French revolution as a feminine character in Charles Dickens's A
Tale of two Cities, Why? A feminist new historicist reading1
Reza Sattarzadeh Nowbari
Abstract
The texts are conceived not as mere reflectors of, but rather as active contributors
to the historical process they illuminate. New Historicists don't believe that we
have clear access to any but the most basic facts of history. Any given event is a
product of its culture, but it also affects the culture in return. In other words, all
events are shaped by and shape the culture in which they emerge.
Dickens, in A Tale of Two Cities, traces the private lives of a group of English
people caught up in the cataclysm of the French Revolution but what the reader has
in mind after reading the novel is the brutal scenes of the Robespierrean Reign of
Terror. For Dickens, the outcome of the revolution is 'the newly born female,
called La Guillotine, a devouring and insatiate monster, a rapacious woman whose
appetite can never be satisfied'. Even the representation of the prominent
revolutionary figure is a woman called Madame Defrage who becomes the leader
of the mob in the revolutionary path and urges them for more and more blood.
The findings confirm that Dickens's perception of the French Revolution in A Tale
of Two Cities is a negative one in which he gives voice to the harsh brutality of the
Revolution and wants the predominant leading group to know that what happened
in France in 1789 may one day happen in England. The paper aims to evaluate the
reasons for the negative female representation of the French revolution from a new
historicist's point of view combined with that of a feminist.
Key Words: New Historicism, French Revolution, Charles Dickens, History, 19th
Century, Victorian England
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1. Women and their role in The French Revolution
It has unanimously been acknowledged by the historians that the French
Revolution has been the greatest revolution in the history of the west. Much has
been said and discussed about the origins and the very structure of the French
Revolution, from the incompetency of Louis XVI, ignorance of the aristocracy,
hardship of French people's life, Robespierre fiery harangues which ultimately
orchestrated the Revolution, the brutality of the Revolution to the overthrown
monarchy and the Reign of Terror and the guillotining of Robespierre and the end
of the reign of Terror and the rise of the new Republic, to name a few. But much
less has been said about the role of women in the Revolution and its later depiction
in French and the world literature.
2 French revolution as a feminine character in Charles Dickens's A Tale of Two
Cities, Why? A Feminist New Historicist Reading
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Women were particularly involved in two of the greatest events of the
Revolution, the storming of Bastille and the march to Versailles. It is assumed that
a brief presentation of the historical fact would facilitate the analysis of the its
depiction in Charles Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities and the possible reasons
behind it.
After a series of failures, the French government had to accept that a conflict
was inevitable. In 1788, they trundled out of the attic of French constitutionalism
the nearest thing to a national representative body that France had ever possessed,
the Estates General which had not met since 1614. Maximilen Robespierre, the
orchestrator of the Revolution, represented the most extreme left. He and his
colleagues demanded that the nobility and clergy pay taxes but Louis XVI felt
increasingly threatened by their radicalism. Then on June 20, 1789 after a six-week
deadlock, the deputies arrived to find that they were being silenced. When they
arrived and found the doors locked, they suspected the plot, moved next door to
what was called a tennis court and gathered together and swore "they would not
stop meeting until they have a new constitution." In one revolutionary stand of
defiance, the new National Assembly was born.
The deputies declared themselves a 'new National Assembly', the true
representatives of the people of France. They realized something of their power
and dignity and saw that they really could defy France's king. But resting power
from the king would not be as easy as signing a simple proclamation. All of the
early victories that took place at Versailles were largely paper victories and they
had no teeth to back them up and the fear that took over the deputies at Versailles
was that the king was gathering his forces to disperse and overthrow them.
By early July, 1789, thirty thousand of the king's troops were taking positions
around Paris. To defend themselves people formed a new national guard. Rioters
raided Paris's armors made away with twenty-eight thousand mussels. The only
thing missing was gunpowder and the people know just where to get it. In the
center of Paris, there looms a massive stone dungeon, notorious as a symbol of
feudal rule, the Bastille. The prison housed the city's stores of gunpowder and was
legendary as a den of torture and unspeakable deaths. Bastille had been the great
symbol of royal despotism, the symbols of the kings of France running beyond the
just limits of their power, a symbol of horror for the people of France. Amidst the
rioting, there was a stunning outrage. Louis fired his finance minister, the people's
beloved Jacques Necker, seen as too sympathetic to the masses. Hours after Necker
had been fired, word reached Paris that their man inside had been ousted. There
was nothing left but revolt. On July 14, crowds ban together identifying themselves
with a small cockade, red and blue for the colors of Paris, separated by white, the
color of the house of Bourbon. The tricoulors was born. From the feverish crowd,
several voices cry out to the Bastille. French people declared that the Revolution
was not to be ignored. Soon Bastille fell into the hands of the revolutionaries.
