♁
A Thesis Submitted to
The Institute of Foreign Languages and Literature
National Sun Yat-sen University
Rethinking the Concept of Time in Dickens’s Novels
Chen, Po-chou
Advisor: Professor Shu-Fang Lai
July 2004
♁
國立中山大學 外國語文學研究所
碩士論文
再思狄更斯小說中之時間觀
研究生：陳柏州撰
指導教授：賴淑芳教授
中華民國 九十三年 七月
Acknowledgments
This thesis has profited from the suggestions of teachers and friends in National
Sun Yat-Sen University.
First, and foremost, I would like to express my deepest
gratitude to my advisor, Professor Shu-Fang Lai, a Dickensian, who, with love for the
writings of Dickens, insightful advice and incredible patience, guided me through the
maze of thesis writing.
I am especially grateful for the valuable suggestions by the committee members,
Professor Tee Kim Tong and Chao-Fang Chen.
I am also grateful for the help by
Tsung-Min Wu, Phoebe Kuo, Chou Wei, Sandy Tsai, Mulder Sue, Darren Dai,
Yi-Fong Li and Sue; some of them read my chapters, and some of them have crossed
their fingers for me.
Finally, I would take the chance to thank my family, my parents, Jin-Wang Chen
and Yu-Ru Lin, my brother, Jiunn-Jye, my sister, May-Lin, and my dearest wife,
Shu-Fen Yeh, for their unconditional support.
Abstract
The aim of this thesis is to examine the concept of time in Dickens’s novels
including A Christmas Carol, Hard Times and A Tale of Two Cities with the newly
discovered concepts of time in physics, geology and social economy.
I intend to use
them to build possible parallels, which will help to clarify the working of time and its
influences imposed upon the characters in Dickens’s novels.
The thesis, in a sense,
is an experiment of cross-boundary study and, through a close examination of the
three books, tends to provide an alternative way to rethink the relationship between
time, characters, the world and the author in Dickens’s novels.
摘要
本文在於檢視《小氣財神》
、
《艱苦時代》
、
《雙城記》這三本狄更斯小說中的時間
觀。作法在於以物理學、地質學及社會經濟各領域中詮釋“時間＂這個觀念的運
作方式和其對人們的影響，來與所選文本中之各種對時間的描述作比較與詮釋。
藉由不同學科的思考及詮釋方式試著找出小說中關於時間運作的不同解釋，以再
思狄更斯小說中所呈現出的時間、人物及其世界、和作者之間的關係。
Table of Contents
Introduction
1-21
Chapter One: Time, Subjectivity and Determination
22-39
Chapter Two: Chronotopes in Hard Times
40-59
Chapter Three: Time and History
60-79
Conclusion
80-81
Bibliography
82-87
Abbreviations
All references to Dickens’s novels are to The Penguin Classics (New York, 1985).
When citing the novels, the following abbreviations are used:
CC
A Christmas Carol
HT
Hard Times
TTC
A Tale of Two Cities
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1
Introduction
The aim of this thesis is to examine the concept of time in Dickens’s novels
including A Christmas Carol, Hard Times and A Tale of Two Cities with the newly
discovered concepts of time in physics, geology and social economy.
I intend to use
them to build possible parallels, which will help to clarify the working of time and its
influences imposed upon the characters in Dickens’s novels.
Yet, it is not to suggest
that Dickens consciously takes and incorporates in his works the concepts of time I
apply, for some concepts, such as the theory of relativity and chronotope, have not
been proposed till the twentieth century. To begin with, if we have a look at the
definitions of time registered in OED and its various examples and definitions, we
will find some helpful depictions of time that are chosen from Dickens’s novels and
some useful examples that will specify ideas of time in the fields of physics, geology
and social economy.
By introducing the formations of each applied concept of time
and the debates in each field, I will try to illustrate that a broad understanding of time
in fact parallels human beings’ relationship with the world.
Many critics have been working on the topic of time, and it is worthwhile to
survey first from what aspects they formulate this notion in Dickens’s novels.
In the
criticisms, one can see that critics formulate diverse forms of time presented in
Dickens’s novels to manifest its influences upon characters.
That is, critics present
Dickens’s concern with human affairs through the topics of time.
A widely
recognized time pattern is the concept of psychological time of an individual.
Some
critics have analyzed the characters’ memories and expectations, the interrelationships
between the past, the present and the future, and argue about the influences on the
characters. For example, in “Dickens and the Voice of Time,” George H. Ford
claims that time in Dickens’s novels takes the forms of “the linear, the cyclic and the
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durational” (429).1
2
Each sense of time suggests an intention of the writer expresses
through his protagonists:
For a convenient mode of classifying our senses of time… the
future-oriented society (whose view of time corresponds to the linear); the
past-oriented (corresponding to the cyclic concept of time); and the
present-oriented (corresponding, but not so neatly, to the durational concept
of time)….
(Ford 430)
The future-oriented linear time refers to a public voice in Dickens’s and other
Victorian novels: “the fearless voice of the great Victorian reformer who is fighting to
correct the ills of social, economic, and political life so that mankind can continue its
progress” (Ford 432).
It indicates the responsibility of a Victorian writer.
The
past-oriented incidents are the nostalgic preferences “for older and established ways
of life, especially the Victorian modes which he loves” (Ford 436).
They are
recurring motifs that can be found over and over again in Dickens’s writings.
The
present-oriented incidents are “the secret prose … dependent upon a different attitude
toward the past, especially his own past, on Dickens’s part” (Ford 437).
Ford
intends to reveal the “role of the artist in society” through the forms of time revealed
in the writer’s writings.
Albert A. Dunn reiterates the concept of time of an
individual in Time in the Later Dickens and deals with the three phases of time, as
Ford does.2
He makes known the importance of the past in which the heroes are able
to recognize the delusions and the falsity of the identities imposed upon them in
childhood (Dunn 6).
Realizing the possibilities in an alternate past, the characters
will have the opportunities to make changes.
1
2
With regard to the relation of
George H. Ford, “Dickens and the Voice of Time,” Nineteenth Century Fiction 24 (1970).
Albert Anthony Dunn, The Articulation of Time in Dickens’ Later Novels (Virginia: U of Virginia P,
1972).
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Dickens’s characters to their pasts, Dunn further demonstrates two forms of time in
Dickens’s novels: one is linear—the time that can be measured by calendar and clock;
the other is personal—a character has the capacity to understand the importance of
subjective experience in the world (Dunn 8).
The linear time view and the
subjective temporality are not extremely against each other.
A reconciliation of
linear and subjective time can be found in Dickens’s later novels.
That is, the past
coexists with the present in protagonists’ consciousness (Dunn 19).
In addition to
Ford and Dunn, James E. Marlow dwells on the interrelation between past, present
and future of the time flow in Charles Dickens: the Uses of Time.3
Marlow believes
that Dickens intermittently associates the consciousness of a character with his own
past, his memory, or with the future, his expectation.
In addition to the psychological time of characters, some critics associate time
with the recurring images in the novels and the sequences of the narrative.
Stephen
L. Franklin, in “Dickens and Time,” demonstrates the significance of a recurring
image—clocks—in Dickens’s novels:
At the heart of Dickens’ creative treatment of time is his use of time and
change. Dickens’ undoubted fascination with clocks rests on what they
record, the flow of time and the action of time on existence rather than on
any particular form of time, such as history or the past. (2)4
Representing “the flow of time and the action of time on existence,” the clocks always
remind characters in Dickens’s novels of an extraordinary significance of the present.
Instead of searching the definition of time drawn from the words of the characters or
the narrators, Soultana Maglavera uncovers “the temporal order of the events in the
narratives in order to demonstrate how Dickens capitalizes on temporal presentation”
3
4
James E Marlow, Charles Dickens: The Uses of Time (Selinsgrove: Susquehanna UP, 1994).
Stephen L Franklin, “Dickens and Time,” Dickens Studies Annual 4 (1975).
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(18).5
4
Maglavera counts the occurrences of a person’s speech or the recurrences of
an event:
Specific choices with regard to the manipulation of temporal ordering and
to the handling of story information are neither arbitrary nor accidental but
rather provide the means to a variety of ends: to maintain the intelligibility
of the story, to establish characterization, to create and manipulate narrative
interest, and to create and solve the mystery…. (18)
“The manipulation of temporal ordering and the handling of story information” serves
to reveal the meaning of the story and to intensify the personalities of characters.
Meanwhile, Maglavera’s analysis demonstrates the importance of the author, for the
success of the novels is attributed to the deliberate design of an author in the
narratives. To sum up critics’ viewpoints of time, no matter from what aspects they
delineate the patterns of time in Dickens’s novels, such as the psychology of the
characters, the metaphors of clocks and narrative sequences, they demonstrate a link
between time and people in Dickens’s novels for which I will explore further in this
thesis.
OED quotes some passages from Dickens’s novels and his magazine in the
instances exemplifying various definitions of time.
To illustrate one of generalized
senses of time, a sentence from All Year Round is quoted—“They don’t keep London
time on a French railway.”6
There are other instances from Dickens’s novels that do
not belong to the generalized senses of time with which this thesis concerns but
related to time in other aspects.
5
For instance, “I’m old-fashioned, and behind the
Soultana Maglavera, Time Patterns in Later Dickens: A Study of the Thematic Implications of the
Temporal Organization of Bleak House, Hard Times, Little Dorrit, A Tale of Two Cities, Great
Expectations and Our Mutual Friend (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1994).
6
OED 103. Dickens, All Year Round 232 (1863): 2.
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time.”7
5
Time in this passage, quoted from Dombey and Son, refers to “a period
considered with reference to its prevailing conditions; the general state of affairs at a
particular period.”8 Moreover, time, referring to a “prescribed period of duration,”9 is
illustrated in the sentence—“In prize-fighting phraseology, [he] always came up to
time with a cheerful countenance.”10
In the following section I will manifest passages from A Christmas Carol, Hard
Times and A Tale of Two Cities that depict time and categorize them according to the
generalized senses of time in OED.
For, in these three novels, vast quantities of
descriptions of time are employed and are at variance with each other.
In A
Christmas Carol, the protagonist, Ebenezer Scrooge, primarily involves within his
own time, his past, present and future.
In Hard Time, one can see that a cyclic time
pattern is formed under the influence of a social phenomenon, the industrial
revolution. In A Tale of Two Cities, fates of the characters are interwoven with the
coming of French Revolution, a historic event. Yet, Dickens treats time in different
ways and from different scopes.
Among different definitions of time in OED, we
will concentrate on the category of the generalized sense of time and explore further
the depictions of time in the chosen novels. According to the category, “time”
means:
1.
Indefinite continuous duration regarded as that in which the sequence
of events takes place.
2.
Personified as an aged man, bald, but having a forelock, and carrying a
scythe and an hour-glass.
3.
7
In restricted sense, Duration conceived as beginning and ending with
OED 101. Dickens, Dombey and Son (1848) ix, 87.
OED 101.
9
OED 101.
10
OED 101. Dickens, Barnaby Rudge (1840) xxii.
8
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6
the present life or material universe; finite duration as distinct from eternity.
4.
A system of measuring or reckoning the passage of time.
The above definitions classify the generalized sense of time into four types. It is
worthwhile to notice in the above definitions that time is regarded as duration, and
could be either indefinite or finite. The primary differences between indefinite and
finite duration are not only the span of time in which the sequence of events takes
place, but the viewpoint of the observers who conceive the former as a being of
eternity that works without other’s interference and the later a distinct duration in
which they have the capacity to make their own decisions.
The passages from
Dickens’s novels in the following discussion will clarify the differences.
First of all, time in the first definition is regarded as the “indefinite continuous
duration regarded as that in which the sequence of events takes place.”11
Though
absent in A Christmas Carol, the indefinite time is exerted in Hard Times and A Tale
of Two Cities, regardless of other happening in the world, manifesting its working
which people have no power to interfere with. In Hard Times, continuous changes
on characters are made by the working of time whose industry is regarded as the
image of factory: “TIME went on in Coketown like its own machinery; so much
material wrought up, so much fuel consumed, so many powers worn out, so much
money made” (HT 126). The on-going process of time leaves the traces of its
significant changes on the characters’ physical appearances: “Time, with his
innumerable horse-power, worked away, not minding what anybody said, and
presently turned out young Thomas a foot taller” (HT 127).
In addition to young
Tom’s growing, the maturity of Louisa is noted:
Louisa had been passing on, so quiet and reserved, … she was almost a
11
OED 103.
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7
young woman—which seemed but yesterday—she had scarcely attracted
his notice again, when he [Thomas Gradgrind] found her quite a young
woman. (HT 128)
Time also reckons the success of the Gradgrinds in their works.
“Time, sticking to
him [young Thomas], passed him on into Bounderby's Bank, made him an inmate of
Bounderby's house …. Time …made him [Thomas Gradgrind] Member of Parliament
for Coketown” (HT 129).
Meanwhile, in spite of the fact that the minds of
characters are distorted by the deformed education system in Coketown, time
continuously goes on: “There happened to be in Coketown a considerable population
of babies who had been walking against time towards the infinite world, twenty, thirty,
forty, fifty years and more” (HT 89-90).
In all, the indefinite time in Hard Times
shows no particular feelings and no judgments on human affairs, functioning merely
as a gigantic steam engine pushing everything in the world forward.
An indifferent but influential force of time in Hard Times can find its echoes in A
Tale of Two Cities in which none of the human affairs, the revolution or the massacre,
can hold up the working of time, the cyclic repetition of the days and nights.
There was no pause, no pity, no peace, no interval of relenting rest, no
measurement of time.
Though days and nights circled as regularly as
when time was young, and the evening and morning were the first day,
other count of time there was none.
(TTC 302)
Taking a recurring metaphor of tide, the infinite time persists in its working regardless
of the misery of the Darnays: “Yet the current of the time swept by, so strong and
deep, and carried the time away so fiercely, that Charles [Darnay] had lain in prison
one year and three months” (TTC 363).
The indifference is reiterated while
compared with the horrible massacre in French Revolution. “The horrible massacre,
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days and nights long, which, within a few rounds of the clock, was to set a great mark
of blood upon the blessed garnering time of harvest…” (TTC 283).
The mark of
blood lasted for days and nights has no effects on the cyclic stages of a year, the
blessed garnering time.
The second definition of time in OED indicates time “personified as an aged man,
bald, but having a forelock, and carrying a scythe and an hour-glass.”12
Although
there is no such clearly described figure of Father Time in Dickens’s novels, we can
see personifications of time as a great manufacturer, a spinner of fates and an
enchanter, resonating the uprising of the industrial revolution in the Victorian age in
Hard Times and the interwoven relations between people and the revolution in A Tale
of Two Cities.
Time is personified as “The Great Manufacturer” in Hard Times.13
TIME … brought its varying seasons even into that wilderness of smoke
and brick, and made the only stand that ever was made in the place against
its direful uniformity. (HT 126-27)
Though borrowing the image of the thriving growth of factory and the machinery, the
writer indicates a significant difference between the factory and time.
The hands of
the great manufacturer of time produce nothing in the “direful uniformity” as the
factory.
In contrast to the monotonous speed of the factory production, “in some
stages of his manufacture of the human fabric, the processes of Time are very rapid”
(HT 128).
The other instance of personifications in Hard Times is a spinner of fate:
“she [Louisa] tried to discover what kind of woof Old Time…would weave from the
threads he had already spun into a woman” (HT 131).
The image of time, regarded
as a spinner of fate, can also be found in A Tale of Two Cities: “If the suddenness of
her calamity, and the whirling wheels of the time, had stunned the Doctor's daughter
12
13
OED 103.
“The Great Manufacturer” is the title of Chapter 14, Book one in Hard Times.
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into awaiting the result in idle despair, it would but have been with her as it was with
many” (TTC 304).
The personification of an enchanter reiterates that, comparing
with the eternity of time, one can see the achievement of human beings is transient:
“Change these back again to what they were, thou powerful enchanter, Time” (TTC
399).
