A Tale of Two Cities(part2)

Analysis
A Tale of Two Cities is one of only two works of historical fiction by Dickens (Barnaby Rudge is the other one). It has fewer characters and sub-plots than a typical Dickens novel. The author's primary historical source was The French Revolution: A History by Thomas Carlyle: Dickens wrote in his Preface to Tale that "no one can hope to add anything to the philosophy of Mr CARLYLE'S wonderful book"[11] Carlyle's view that history cycles through destruction and resurrection was an important influence on the novel, illustrated especially well by the life and death of Sydney Carton.


[edit] Language
Dickens uses many literal translations of French idioms (such as "What the devil do you do in that galley there?"), which are presumably intended to make Paris seem more foreign in comparison to London. The Penguin Classics edition of the novel notes that "ALL readers have regarded [this] experiment as a success."[12]


[edit] Humour
Dickens is renowned for his humour, but A Tale of Two Cities is one of his least comical books. Nonetheless, Jerry Cruncher, Miss Pross, and in particular Mr. Stryver provide much comedy. Dickens also uses sarcasm as humour in the book to show different points of view.


[edit] Foreshadowing
A Tale of Two Cities positively overflows with foreshadowing. Carton's promise to Lucie, the "echoing footsteps" heard by the Manettes in their quiet home, and the wine spilling from the wine cask are only a few of dozens of instances. Cartons promises Lucie he would die for her because he loves her so much. Echoing footsteps can either be the people coming into their lives or the revolutionaries. The wine spilling in the streets can be blood running thorugh the streets of France. The wine cask breaking is a corrupted government, freedom, or blood from guillotine.


[edit] Themes

[edit] "Recalled to Life"
The theme of resurrection runs through the entire novel; it is the first theme invoked (in Jarvis Lorry's thoughts of Dr. Manette) as well as the last one (in Carton's sacrifice). Dickens originally wanted to call the entire novel Recalled to Life. (This instead became the title of the first of the novel's three "books".)

In Dickens' England, the idea of resurrection always sat firmly in a Christian context. Most broadly, it is Sydney Carton who is resurrected in spirit at the novel's close (even as he, paradoxically, gives up his physical life to preserve Darnay's — just, of course, as Christians believe that Christ died for the sins of all mankind.) More concretely, "Book the First" deals with the rebirth of Dr. Manette from the living death of his incarceration.

The theme of resurrection first appears when Mr. Lorry replies to the message carried by Jerry Cruncher with the words "Recalled to Life". Then, during Mr Lorry's coach ride to Dover, he ponders repeatedly a hypothetical conversation with Dr. Manette:("Buried how long?" "Almost eighteen years." ... "You know that you are recalled to life?" "They tell me so.") He regards himself as the vehicle for Dr. Manette's revival, and imagines himself physically "digging" Dr. Manette from his grave.

Jerry is also drawn into the theme: he himself is involved in death and resurrection in way that the reader does not yet know. The first piece of foreshadowing comes in his remark to himself: "You'd be in a blazing bad way, if recalling to life was to come into fashion, Jerry!" The black humour of this statement becomes obvious only in hindsight. One stormy night five years later (in June 1780[13]), Mr Lorry reawakens the reader's interest in the mystery by telling Jerry that it is "Almost a night ... to bring the dead out of their graves". Jerry responds firmly that he has never seen the night do that.[14]

It turns out that Jerry Cruncher's involvement with the theme of resurrection is that he is what the Victorians called a "Resurrection Man", one who (illegally) digs up dead bodies to sell to medical men (there was no legal way to procure cadavers for study at that time).

The flip side of resurrection is death, which also appears often in the novel. Dickens is angered that in both France and England, courts hand out death sentences for insignificant crimes. In France, peasants are even put to death without any trial, at the whim of a noble. The Marquis tells Darnay with pleasure that "[I]n the next room (my bedroom), one fellow ... was poniarded on the spot for professing some insolent delicacy respecting his daughter - his daughter!"[15]

Interestingly, the demolition of Dr. Manette's shoe-making workbench by Miss Pross and Mr Lorry is described as "the burning of the body".[16] It seems clear that this is a rare case where death or destruction (the opposite of resurrection) has a positive connotation, since the "burning" helps liberate the doctor from the memory of his long imprisonment. But Dickens' description of this kind and healing act is strikingly odd:


"The Accomplices", an illustration for Book 2, Chapter 19 by "Phiz"So wicked do destruction and secrecy appear to honest minds, that Mr Lorry and Miss Pross, while engaged in the commission of their deed and in the removal of its traces, almost felt, and almost looked, like accomplices in a horrible crime.[17]

Sydney Carton's martyrdom atones for all his past wrongdoings. He even finds God during the last few days of his life, repeating Christ's soothing words, "I am the resurrection and the life".[18] Resurrection is the dominant theme of the final part of the novel. Darnay is rescued at the last moment and recalled to life; Carton chooses death and resurrection to a life better than that which he has ever known: "it was the peacefullest man's face ever beheld there ... he looked sublime and prophetic".