Victory at the Bastille unleashed the irrepressible torrent of Revolution. The people
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had defied their king and won. There would be no turning back. As a symbol of the
defeat of tyranny, the people, men, women and children dug in with bare hands and
tore the Bastille apart, brick by feudal brick. They were beginning to dismantle the
past itself. The French went about the process of tearing down the Bastille as
quickly as they could. In the absence of powerful explosives, this was done very
painstakingly but with a tremendous amount of vigor and the bricks were given
away and sold as emblems of the demolition of despotism (Censer DVD).2
Women had an active role along with men in storming of the Bastille but their
greatest move was still to come and that was the march to Versailles. On October
5, 1789 down broke to the furious ringing of bells. Women gathered in the city hall
to protest against the shortage of bread and now the fear of the approaching royal
troops mixed with the anger as news of the king's offensive party circulated
through the crowd. It was believed that in a party at Versailles, the day before, the
royals had thrown the tricoulors, the symbol of the Revolution. Soon thousands of
women were marching to Versailles, pikes and guns in hand; the women were
taking their complaints to the king. "The core of the crowd was made up of the
famous poissarde, the fearsome fish ladies of the central markets who were known
for their robust build and fearlessness. They were equipped with large knives for
scaling fish and they were hugely muscular because they carted boxes. You didn't
want to tangle with these ladies!"3 They were the women of the poor quarters who
had been affected by the increase in the price of food and bread and the scarcity of
the products who suddenly begin to realize that they must act. "It is quite
extraordinary how these ordinary women, probably most of whom were incapable
of writing their names, suddenly act as the protagonists of a historical process."4
As the mob of women gathered outside the gates, Louis understood that the
revolution can no longer be ignored, it was being brought to his front door, and he
agreed to sign the declaration of the rights of man and the crowd continued to grow
throughout the night. By morning twenty thousand people had camped outside the
royal palace to close the centuries of distance between the king and his subjects.
The angry mass demanded that the king and queen move to Paris. Indecisive as
ever, Louis was weak to respond; his hesitation would provoke fury in the crowd
and put the lives of the royal family in great danger. "When they don't get instant
compliance with what they want, it really looks as if they are going to massacre the
Queen".5
A wave of women broke into the royal palace, screaming for the blood of the
Queen. They massacred the guards, decapitate them and impale their heads on
pikes. They had grown so frenzy that if they had encountered Marie Antoinette, the
Queen, they would have torn her into pieces. Terrified for her life, Marie escaped
to Louis's apartments, moments before the crowd burst into her chambers and tore
her bed. The king and Queen were now at the mercy of the mob, and what the mob
wanted was a little attention from their king. They marched sixty thousand strong,
leaving Versailles with carts and wagons overflowing flour from king's
storehouses, flanking the royal carriage all the way to Paris. "The King and Queen
4 French revolution as a feminine character in Charles Dickens's A Tale of Two
Cities, Why? A Feminist New Historicist Reading
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were forced to go back to Paris with the heads of their guards who had been
massacred in the chateau. Their heads had been cut off and then beautified by
makeup, paraded at the head of the cortege with the King and Queen following.
This was really an unbridled violence."6 The King and Queen never returned to
Versailles again.
What women did throughout the process of the French Revolution was
unprecedented in the history of, not only France, but also mankind and remains one
of the first major acts of what can today be called "A feminist movement".
2. Women in Charles Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities
Dickens traces the private lives of a group of individuals caught in the
cataclysm of the French Revolution. But what readers bear in mind about this
group is the centrality of women in the narrative. The characters around whom the
action revolves are both Paris and London women who provide the moral climate
of the group or family throughout the narrative. The women in the novel, provide
men with an emotional foundation that causes the men to act for or react against
what the women represent.