In the third category, time in restricted sense refers to “a duration conceived as
beginning and ending with the present life or material universe; finite duration as
distinct from eternity.”14
Distinct from eternal time, Dickens demonstrates the finite
duration with the life of human beings, the time of his contemporary and the time of
history. From the passages in A Christmas Carol, one can see that Dickens focuses
on the time of the characters’, both before and after death. The ghost of Marley
addresses to Scrooge about the suffering after seven years’ death: “‘The whole time,'
said the Ghost. 'No rest, no peace. Incessant torture of remorse’” (CC 62).
Moreover,
as the Ghost of Christmas Present comes, Scrooge never sees a fire so strong in the
hearth and is never so frightened in his life of time: “such a mighty blaze went roaring
up the chimney, as that dull petrification of a hearth had never known in Scrooge's
time, or Marley's, or for many and many a winter season gone” (CC 87).
After the
expedition with spirits, the narrator describes: “Best and happiest of all, the Time
before him was his own, to make amends in!”(CC 127)
Time before Scrooge is his
own life, restarting at this moment to make amend till the end of it.
In contrast to the
retrospective personal time in A Christmas Carol, we can see Dickens intertwines the
life time of a character with the time of the material world in Hard Times. Mr.
Bounderby demonstrates his view of time in the dialogue to the riders in Sleary’s
circus: “we are the kind of people who know the value of time, and you are the kind
14
OED 103.
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of people who don't know the value of time.” (HT 72)
Bounderby’s value of time
depends on increasing his wealth. In contrast to Bounderby’s viewpoint, Sleary
indicates, “I don't expect I thall begin otherwithe at my time of life, with a rider.” (HT
80)
Sleary rather deems that time is the process of a person’s growing.
In addition to the life of a character, depictions of history are significant
instances of the finite duration of time in A Tale of Two Cities.
The first sentence of
A Tale of Two Cities illustrates the writer’s effort to represent the impacts of French
Revolution on characters and their world: “it was the best of times, it was the worst of
times.” (TTC 35)
Signs as the wine spilled on the street and the scarecrows over the
lamplighter foreshadow the coming of this historic event.
As Madam Defarge says,
The time was to come, when that wine too would be spilled on the
street-stones. … For, the time was to come, when the gaunt scarecrows of
that region should have watched the lamplighter … But, the time was not
come yet; and every wind that blew over France shook the rags of the
scarecrows in vain, for the birds, fine of song and feather, took no warning.
(TTC 61-62)
The conversation between Mr. and Mrs. Defarge reveals their expectation of the
coming of the revolution that will rapidly change the injustice in France regardless of
the longtime preparation:
"It does not take a long time to strike a man with Lightning," said Defarge.
It does not take a long time," said madame, "for an earthquake to swallow a
town.
Tell me how long it takes to prepare the earthquake?"
"A long time, I suppose," said Defarge. (TTC 207-08)
However, the development of the revolution becomes disastrous and is described as
the recurring image, such as “the swift changes and troubles of the time”, “the public
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current of the time” and “the troubled time” (TTC 271, 301, 391).
As Carton Sydney
tells the seamstress: “my child; there is no Time there, and no trouble there” (TTC
403).
The only place where people will not feel the indifference of the world is after
death.
In contrast to the depictions of history, the passage of life is presented
differently. Instead of a linear time pattern of life marked with its beginning and
ending, the cyclic temporality that Jarvis Lorry observes in his life resembles the
nature time in which changes and passions seem to be fairly trifling: “At this time of
my life, no. For, as I draw closer and closer to the end, I travel in the circle, nearer and
nearer to the beginning” (TTC 340).
The last category of the generalized senses of time in OED is “a system of
measuring or reckoning the passage of time”15—the time of clock or church bells that
record the time of a day or the standard time.
The notion of a standard time
prevailed in nineteenth century especially as the railway system had been constructed.
An instance of the standard time in OED noted this phenomenon in 1840: “outside
clock to be provided for each station so as to be seen by passing trains, in order to
ensure punctuality.
London time to be adopted at all stations.”16
The booming of
railway construction inaugurates the notion of a “standard time” of a clock, instead of
sun, in United Kingdom and Europe. Stephen Blackpool, a “Hand” in Hard Times,
expresses a similar notion of time as he defends his working right: “Put that clock
aboard a ship an' pack it off to Norfolk Island, an' the time will go on just the same”
(HT 181). Time of clocks, the primary measuring for the time traveling of Scrooge
and the spirits, recurs frequently in A Christmas Carol. The Ghost of Christmas Past
murmurs to himself: “'My time grows short,' ….’Quick!” (CC 67)
The Ghost of
Christmas Present answers Scrooge’s question about the lifespan spirits have:
15
16
OED 103.
OED 103. Minutes Board of G.W.R. in Railway Gaz (1935) 30 Aug. (G.W.R. Suppl.)7/2.
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“'To-night at midnight. Hark! The time is drawing near.'”
aware of the existence of time after spirits’ visit.
Moreover, Scrooge is
Before the coming of the second
spirit, Scrooge feels that “he was restored to consciousness in the right nick of time.”
As the third spirit comes, he exhibits his awareness of the lessons he has learned and
yearns for more: “The night is waning fast, and it is precious time to me.”
Yet, the
clocks in Dickens’s novels are “the clock without hands” as Stephen L. Franklin
argues: “Dickens’ undoubted fascination with clocks rests on what they record, the
flow of time and the action of time on existence…” (2). “The flow of time” and
“action of time on existence” affirm the emphasis on the present in A Christmas
Carol.
In regard to applying three different concepts of time in this thesis, it is necessary
to state clearly what they are and the variance between each other. It may be helpful
to use the definitions17 in OED to categorize the different concepts of time.
Then, I
will make a brief survey of the transformations in the applied concepts of time—the
debates on time in physics, geology and chronotopes—to see how they changes and
the possible impacts on people.
Though they are taken from different scientific
fields, the applied concepts of time have two elements in common.
One is the
essence of changing, and the other is that the understanding of time in fact parallels
human beings’ relationship with the world.
In two ways, I will demonstrate these
two elements—one is to manifest the debates on the applied concepts of time, and the
other is to use the literary instances of time in OED.
The first applied notion is time in physics.
Time in physics refers to the
“indefinite continuous duration,” a concept derived from the debates in cosmology in
which scholars have argued about the status of time, from the objective standard in
17
The following definitions and passages are taken from the instances for the third definition of time
in OED, the generalized sense of time.
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the universe to the subjective recognition.
Scientists have debates on this subject
which can be observed from the history of time.
In the debates, different viewpoints
result in various concepts of time and various concepts of people within the time.
Thus, the debate of time in physics reveals the role of people within it. The significant
changes in the concept of time in the history of physics illustrate how the concepts of
time affect the role of people.
A debate in cosmology against Biblical explanation has started since the
publication of the treatise by Nicholas Copernicus who placed the sun as the
stationery center of the movements of all heavenly bodies in 1514. 18
Before
Copernicus, Ptolemy’s model19 in which the earth is placed in the center of the
universe, and other planets orbits around it is accepted by the Church who deems this
model in accordance with Scripture.
The discovery of Copernicus challenges the
authorities of Bible and inaugurates a series of arguments upon the biblical and
cosmological universe (Hawking 5). 20
Sir Isaac Newton formulated an infinite
universe in Philosopiae Naturalis Principia Mathematic in 1687.
The law of
universal gravitation indicates an indefinite universe, and denies the presumptions of a
center in the universe (Hawking 6).
The controversy on time raised by Newton’s
acclaim dwells on the scope of the universe, whether time consists of a finite period
created by God or it is infinite as the Newtonian universe (Hawking 6). The span of
time is no longer an issue since Albert Einstein proposed the theory of relativity.
Stephen Hawking’s directly points out the results brought by the most influential
18
Nicholas Copernicus (1473-1543) born in Poland, was the founder of modern astronomy. In his
treatise De Hypothesibus Motuum Coelestium a se Constitutis Commentariolus, circulated
anonymously in 1514, the earth was not the center of the Ptolemaic universe but one of the heavenly
bodies annually revolved around the sun and meanwhile rotates every day.
19
Ptolemy (Claudius Ptolemaeus, ca. 100-170). His major astronomical work, the Almagest,
proposed an appropriate geometric model of the universe which is similar as the ancients conceived but
based on the cosmological and mathematical prerequisites.
20
Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time: From Big Bang to Black Holes (New York: Bantam,
1988).
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thinkers in the history of physics: “Newton’s laws of motion put an end to the idea of
position in space.
The theory of relativity gets rid of absolute time” (Hawking 34).
According to Newton, in spite of the fact that the universe is infinite or finite, the
essence of time was regarded as the absolutely unaffected standard of measurement.
However, Einstein proves, in his famous equation E=mc2, the reckoning of time is
relatively increased or decreased as the speed of the observers differs (Hawking 21).
The notion of absolute time is thus substituted. In the debate of time in physics, one
can see the changing in the role of people who are no longer disposed by time but
have the capacity to decide it.
Secondly, the geological time is applied to demonstrate the tension between
history and nature.
Geologists construct their geological time through the formation
of the layers of rocks in contrast to physicists who formulate the model of time by
estimating the movement of heaven bodies.
The time of geology indicates two
different directions of time, time’s arrow and time’s cycle.
The debates in geology
concerns with the age of earth—time’s arrow manifests “a finite duration,” and time’s
cycle “an infinite duration.”
The idea of infinite comes from the endless repeating which makes people
unable to trace its beginning while the incidents are recorded according to a certain
chronology and can be traced back to the origin.
In Theory of the Earth, James
Hutton21 claims that the history of the earth is unaccountably old (although he did not
give a precise number).
Hutton’s treatise emphasizes the vastness of time that
contradicts the biblical limitation of the Mosaic chronology in which the earth is
formed in a comparably short period, six thousand years.
21
In his observation, the
James Hutton (1726-1797), born in Edinburgh, chief founder of geology as a science. The two
volumes of his Theory of the Earth (1795) lay the foundation of geology as a proper scientific study.
He formulated the two main principles: the geological cycle and uniformitarianism.
Chen 15
intrusive phenomenon of granite in the layers of rocks breaks the traditional
sequences of the forming of layers that are accumulated as the continuous sediments
resulted from the floods in the Bible.
James Hutton’s geological theory incorporates
three stages, the decaying of the surface earth, the sediments of the erosion, and the
generating new continents because of the uplifting.
Stephen Jay Gould coins
metaphors for the mechanics of Hutton’s theory: “Uplift may follow erosion in an
unlimited cycle of making and breaking” (65).22
The endless cyclic stages in the
history of Hutton’s geology change the direction of the linear time’s arrow.
The
notion of Time’s cycle did not prevail right after the publication of James Hutton’s
treatise while most contemporary geologists still tend to explain the linear deep time
suggested by Bible.
Charles Lyell 23 can be regarded as the most significant
successor of the Huttonian deep time.
Although a lawyer by profession, Lyell’s
Principle of Geology in 1830 reaffirms the notion of time’s cycle.
In these two
metaphors, one can see the greatest variance is not only the span of time they infer but
the distinctness of an incident. In time’s arrow, every incident is distinct; yet, in
time’s cycle, every incident becomes insignificant.
Thirdly, I will apply chronotopes to demonstrate the relation between time and
space.
Chronotope, a jargon coined by Mikhail Bakhtin, illustrates “the intrinsic
connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships that are artistically expressed in
literature” (84).24
The temporality refers to “a finite duration” in the fictional world
which consists of “the biographical time” of a character and “the adventure time” of
the events that the character encounters (Bakhtin 84).
22
23
24
The spatiality is regarded as
Stephen Jay Gould, Time’s Arrow, Time’s Cycle: Myth and Metaphor in the Discovery of Geological
Time (Massachusetts: Harvard UP, 1987).
Charles Lyell (1797-1875) applied to geology the strictest discipline of rigorous reasoning, and
expunged it of all that was merely fanciful and speculative.
Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael
Holquist (Texas: U of Texas P, 1981).
Chen 16
the “social dynamic” (Morson and Emerson 371).
Bakhtin exerts chronotope to reveal the influence from the world on people’s
forming of images25.
From Bakhtin’s own analysis of chronotopes, one can see the
variety of ways in which the relation of people to their world may be understood. In
early literary works, such as the Greek and medieval romances, “the image” of
characters persist unchanged regardless of the innumerable testing they have been
through and the places they have explored (Bakhtin 85).
Gradually, in “the novels of
emergence,” such as the buildungsroman and the realistic novels in the nineteenth
century, the image of a person, shaped by his experience, develops (Morson 412).
The phenomenon of the industrial revolution exemplifies the influences of spatiality
in chronotope.
The industrial revolution changes people’s daily life and achieves
overall and substantial influences in nineteenth century. Instead of the bells in the
churches, people start to lead their life according to the ringing in the factories.
Meanwhile, the railway time, another significant product of industrial revolution,
substitutes for the time of the sun. The construction of the railroad system impels
people to read time more precisely.
From the debates in the history of applied concepts of time, we can see time in
essence is dialectical, not static; the concept of time is always changing, for new
knowledge constantly challenges the accustomed believes.
Thus, it is always
worthwhile to rethink the change of it and the reaction of people within it. I will
explore further the essence of changing in time by analyzing the literary instances in
OED.
Associated with the definition, “indefinite continuous duration regarded as
that in which the sequence of events takes place,” time was regarded as a reliable
means of measurement.
25
The characteristic of time was emphasized on its objectivity
A further discussion on the concept of chronotope and the application will be demonstrated in
chapter two.
Chen 17
and impartiality in descriptions of early articles. In 1398, Tervisa quoted Aristotle’s
words, “Tyme is mesure of chaungeable pinges.” 26
Time was regarded as the
criterion that was able to measure everything changing. Hooker brought forth the
measuring function of time again in 1597: “Some haue defined time to be the measure
of the motion of heauen.”27
Yet, the concept of time that took the role as the
measurement of everything had concealed in the passages of 1800s in which the
concepts of time turned to the notion of duration in which the sequence of events was
contained. In 1854, Calderwood in Philos Infinite indicated “Add event to event,
still Time is recognized as stretching forth, and still there is room for more.”28
The
infiniteness of time that can contain “event to event” was emphasized. Spencer in
First Princ, 1862, defined time as “the abstract of all sequences.”29
Although
lacking substantial evidence to suggest the causes of change in the concept of time
from the descriptions above, the sense of becoming still can be discerned.
The instances indicating “the system of measuring or reckoning the passage of
time” provides more concrete evidence for the changes in the concept of standard
time.
From the instance of Phillips, “true time” emphasized the uniqueness and
absolute status of the time.
Other notions of times that were different from the “true
time” were regarded as “vulgar.”
Yet, the unique idea of a “standard” time had been
challenged later by the astronomies who used “three kinds of time, sidereal time,
apparent solar time and mean solar time.”30
As the industrial revolution took place,
time once conjectured from the movement of the sun has been replaced by the hands
of the clocks.
The “railway time” in the mid-nineteenth century was set up as the
standard time, for the punctuation and precision in time could ensure the working of
26
27
28
29
30
OED 103.
OED 103.
OED 103.
OED 103.
OED 103. 1764 Maskelyne in Phil. Trans. LIV. 344.
Chen 18
the railroad system.
Yet, the standard railway time still differed in different areas in
Europe as Dickens depicted in All Year Round: “They don’t keep ‘London time’ on a
French Railway.”31
The expansion of the European empires in nineteenth century
attributed to spatializing the notion of time—the notion of time zone.
In 1883,
standard time clocks were set,32 and since then, people followed the standard time in
their designated time zones.
Throughout the chronological instances of time in OED,
the discussions above suggest that even the same definition may generate diverse
concepts, such as the vanishing role of the standard time and the spatialized time.
The concept of time can always be changing, especially while great innovations in
different fields occur.
From the above discussions, we have already seen that the topics of time prevail
in Dickens’s novels. A Christmas Carol, Hard Times and A Tale of Two Cities
respectively present a particular temporality that is the crucial factor inspiring
responses from the characters in their fictional world.
There is the need to elaborate
further concepts of time in each novel in order to study different dimensions of how
time is treated in different texts.