In the broadest sense, at the end of the novel Dickens foresees a resurrected social order in France, rising from the ashes of the old one.


[edit] Water
Many in the Jungian archetypal tradition might agree with Hans Biedermann, who writes that water "is the fundamental symbol of all the energy of the unconscious — an energy that can be dangerous when it overflows its proper limits (a frequent dream sequence)."[19] This symbolism suits Dickens's novel; in A Tale of Two Cities, the frequent images of water stand for the building anger of the peasant mob, an anger that Dickens sympathises with to a point, but ultimately finds irrational and even animalistic.

Early in the book, Dickens suggests this when he writes, “[T]he sea did what it liked, and what it liked was destruction.”[20] The sea here represents the coming mob of revolutionaries. After Gaspard murders the Marquis, he is “hanged there forty feet high - and is left hanging, poisoning the water.”[21] The poisoning of the well represents the bitter impact of Gaspard's execution on the collective feeling of the peasants.

After Gaspard’s death, the storming of the Bastille is led (from the St. Antoine neighbourhood, at least) by the Defarges; “As a whirlpool of boiling waters has a centre point, so, all this raging circled around Defarge’s wine shop, and every human drop in the cauldron had a tendency to be sucked towards the vortex...”[22] The crowd is envisioned as a sea. “With a roar that sounded as if all the breath in France had been shaped into a detested word [the word Bastille], the living sea rose, wave upon wave, depth upon depth, and overflowed the city...”[23]

Darnay’s jailer is described as “unwholesomely bloated in both face and person, as to look like a man who had been drowned and filled with water.” Later, during the Reign of Terror, the revolution had grown “so much more wicked and distracted ... that the rivers of the South were encumbered with bodies of the violently drowned by night...” Later a crowd is “swelling and overflowing out into the adjacent streets ... the Carmagnole absorbed them every one and whirled them away.”

During the fight with Miss Pross, Madame Defarge clings to her with “more than the hold of a drowning woman”. Commentators on the novel have noted the irony that Madame Defarge is killed by her own gun, and perhaps Dickens means by the above quote to suggest that such vicious vengefulness as Madame Defarge's will eventually destroy even its perpetrators.

So many read the novel in a Freudian light, as exalting the (British) superego over the (French) id. Yet in Carton's last walk, he watches an eddy that "turned and turned purposeless, until the stream absorbed it, and carried it onto the sea" - his fulfillment, while masochistic and superego-driven, is nonetheless an ecstatic union with the subconscious.


[edit] Darkness and light
As is common in English literature, good and evil are symbolised with light and darkness. In particular, Lucie Manette is often associated with light and Madame Defarge with darkness.

Lucie meets her father for the first time in a room kept by the Defarges: "His old white head mingled with her radiant hair which warmed and lighted it as though it were the light of freedom shining on him." Lucie's hair symbolises joy as she winds "the golden thread that bound them all together". She is adorned with "diamonds, very bright and sparkling", and symbolic of the happiness of the day of her marriage.

Darkness represents uncertainty, fear and peril. It is dark when Mr Lorry rides to Dover; it is dark in the prisons; dark shadows follow Madame Defarge; dark, gloomy doldrums disturb Dr Manette; his capture and captivity are shrouded in darkness; the Marquis’s estate is burned in the dark of night; Jerry Cruncher raids graves in the darkness; Charles's second arrest also occurs at night. Both Lucie and Mr Lorry feel the dark threat that is Madame Defarge. "That dreadful woman seems to throw a shadow on me," remarks Lucie. Although Mr Lorry tries to comfort her, "the shadow of the manner of these Defarges was dark upon himself". Madame Defarge is "like a shadow over the white road", the snow symbolising purity and Madame Defarge's darkness corruption. Dickens also compares the dark colour of blood to the pure white snow: the blood takes on the shade of the crimes of its shedders.


[edit] Social injustice
Charles Dickens was a champion of the maltreated poor because of the terrible experience when he was forced to work in a factory as a child. His sympathies, however, lie only up to a point with the revolutionaries; he condemns the mob madness which soon sets in. When madmen and -women massacre eleven hundred detainees in one night and hustle back to sharpen their weapons on the grindstone, they display "eyes which any unbrutalised beholder would have given twenty years of life, to petrify with a well-directed gun".

The reader is shown the poor are brutalised in France and England alike. As crime proliferates, the executioner in England is "stringing up long rows of miscellaneous criminals; now hanging housebreaker ... now burning people in the hand" or hanging a broke man for stealing sixpence. In France, a boy is sentenced to have his hands removed and be burned alive, only because he did not kneel down in the rain before a parade of monks passing some fifty metres away. At the lavish residence of Monseigneur, we find "brazen ecclesiastics of the worst world worldly, with sensual eyes, loose tongues, and looser lives ... Military officers destitute of military knowledge ... [and] Doctors who made great fortunes ... for imaginary disorders".[24]

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