Lucie Manette and Madame Defrage are the central female characters who
ultimately put the revolutionary France and Victorian England against each other.
Lucie is a passive character who influences others through who she is rather than
by what she does. The comfortable home she creates comforts the men in her life
and her devout compassion for others inspires them. Her goodness enables them to
become more than they are and to find the strength to escape the prisons of their
lives. As Waters has observed, Lucie demonstrates an ardent faith in the overriding
power of gender as the natural determinant of female identity. Her supreme appeal
is to the sanctity of the Victorian middle-class family and to the status of women as
relative creatures within it.7 She is "the golden thread" that binds many of the
characters' lives together. Her dialogue aside, Dickens portrays her as a
compassionate, virtuous woman who inspires great love and loyalty in the other
characters. Although Lucie is a flat character, she is an important one. She
represents unconditional love and compassion, and Dickens uses her to
demonstrate how powerful these qualities can be, even in the face of violence and
hatred.
On the other hand, Madame Defarge stands at the center of the revolutionary
activity in Paris as an active agent of change, even when she is just sitting in the
wine-shop and knitting her death register. As Bloom says 8, Dickens provides us
with his lady Macbeth in Madame defrage, the fiercely attractive genius of the
French Revolution. Madame Defarge instigates hatred and violence, exemplified
by her leadership in the mob scenes. Childless and merciless, Madame Defarge is
the antithesis of Lucie Manette. Both women possess the ability to inspire others,
but while Lucie creates and nurtures life, Madame Defarge destroys it. Because her
entire family perished when she was a young girl, Madame Defarge wants revenge,
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not merely on the family that caused the evil but on the entire class from which it
came. Her knitting represents both her patience and her urge to retaliate, because
she knits the names of her intended victims. She knits a register of all the
oppressors belonging to the ancien régime, dooming them to destruction. Her
knitting is an unalterable chronicle, a grim history which records the past in a
mysterious female language that only she and her sister-knitters can decipher. It
forms an analogue for omniscient narration in the novel, contrasting with Dickens's
apparently more fluid and sympathetic handling of history. The knitted register
produces a shock in its implicit linkage of images and emotions normally opposed
in Victorian middle-class ideology. The creativity, nurture and maternal affection,
conventionally associated with knitting, are connected here with vengeance,
violence and death. This overriding of the boundary between public and private
realms in the deadly knitting of the patriotic women defies the Victorian middleclass ideals of femininity and domesticity.9 A related example is the rose that she
pins in her head-dress as a warning signal to her compatriots in Book the Second,
chapter XVI.10 While the function of the rose as an emblem of England is relevant
here, it is also significant that the aesthetics of feminine adornment are deployed in
the service of the Revolution. Rather than observing the rules of fashion in an
effort to attract the admiration of male onlookers, Madame Defarge uses the
trappings of female finery as a code for political intrigue. The ritual expression of
beauty and sexual attractiveness becomes a guise for the subversive activities of
the revolutionaries.
One of the most obvious points of comparison is the contrast drawn between
Madame Defarge's knitting in the service of the Revolution and Lucie's busy
winding of 'the golden thread which bound her husband, and her father, and
herself, and her old directress and companion, in a life of quiet bliss' 11. While the
handiwork of one promotes violence and destruction, the other toils only to secure
peace and domestic harmony. Lucie assumes the existence of a fellow-feeling
between herself and Madame Defarge, based on their common gender. She
automatically expects Madame Defarge to identify with her joy as a woman. The
realisation of her mistake strikes her with 'terror' and leads to the admission 'We
are more afraid of you than of these others' which Madame calmly receives as 'a
compliment'.12 Madame Defrage can best be described as a female who lacks
femininity.13 Symbolically, Madame Defarge stands for the intensity and
bloodthirst behind the Revolution. As Lloyd has noted14 'She embodies in its most
absolute form the inevitable release of what Schiller terms the 'crude, lawless
instincts' of those repressed politically and psychologically'.
Even when reproached by her husband about the end of the revolutionary
violence, Madame Defrage replies 'Tell the wind and the fire where to stop; not
me!'15 The male-female pairing ratified by marriage has apparently been cut across
by new relationships and alliances formed in the pursuit of revolutionary goals.