In Chapter one, my study concerns with the link
between time and the subjectivity of the character in A Christmas Carol.
this story is a very personal realization in this concept.
Time in
With the help of three spirits,
the protagonist, Ebenezer Scrooge, travels through the course of his life and sees the
visions of his past, his present and his future. Hawking’s time can shed light on the
personal time of Scrooge.
Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time reveals the
links between time and the formation of subjectivity.
In his book, the ideas of the
scientific determinism in the history of time, subjectivity derived from the theory of
relativity and the emphasis on the present, all resonate with the story of A Christmas
31
32
OED 103. Dickens, All Year Round 232 (1863): 2.
OED 103. 1883 New York Times 19 Nov. 5/2.
Chen 19
Carol. Opposed to the determinism that has pre-destined consequence in the past,
characters in A Christmas Carol always persist in the present to solve their problems.
The absence of God in this story is not the result of denial but results from the praise
of mankind that manifests itself in the emphasis on the present.
In Chapter two, my focus is laid on the connectedness of time and space in Hard
Times.
With Bakhtin’s idea of chronotope that can effectively explain the
interrelationship among characters, their time and space, I try to point out a often
neglected time pattern the formation of which is related to the contemporary social
dynamics in Victorian age. Hard Times presents a distinctive example of Bakhtin’s
categorization of the nineteenth-century novel which “links the individual’s story to
society … and the hero’s story is itself shaped by historical forces” (Morson and
Emerson 388).
Thus, I try to argue that in Hard Times, throughout the whole course
of Louisa Gradgrind’s life, fact and fancy are not the only forces that drive her to
either opposite extreme, but more voices have gradually appeared and affected her.
The time of Louisa does not exactly resemble the monotonous repetition as the
working of steam engine as the “keynote” suggests.
development of railroad system.
Instead, it is an analogue to the
The gathering of different characters in Hard Times
can only take place in the nineteenth century when the rail roads were developed.
In chapter three, with the metaphors of time, I will demonstrate the tension
between history and nature in A Tale of Two Cities.
The fates of most characters in
this novel are influenced by the events in French Revolution.
In contrast to the
dominant force in the fictional world, the working of nature time submerges.
In
Gould’s Time’s Arrow, Time’s Cycle, the contribution in geological time illuminates
the tension between history and nature within this novel. In A Tale of Two Cities, the
time of history parallels the irreversible chronological order as the time in Bible and
Chen 20
possesses the linear characteristic of time’s arrow.
The time in nature presents an
unlimited cycle of making and breaking as the narrator observes its indifference
toward the historic events.
Dickens expresses his observation upon the interaction
between the on-going process of cosmos and the distinct remarks that human beings
have drawn in history. Time works, as metaphors, to express his alert to the social
reforms.
In addition to explaining and defining the concepts of time in the chosen novels,
this thesis tries to parallel descriptions of the protagonists with Dickens’s own
accounts in his biography.
For example, in A Christmas Carol, Scrooge is an
autobiographical character, like many a Dickensian persona who speak for the author.
Evidences can be found in the descriptions of his past, such as the imaginary
Robinson Crusoe walking by the window and his sister coming to take him home.
In Hard Times, the way of Louisa’s observing the world or being under other
people’s sight can be traced back to the experience of young Dickens who works at
the blacking factory and watched by the passengers of the street. In A Tale of Two
Cities, we can see that Dickens exemplifies the precision in writing history with his
modification of manuscript.
For instance, in order to fit the plot in the September
Massacres, Dickens deliberately alters the time of Darnay’s departure to France.
By showing the parallels between the characters and the author, one can see the
intentions of the author can be inferred from the text.
In all, my investigations into Dickens’s novels may lead to some more universal
questions. What is the concept of time in a novel?
concept of time in other fields of studies?
How does it parallel with the
What do the parallels reveal?
The thesis,
in a sense, is an experiment of cross-boundary study and, through a close examination
of the three books, tends to provide an alternative way to rethink the relationship
Chen 21
between time, characters, the world and the author in Dickens’s novels.
Chen 22
Time, Subjectivity and Determination
In A Christmas Carol, two principal thematic features can be detected in most of
the plots. One is the chaotic time scheme interrupted, muddled and reconstructed by
three spirits with whom the protagonist, Ebenezer Scrooge, breaks the constriction of
physics and traverses within the time flow. The other is the conversion of a person,
from “a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old sinner” to a
man “as good a friend, as good a master, and as good a man, as the good old city knew,
or any other good old city, town, or borough, in the good old world” (CC 46,134).
The link between the temporal scheme and Scrooge’s dramatic conversion has drawn
attentions of many critics who see time as significant spaces in which the
characteristics of a person are presented and his transformation can be explained.
George H. Ford emphasizes the duration of time that works decisively in the
process of growth33 (Ford 428-48). He believes that “we are made aware … that the
miser is a product of past experience” and “to confront that past” is Scrooge’s only
way out of his miserable ending (Ford 439).
The character cannot alter the
consequence in the future before he is able to adapt the memory of the past.
Scrooge’s timely awareness of the past enables him to avoid the future presented by
the Spirit of Christmas Yet to Come.
In contrast to Ford’s argument, James E.
Marlow indicates that it is the fear of the unknown future, instead of the painful
memory of the past, which changes young Scrooge (Marlow 45).
To pursue
financial security in the future, young Scrooge chooses to leave Belle and the
“community of love” that includes Belle, the Fezziwig’s party and all his past
(Marlow 45).
Yet Ford’s conclusion is affirmed by Marlow that “Dickens suggested
that only by recalling the past—both happy and unhappy—can one disarm it and gain
33
Ford indicates, between the experience of the past and the expectation of the future, a temporal sense
of duration where the conflict between past and future can be solved.
Chen 23
freedom” (Marlow 45).
Time achieves “mutual, continuous looping effects” of the
past and the present (Marlow 45).
While regarding the time scheme of A Christmas Carol, various critics provide
markedly different accounts.
Robert Patten thoroughly investigates the time scheme
in A Christmas Carol and indicates, “Scrooge revisits five past times, past stages in
his psychosexual and psychosocial development …” (176),34 and his conversion is a
move “out of quantitative time into qualitative time” (191).
Scrooge’s view of time,
originally from a mere machinery of measurement, “the simple chronicity of humanly
uninteresting successiveness,” is transformed into a field of integration of the present,
memory of the past and expectation of the future (Patten 191).
Yet, Hillis Miller
holds a distinctive opinion of the temporal scheme in A Christmas Carol. Unlike
Patten and many other critics who consider the process of time as continuity, a
necessary recombination between past and present to achieve the conversion, Miller
holds a more radical attitude towards the present and the future. He allows a gap in
the time scheme and considers the past and the future as an independent time space in
which one can achieve genuine conversion.
Miller indicates:
The conversion works not just by way of the new knowledge it gives, for
example the knowledge Scrooge gets, but by way of an affective break that
leads to action. This action cuts the determining chain of cause and effect
and so falsifies the apparently irrevocable visions presented by the Ghost of
Christmas Yet To Come. (205-06)35
The success of Scrooge’s conversion lies in transcending the fatalistic view of time in
which the consequence of every incident is predestinated.
In all, critics in the past generally accept that Scrooge and most Dickensian
34
35
Robert L. Patten, “Dickens Time and Again,” Dickens Studies Annual 2 (1971).
J. Hillis Miller, “The Genres of A Christmas Carol,” The Dickensian 89.3 (1993).
Chen 24
characters are inevitably shaped with the surge of time; a metaphor indicates a
superior position of time over other influential factors.
However, they neglect an
aspect of the concept of time, a concept that the theory of relativity in the following
century has thrown light on.
This later breakthrough provides a valid and distinct
explanation on the working of time.
Thus, in this chapter, I will demonstrate how
both a deterministic time notion and a relative one prevail in A Christmas Carol.
The deterministic time is an old literary convention since Greek tragedy and is
reinforced by the scientific determinism in the nineteenth century.36
As can be
observed in this story, the escape from the deterministic temporality and the revelation
of relativity in time infer the affirmation of the subjectivity.
The bond of the
conversion and time pattern reveals the subjectivity of a character as well as that of
the author.
I.
A brief survey of Hawking’s ideas before our critical operation may be helpful.
Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time reveals the links between time and the
formation of subjectivity.
His idea illuminates the possible paths of reconstructing
the forming process of subjectivity in Dickens’s A Christmas Carol. To our surprise,
the recursive metaphor of the clock Hawking uses in his book can parallel the time
Dickens demonstrates—both deem the value of human being over other forces in the
world.
As can be detected, the ideas of scientific determinism in the history of time,
subjectivity derived from the theory of relativity and the emphasis on the present, all
resonate with the story of A Christmas Carol.
Scientific determinism is the first conclusion that can be drawn from Hawking’s
36
Here refers to Pierre Simon Laplace (1749-1827), French astronomer and mathematician. His
achievement in celestial mechanics brought profound influence in the eighteen and nineteen century.
Hawking regards him as the founder of the scientific determinism in nineteenth century.
Chen 25
studies of the history of time.
Behind those famous physicists and their complex
models and theories about the universe, an extended concept of time is revealed—a
time pattern either theologically determined or scientifically determined.
The
universe is thought to be controlled by an implied force at first by spirits, later by God
and then by the scientific laws.
absolutely objective parameter.
Since Aristotle, time has been regarded as an
People consider “one could unambiguously measure
the interval of time between two events, and this time would be the same whoever
measured it, provided they used a good clock” (Hawking 18).
This notion of time
has affirmed “an absolute space” that accords with the idea of “an absolute God”
(Hawking 18).
Under the circumstance, human beings are rather vulnerable and
powerless to change the future.
The Greek tragedy, Oedipus the King, thoroughly
exemplifies the power of a deterministic time pattern: the attempt to escape from the
oracle is futile, and the oracle of the future will eventually be fulfilled.
Yet,
following the development of science, the dominant position of God is gradually
removed from the common perception of the universe.
The newly discovered
cosmologic laws substitute the place of God and demonstrate the working of this
world.
On the one hand, new discoveries can prove the intelligence of man; on the
other hand, they expose a world in which everything works according to a certain
nature law.
Most scientists endeavor to develop the complete unified theories that
can describe “what the universe is” (Hawking 174).
Newton’s law of universal
gravity, Einstein’s theory of relativity or Planck’s quantum principle indicates, in the
extreme of each one, a scientific determinism.
The implication of the scientific determinism in the history of time evokes some
issues that draw more attention of Hawking.
surge of time?
What’s the role of people under the
Are people merely subject to the dominance of the nature law or can
Chen 26
they find any method to fight against it?
These questions direct Hawking to his own philosophy of time.
In Hawking’s
viewpoint, the primary purpose of his retelling Newton’s or Einstein’s theories lies not
so much in their explanation of the working of the universe as in the position of man
within the set of laws and world these scientists describe.
Einstein’s theory of
relativity37 that Hawking’s temporal philosophy derives from overthrows Newtonian
assumptions about “absolute time.”
The theory of relativity attributes a
breakthrough in the subject/object relationship that has long been defined by the
deterministic time under which the subjectivity of human beings has been reduced.
However, Hawking alters the clock metaphor, saying, “It appeared that each person
has his own personal measure of time, as recorded by a clock carried with him, and
that identical clocks carried by different observers would not necessarily agree” (21).
In the view of theory of relativities, time is no longer objective and unchangeable.
Instead, time can be redefined by its viewer and the subjectivity of a person emerges
in the process of re-definition.
From the alteration in the definition of the universe and his real life, Hawking’s
emphasis on the status of present can be tracked down. Hawking’s philosophy in
time derived from the theory of relativity is not a random choice. Jack Bushnell
demonstrates a strong connection between most scientists’ minds and the
constructing of their theories, and he believes,
Scientists, like other human beings, search out and find outside themselves
those phenomena or explanations that resonate most personally and
compellingly within. They ‘write’ the world that makes the most sense to
37
In relativity, the speed of light is agreed to be the same, but the distance of the light traveled varies
from different observers who moves in different direction to the object of the light. The time is the
distance divided by the light’s speed and, as a result, varies according to different observers.
Chen 27
them, and in the process they reveal as much about themselves as they do
about the ostensible subject of their discourse. (4)38
Instead of randomly picking up formulas, Hawking deliberately chooses a theory that
both makes sense to him and reveals his personal concepts.
Throughout A Brief
History of Time, we can sense that the author gradually alerts his definition of the
universe. He gradually substitutes the idea of a singularity at the beginning and
ending of the universe with a sense of uncertainty.
As Bushnell indicates, “Hawking
seems from the start concerned less with beginnings and endings than with points on a
seamless continuum, an emphasis on being rather than on past and future” (2).
Hawking’s emphasis on the present results not only from the speculation of physic
theories, but also from his experience in real life. Although he has been suffering
from the ALS and was announced of short life, his mind has been amazingly active
and thus seems to acquire much more time.
As Hawking says, “My disability makes
this rather a slow process, so I had plenty of time.”
Jack Bushnell claims:
Hawking’s disability (his slower process) actually serves to lengthen time
for him: time for thinking, for working, for having children, for perhaps
extending indefinitely the brief life predicted by his doctor. This passage
may be the first clear indication that his book’s title refers to timeaccording-to-Stephen-Hawking, a subversive “history” with no easily
defined beginning or end. (3)
Bushnell’s analysis clarifies the subjective view of judging time by the watcher and
Hawking’s intention to build up his own version of time.
These concerns with
different aspects of time are helpful, for they not only provide an assumption of the
mechanism of the world which can be examined in A Christmas Carol, but also reveal
38
Jack Bushnell, “A Brief History of Stephen Hawking: Beginnings and Endings” Michigan Quarterly
Review 39.4 (2000).
Chen 28
the interaction of people and time.
II
In A Christmas Carol, the way of how the world functions embeds a debate on
determinism.
Through the story, Dickens questions deterministic time notion, rebels
against it with his narrative and advocates the subjectivity in human beings with the
expression echoing the doctrine and spirit of the scientific theory of relativity.
The dialogue between Scrooge and the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come at the
crucial scene of the churchyard portraits the model of time in this story.
“Are these the shadows of the things that Will be, or are they shadows of
things that May be, only?” … “Spirit!” he cried, tight clutching at its robe,
“hear me! I am not the man I was.
but for this intercourse.
I will not be the man I must have been
Why show me this, if I am past all hope?” (CC
124-26)
“Will be” or “May be” does not merely represent an inquiry for his future but stands
for Scrooge’s endeavor to understand the working of the world.
“Will be” stands for
a destined outcome, determinism in time, in which people, as Scrooge, cannot help
but “past all hope” to change anything. Apparently this scene is an epiphany in
which Scrooge is led to realize the relation of past, present and future.
Comparing
the ending of A Christmas Carol with Oedipus the King, Dickens spares his character
and prevents the happening of the miserable future.
To fight the deterministic world, Dickens’s characters often seek for their own
subjectivities which can be affirmed when no longer subjected to time.
In the first
stave39, the chattering of the church bell comprises no evangel but informs Scrooge
39
The divisions of the story are staves that refer to “a unit of the lines and spaces that make the basis
of musical notation.” Miller thinks that one possible classification of genres of A Christmas Carol
can be regarded as a Christmas carol.
Chen 29
the time for work and meals.
Arthur P. Patterson argues that Scrooge “fails to notice
the spiritual values symbolized by the church bell chattering above his head” (174).40
The prelude of the Spirits’ emerge is the description of time that shows its inconstant
status.
Stave II.
As can be seen, the variability of time is the key concept at the beginning of
Experiencing the extremely changing pace of time enables Scrooge to learn
gradually the existence of time and to rediscover his relationship to it.
Time in its
conventional definition is supposed to be the measurement of the day that never goes
wrong.
However, before the emergence of the first Spirit, there is a deliberate and
precise description of time that also demystifies the role of time:
“To his great astonishment the heavy bell went on from six to seven, and
from seven to eight, and regularly up to twelve; then stopped.
was past two when he went to bed. The clock was wrong.
