a mob in these same streets.
Throughout the novel, Dickens sharply criticizes this mob mentality, which he condemns for perpetrating the very cruelty and oppression from which the revolutionaries hope to free themselves. The scene surrounding the wine cask is the novel’s first tableau of the mob in action. The mindless frenzy with which these peasants scoop up the fallen liquid prefigures the scene at the grindstone, where the revolutionaries sharpen their weapons (Book the Third, Chapter 2), as well as the dancing of the macabre Carmagnole (Book the Third, Chapter 5).
Madame Defarge’s Knitting
Even on a literal level, Madame Defarge’s knitting constitutes a whole network of symbols. Into her needlework she stitches a registry, or list of names, of all those condemned to die in the name of a new republic. But on a metaphoric level, the knitting constitutes a symbol in itself, representing the stealthy, cold-blooded vengefulness of the revolutionaries. As Madame Defarge sits quietly knitting, she appears harmless and quaint. In fact, however, she sentences her victims to death. Similarly, the French peasants may appear simple and humble figures, but they eventually rise up to massacre their oppressors.
Dickens’s knitting imagery also emphasizes an association between vengefulness and fate, which, in Greek mythology, is traditionally linked to knitting or weaving. The Fates, three sisters who control human life, busy themselves with the tasks of weavers or seamstresses: one sister spins the web of life, another measures it, and the last cuts it. Madame Defarge’s knitting thus becomes a symbol of her victims’ fate—death at the hands of a wrathful peasantry.
The Marquis
The Marquis Evrémonde is less a believable character than an archetype of an evil and corrupt social order. He is completely indifferent to the lives of the peasants whom he exploits, as evidenced by his lack of sympathy for the father of the child whom his carriage tramples to death. As such, the Marquis stands as a symbol of the ruthless aristocratic cruelty that the French Revolution seeks to overcome.
Style
A Tale of Two Cities is written in a grandiose style. The omniscient narrator can see both into the past and the future, and uses this perspective to make sweeping pronouncements about human nature and what lies ahead. For example, after the Marquis heartlessly kills a young boy, the narrator describes how “The water of the fountain ran, the swift river ran, the day ran into evening, so much life in the city ran into death according to rule, time and tide waited for no man.” Imagery of water, and the repetition of the word “ran” creates the sense of looming disaster, and turns one specific event into a part of larger pattern. This style contributes to the effect of recounting history, because singular events are shown to cause major shifts in society. This same style is also evident at the novel’s conclusion when the narrator describes Carton’s prophetic vision of the future. He is able to look beyond the violence of the Revolution and predict: “I see the evil of this time … gradually making expiation for itself and wearing out.”
Characters
Charles Darnay -
A French aristocrat by birth, Darnay chooses to live in England because he cannot bear to be associated with the cruel injustices of the French social system. Darnay displays great virtue in his rejection of the snobbish and cruel values of his uncle, the Marquis Evrémonde. He exhibits an admirable honesty in his decision to reveal to Doctor Manette his true identity as a member of the infamous Evrémonde family. So, too, does he prove his courage in his decision to return to Paris at great personal risk to save the imprisoned Gabelle.
Sydney Carton -
An insolent, indifferent, and alcoholic attorney who works with Stryver. Carton has no real prospects in life and doesn’t seem to be in pursuit of any. He does, however, love Lucie, and his feelings for her eventually transform him into a man of profound merit. At first the polar opposite of Darnay, in the end Carton morally surpasses the man to whom he bears a striking physical resemblance.
Doctor Manette -
Lucie’s father and a brilliant physician, Doctor Manette spent eighteen years as a prisoner in the Bastille. At the start of the novel, Manette does nothing but make shoes, a hobby that he adopted to distract himself from the tortures of prison. As he overcomes his past as a prisoner, however, he proves to be a kind, loving father who prizes his daughter’s happiness above all things.
Lucie Manette -
A young French woman who grew up in England, Lucie was raised as a ward of Tellson’s Bank because her parents were assumed dead. Dickens depicts Lucie as an archetype of compassion. Her love has the power to bind her family together—the text often refers to her as the “golden thread.” Furthermore, her love has the power to transform those around her. It enables her father to be “recalled to life,” and it sparks Sydney Carton’s development from a “jackal” into a hero.
Monsieur Defarge -
A wine shop owner and revolutionary in the poor Saint Antoine section of Paris, Monsieur Defarge formerly worked as a servant for Doctor Manette. Defarge proves an intelligent and committed revolutionary, a natural leader. Although he remains dedicated to bringing about a better society at any cost, he does demonstrate a kindness toward Manette. His wife, Madame Defarge, views this consideration for Manette as a weakness.
Madame Defarge -
A cruel revolutionary whose hatred of the aristocracy fuels her tireless crusade, Madame Defarge spends a good deal of the novel knitting a register of everyone who must die for the revolutionary cause. Unlike her husband, she proves unrelentingly blood-thirsty, and her lust for vengeance knows no bounds.
Jarvis Lorry -
An elderly businessman who works for Tellson’s Bank, Mr. Lorry is a very business-oriented bachelor with a strong moral sense and a good, honest heart. He proves trustworthy and loyal, and Doctor Manette and Lucie come to value him as a personal friend.
Jerry Cruncher -
An odd-job man for Tellson’s Bank, Cruncher is gruff, short-tempered, superstitious, and uneducated. He supplements his income by working as a “Resurrection-Man,” one who digs up dead bodies and sells them to scientists.
Miss Pross -
The servant who raised Lucie, Miss Pross is brusque, tough, and fiercely loyal to her mistress. Because she personifies order and loyalty, she provides the perfect foil to Madame Defarge, who epitomizes the violent chaos of the revolution.
Marquis Evrémonde -
Charles Darnay’s uncle, the Marquis Evrémonde is a French aristocrat who embodies an inhumanly cruel caste system. He shows absolutely no regard for human life and wishes that the peasants of the world would be exterminated.
Mr. Stryver -
An ambitious lawyer, Stryver dreams of climbing the social ladder. Unlike his associate, Sydney Carton, Stryver is bombastic, proud, and foolish.
John Barsad - Like Roger Cly, John Barsad is a British spy who swears that patriotism is his only motive. Barsad falsely claims to be a virtuous man of upstanding reputation.
Roger Cly -
Like John Barsad, Roger Cly is a British spy who swears that patriotism alone inspires all of his actions. Cly feigns honesty but in fact constantly participates in conniving schemes.
Gabelle -
The man charged with keeping up the Evrémonde estate after the Marquis’ death, Gabelle is imprisoned by the revolutionaries. News of his internment prompts Darnay to travel to France to save him.