Madame Defarge's closest ally is no longer her husband, but a female friend who
as one of Madame's 'sisterhood' one who sits faithfully beside her, knitting, and
6 French revolution as a feminine character in Charles Dickens's A Tale of Two
Cities, Why? A Feminist New Historicist Reading
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who 'had already earned the complimentary name of The Vengeance.'16 The crazed
passion of The Vengeance betrays a fundamental loss of rationality that is part of
the novel's feminisation of the Revolution, and that is suggested elsewhere in the
imagery of natural disaster used to portray the rising of the people. Madame
Defarge's reply to her husband's plea invokes the resistless forces of nature to
identify her implacability with the impulse of the Revolution, which is also
described as the working-out of catastrophic natural history.17
Indeed, Madame Defrage's motives are based upon a different notion of family
altogether. Already subject to censure in the narrative for her violence, overt
sexuality and sisterly solidarity, she is finally condemned by her ironic dedication
to the sovereign power of genealogy for which the aristocracy of the ancien régime
is overthrown. Madame Defarge is motivated by the blood-ties of a 'race'. The
reactionary stance implied in her ironic capitulation to the very principle of
genealogy set up as a distinguishing trait of the aristocracy sits oddly with the more
subversive activities undertaken by Thérèse Defarge, as a revolutionary worker and
as a woman, in the novel. But such inconsistency only enhances her function as the
monstrous example of female deviance with which the horror of the Revolution
can be identified. As she is finally brought down in the text to be punished and
eliminated, some of the threat posed by the alien realm of revolutionary France is
symbolically diminished. And it is for this reason that the nemesis chosen for
Madame Defarge is the otherwise unlikely figure of Miss Pross. In the end, though,
it is not the race’s demise but its future that two barren – or at least childless –
women purchase. As Madame Defarge and Miss Pross fight to the death, Madame
Defarge remains anchored firmly in the past as she seeks revenge for the suffering
and death of her siblings. In contrast, Miss Pross strikes not for the dead but for the
living, insuring the escape to safety of a loving, healthy, and – not
inconsequentially – fertile nuclear family of husband, wife, and child. Dickens
counters barrenness with fertility, death with birth.18
What distinguishes the struggle between Madame Defarge and Miss Pross is not
its commonly proclaimed thematic function as a contest between the forces of
hatred and love, but its characterisation as a confrontation between France and
England. The significance of Miss Pross's defence is expressed in her vow, 'you
shall not get the better of me. I am an Englishwoman'.19
As a movement that is mindlessly passionate and dangerously unpredictable,
the Revolution suggests the chaos associated with the idea of female
insubordination. What was the outcome of the Revolution? For Dickens it was the
newly-born female, called La Guillotine. Dickens emphasizes the role of the
women in the French Revolution as evidence of a violation of the sexual hierarchy.
Even that most notorious instrument of revolutionary justice La Guillotine is
female. It is a 'devouring and insatiate' 20monster, a rapacious woman whose
appetite can never be satisfied: 'Lovely girls; bright women, brown- haired, blackhaired, and grey; youths; stalwart men and old; gentle peasant born; all red wine
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for La Guillotine, all daily brought into light from the dark cellars of the loathsome
prisons, and carried to her through the street to slake her devouring thirst. Liberty,
equality, fraternity, or death; - the last, much the easiest to bestow, O Guillotine! 21
Dickens manages the turmoil of the French Revolution by its gradual
identification with the activity of Madame Defarge and her knitting sisters
throughout the narrative. Revolutionary violence becomes an exhibition of female
deviance. By constructing the desires of the revolutionaries as transgressive of
gender, the novel apparently makes them 'other' and clears a safe space for the
English middle-class subject. This strategy of displacement and denial is part of a
normalising technique which enables the reproduction of respectable femininity
and domesticity as the mutually authorising and dominant definitions of female
identity and the family. However, at the same time, the use of a male omniscient
narrator to gender the Revolution makes the instability of this rhetorical and
ideological strategy apparent. The figures of female deviance with which the
Revolution is identified threaten to exercise an allure that would undermine the
project of narrative containment they ostensibly enable. The feminisation of the
French Revolution is thus not an unequivocal strategy of consolation, for this
narrative gesture is inhabited by the kind of unruly desires it would seek to restrain
and exclude.