Twelve! It
An icicle must
have got into the works. Twelve!” (CC 66)
Consequently Time is no longer the conventionally absolute idea but something
pliable that can be altered and manipulated by the spirits.
Yet, under the
manipulation of the spirits who accelerate the working of time, Scrooge has been slept
over twenty-two hours, “through a whole day [from past two] and far into another
night [at twelve].”
As Scrooge wakes up and waits for the arrival of the first Spirit, the conventional
notion of time is being challenged again. Scrooge “was more than once convinced
he must have sunk into a doze unconsciously, and miss the clock” (CC 67).
The
division of an hour into four quarters, and the intersecting narratives of reports on the
passing of the time units strengthen the stretching of the hour.
“Ding, dong!”
40
Arthur P. Patterson, “Sponging the Stone: Transformation in A Christmas Carol,” Dickens Quarterly
11.4 (1994).
Chen 30
“A quarter past,” said Scrooge, counting.
“Ding, dong!”
“Half past!” said Scrooge.
“Ding, dong!”
“A quarter to it,” said Scrooge.
“Ding, dong!”
“The hour itself,” said Scrooge, triumphantly, “and nothing else!”
“He spoke before the hour bell sounded, which it now did with a deep,
dull, hollow, melancholy One.” (CC 67)
While waiting for the coming of the first Spirit, Scrooge now is aware of the existence
of time and is able to prolong the length of it. This passage echoes Hawking’s
interpretation of the theory of relativity that debunks the “absolute time” in the
deterministic time pattern and postulates another temporality in which “each person
has his own personal measure of time” (Hawking 18, 143). The invariability in time
is smashed, and time can be shortened or stretched on different occasions.
Robert Patten has tried to describe the transformation of Scrooge’s attitude
toward time shown in the above passage.
He suggests that Scrooge’s conversion is a
move “out of quantitative time into qualitative time” (191).
Quantitative time refers
to the successive records of events that are totally unrelated to human beings.
Time
stands for the records of daily events that can never interrupt his rhymes of life. At
first, the appearance of the Ghosts interrupts Scrooge’s “accustomed rhythm of
business” (Patten 172). Then, in consequence of the breaking of an hour into four
quarters, “he [Scrooge] is attending to time’s variability and quality in a way he never
has before” (Patten 174).
The temporal variability that Patten features reverberates
the notion of the relativity in time.
As Scrooges converts, he gradually understands
Chen 31
the qualitative time, integrates “the perception of present, the memory of the past and
expectation of the future” and exhibits “a concern for Mankind” (Patten 191, 192).
Patten exhibits one aspect of man’s relation to time, and Hawking’s notion of time
presents another.
People struggle to maintain their own subjectivity in the
deterministic world. Although relativity in time has been an old theme that has
partaken a role in the history of literature long time ago, Hawking’s explanation of it
make known the relation between subjectivity and time in the theory of relativity that
provides a path through which Scrooge can evade from the doomed ending.
Another instance of the relativity in time, implied by Hawking, occurs between
personal believes and their explanation in time, for different explanation in time
reveals a more personal concept. Throughout A Christmas Carol, we hear abundant
debating upon the value of Christmas day.
Each character in this novel has, as
Hawking reiterates, “his own measure of time as recorded by a clock that he carried:
clocks carried by different observers would not necessarily agree” (143).
everyone imposes his personal concept upon his temporal viewpoint.
whimsical masque of diverse voices of time hide diverse ideologies.
that Scrooge encounters represents a different view of time.
That is,
Behind the
Every character
The quarrel between
him and Fred about the celebration of Christmas exemplifies the disagreement upon
time.
‘What’s Christmas time to you but a time for paying bills without money; a
time for finding yourself a year older and not an hour richer…’ said Scrooge,
indignantly … [but] returned the nephew: ‘… I am sure I have always
thought of Christmas time, … when men and women seem by one consent
to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of people below them as if
they really were fellow-passengers to the grave …. (CC 48-9)
Chen 32
The very first conversation of the story reveals relatively different opinions.
Scrooge’s concept of time equates money, either spending or accumulating.
Compared to his uncle’s practical and economic concern with time, Fred shows his
sympathy with other fellow-passengers. Subjectivity emerges when the variability
in temporality presents itself from the conversation among different characters and
from Scrooge’s realization of the time.
The past, the present and the future are accustomed divisions of the time-space.
Opposed to the determinism that has pre-destined consequence in the future,
characters in this story always persist in the present and solve their problems.
The
absence of God in this story can be regarded as one support to this statement.
Dickens implies an emphasis on the time of present as Hawking does. There is a
parallel between the scientists’ choices of explanations and novelists’ depictions of a
scene.
Hawking’s emphasis is revealed in his alteration on the history of time.
In
the introduction to A Brief History of Time, Carl Sagan considers Hawking’s
conclusion in this book as a manifestation of “the absence of God” in the history of
the universe.
Sagan claims,
Hawking is attempting, as he explicitly states, to understand the mind of
God.
And this makes all the more unexpected the conclusion of the effort,
at least so far: a universe with no edge in space, no beginning or end in time,
and nothing for a Creator to do. (x)
“Nothing for a Creator to do” in the history of time Hawking assumes is eligible, for
all the phenomena work in a deterministic world according to the laws that rule it.
Yet, Sagan neglects a question that Hawking raises, Why?
possible answer to Hawking’s question.
Dickens provides a
Tiny Tim’s expression, “it might be pleasant
to them to remember upon Christmas Day, who made lame beggars walk and blind
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men see” (CC 94), suggests one of the evidences that Dickens proposes Christianity
as his primary belief in his philosophy of Christmas.
Yet, the idea of the absence of
God also reverberates at the end of the story. Scrooge “had no further intercourse
with Spirits, but lived upon the Total Abstinence Principle, ever afterwards…” (CC
134).
The absence is not the result of denial of God but the result of the praise of the
subjectivity of mankind that manifests itself in the emphasis on the present.
In the
present, the protagonist in A Christmas Carol has both the chance and the capacity to
make amends for his wrong doing.
Dickens’s another emphasis on the present is illustrated by Scrooge’s time travel.
Compared to other nineteenth century scientific fictions, such as H. G. Wells’ The
Time Machine, Dickens’s time travel has a distinct feature. His character behaves as
an observer that has no interference with the scenes in the experienced time-spaces.
The unchanged past and the uncertain future achieve the emphasis on present, a
primary element that resonates in A Christmas Carol, for only in present can the
conversion succeeds.
“His [Scrooge’s] final conversion is marked by his promise to
keep all three times, Past, Present, and Future, in his heart always.
time is eternally present, time is redeemable” (Patten 190).
For Dickens, if
As Scrooge eventually
wakes up, his joyous exclamation reflects an integration of the three time phases into
one, into a seamless continuum. Despite the fact that past is always a crucial factor
within Dickens’s novels, it is not the time-space that a conversion can work out.
Past in Dickens’s mind is eluded as the Ghost suggests, “These are but shadows of the
things that have been. … They have no consciousness of us” (CC 71).
Past can
provide stimulation and inspiration, but still scenes in the past remain unaffected by
Scrooge’s revisiting.
in the past, he thinks:
In Patten’s explanation about the characteristics of the shadows
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Though his path away from the countryside and human community into the
city has been voluntarily chosen, these shadows of the past cannot be
changed: they have been determined by men’s deeds, and are not the fault of
the Spirit. (179)
The shadows of the past have been determined and unchangeable.
ground where the present can be compared with.
They provide a
Robert Tracy claims that the role
of Scrooge is “a passive but absorbed witness of events that have shaped the present
where he watches them” (128).41
Although in his past, Scrooge is detached from the
surrounding, and his personal time tickles forward as usual. His role as a detached
witness remains the same in the scene of the future.
In contrast with the unchanged
past, future possesses infinite possibilities. Back to the question on the graveyard,
“Are these the shadows of the things that Will be, or are they shadows of things that
May be, only?” (CC 124)
Scrooge receives no answer from the Spirit whose silence
strengthens the uncertainty.
III
Before the appearance of the well-known autobiographical character, David
Copperfield, in 1850, Ebenezer Scrooge, who Dickens creates to make known the
motif of the story—“bring home to the better-off the plight of the poor, especially the
children”—shares many in common with the author himself (Slater 34). 42
Intentionally or unintentionally, Scrooge is an autobiographical character, like many a
Dickensian persona who speak for the author. Evidences can be found in The Life of
Charles Dickens in which Dickens’s own accounts are paralleled to the descriptions of
41
Robert Tracy, “‘A Whimsical Kind of Masque’: The Christmas Books and Victorian Spectacle,”
Dickens Studies Annual: Essays on Victorian Fiction 27 (1998).
42
Michael Slater, Introduction, The Christmas Books Volume 1: A Christmas Carol/ The Chime, 1843,
by Charles Dickens (New York: Penguin, 1985).
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Scrooge’s past in A Christmas Carol.43
First of all, at the first scene of Master
Scrooge’s past, he is reminded of his readings with excitement and surprise:
It’s dear old honest Ali Baba! Yes, yes, I know. One Christmas time,
when yonder solitary child was left here all alone, he did come, for the first
time, just like that. … There’s the Parrot! … there he is!
Poor Robin
Crusoe…. There goes Friday…. (CC 72-3)
The imaginary characters that Master Scrooge creates to comfort his neglected school
life are from the books that can be found in the collections of Dickens’s father’s.
My father had left a small collection of books in a little room upstairs ….
From that blessed little room, Roderick Random, Peregrine Pickle,
Humphrey Clinker, Tom Jones, The Vicar of Wakefield, Don Quixote, Gil
Blas and Robinson Crusoe came out, a glorious host, to keep me company.
(Forster 8-9)
The appearances of Ali Baba and Robinson Crusoe outside the window resonate the
description of Dickens to Forster about his childhood.
The loneliness of young
Dickens underlined by his reading is soothed when the fictional characters “came
out.”
In the second scene of Scrooge’s past, being allowed to go home for
Christmas reminds us of young Dickens’s affection for his sister, Fanny.
“I have come to bring you home, dear brother.” Said the child, clapping her
tiny hands down to laugh.
“To bring you home, home, home!”
“Home, little Fan?” returned the boy. (CC 73)
The joyous exclamation of little Fan seeing her brother, Scrooge, and the dearly
addressing to each other exemplify Forster’s observation of the relation between
Dickens and his sister. As Forster depicts, Dickens’s ecstasy seeing his sister’s
43
John Forster, The Life of Charles Dickens, 1876 (New York: Walter J. Black,1900).
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achievement and his sorrow after the funeral can prove the intense feeling between
them:
Extreme enjoyment in witnessing the exercise of her talents, the utmost
pride in every success obtained by them, he manifested always to a degree
otherwise quite unusual with him; and on the day of her funeral, which we
passed together, I had most affecting proof of his tender arid grateful
memory of her in these childish days. (Forster 37)
The “affecting proof of his [Dickens’s] tender arid grateful memory” can be traced
easily in the exclamation of master Scrooge’s seeing his young sister, Fanny, and the
dearly addressing to each other.
However, Fanny’s achievement in the Royal Academy of Music reminds Dickens
of his misery in the blacking factory.
I could not bear to think of myself—beyond the reach of all such
honourable emulation and success. The tears ran down my face. … I
prayed, when I went to bed that night, to be lifted out of the humiliation and
neglect in which I was. I never had suffered so much before.
There was
no envy in this. (Forster 37)
Dickens’s “tear” and “humiliation” do not come from his envy for his sister but
because of the “neglect” from the parents’ that parallels the scene of Master Scrooge
being left alone in school in Christmas time.
The most remarkable resemblance dwelled in both young Scrooge and young
Dickens is their anxiety about the future. From the conversation between young
Scrooge and Bell, what makes him change is revealed: “You fear the world too much”
(CC 79).
Scrooge’s fear comes from being destitute in money, for he thinks “there is
nothing on which it is so hard as poverty…” (CC 79).
To avoid being trapped in
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poverty, young Scrooge turns to pursue his “golden Idol” (CC 79).
A circumstance
paralleled to this conversation can be seen in Dickens’s childhood who was aware of
the hardship of poverty, for the financial failures of his father, John Dickens, were
definitely the most profound influence upon him.
Dickens remembered his visit to
Marshalsea as his father had been arrested for debt.
To improve the domestic
economic of his family, little Dickens had to work in the blacking warehouse and
earned six shillings a week.
Dickens related the frustration at that time to his
biographer:
No words can express the secret agony of my soul as I … felt my early
hopes of growing up to be a learned and distinguished man, crushed in my
breast. The deep remembrance of the sense I had of being utterly neglected
and hopeless; of the shame I felt in my position; of the misery it was to my
young heart to believe that, day by day, what I had learned, and thought, and
delighted in, and raised my fancy and my emulation up by, was passing
away from me, never to be brought back any more; cannot be written.
(Forster 26-27)
The senses of “being neglected and hopeless,” “of shame” and “of the misery,”
possess in little Dickens’s mind who regards himself as been trapped in the hardship
and realizes that he would step to a destined ending as that of his father’s.
The
experience of working at window “haunted him and made him miserable” (Forster 23).
John Dickens’ financial trouble and the “haunted” recollections of the child labor
result in Charles Dickens’s endeavor to avoid destitution. As Forster indicates, “a
natural dread of the hardships …became by degrees a passionate resolve…not to be
what circumstances were conspiring to make him” (Forster 40-41). “The natural
dread of the hardship” corresponds to Bell’s conclusion about Scrooge’s “fear of the
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world” (CC 79).
The “passionate resolve” that Dickens takes echoes young
Scrooge’s strive to be rich.
The story of Gadshill-place illuminates a time pattern similar to that of A
Christmas Carol.
In the interposing of the past and the present, Dickens has a
conversation with his former self:
And ever since I can recollect, my father, seeing me so fond of it, has often
said to me, If you were to be very persevering, and were to work hard, you
might some day come to live in it. Though that's impossible!
I was rather amazed to be told this by the very queer small boy; for that
house happens to be my house, and I have reason to believe that what he
said was true. (Forster 6)
The father’s expectation and the boy’s response manifest Dickens’s contradicting
realizations in time which he presents through Scrooge in the story.
Robert Tracy
believes that Scrooge can avoid the ending of his life shown by the Spirit because he
maintains “the author’s supreme power, that of deciding fates” (123), and rewrites his
story and the ending of Tiny Tim.
He is authorized a power that makes him surpass
the confinement of time pattern and his identity as a character in a story.
In all, the deterministic view of time shapes an arrow-like metaphor that heads
for only one direction—to its ultimate ending.
In A Christmas Carol, the spirits
presents a lineal and irreversible succession of moments in Scrooge’s life.
Scrooge’s timely awareness earns him a second chance.
Yet,
The escape from the
deterministic temporality affirms the subjectivity of an individual who would not
passively accept a predestined future but change it according to his own free will. In
the following chapter, I will demonstrate how an individual’s life is formed in an
industrialized society. In contrast to seeing the growth of an individual from the
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time within himself in A Christmas Carol, I will investigate the time derived from a
social phenomenon with the help of chronotopes and their influence upon the concept
of time of an individual in Hard Times.
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Chronotopes in Hard Times
Dickens formulates the industrial city, Coketown, as the background of Hard
Times.
But in addition to being a mere fictional setting, the foreground of Coketown
also indicates the writer’s concern with the time in which the living pattern of people
is profoundly influenced by Industrial Revolution.
“Tall chimneys,” “black canal,”
and the “unnatural red and black” shape the features of Coketown, and they jointly
form the monotonous “Key-note”44 performed by “the piston of the steam-engine
worked monotonously up and down, like the head of an elephant in a state of
melancholy madness” (HT 65).
The monotonous time that prevails in Coketown is
not the mimicry of nature but of industrialization represented by the steam-engine that
works repetitiously up and down.
Eric Levy follows the key-note of the novel and
emphasizes the monotonous mechanism as the representation of life in Coketown:
At the most profound level, time has value in Coketown only through its
monotony. … Though time itself cannot be stopped, its very passage can be
made to signify stasis; for here time is merely the measure of mechanical
repetition. (455)45
Levy takes a paradoxical expression of time—non-stopped but static.