3. French Revolution: A Feminine Character in A Tale of Two Cities, A
new Historicist Reading
The texts are conceived not as mere reflectors of, but rather as active
contributors to the historical process they illuminate. For most traditional
historians, history is a series of events that have a linear, causal relationship and is
progressive.22 New Historicists, in contrast, don't believe that we have clear access
to any but the most basic facts of history. Any given event is a product of its
culture, but it also affects the culture in return. In other words, all events are
shaped by and shape the culture in which they emerge. The political notion of New
Historicism suggests that the works of art should be studied in terms of their social
and political function. New Historicists believe that one’s culture permeates both
texts and critics. Because all of society is intricately interwoven, so are critics and
texts, both to each other and in and to the culture in which they live and in which
the texts are produced.
When New historicism is being talked about, the first question which may rise
in the mind of the reader is the meaning of history for New Historicists. What is
new about new historicism in particular is its recognition that history is the 'history
of present', that history is in the making, that, rather than being monumental and
closed, history is radically open to transformation and rewriting. Literary texts are
embedded within the social and economic circumstances in which they are
produced and consumed. But what is important for new historicists is that these
circumstances are not stable in themselves and are susceptible to being rewritten
and transformed. From this prospective, literary texts are part of a larger circulation
8 French revolution as a feminine character in Charles Dickens's A Tale of Two
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of social energies, both products of and influences on a particular culture or
ideology.23
It could be argued that the society and culture under which Dickens wrote A
Tale of Two Cities was very similar to that of in France in late 18th century which
had resulted in the French Revolution. Significantly, A Tale of Two Cities is
dedicated to Lord John Russell, the Whig statesman who had been so important in
pushing through the 1832 Reform Act, and who had sponsored an unsuccessful
reform bill as recently as 1854. Opponents of the bill had deployed all the usual
arguments: that 1832 had gone quite far enough (some would say too far); that the
best interests of the nation would not be served by giving the vote to men without
sufficient material interest or social accountability; that tinkering with the
constitution was a slippery slope that could lead to disaster. And the disaster of
disasters, the nightmare that would have had politicians clammily waking in the
early hours, was a British repetition of the French Revolution.
According to Palmer, Dickens "works as a novelist who 'decenters' the portrayal
of history in his novels''24. Palmer likens the critical act of new historicism to a sort
of detective work, and he finds Dickens pursuing the '''why' of historical anecdote
or eventuality by restaging it ... as a means of understanding it''25. Palmer's major
contribution to the understanding of Dickens is in a number of new readings that
''show Dickens to be a social historian who is constantly moving between master
text, parallel text, and subtext.''26
The novel shows Dickens’s awareness of the compulsion to repeat, and also his
investment in a process of exorcism, the process of flushing out and working
through repressed traumas from the historical past. This novel, set in the late
eighteenth century, gestures forcefully and optimistically toward a redemptive
future located squarely in the heart of Victorian London. This requires the
remembering, repeating, and working through of past violence and shame. The
present, Dickens seems to suggest, is always beholden to the past. Historical novels
exist within at least two temporal frames of reference: the present moment of the
text’s exegesis and the present moment of its composition and publication. In
writing A Tale of Two Cities as a historical novel, then, Dickens “recalls to life”27
events of the previous century, opening in 1775 and casting from that point to days
both earlier – 1757 – and later – 1794 – in order to trace the developmental arc of
French revolutionary sentiments and actions.28
What was the outcome of the French Revolution? For Dickens it is the newly
born female, called La Guillotine, a 'devouring and insatiate' monster, a rapacious
woman whose appetite can never be satisfied.29 And the famous revolutionary
motto, Liberty, equality, fraternity is always accompanied by the word 'death'
throughout the novel. Having put Mme.Defrage as the leader of the revolutionary
mob, Dickens directly associates female insubordination with the act of the
Revolution and negative female role in the act of the violence and bloodshed,
following the Revolution, is vividly portrayed within the pages of A Tale of Two
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Cities. The origins of this unfavorable representation of women can be traced back
to the personal and social life of Dickens but, probably, the latter one carries more
weight.
Written in the year after he separated from his wife and began his secret
relationship with Ellen Ternan, Dickens may have projected himself into his
tripartite hero: into Manette, the older man recalled to life by the love of a young
woman after 18 years of (marital?) imprisonment; into Darnay, who shared his
initials and escaped prison to achieve domestic happiness; into Sydney Carton, the
noble and martyred epic hero, who entered the manuscript as Dick Carton, bearing
Dickens’s initials in reverse.30 Dickens, inspired by the revolutionary events in
Paris in February 1848, wrote to Forster in French and signed himself “Citoyen
Charles Dickens”.31 The desire for reform that prompted this temporary enthusiasm
would soon be overcome by a fear of anarchy, for Dickens, like many of his fellow
countrymen, saw in France a warning of the dangers of radicalism and mob rule,
and by the mid-1850s, he worried about a “sullen, smoldering discontent” in
England that reminded him of “the general mind of France before the breaking out
of the first Revolution.”32
The novel uses gender difference defined by the Victorian middle-class ideal of
domesticity to represent its political conflicts in a narrative strategy designed to
universalise the horror of the crisis. Dickens characteristically rejects politics in
favour of a personal, familial resolution; but the dissemination of the ideal of
domesticity in his fiction that this narrative procedure entails has a normalising
effect that is, nonetheless, politically significant. Dickens genders the Revolution,
turning its overtly political conflicts into questions of sexual difference. Posing the
political crisis as a threat to the values of the English middle-class family, the
novel performs a larger cultural function by participating in the development of
forms of knowledge and power based upon a model of sexual difference. In A Tale
of Two Cities, this process is primarily shown in the sustained effort to identify the
French Revolution with female deviance in the narrative. Dickens's primary source
for the historical background of his novel was Thomas Carlyle's mammoth French
Revolution (1837) which Dickens claimed to have read for five hundred times.
Like Carlyle, Dickens attempts to provide an imaginative reconstruction of this
historical conflict. But rather than finding a way out of revolutionary chaos through
hero-worship, he relies upon the saving power of the middle-class family,
conceived as an ideal transcending social and national differences.33 The novel's
apparent goal, suggested in the opening antitheses which mock attempts to define
the age, is to universalise the action to emphasise the commonality of human
experience everywhere and the representation of the family is central to this
process, because the domestic ideal is invoked as a norm ostensibly beyond the
contingency of historical difference. Dickens uses the idea of the family in an
attempt to depoliticise and dehistoricise the events recorded in what one might
expect to be the most overtly political and historical of his novels.
10French revolution as a feminine character in Charles Dickens's A Tale of Two
Cities, Why? A Feminist New Historicist Reading
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The gendering of the Revolution in A Tale of Two Cities is primarily brought
about through the concentration of the narrative upon the figure of Madame
Defarge, 'leader of the Saint Antoine women'.34 She and her husband come directly
from Carlyle. The history presents Santerre, a brewer, living in Saint-Antoine, who
became a leader of the revolt, and Carlyle makes casual mention of the president of
the Jacobin Society, whose name was Lafarge. A certain Usher Maillard was active
in the storming of the Bastille, doing most of what Defarge did in Dickens'
narrative. "Defarge" combines from these originals whatever the novelist needed
for his action. Carlyle also devoted eleven chapters in his history of the early
rioting to "The Insurrection of the Women." One of his female leaders, a black
Joan of Arc, was Théroigne de Méricourt, who was active as a feminist in the last
years of the constitutional monarchy and a member of the 'Société fraternelle des
patriotes des deux sexes'. She took part in the October 1789 march to Versailles,
and is described by Carlyle's narrator as 'the brown-locked, light-behaved, firehearted Demoiselle Théroigne'.35 Carlyle indicates the transgression of gender
norms evident in the behaviour of Théroigne, and Dickens develops this suggestive
combination of violence and sexual attraction in his portrayal of Thérèse Defarge.