Such a
contradiction occurs when the idea of time in Coketown echoes the Keynote of the
novel.
Here though time is always moving forward, it “goes no further than an ever
repeating present” (Levy 457).
people in Coketown follow.
Repetition thus becomes the pattern of time that
Consequently, in addition to the symbolic image of the
steam engine that works repetitiously up and down, the sequential order of narrative
also echoes a repetitious time pattern.
44
Running headlines have been introduced in the publishing of the Charles Dickens Edition of
1867-68.
45
Eric P. Levy, “Dickens’ Pathology of Time in Hard Times,” ed. Fred Kaplan and Sylvere Monod
Hard Times, 1854, by Charles Dickens (New York: Norton, 2001).
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Soultana Maglavera’s analysis on the sequence of events in Hard Times, the
repetition in narratives, suggests controversial significances of stasis and change in
“the semantic and thematic level” (Maglavera 76).
For instance, Bounderby’s
re-telling of the fictitious childhood does not result in any actual “changes.” His
statements are “almost clichés, or inflexible repetitions,” and “ultimately the idea of
history as ‘stasis’ describes Mr. Bounderby’s world” (Maglavera 76).
In contrast to
his case, the repetition of narrating Sissy’s past signifies a very different meaning.
Sissy’s past has been re-told by different characters.
“The narrative units that make
up Sissy’s stories involve not only a temporal displacement but also variations in the
angle of presentation” (Maglavera 81).
This kind of repetition “invests more
information with meaning” and “highlights the theme of human relationships and love
more effectively” (Maglavera 82).
As can be seen, though Levy and Maglavera emphasize the repetitious time
pattern within the story, both of them manifest their understanding of time from
different angles, such as the social dynamic, and the events of narrative. Their
analysis might result in a dichotomy of stasis and change in time. In their criticism,
time echoes the tempo of factory machine—repetitious time pattern. Yet in Hard
Times, there are some characters that cannot be dichotomized into the spheres that the
above critics have suggested. For such characters, Mikhail Bakhtin’s idea of
chronotope can effectively explain the interrelationship among these characters, their
concepts of time and space that represent another kind of time pattern, emerged with
the social dynamics but often neglected.
In Hard Times, the temporality should not be read solely out of the social context.
The title suggests both the hard time that most characters have been experienced in
their lives and the turbulence of the contemporary society. We can infer that the
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primary concern in the novel lies in the society and in people as well.
connectedness echoes Mikhail Bakhtin’s reading of temporality in literature.
This
While
coping with the time element in the novels, he creates the term, chronotope (literally,
‘time space’) (84).46
Bakhtin does not define this jargon specifically but gives a
principle that helps readers to identify chronotopes as the structure in different literary
works—“the intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships that are
artistically expressed in literature” (Bakhtin 84).
According to Bakhtin’s own
analysis of chronotopes from Greek Romance to Rabelais’ novels, rather than a static
structure that forms itself as the center of deciphering meaning, we can see the
dynamics of the structure that transforms while the world changes—a structure
manifests the “assimilating real historical time and space” and “actual historical
persons in such a time and space” in each text (Bakhtin 84).
Chronotope is a
structure “for conceptualizing the image of a person, the processes of history, and the
dynamics of society” (Morson and Emerson 371).47
Meanwhile, the dynamics on
the structure—every individual’s activities, such as information seeking, rumors
spreading and decision making—are interrelated.
Chronotope manifests different forms of time.
According to Cary Saul Morson
and Caryl Emerson, “in literature and culture generally, time is always in one way or
another historical and biographical, and space is always social” (Morson and Emerson
371).
The following analysis will illustrate the interconnectedness of these three
aspects of the “chronotopic aura” (Morson and Emerson 374).
First of all, the
temporality in chronotope aims at reconstructing the time of characters by showing
the dialectic encounters in their lives. From the discussion of the biographical time
46
47
Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael
Holquist (Texas: U of Texas P, 1981).
Cary Saul Morson and Caryl Emerson, Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics (California:
Standford UP, 1990).
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of a character, Bakhtin tries to find out whether the character achieves becoming or
not.
A character’s development is either heading for a fixed end in which time
forges nothing new or emerges voices that are contradictory to the former self
(Morson and Emerson 396). Secondly, the spatiality of chronotope concerns with
the characters and the social dynamics.
In theory, there is no reason why the same
person could not have appeared and developed the same way in a different culture or
period in which the environment has been changed (Morson and Emerson 396).
For
instance, the nineteenth century would be the only epoch when the gathering of
different characters in Hard Times could only take place, for it was the time when the
rail roads had been developed.
The innovation in transportation and the subversion
of hierarchy imply a connecting pattern of different social clustering.
readers neglect this phenomenon.
Yet, most
The structure is not fixed or unchanged but varies
and progresses according to the development in the story; therefore, the meaning
would not be predetermined. Bakhtin thinks “the chronotope … determines the
image of man in literature” (Bakhtin 85). “The image of man” in a text concerns
Bakhtin most.
In the following analysis, I will reconstruct the concept of time
presented in the characterization of Louisa by examining her encounters with other
characters throughout Hard Times.
Hard Times presents a distinctive example of Bakhtin’s categorization of the
nineteenth-century novel which “links the individual’s story to society … and the
hero’s story is itself shaped by historical forces” (Morson and Emerson 388).
That is,
the protagonists actually live in their own time and respond to every coming impulse
in their daily life which attributes to the change of the protagonists. The image of
people would be the first issue in the following analysis, for it is the dominant
principle in the chronotope and represents a controversial temporality opposed to the
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monotony which implies the “static affirmation of the identity” in Louisa Gradgrind
(Bakhtin 117).
The aim of the present analysis is to illustrate a dialectical rather than
static concept of time Louisa presents.
Before illustrating the interactions among them, a particular way of
communicating between characters is worth to point out.
“Gaze” is a particular way
of communicating in this novel through which Louisa’s self either identifies or
struggles with the expectations of others’. Throughout the novel, Louisa is trying to
construct an image of her self in the course of her life.
Every incident and every
character she meets are all at a critical moment in her course of life and stimulate her
to redefine her own image.
“Self” is not predetermined, but gradually formed in the
dialogue with others.
Yet, in Hard Times, the dialogues between characters take place in a very limited
way.
It is worth to notice that eyes are the only way through which she and other
characters, who were instructed in Gradgrind’s education system, contact with the
outside world.
The passionate exclamation for seeking her father’s help, after
Harthouse’s courting, exemplifies the only way of seeing the world, though it is very
much deformed by her father’s education:
If I had been stone blind; if I had groped my way by my sense of touch, and
had been free, while I knew the shapes and surfaces of things, to exercise
my fancy somewhat, in regard to them; I should have been a million times
wiser, happier, more loving, more contented, more innocent and human in
all good respects, than I am with the eyes I have. (HT 240)
Depending solely on her eyes to see the world is not enough.
She is aware that the
deficiency of her sense of touch and her capacity of fancy compel her to neglect other
facets of things.
Her deploring is an inevitable consequence of her education that
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has long been noticed. Her eyes are the primary and only device through which she
sees the world.
This can be detected from a famous episode in which Bitzer is asked
to define a horse. He readily answers, “Quadruped. Graminivorous. Forty teeth,
namely twenty-four grinders, four eye-teeth, and twelve incisive…” (HT 50).
Instead of showing a physical sense to see the shape of a horse, her eyes, as those of
Bitzer’s, only serve to read the description of it. One can see that all senses except
reasoning are excluded in Mr. Gradgrind’s classroom.
excluded because wondering is forbidden.
Sissy’s other senses are also
Trained by Gradgrind’s educational
system, people lack the capacity to articulate the feeling or emotion within them.
Both of his own children Louisa and Tom have similar obstacles in revealing their
thoughts. As the narrator notes:
“I don’t know what this—jolly old—Jaundiced Jail,” Tom had paused to
find a sufficient complimentary an expressive name for the parental roof,
and seemed to relief his mind for a moment by the strong alliteration of this
one, “would be without you.” (HT 91)
Tom’s compassionate expression, “would be without you,” is turned into an objective
but convincing phrase—“Jaundiced Jail.”
Here his personal emotion has been
suppressed.
The only sense that Louisa has left to learn the world is seeing by which she
gradually constructs her self.
As can be observed in many scenes in which Louisa
and other characters’ dialogues take place, the eye contacts imply further
understanding—she sees the possible definition of her self from other’s expectation.
Louisa’s seeing echoes the gaze in psychological significance.
Jacques Lacan’s illuminating idea to interpret the “gaze.”
Here we may borrow
“From the moment that
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this gaze appears,” as Lacan claims, “the subject tries to adapt himself to it” (83).48
The adaptation, in fact, involves at least two phases.
First of all, the person infers a
possible image according to others’ definition and then performs an adaptation.
Louisa’s responses echo Lacan’s description on several occasions throughout the
novel in which she strives to meet other people’s expectations. Lacan further indicates
the effect of adapting into other’s gaze: “he becomes that punctiform object, that point
of vanishing being with which the subject confuses his own failure” (83).
Yet, gaze
does not mean the totally impassive acceptance, for the subject should possess the free
will to decide whether to fit into other’s expectation or not. The effect of gaze, or
being under people’s sight, can be traced in John Forster’s The Life of Charles
Dickens. According to Forster, young Dickens was once watched by the passengers of
the street when he was sent to work at a blacking factory. Harry Stone scrutinizes
the interaction between Dickens and the passengers in their eye contacts, and his
description reinforces the miserable feeling in Dickens’s mind:
He worked … watching the unfettered world go by and, to his great shame,
being watched, in turn, by passing strangers … watched, and gawked at, and
stared at while he toiled on in his shadowy den, an ignominious street show,
a wretched emblem of degradation and servitude. (514)49
Even though Dickens is isolated within the window, he still perceives the sense of
“degradation and servitude” while being “watched,” “gawked,” and “stared” by
passing strangers.
This miserable memory of Dickens’s childhood is a theme that
can be traced in lots of his novels and stories.
For instance, Louisa Gradgrind’s
“intense and searching” (HT 58) look at her father’s face echoes a scene in Dickens’s
48
Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans.
Alan Sheridan (New York : Norton, 1978).
49
Harry Stone, The Night Side of Dickens: Cannibalism, Passion, Necessity (Columbus: Ohio State UP,
1994).
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biography: “I saw my father coming in at the door one day when we were very busy,
and I wondered how he could bear it” (Forster 34). Both Louisa and young Dickens
care about what their father would think of them.
A possible way to get into Louisa’s mind and see the process of her constructing
her self ascribes to the gaze of other and hers.
The following analysis will
reconstruct the time of Louisa by following her learning and her response to people’s
gaze, both literally and psychologically.
Throughout the passage of her life, fact and
fancy are not the only forces that drive her to either opposite extreme, but more voices
will gradually appear and have dialogues with her.
Throughout the passage of her
life, the incidents that Louisa encounters stimulate and achieve a dialectical
temporality in Louisa’s self.
One can see that Louisa tries to adapt herself into her
father’s and her brother’s gaze.
The initial image of her identity in his father’s eyes
manifests itself in Thomas Gradgrind’s question to her—“What would Mr. Bounderby
say!” (HT 58)
Louisa responds to the mention of this name immediately with an
“intense and searching” look at her father’s face (HT 58).
Louisa’s intense and
searching look reconfirms her father’s definition of the daughter that needs to be
recognized by his friend of facts.
Louisa obeys and later even becomes the
“success” of Thomas Gradgrind’s training (HT 137).
As the object of the gaze still
has the right to choose, Louisa’s response is actually a disguise. Louisa desperately
wants to fulfill the gaze from her brother. As James Harthouse observes, while Tom
enters, Louisa “broke into a beaming smile” (HT 163).
the only creature she cares for” (HT 164).
He realizes that “the whelp is
In fact, Tom has told Louisa that, in the
eyes of Bounderby, she is “his little pet” and “his favorite” (HT 93).
Tom even
boasts to Harthouse his use of Louisa: “I may have wanted more than she was likely
to have got…. She didin’t marry old Bounderby for her own sake, or for his sake, but
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for my sake” (HT 207).
Louisa has adapted herself into Tom’s expectations, and in
some occasions, she has even vanished her original identity, confused with the seer’s
expectation. As Louisa beseeches Tom to tell the truth so that the question in her
mind would be solved:
You may be certain … that I will not reproach you.
that I will be compassionate and true to you.
You may be certain
You may be certain that I
will save you at whatever cost. O Tom, have you nothing to tell me?
Whisper very softly.
Say only ‘yes,’ and I shall understand you! (HT 216)
We see clearly the role of Louisa, instead of a sister, “taking the roles of mother and
wife” (76).50
On the one hand, Louisa promises not to reproach at his faults and
saves him from any predicaments.
She possesses the role of a mother and takes the
responsibility of instructing Tom to behave properly.
On the other hand, her
compassion and sincerity implies the fidelity that would exist between lovers.
The change of Louisa’s biographical time starts when she meets Sissy Jupe.
While Louisa accompanies Mr. Gradgrind to the Bounderby’s for Sissy’s problem, her
eyes vividly express her impatience. “Louisa stood coldly by, with her eyes upon the
ground” (HT 88).
Later on, she is gradually changed.
“It was only now, when her
sorrow broke out, that Louisa looked at her [Sissy]” (HT 88).
What has caught
Louisa’s attention was the interaction between father and daughter—the reading
between Sissy and Sissy’s father.
The sudden change of the attitude from
indifference to curiosity results from what she sees a thoroughly different image of
woman.
This is a critical moment in Louisa’s course of life, for she has experienced
an impact in mind.
50
Some days later, Louisa resumes the topic of Sissy’s reading
Richard Fabrizio, “Wonderful No-Meaning: Language and the Psychopathology of Family in Hard
Times,” Dickens Studies Annual: Essays on Victorian Fiction 16(1987). Fabrizio argues that the
relationship of Louisa and the whelp reflects the sibling incest that “has a long history in literature.”
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again.
“And he likes them [readings]? Said Louisa with her searching gaze on Sissy
all this time” (HT 99).
Louisa’s eagerness in learning a new definition of the
father/daughter relationship is revealed in her “searching gaze.”
Sissy plays the role of “fool” in Hard Times and fails to “understand the habitual
way of conceiving the world” (Bakhtin 402). She assumes that she can never do
well in learning and is stupid.
Bakhtin coins the term “fool” in his definition of
chronotopes and indicates that “the rogue, the clown and the fool create around
themselves their own special little world, their own chronotope” (159). Sissy lives
in her own world and lives according to her belief.
environment of Coketown.
She is not assimilated into the
The narrator notes a significant characteristic of Sissy:
“It had no effect on Sissy, fact or not fact” (HT 255).
Bakhtin further explains the
functions of the rouge, the clown and the fool who “opposed to convention and
functioning are a force for exposing it” (162), and “by his very uncomprehending
presence, he makes strange the world of social conventionality” (404). Regarded as
a food failing to answer the mathematical calculations, Sissy’s misunderstanding of
the implications in the questions yet makes readers reconsider the value of human
being.
In Bakhtin’s term, Morson and Emerson clarify the importance of the fool:
“the figure of the fool could be used to stand for all humanity, as an extreme that
allows us to see the norm [of the society]” that sometimes is unreasonable and
ridiculous (Morson and Emerson 402-03).
We can infer from Sissy’s answer that
Dickens presents a disapproving attitude of the contemporary political economy in
which human beings are reduced to mere numbers, and the right of the minority is
sacrificed when the profits of the majority are affirmed.
Neither can human being be
reduced to be merely Hands who contribute all their life to achieve the prosperity of
their society.
Chen 50
As Louisa accepts Bounderby’s proposal, she deliberately avoids Sissy’s eye
contact. “Sissy had suddenly turned her head, and looked, in wonder, in pity, in
sorrow, in doubt, in a multitude of emotions, towards Louisa. Louisa had known it,
and seen it, without looking at her” (HT 138).