Dickens also invents a character, a companion of Mme. Defarge, whom he
designates only as The Vengeance. He took what he wanted from Carlyle, changed
and concentrated it, and dressed up the details of his story from the historical
record.36
In parallel and contrast with Mme.Defrage is Lucie Manette, in whose pusuit,
Mme.Defrage has been described as a 'tigress', a woman 'absolutely without pity'.37
The symmetry of their pairing is part of a set of parallels drawn between England
and France, designed to bridge national differences in the interests of rendering
universal human nature. As the careful juxtapositioning of Madame Defarge with
Lucie Manette in the novel shows, the universal human nature which Dickens is
attempting to portray through these techniques of parallelism takes gender as the
transhistorical constituent of identity, and yet, at the same time, grounds it in the
ideology of the Victorian middle-class family.38 For the definition of female
identity produced through the opposition between these two women hinges upon
the wider formation of domestic ideology and the propagation of the values of
home in Victorian middle-class culture. The fear of social disintegration generated
by the hostility of class difference is apparently allayed through the commonality
of a belief in shared familial values that define the activities of Madame Defarge as
deviant. However, the family can be regarded as a problematic mechanism for
easing bourgeois anxieties about the consequences of class conflict, since its use in
the novel is informed by the very social differences it was supposed to transcend.
The social structure of the revolutionary France in the novel is also in contrast
with the norms of the Victorian way of life. The relationship between
Mme.Defrage and The Vengeance is an indication of the Revolution's most
significant challenge to patriarchal authority and order. The relationships shown to
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obtain between these revolutionary citizens are not 'properly' refracted by gender.
There is no differentiation between the underlying bonds of desire joining Madame
Defarge to her male and female comrades. And this failure to preserve the
difference between heterosexual and homosocial relationships represents a
challenge to the patriarchal social structure that characterises not only the ancien
régime in France, but the social order of Victorian England.39 As a crucial part of
the novel's effort to solve the problems posed by the Revolution, Madame Defarge
serves as the monstrous female 'other' against which the norms of Victorian
middle-class femininity and domesticity can be invoked. Later representations
showing Madame Defarge as a witch provide evidence of a historical change in the
significance of femininity and domesticity as cultural norms. In order to continue
serving as the 'other' woman, Madame Defarge is represented as old, ugly and
deformed, because overt sexual attractiveness, assertiveness and freedom from
convention have become attributes of the new twentieth-century heroine. These
traits no longer function as signs of female deviance. As Waters has noted,
Mme.Defrage can be described as a 'female who lackes femininity'40
Dickens was drawing upon a well-established apocalyptic tradition for the
imagery he used to portray the Revolution. But this representation of the
Revolution in terms of catastrophic natural history is also part of the novel's
exploitation of sexual difference to represent political conflict. The history of the
concept of reason in Western philosophical thought has been characterised by the
use of oppositional formulations in which men have been distinguished by their
rational capacity and women have been defined as irrational and associated with
the uncontrollable forces of nature. In a similar way, the characterisation of the
revolutionary mob in A Tale of Two Cities as an irresistible natural force locates its
violent activity outside the realm of patriarchal culture and helps displace political
conflict on to gender conflict.
In spite of the novel's conscientious effort to condemn the revolutionaries'
desire for revenge, Miss Pross's victory over Madame Defarge brings with it all the
satisfaction of an exacted retribution. An unmistakable note of triumph informs the
narrator's ironic adjurations to The Vengeance in the final chapter to 'cry louder'41
for the missing Thérèse at the site of La Guillotine.
With Mme.Defrage's death and downfall, the salvation of Lucie Manette and
her family is secured. Their survival, together with the ideals they represent, is of
course exactly what Miss Pross fights for. But while 'eccentric' figures like Miss
Pross play such an important role in enabling the representative Victorian middleclass family to withstand the assault of the French Revolution, its initial formation
is entrusted primarily to Lucie. Regardless of Lucie's description based on Ellen
Ternan, she has the 'short, slight, pretty figure', 'quantity of golden hair' and 'blue
eyes'42, that typically distinguish those heroines who embody the feminine ideal in
Dickens's fiction.
4.
Conclusion
12French revolution as a feminine character in Charles Dickens's A Tale of Two
Cities, Why? A Feminist New Historicist Reading
__________________________________________________________________
From what has been presented, it could be argued that Dickens is more keen on
keeping the status que with which he lives but at the same time is aware of the
possibility of a turmoil in the form of a Revolution which tore apart France 60
years before his the time when he wrote A Tale of Two Cities. Class struggle is the
main reason for this horrific depiction of the revolutionary days of France. It was
creating a huge gap between the rich and the poor and there was the imminent
probability of what happened in the streets of Paris in 1789, to be repeated in the
streets of London. Dickens sees revolution, not always, as a means of progress. It
can shift and reverse its direction, into a form of Darwinian progress, i.e. rather that
elevating the human style of life, it can take us back to the primitive days. The
bloodshed, associated with the revolution is the most vivid example of this.