“Wonder,” “pity,” “sorrow” and
“doubt” are manifested as the emotion of disappointment because Louisa fails the
expectation from Sissy.
Louisa has shut down the only channel of
conversation—the possibility of dialogue. “What does it matter?” is her existential
statement that infers indifference towards everything concerned with her (HT 136).
At this moment, as Levy argues, “The deepest motive of this despair is an impatience
for her life to be over, so that she will be excused from struggle during it” (456).
the impatience is temporary.
Yet,
The time of Louisa does not cease to be static but
retains the dialectical essence while other stimulations constantly rush in.
Another critical moment during Louisa’s life time happens when Stephen
Blackpool meets Louisa in the bank where he has been tormented by Bounderby’s
menace.
Through the eye contacts, Stephen seeks the “natural refuge” from a
Victorian housemistress (HT 179).
Stephen is “staunchly protesting against the
words that had been used, and instinctively addressing himself to Louisa, after
glancing at her face” (HT 179).
He assumes that Louisa plays the role of the
housemistress and believes in the assistance she will ultimately offer as a lady usually
does.
Stephen’s inquiries indeed gain responses from Louisa: “Reverting for a
moment to this former refuge, he observed a cautionary movement of her eyes
towards the door” (HT 181).
Yet, Louisa’s response is not necessarily a confirmation
of the role of the housemistress.
In previous chapters of the novel, as James
Harthouse takes the first glance at Louisa and the drawing room, the display of
ornaments and furniture reveals her indifference to be a mistress of the house:
Chen 51
From the mistress of the house, the visitor glanced to the house itself.
There was no mute sign of a woman in the room.
No graceful little
adornment, no fanciful little device, however trivial, anywhere expressed
her influence. (HT 161)
The observation of Harthouse suggests that the most common mistress of a house
might do, and Louisa is unwilling to take the role as a Victorian mistress of the
Bounderby’s house.
Catherine Gallagher might suggest a better explanation to the
aid from Louisa to Stephen.
Gallagher points out a parallel situation in Louisa and
Thomas Gradgrind with that in Stephen Blackpool and Josiah Bounderby: “Gradgrind
refuses to recognize his daughter’s emotional needs, just as Bounderby has refused to
recognize Stephen’s” (151). 51
Louisa sees a double of herself, suffering from
lacking the capacity of negotiating, and thus urges Stephen to leave. At the night of
the same day, her personal contact with Blackpool is a new experience for her who
always reads the fact but never sees it. Compared with Sissy who exemplifies a
totally different belief in Louisa’s earlier education, Stephen enables Louisa to see the
real world described in the bluebooks.
“For the first time in her life, Louisa had
come into one of the dwellings of the Coketown Hands; for the first time in her life,
she was face to face with anything like individuality in connexion with them” (HT
187).
It is an epiphany for her to realize the missing part in her way of seeing.
Among all the characters around Louisa Gradgrind, the emergence of James
Harthouse achieves the most profound influences—strangers or acquaintances provide
information that people normally cannot get from their own/old friends who possess
similar information as they do.
between Harthouse and Louisa.
51
The influence of a stranger is seen in the relationship
Taking the advantage of Louisa’s spoiling for the
Catherine Gallagher, The Industrial Reformation of English Fiction: Social Discourse and Narrative
Form 1832-1867 (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1985).
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whip, Harthouse successfully gains Louisa’s confidence and imposes on her his
influence, a new knowledge that, more importantly, is outside the binary classification
of Gradgrind’s system, between fact and fancy. James Harthouse accidentally has an
indeliberate accomplice in this affair, Mrs. Sparsit whose “action upon Mr. Bounderby
threw Louisa and James Harthouse more together, and strengthened the dangerous
alienation from her husband and confidence against him with another” (HT 221-22).
As can be inferred from Louisa’s confidence with Harthouse, Louisa possibly accepts
his amoral attitude which is totally new to her. Gallagher blames people around
Louisa for the indignant affair: “Preyed upon by husband, brother and lover, Louisa is
seen descending a gothic staircase of dishonor in Mrs. Sparsit’s imagination” (156).
Louisa’s “descending” results from a response to the “preying” around her.
Compared with Sleary’s circus that is another effective instance attracting Louisa to
break the rule and to peep into it, Harthouse’s influence is even more powerful, for
fancy has been an object that Mr. Gradgrind always tries to attack, but the amoral
attitude of James Harthouse can not be categorized into the classification of
Gradgrind’s system.
After Louisa returns to Stone Lodge for refuge, her words to Thomas Gradgrind
reveal her accustomed subjection to other people’s expectation. “If you had only
neglected me, what a much better and much happier creature I should have been this
day” (HT 239).
The interaction between father and daughter has been reduced to
fact delivering, and thus Louisa deplores that her father’s education has constrained
her senses. “The book seems suffused with a fear of making connections in a world
where relationships are almost without exception destructive” (Gallagher 159).52
Gallagher thus interprets this father-daughter relationship.
52
Michael Slater’s
Although explicit and thematic, the connections of the metaphors, such as the metaphor of fancy,
circus, the working-child, and devouring monster of factory, are “ambiguously presented.”
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concluding remark on Louisa shows an actual change of Louisa at the end of the
story:
She has come so near to being a fallen woman that, in accordance with the
iron laws of Victorian fiction, there can be for her no happy turning to a new
and fruitful marriage and motherly concern… Instead, it seems that she is to
become a sort of universal aunt… (27)53
Louisa’s “turning” from a fallen woman into a “universal aunt” echoes my argument
about the dialectical temporality in which she encounters different ideologies and
either identifies with or repels against them.
related to Louisa.
There are more issues to be discussed
Being a fictional character of the nineteenth century novel, there
is no such “extratemporal hiatus” in the biographical time of Louisa as the characters
that Bakhtin has examined in epics who “remain absolutely unchanged” (89) in
essence throughout the wandering or the protagonists in the chivalric romance who
keep “their fidelity in love and their faithfulness to the demand of chivalric code”
(151) throughout the testing. The pattern of the incessant dialogues between Louisa
and others in her life can not be simplified as a monotonous repetition of the steam
engine or the cycle of nature but a gradual stimulation and modification.
not facing “an ever repeating present” as Levy suggests.
Louisa is
One can see that,
throughout the life course of Louisa, the influence from other social phenomena
emerges.
The temporality in Hard Times is, in Bakhtin’s term, “profoundly spatial and
concrete” (208), for the process of constructing Louisa’s self connects tightly with one
of the social dynamics, the booming of the railroad.
Each meeting in the temporal
marker of Louisa’s life is inseparable from the spatial marker of the railroad that
53
Michael Slater, An Intelligent Person’s Guild to Dickens (London: Duckworth, 1999).
Chen 54
becomes a device connecting different clusters in the Victorian society. Instead of
random contingency, the gathering of characters, such as James Harthouse, Mrs.
Sparsit, Mrs. Pegler, Sissy Jupe, Stephen Blackpool and Rachel, from different
hierarchies and places possesses an analogue of the working of the railroad system.
Although Louisa seldom leaves Coketown in her life, she intermittently receives
impacts from the outside world. The image of railroad in Hard Times works as a
main structure that echoes the significance of Bakhtin’s chronotope:
The place where the major spatial and temporal sequences of the novel
intersect… the place where encounters occur [and] where dialogues happen,
something that acquires extraordinary importance in the novel, revealing the
character, ‘ideas’ and ‘passions’ of the heroes. (246)
The “encounters” and “dialogues” between different ideologies take place on the
metaphoric railroad, and the interactions among characters forms the time of Louisa.
The following analysis will delineate the temporality shaped by the railroad in the
novel.
Dickens registered the growing of Railway Company in his article “Iron
incidents” in Household Words:
The London and North Western Railway Company… is not only wealthier
than any other corporation in the world, but it is distinguished by having a
larger and more important field of operation.… The value of the
stock-in-trade connected with this one little home transaction is rather more
than the whole capital of the East India Company… it is quite double that of
the Bank of England; and it covers very close to the total outlay upon the
three thousand miles of canal now established in Great Britain and Ireland.
(412)54
54
Charles Dickens, “Iron incidents,” Househould Words 8 (1853-54). Michael J. Freeman,
Chen 55
Here Dickens emphasizes the enormous scale of the London and North Western
Railway Company that has been accumulating its wealth since the thriving
development of the railroad system.
The twenty-four-year construction of the
railroad network has reached the scale of canals that has been developed for hundreds
of years.55
As M. J. Freeman calls, “essentially a nineteenth-century phenomenon”
(2), the development of railroad has set the interactions among Louisa and other
characters within the time of the mid-Victorian age.
Margaret Simpson describes
Dickens’s attitude toward railroad: “Dickens, an advocate of technological progress
but also a critic of its negative impact, was swift to respond in his fiction and in HW”
(190).56
As a keen observer of the new phenomena, Dickens reflects the result of his
observations in his writings.
In the following passages, discussions will be focused
on the impacts brought by the railroad in Hard Times.
Powered by steam engine and built up originally and mainly for distributing
manufacturing goods and textile products, the railroad network has condensed the
spatiality of the story. Lyons, London, Parliamentary and Liverpool can be reached
within a day.
Mrs. Pegler’s description of her journey from Parliamentary to
Coketown reveals the efficiency of the railway system.
morning.
“By Parliamentary, this
I came forty mile by Parliamentary this morning, and I’m going back the
same forty mile this afternoon” (HT 116).
The development of railway system has
improved people’s mobility; traveling eighty miles a day would be impossible for Mrs.
Pegler, for “nine mile to the station this morning” and “the nine mile back tonight”
probably is the farthest distance she can reach on foot. (HT 116).
The railroad compresses the space, the time and shortens the distance to truth in
55
56
Introduction, Transport in Victorian Britain, Ed. Michael J. Freeman and Derek H. Aldcroft, (New
York: Manchester UP, 1988) 8.
The construction of the railroad system has been started in the autumn of 1830, The Liverpool and
Manchester Railway.
Margaret Simpson, The Companion to Hard Times (East Susses: Helm Information, 1997).
Chen 56
Hard Times.
The ever repeating legend of Bounderby’s childhood is known as a
made-up story when Mrs. Pegler is found by Mrs. Sparsit.
The uncovering of
Bouderby’s repetitious story could be regarded as the dialogue between the time
patterns that most critics mentions and the concern of this chapter—the influences
brought by the railroad. That is, an ever repeating present has been made to change
because of the unintentional intruder brought by the railroad.
The role of railroad
has been emphasized again as Mrs. Sparsit intends to find out the affair between
Harthouse and Louisa.
While Mrs. Sparsit figures out that waiting for Harthouse at
the railway station is “a device to keep him [Tom] away [from home],” (HT 233) she
takes the coach and the train and heads for Bounderby’s country house:
The time was short, the road not easy; but she was so quick in pouncing on
a disengaged coach, so quick in darting out of it, producing her money,
seizing her ticket, and diving into the train that she was borne along the
arches spanning the land of coal-pits past and present, as if she had been
caught up in a cloud and whirled away. (HT 233)
The swiftness of Mrs. Sparsit is easily accomplished with the aid of railroad that has
crossed over “the land of coal-pit past and present.”
Yet, one can be reminded of a
parallel situation later when Stephen Blackpool tries to come back to prove his
innocence but unfortunately falls into “the Old Hell Shaft.”
Rather than stressing the dramatic effect on a poor and honest worker, Dickens
takes the death of Stephen Blackpool to remind the reader of the enlarged gap in
social hierarchies.
While most characters enjoy the convenience brought by the
railroad construction, the workers still rely on their feet to travel.
concerning with Blackpool’s journey is:
“How will you travel?”
The last question
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“Afoot, my kind ledy, afoot.”
“Rachel, will you tell him—for you know how, without offence –that this is
freely his, to help him on his way?” (189)
Stephen rejects Louisa’s offer.
“Louisa looked, in part incredulous, in part
frightened, in part overcome with quick sympathy” (HT 189).
As Michael Freeman
indicates, “the labouring classes may have been surrounded by the wonder of the
steam age as applied to traction, but their daily lives benefited from it very little” (8).
After the explosion of the bank robbery, Mrs. Pegler was suspected as one of the
accomplices, for her showing up in town is rather dubious. The rumor comes out:
“An old woman who seems to have been flying into town on a broomstick, every now
and then” (HT 212).
The mystery of Mrs. Pegler is regarded in two aspects, her
identity and her mobility. “She was very cleanly and plainly dressed, had country
mud upon her shoes,” as Stephen observes her at the first time (HT 115).
Her dress
and the mud on the shoes suggest her financial situation as that of other ordinary
workers who can not afford the train tickets.
a person’s social status.
The choices of traveling vehicle reflect
In the case of Mrs. Pegler, trains enable her to travel far, but
she still has to walk nine mile to the station. Comparing to the railway system,
horses represent the aristocracy and the new rich.
“There’s stabling in this place for
a dozen horses; and unless Nickits is belied, he kept the full number” (HT 197).
Although Bounderby despises the stable, he still keeps one horse for practical reasons.
The present chapter aims at investigating the time pattern that is not the
monotonous repetition of nature or factory, but one that is dynamic. On the one hand,
the industrial revolution in manufacturing has designated a new living pattern of the
contemporary Victorian society—the Key-note of Hard Times that represents the
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monotony of mechanic movement and the life of Hands who work and live by the bell
of the factory. On the other hand, the advance in transportation has effectively
changed the structure of the society, providing more chances of dialogues between
different classes.
Comparing with Dickens’s later novels which takes the author
years to conceive, Margaret Simpson points out that Dickens “not only rooted the
novel in its contemporary setting but also pointed to the immediacy of its material”
(11).
The incidents and issues in Hard Times, such as the train accident told as a
joke in Parliament and the union strike in Coketown, are indeed the current issues.
In 1856, Dickens depicted an experience in a train traveling in an article entitled
“Railway Dreaming,” in Household Words. 57
The complex feeling toward this
phenomenon can be detected:
Rattling along in this railway carriage in a state of luxurious confusion, I
take it for granted I am coming from somewhere, and going somewhere else.
I seek to know no more. (385)58
The destination of his travel would never be the “luxurious confusion” that Dickens
bore in mind.
The indistinct expression, “somewhere,” may suggest that the novelist
is still uncertain about what kind of influences the innovations in politics, science and
economics will impose upon people in the future.
Railroad has brought up new
surprises from everywhere of the kingdom and interrupted the monotonous repetition
of daily life and experiences.
Dickens represents a world in which the image of man
is influenced, but not determined, by the time and the space. Characters, such as
Louisa, a victim of Gradgrind’s educational system, and Blackpool, once one among
Coketown Hands without identity and a victim of the injustice of the society, can
57
Household Words 13 (1856): 385
‘Railway Dreaming,’ Household Words 13 (1856). Simpson 191. This passage is quoted by
Margaret Simpson in The Companion to Hard Times.
58
Chen 59
make their own decisions eventually.
In the following chapter, a historic event,
French Revolution, will be depicted. I will demonstrate what historical time means
to the people—people’s expectation manifested in history. Meanwhile, I will
explore further the nature time and what people should learn from it.
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Time and History
In 1982, Stephen Greenblatt coined the term, New Historicism, in his
Introduction to Genre. This term has been applied to great quantities of critical
practices, but many of them share few resemblances.
A few years later, Greenblatt
was surprised at seeing advertising for a specialist in New Historicism; for, he never
thought New Historicism could be systemized and become a ‘field’; originally he just
regarded it as a “new interpretative practice.”59
Or to be more accurate, Greenblatt
and his colleagues deliberately “resisted systematization” of New Historicism
(Gallagher and Greenblatt 1). They hold the belief that “the task of understanding
then depends not on the extraction of an abstract set of principles, and still less on the
application of a theoretical model, but rather on an encounter with the singular, the
specific, and the individual” (Gallagher and Greenblatt 6).
Based on such a
characteristic, their New Historicist magazine, Representations, adopts a plural title to
avoid misunderstanding of constructing a unified theory.
Even though New Historicists never give this practice an adequate referent,
Aram H. Veeser strives to extract five assumptions from the texts of New Historicism.
NH [New Historicism] really does assume: 1) that every expressive act is
embedded in a network of material practices; 2) that every act of unmasking,
critique, and opposition uses the tools it condemns and risks falling prey to
the practice it exposes; 3) that literary and non-literary “texts” circulate
inseparably; 4) that no discourse, imaginative or archival, gives access to
unchanging truths or expresses unalterable human nature; and 5) that a
critical method and a language adequate to describe culture under capitalism
59
Catherine Gallagher and Stephen Greenblatt, Practicing New Historicism (Chicago: U of Chicago P,
2000) 1.
Chen 61
participate in the economy they describe.60
Veeser puts the emphasis on the inseparability between the text and “the network of
material practices” where it comes from. Every language performance, such as the
expressive act or the act of unmasking, participates in the culture while the culture
evolves along with the language performances.
These five “tentative” assumptions
roughly delineate New Historicists’ objectives to uncover the voices within the text
and its social and historical background. History and the cultural background are no
longer regarded as the sources where meaning of the language performances
generates.
The assistance of these assumptions is employed to unravel possible
answers behind the contradictory roles of nature time and artificial history that happen
in A Tale of Two Cities. Meanwhile, the assumptions of New Historicism will help
to solve the question whether A Tale of Two Cities can be deemed as a literary or
historical text.
In this chapter, my main focus is laid upon the conflicts between the
understanding of nature time and history in A Tale of Two Cities.
That is, Dickens
expresses his observation of the interaction between the on-going process of the
cosmos and the distinct records that human beings have drawn in history. To analyze
his observation, I try to describe his viewpoint of his society.
metaphor, to express his alert to the social reforms.
Time works, as a
The research into time patterns
performs as a speculation on Dickens’s attitude of his society. It is worthwhile to
mention Stephen Jay Gould’s Time’s Arrow, Time’s Cycle that serves to clarify the two
different assumptions of people’s thinking of time.
The representation of a historic event takes a significant portion in A Tale of Two
Cities.
60
Dickens dedicates this novel to the influential historian, Thomas Carlyle,
Aram H. Veeser, ed, The New Historicism: Reader (New York: Routledge, 1994) 2.
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whose historical novel, The French Revolution, is regarded as the primary historical
sources for A Tale of Two Cities.
Carlyle’s intention in his historical writing is
crucial and inspiring to Dickens and can serve to explain Dickens’s implying posture
in this novel.
I.
The background of The Tale of Two Cities is set in the time of French Revolution.
It has long been argued about the historical accuracy within this novel, whether it
genuinely reflects this important historic event or not.
Critics regard the
overemphasis on the violence of the mob as a significant element that eludes
Dickens’s a-historical position. As Robert Alter argues,
What Dickens is ultimately concerned with in A Tale of Two Cities is not a
particular historical event—that is simply his chosen dramatic setting—but
rather the relationship between history and evil, how violent oppression
breeds violent rebellion which becomes a new kind of oppression.61
Alter’s observation stresses the cycling repetitions of violent oppression and rebellion
in the history of A Tale of Two Cities. Instead of “a particular historical event,”
French Revolution becomes a “setting” for Dickens to express his vision of history, an
endless repetition.
J. M. Rignall further extends Alter’s viewpoint but defines
Dickens’s notion of history as an “emphatic linearity, continuity, and negative
teleology.” 62
As the title of Rignall’s essay indicates, history becomes a
“catastrophic continuum” (121).
Although the characters are aware of its existence,
they fail to break it and stop the inevitable process.
61
According to Rignall, the end of
Robert Alter, “The Demons of History in Dickens’s Tale,” Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities,
ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea, 1987) 16.
62
J. M. Rignall, “Dickens and the Catastrophic Continuum of History,” Bloom, Charles Dickens’s A
Tale of Two Cities 121.
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the novel highlights a sense of finality rather than resurrection:
[D]eath haunts even the conventional pieties of the domestic happy ending:
Lorry is seen “passing tranquilly to his reward” and the Darnays, “their
course done, lying side by side in their last earthly bed.”
… [A]ll this …is
envisaged by a man who is himself gratefully embracing death as a
welcome release. (132)
The rebirth of the Darnays can be traded only by the death of Carton. The hope of
“Recalled to Life” since the first chapter has been negated at the end. Rignall senses
a strong deterministic factor that operates throughout the whole story, and only death
could be a release for the people within it. Although both critics emphasize the
aspect of violence in A Tale of Two Cities, the notions of time they analyze are in
polarities. Compared with Rignall’s focus upon the linearity of history that moves
always forward and irreversibly, Alter’s analysis reveals a repetitious regularity of
history. In this novel, we witness “violent oppression [aristocracy] breeds violent
rebellion [the mob] which becomes a new kind of oppression,” and the new
oppression would be again overthrown in Carton’s final prophetic vision (Alter 16).
It is arguable to claim either one of the critics would be closer to the author’s
representation of history.
The divergent explanations upon history imply a
paradoxical understanding of time.
In fact, Rigall and Alter respectively express
Dickens’s opinion of history and nature.
Such a conflict of definitions of history
may find good explanations in Stephen Jay Gould’s Time’s Arrow, Time’s Cycle in
which he points out some metaphors of time.
According to Gould, time is usually conceived as two seemly-dichotomized
metaphors, time’s arrow and time’s cycle (2).
considered as two dichotomized notions.
The two metaphors are often
The debates in geology will clarify the
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forming of the metaphors and what these two metaphors imply in the mind of people.
The concept of time’s arrow is at first manifested in the biblical history of earth, “a
comprehensive rip-roaring narrative, a distinctive sequence of stages with a definite
beginning, a clear trajectory, and a particular end” (22) and reinforced by the
geologists who did not rise from their armchairs but preclude the understanding of our
earth’s history from “the biblical limitations of the Mosaic chronology” (5).
Here
are the stages of the history of the earth: We see first the original chaotic earth
without form and void, a perfect earth of Eden’s original paradise, a smooth
featureless globe, the consuming deluge and the cracked crust of our current earth, the
consuming fire and the battle of good and evil, and after the final judgment, earth
becomes a star no longer needed as a human abode (Gould 21-22).
As indicated in
the Mosaic chronology, each stage possesses its significance and is regarded as an
irreducible part of the history.
Either is irreplaceable and chronologically
irreversible in the whole process of constructing the history of earth.
The biblical
descriptions are drawn by geologists to explain the forming of the earth surface and
the layers of the rocks. The former becomes the evidence of the erosion from the
deluge and the later the sediments of it. The concept of time’s arrow achieves what
Gould indicates, “Each moment occupies its own distinct position in a temporal series,
and all moments, considered in proper sequence, tell a story of linked events moving
in a direction” (11).
The distinctness of each moment in time’s arrow parallels to the
events in history which are recorded and regarded as distinct and meaningful incidents
to human beings.
In this chapter, time’s arrow refers not only to the incidents in
history that emphasizes on its irreversible sequence and unrepeatable events, but to
human beings who strive to manifest their meaning of existence through history.
On the other hand, time’s cycle suggests the immanent regularity of nature that
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endlessly repeats the procedure, the nature recurrences of days and seasons. In
Gould’s analysis, James Hutton’s theory of the earth incorporates a concept of
repairing in geological history and creates a metaphor of time’s cycle.
If uplift can restore an eroded topography, then geological processes set no
limit upon time.
Decay by waves and rivers can be reversed, and land
restored to its original height by forces of elevation.
Uplift may follow
erosion in an unlimited cycle of making and breaking. (Gould 65)
The “unlimited cycle of making and breaking” in geology infers the uncountable old
age of the earth.
Hutton’s theory responds to Alter’s argument of the time notion in
Dickens’s novel, and further suggests indiscernible beginning and ending as Alter’s
repetitious violence intersected by oppressions and rebellions in A Tale of Two Cities.
Both Huttons’ and Alter’s metaphors indicate the working of time as an endless
cyclical process.
In contrast to the distinctness of every event in the concept of
time’s arrow, incidents in the concept of time’s cycle have been reduced to part of the
temporal mechanics and lose their uniqueness.
In spite of Alter’s and Rignall’s definitions of the same term, history, other
contradictory temporal characteristics result from different viewpoints of time
according to Gould’s definitions.
Thus, two critics’ observations actually reflect two
distinctive aspects in this novel, history and nature time.
These two aspects work
respectively and designate different importance to the characters in the novel.
II
Regarding time in A Tale of Two Cities, I will focus on the employment of nature
time that undermines the hegemonic status of history. The geological metaphors are
applied to clarify both the working of history and nature and the people under the
conflicts of the two concepts of time.
The tension of these two concepts of time’s
Chen 66
arrow and time’s cycle respectively takes the form of history and nature.
In history,
every incident has its uniqueness and its inevitable effects on the sequential events.
A Tale of Two Cities is a story that works in the form of history and as a “catastrophic
continuum” in which every event becomes an inevitable cause for another and fixedly
connected to each other.
Yet, the deterministic function of time’s arrow is
intermittently challenged since incidents once considered as distinct are easily
obliterated. All incidents become trivial under cyclic mechanics of nature time.
History, which speaks through the event of French Revolution, is ostensibly a
dominant voice that superintends fates of most characters in A Tale of Two Cities.
The incidents in the fictional world follow the real historic records.
In the beginning
of the novel, the release of Doctor Manatte, who had been arrested under “the letters
de cachet” without any trials and imprisoned for eighteen years, reminds the French
rebels of the oppression they have suffered. 63
Then, the outburst of French
Revolution affects the Darnays’ life, dramatizing the development of the plots and
disturbing the tranquil lodge in London.
It forces Charles Darnay to return to France
in order to rescue Gabelle charged of acting “against them [the new regime] for an
emigrant.”
This charge employed to obligate Darnay to return can trace its history
back to the fall of Louis XVI.
As Andrew Sander puts it, “the property of émigrés
was not confiscated by the state until after the fall of Louis XVI on 10 August, for the
king had used his right of veto to prevent the passage of the proposed law” (131-32).
French Revolution leads the development of the plots. The arrangement of plots is
not arbitrarily based on the writer’s imagination, but can be pinned down its historical
resources.
Judging from the way Dickens revised his original text to fit in his plot, the
63
Andrew Sanders, The Companion of A Tale of Two Cities (East Susses: Helm Information, 1988)
42.
Chen 67
event of September Massacres, we detect his intention of writing with precision.
After reading Dickens’s manuscript, Andrew Sanders believes that Dickens
deliberately alters the time of Darnay’s departure to France to fulfill this objective.
“That night—it was the fourteenth of August.”
appear in the MS.
This phrase does not
Dickens has added it, like the earlier changes of the
time-scheme from winter to autumn, in order to date Darnay’s departure to
the dangerous period between the siege of the Tuileries on 10 August and
the defeat of the French armies at Longwy on 29 August.
Darnay will thus
be in Paris at the time of the violent reaction to the news of defeat and the
subsequent massacres in the prisons between 2 and 6 September. (133)
Such evidence shown in the process of Dickens’s writing presents a strong sense of
history and affirms my assertion about the dominant role of history in this novel.
Another instance that justifies this assertion is the alteration of the location of the jail
in manuscript and the publication version where the Prison of La Force substitutes for
the Prison of the Luxembourg (Sanders 136). After consulting Carlyle’s extensive
quotation of a prisoner’s memoirs in La Force, Dickens substitutes the Luxembourg
for La Force, for the later prison is more suitable to render Darnay as “a potential
victim of the September Massacres” in 1792 (Sanders 136). The abundant historical
resources indicate Dickens’s representing the historical background of French
Revolution instead of a merely fictional world.
In addition to the external evidences, there also are internal evidences to support
the dominant role of history.
French Revolution is metaphorized as a foreseeable
army that comes directly to France:
‘I tell thee,’ said madame [Defarge], extending her right hand, for emphasis,
‘that although it [Revolution] is a long time on the road, it is on the road and
Chen 68
coming.
I tell thee it never retreats, and never stops. I tell thee it is
always advancing.’ (TTC 208)
The characteristic of time’s arrow manifests itself in the way French Revolution
comes which “never retreats,” “never stops” and “is always advancing.”
army drives in Paris, every old institution collapses.
While this
The aristocracies are
imprisoned, “the king was tried, doomed, and beheaded,” and prisoners are released.
(TTC 301)
country.
Crowds dance fervently on the street to celebrate the renewal of the
Yet, regardless of the importance of this event in human history, the tone of
the narrator changes and presents it as a vanity fair:
Not before dark night did the man and women come back to the children,
wailing and breadless. Then, the miserable bakers’ shops were beset by
long files of them, patiently waiting to buy bad bread; and while they waited
with stomachs faint and empty, they beguiled the time by embracing one
another on the triumphs of the day and achieving them again in gossip.
(TTC 254)
The narrator reveals the reality that most crowds have to face after the passionate
carnival. All they gain is an ironical victory, for people still have to feed their young
children and themselves and face the problems of survival, such as the want of food
and the lack of money, day after day.
The voice of nature is not explicitly heard from the text but manifests its power
to devour the remaining of human history. The banker, Jarvis Lorry’s words are the
crucial counterpart to the linearity of history and imply the cyclic time of eternity.
Lorry is being asked by Sydney Carton whether his childhood seems far away.
Lorry replies, “Twenty years back, yes; at this time of my life, no.
For, as I draw
closer and closer to the end, I travel in the circle, nearer and nearer to the beginning.”
Chen 69
(TTC 340)
Lorry regards the course of his life as moving back to the point he has
started instead of a lifetime with beginning and ending. Lorry’s expression is, as
Elliot L. Gilbert analyzes, the recurring metaphors of resurrection in A Tale of Two
Cities:
Resurrection, celebrating a cyclical view of existence, necessarily rejects
the vision of life as a linear progress through time, in one direction only and
without possibility of return, a vision that is the unavoidable first
assumption of historical science.64
Gilbert’s description of the visions of life in this novel parallels the metaphors of time
in geology, time’s arrow and time’s cycle which present distinct time patterns, and the
impact of which sometimes collides with each other in the novel.
That is, although
history works as a centripetal force that prevails in the story, its dominance is
challenged and subverted.
The dominant position is completely reversed.
The
anonymous and unaware nature time can be regarded as the centrifugal voice within
this carnival.
It moves undisturbed and indifferently while the Revolution continues.
As the narrator depicts, even at the prime time of the revolution, the cyclic movement
of days and night is still undisturbed:
There was no pause, no pity, no peace, no interval of relenting rest, no
measurement of time.
Though days and nights circled as regularly as
when time was young, and the evening and morning were the first day,
other cont of time there was none. (TTC 302)
Though the narrator depicts the relentless progress of the French Revolution, he also
points out the indifference of nature, an unaware but strong force imposing its
working on the historic events.
64
Elliot L Gilbert, “‘To Awake From History’: Carlyle, Thackeray, and A Tale of Two Citie,.” Dickens
Studies Annual: Essays on Victorian Fiction 12 (1983): 259.
Chen 70
From the above depictions in A Tale of Two Cities, we can see history and nature
respectively present the characteristics of time’s arrow and time’s cycle.
forces often interweave with each other.
Yet, the two
To be more precise, the eternal nature
always overwhelms human achievements in history.
In the instance of Monseigneur,
the time of the nature manifests its working:
Monseigneur … was a polite example of luxurious and shining life, and a
great deal more to equal purpose; nevertheless, Monseigneur as a class had,
somehow or other, brought things to this.
Strange that Creation, designed
expressly for Monseigneur, should be soon wrung dry and squeezed out!
There must be something short-sighted in the eternal arrangements,
surely!
…
Monseigneur began to run way from a phenomenon so low
and unaccountable. (TTC 257)
In spite of the fact that Monseigneur is an arbitrarily made social hierarchy, this
privileged class is inevitably consumed within the whirl of time as ordinary people.