But what must be born in mind is the fact that all this thirst for blood and
backward progress is shown with the huge presence of female figures which casts a
shadow at the male proponents of the Revolution, both real and fictional. Having
lived all his life within the Victorian way of life and frame of mind in which
patriarchy has the ultimate power, Dickens finds female insubordination as the best
possible stigma to represent the brutality of the Revolution. For him, and all the
Victorians, being a woman is stereotyped with specific definitions and red lines.
Ignoring these red lights results in revolt and a revolt brings blood. French women
of the revolutionary days are insatiate monsters whose appetite for blood can never
be satisfied. Even the most important invention of the Revolution, La Guillotine, is
also female. What can be said about Dickens's portrayal of the French Revolution
in a nutshell is this that the act of writing about the past is always the act of writing
about the present, and, the present of Dickens is marked, or will be marked by an
enormous class difference which will eventually tear Britain apart. In order to warn
the officials of his land for the possibility of this uprising, he finds no means better
than female disobedience, which is in total contrast with the Victorian patriarchal
perceptions.
Notes
1
This article is a part of a larger piece of study concerning the representation of the French Revolution in Charles
Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities and Victor Hugo's Les Misérables: A New Historicist Reading.
2
Jack Censor, "The French Revolution," directed by Doug Schultz (History Channel, 2005)
3
Sarah Maza, ibid.
4
Alan Woods, ibid.
5
William Doyle, ibid.
6
Evelyne Lever, ibid.
7
Catherine Waters, Dickens and the Politics of the Family (Cambridge: Cambridge, 2000), 139.
8
Harold Bloom ed. Charles Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities Bloom's Notes (Broomall: Chelsea House Publishers, 1996),
5.
9
ibid, 128.
10
Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities (Heartfordshire: Wordsworth editions, 1999), 149.
11
ibid, 178.
12
ibid, 229.
13
Waters, 139.
14
Tome Lloyd, "On Madame Defrage", ed. Bloom, 60.
15
Dickens, 292.
16
ibid, 189.
17
For a discussion of the imagery of natural catastrophe in the novel, see Kurt Tetzeli Von Rosador, 'Metaphorical
Representations of the French Revolution in Victorian Fiction', Nineteenth-Century Literature 43 (1988), 123.
18
Carolyn Dever, "Psychoanalyzing Dickens", ed. John Bowen and Robert L.Patten, Palgrave Advances in Charles
Dickens Studies (Hampshire: Palgrave, 2006), 230.
19
Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities (Heartfordshire: Wordsworth editions, 1999), 313.
20
ibid, 316.
21
ibid, 235.
22
Lois Tyson, Critical Theory Today (New York: Routledge, 2006), 283.
23
Andrew Bennet and Nicholas Royle, An Introduction to Literature, Criticism and Theory (Heartfordshire: Prentice
Hall Europe, 1999), 112.
24
William J.Palmer, Dickens and New Historicism. (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1998), 4.
25
ibid, 11.
26
ibid, 14.
27
"Recalled to Life" is the title of Book the First in A Tale of Two Cities
28
Carolyn Dever, "Psychoanalyzing Dickens", ed. John Bowen and Robert L.Patten, Palgrave Advances in Charles
Dickens Studies ( Hampshire: Palgrave, 2006), 222.
29
Dickens, 316.
30
Paul Davis, "A Tale of Two Cities", ed. David Paroissien, A Companion to Charles Dickens (Oxford: Blackwell,
2008), 420.
31
ibid.
32
ibid.
33
Waters, 123.
34
Dickens, 189.
35
Thomas Carlyle, The French Revolution (Harrisburg: Pennsylvania University Press, 2001), 98.
36
Earle Davis, "On Carlyle's influence on Dickens", ed. Harold Bloom, Charles Dickens Bloom's Major Novelists
(Broomall: Chelsea House Publishers, 2000), 98.
37
Dickens, 309.
38
Waters, 125.
39
ibid, 131.
40
ibid, 139.
41
Dickens, 318.
42
Michael Slater, Dickens and Women (London: Chaucer Press, 1983), 211.
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