Through the voice of the narrator and the characters, nature time reiterates its
existence and erodes the institution of human beings. In the last chapter, before
Sidney Carton is executed, the narrator describes the street scene and the personified
time:
Six tumbrels roll along the streets. Change these back again to what they
were, thou powerful enchanter, Time, and they shall be seen to be the
carriages of absolute monarchs, the equipages of feudal nobles, the toilettes
of flaring Jezebels, the churches that are not my father’s house but dens of
thieves, the huts of millions of starving peasants! No; the great magician
who majestically works out the appointed order of the Creator, never
reverses his transformations.
Changeless and hopeless, the tumbrels roll
Chen 71
along. (TTC 399)
The “powerful enchanter, Time,” enforces his work regardless of the depictions of the
street recurred throughout the novel, such as the spill of the wine, an innocent child
run over by the chariot or the ostentatious carriages of monarchs and aristocracies.
The “changesless and hopeless” rolling of the tumbrels parallels the cyclic mechanic
of the geological time.
Richard Dunn has remarkable criticism on this passage:
“Time” to Dickens’ thinking, and indeed in many an earlier Dickens fairy
tale, is certainly a ‘powerful enchanter,’ but here Dickens sounds a more
serious Carlylean note of respect for time as a scope of dramatic action, a
theater for history.
Note especially his metaphors of performance when he
speaks of the royal carriages, equipages, toilettes.
With the elaborate
props, the former rulers of France seemed always to present themselves as
performers.65
In his theatrical metaphor, no matter how these noble characters splendidly perform,
they have to retreat when the play of history ends.
As the metaphor of time’s cycle
suggests, the once established system is always destroyed and leaves no traces.
French Revolution signifies more than a historic event.
It fulfills people’s
attempt to break the social code and desire to escape from the order of law.66
metonymic symbol of breakthroughs in the nineteenth century.
It is a
As Lacan defines
metonymy—“The part taken for the whole,”67 French Revolution here is taken as a
representative of the reforms in this period from which Dickens asserts his alert to the
radical reforms in his contemporary.
65
As a keen observer of his era, Dickens
Richard J. Dunn, “A Tale of Two Dramatists,” Dickens Studies Annual: Essays on Victorian Fiction
12 (1983): 122.
66
Chris R. Vanden Bossche, “Prophetic Closure and Disclosing Narrative: The French Revolution and
A Tale of Two Cities.” Dickens Studies Annual: Essays on Victorian Fiction 12 (1983): 210.
67
Jacques Lacan, “The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious or Reason Since Freud,” Critical
Theory Since 1965, ed, Hazard Adams and Leroy Searle (Florida: U of Florida P, 1986) 744.
Chen 72
unquestionably discovers the impacts of the social reforms on his society and the
influences ensue.
In A Tale of Two Cities, the change of Dickens’s attitude toward
French Revolution deserves notice.
The gathering of crowd to sip the spilled wine
on the ground is a deliberate design to express his sympathy of French paupers who
were oppressed and suffered: “Others, men and women, dipped in the puddles with
little mugs of mutilated earthenware, or even with handkerchiefs from women’s heads,
which were squeezed dry into infants’ mouths…” (TTC 59-60).
Yet, his sympathy
gradually wanes with the rise of the violent mobs:
“… [A] throng of people came pouring round the corner by the prison wall,
in the midst of whom was the wood-sawyer hand in hand with The
Vengeance. There could not be fewer than five hundred people, and they
were dancing like five thousand demons…. This was the Carmagnole.
As
it passed, leaving Lucie frightened and bewildered in the doorway of the
wood-sawyer’s house….” (TTC 307-08)
The dance of Carmagnole, the dance of triumph for the people in Paris, turns the
hilarious crowds into “demons” frightening and bewildering Lucie.
Unlike the
pathos for the crowds sipping the wine on the street ground, the narrator feels now
“frightened and bewildered.”
A prominent evidence that shows Dickens’s change of attitude is the death of
Madame Defarge who is no doubt a leading revolutionary character in A Tale of Two
Cities and whose death at the end would be a heavy strike on the revolution. Even
though she is a victim of the old regime, her violent retribution changes Dickens’s
original sympathy.
The death of Madame Defarge is a destined doom for her
retribution. The variant in Dickens attitude toward French Revolution might be
taken as an indicator of his attitude toward his contemporary society.
The revolution
Chen 73
Dickens tries to present took place in 1789, and Michael Goldberg further argues that
the revolution of 1848 achieves a profound effect on the author’s attitude toward
political reforms.68
“The revolution [of 1848] broke Dickens’ faith in the adequacy
of reform and alerted him to the ongoing process of revolutionary change and the
constant possibility of the fire next time” (Goldberg 231). While facing swamps of
political and economic reforms in his society, he sees the ambition of human beings to
change the order of the world.
Dickens inevitably involves himself in these
incidents because of the responsibility of a novelist.
He delineates the public events
in his novels, such as the Poor Law and child labor in Oliver Twist and the union
strike in Hard Times.
Although he attempts to depict each event objectively and
leaves the judgment to his readers, his sympathy can be uncovered between the lines.
Yet, in A Tale of Two Cities, the narrator’s change of attitude reveals the anxiety of the
novelist who contemplates about the possibly uncontrollable aftermath of reforms and
becomes more conservative about public events.
The concept of history to the characters in A Tale of Two Cities, especially the
people in France, suggests a striving to create a meaning for their existence.
try to figure out the connection between themselves and time.
regardless of anything else.
People
Yet, time goes on
Thus, the metaphors of arrow and cycle indeed reveal
the disputes over the meaning of people’s existence in the world.
Dickens dedicates
this book to Thomas Carlyle, an influential thinker in the nineteenth century; the
parallels between Dickens and Carlyle will be introduced in the following section.
III
It has been one of my hopes to add something to the popular and
picturesque means of understanding that terrible time, though no one
68
Goldberg, Michael, “Carlyle, Dickens, and the Revolution of 1848,” Dickens Studies Annual: Essays
on Victorian Fiction 12 (1983): 223.
Chen 74
can hope to add anything to the philosophy of Mr. Carlyle’s wonderful
book. (TTC 29)
In the preface, Dickens declares two sources that influence his writing in this
novel, Wilkie Collins’s drama of The Frozen Deep and Thomas Carlyle’s The French
Revolution.
The formation of the main characters and their relationships are
attributed to the former drama.
The precision in history is ascribed to the latter.
The two-volume edition published by Chapman & Hall in 1857 in the novelist’s
library is the source for researching the incidents in French revolution. According to
Andrew Sanders, Dickens “was frequently obliged to return to Carlyle’s narrative to
check the dates of specific events or to set the scene during a given period (3). The
previously mentioned adaptation of his manuscript is one of the evidences of
Dickens’s seeking information and advice from Carlyle’s book.
In addition to the
precise historical information, Carlyle is a highly influential writer for Dickens’s idea
about the tension between history and nature. Passages from Carlyle’s The French
Revolution and Past and Present exemplify similar discussions and even reach similar
conclusions.
Carlyle’s intention in his writing and the discussions on the concept of
time will further clarify the working of temporalities in Dickens’s A Tale of Two
Cities.
Richard Altick describes Carlyle in the introduction to Past and Present as “a
shrewd observer of his fellows, humorous and wise, interested in every detail of the
life not merely of Abbot Samson, but of the community in which the greater part his
life was spent.”69
In contrast to traditional history writings that often focus on a
specific subject or person, Carlyle collects more details around to represent a more
accurate situation. “Collecting detail of life … of the community” is a manner
69
Richard D. Altick, Introduction, Past and Present, 1843, By Thomas Carlyle (New York: New York
UP, 1977) xiii.
Chen 75
regarded by K. J. Fielding as the “Carlylean Orthodoxy.”
Yet if history is essentially fictitious, how can it be told, how does
‘accuracy’ matter, and why should we take pains with it?
answers, but two belong to Carlylean orthodoxy.
There are several
The first is that if
everything perceived is a matter of appearance, this only increases the need
to seek the reality behind them. … The second … is that we can see the
ultimate reality of God repeated in recorded event….70
Carlyle believes that there is an “ultimate reality of God” behind the “appearance” of
different matters, and to him, being a historian is to “seek the reality behind them”
(Fielding viii).
The human establishments are trivial comparing with the working of nature.
Dickens’s attitude to the privileged class can be easily traced in Thomas Carlyle’s
satirical valuation of the tradition of Aristocracy in the Victorian society.
Thy parchments: yes, they are old, of venerable yellowness; and we too
honour parchment, old-established settlements, and venerable use and wont.
Old parchments in very truth:—yet on the whole, if thou wilt remark, they
are young to the Granite Rocks, to the Groundplan of God’s Universe! We
advise thee to put up thy parchments; to go home to thy place, and make no
needless noise whatever. (174)
Carlyle compares parchments, the old, venerable achievement recorded by men, with
the granite, a work of God or nature.
Granite rocks is the most crucial evidence for
James Hutton to argue the cyclic mechanic of the earth and takes very long time to
form its present status in the layers of rocks.
Carlyle weights the significance of
historical events in the eternity of time:
70
K. J. Fielding, Introduction, The French Revolution, 1837, By Thomas Carlyle (Oxford: Oxford UP,
1989) viii-ix.
Chen 76
My friend, if thou ever do come to believe in God, thou wilt find all
Chartism, Manchester riot, Parliamentary incompetence, Ministries of
Windbag, and the wildest Social Dissolutions, and the burning up of this
entire Planet, a most small matter in comparison. Brother, this Planet, I
find, is but an inconsiderable sandgrain in the continents of Being: this
Planet’s poor temporary interests, thy interests and my interests there, when
I look fixedly into that eternal Light-Sea and Flame-Sea with its eternal
interests, dwindle literally into Nothing. (224)
Carlyle intents to indicate a comparison between the “temporary interests” and the
eternal which serves to explain Dickens’s implying posture in A Tale of Two Cities.
Either the sufferings of the poor or the financial or political success of the rich will
eventually be consumed and disappeared.
In Carlyle’s The French Revolution, there
are also passages that echo the idea of insignificance in aristocracy:
Beautiful Armida-Palace, where the inmates live enchanted life; lapped in
soft music of adulation; waited on by the splendours of the world; —which
nevertheless hangs wondrously as by a single hair. (5-6)
Dickens re-imagines his own French Revolution in his novel with the abundant
historical resources offered by Carlyle’s book. Besides, the novelist shares with the
historian the responsibility to uncover the fact behind the appearance.
Murray
Baumgarten claims a resemblance of these two writers’ discovery of the potential
danger of the same event and their reaction towards it.
Carlyle wrote as well to bring the presence of the Revolution to a troubled
England and warn it of impending danger.
In 1859, when Dickens wrote
and published A Tale of Two Cities, twenty-two years after the publication
of the French Revolution, personal and public concerns again came together,
Chen 77
as they had for Carlyle.”71
Although expressing in different genres, both of the writers demonstrate their concern
and anxiety about the impending social transformations, and uncovering the possible
aftermath of the changes is their responsibilities as a writer.
By comparing Carlyle and Dickens, I try to find the answer to the long-argued
question: whether A Tale of Two Cities is a pure novel or a somewhat history book.
The solution to this question is impossible to be found from the narrative figures and
the semantics of the texts.
Although respectively regarded as a historian and a
novelist, Carlyle and Dickens possess resemblances in the perspective of narrative
techniques, such as their using epithets to address their characters, their shifting
between an omniscient narrator and that of a protagonist-narrator to create the
dramatic urgency and immediacy, their adapting figurative language, their including
abundances of authorial commentary and their aiming at the relationship with their
readers drew into the narratives.72
Keith Thomas in his speech delivered at the
Corpus Christi College asserts, “Historical writing is itself a form of literature... and
historians would benefit from being more aware of the literary constraints under
which they operate”. 73
Thomas is persuasive if we consider that history and
literature can barely be distinguished in the domain of writing.
The recognition between novel and history becomes more controversial with
regard to the information that they provide.
Truth and facts were regarded as the
main characteristics that enable people to discern the difference between history and
literature.
71
Yet, more and more critics assert that historians offer their own
Murray Baumgarten, “Writing the Revolution,” Dickens Studies Annual: Essays on Victorian Fiction
12 (1983): 165.
72
H M. Daleski, “Imagining Revolution: The Eye of History and of Fiction,” Journal of Narrative
Technique 18.1 (1988): 62-64.
73
Keith Thomas, History and Literature (Swansea: U of Swansea, 1988) 8.
Chen 78
interpretations of the past as most authors do in their literary works (Thomas 11).
The boundary between history and literature lies in the representation of truth and
fiction.
The distinction often blurs, for critics argue that there exists no “absolute
truth” but selective knowledge in history. That is, as Susana Onega indicates, each
interpretation of the past or the presence in different works represents “the perspective
of the dominant race, class and culture” (11).74
In contrast to the common belief in
the objectivity of history, the incidents were chosen to suit a certain end.
Exploring
a passage in The French Revolution, H. M. Daleski perhaps provides a manner to
distinguish between the two subjects, the novelist and the historian:
The occasion is the flight of the royal family in June 1791 and their arrest at
Varennes by the “Procureur of the Township,” ….
For a moment Carlyle
allows himself to consider what might have happened if Louis hand been a
different sort of man, but then quickly returns to recorded fact. (70)
In the instance Daleski provides, Carlyle “allows himself furthermore to ‘fancy’ the
reaction of those who would have been as address” (71). As a historian, Carlyle is
able to refrain his fancy and “returns to the bare record of fact” (Daleski 71).
perhaps provides an answer to the question about this novel.
This
The writer’s intention,
what he tries to impart through the writing of history, may be the criteria to justify his
writing.
In A Tale of Two Cities, even though the characters manifest their belief in
deciding their own future, we have seen Dickens persists in a moderate attitude to the
advocating of people’s subjectivity. History, accumulation of human achievements,
is the evidence of people’s existence and of their struggle to create their own meaning
of life.
74
Yet, in the view of eternity, one can see that these records are easily erased
Susana Onega, Introduction, Telling Histories: Narrativizing History, Hstoricizing Literature
(Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1995).
Chen 79
by the time of nature.
Limitation upon the advocating of human beings’
achievements can be observed from the working of time in this novel.
The
metaphors of geological time help to reveal respectively the characteristics of history
and nature and the tension between these two forces.
Chen 80
Conclusion
What I have tried to re-examine is that whether people have the ability to exceed
the limit associated with the concepts of time.
In contrast to the determinism that
leaves no free will to people, the concept of time derived from theory of relativity is a
very subjective interpretation.
In contrast to the monotony brought by
industrialization in which everyday repeats itself, the railroad provides people with
unpredictable stimuli.
In contrast to the power of nature that works indifferently
since the beginning of the universe, people record the fact of their existence with
history.
What I have tried to point out from the significant changes in the concepts
of time in physics, social phenomena and geology, and from the differences before
and after the change is a similarity—the confinement that time has imposed on people
and that human beings make every effort to get rid of.
After examining the concept of time of an individual, about a social phenomenon
and about history and nature in Dickens’s novels, one can easily recognize that the
novelist is concerned with the issues of man, such as the subjectivity of an individual
and the formation of the self.
In A Christmas Carol, Ebenezer Scrooge strives to
escape from the confinement of time and advocate his subjectivities through breaking
it.
Moreover, in Hard Times through examining of Louisa Gradgrind’ life, we have
observed that the temporality of her life, which is not monotonously repetitious but
dialectical, indicates that a person’s self is not predetermined but interacts with her
surroundings.
Yet, in A Tale of Two Cities, it is worth to notice that we have seen a
more moderate attitude to the advocating of man’s subjectivity than the other two
novels.
On one hand, we have seen characters like Madame Defarge who have
written down their own remarkable history; on the other hand, time of nature has
ruthlessly crushed all signs of them.
Chen 81
A quantitative and qualitative writer, Charles Dickens’s concepts of time is
impossible to be completely specified out of three novels.
Yet, there are still
evidences from the texts that I have pointed out revealing some traces of Dickens’s
concepts of time.
To give a bold conclusion to the concepts of time in Dickens’s
novels, time is one of the possibilities by challenging which people can manifest their
subjectivities, but there still lies the boundary that people has no capacity to surpass.
Chen 82
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