In an earlier blog, I lumped all Charles Dickens novels into a heap of endless pages that were entertaining, yet desperately in need of editing. That was before I read A Tale of Two Cities and that book has changed my tune altogether.
Have you read it? And if you did was it at the arm twisting of your high school English teacher? It was all new to me and hit me like a runaway train.
Unlike many other Dickens novels, the cast of main characters in A Tale of Two Cities is suprisingly short and carefully connected. You can tell that Dickens knew where he was going before he sat down to write. There is no comedy and no list of funny names. I can't decide who was the main character - was it Lucie Manette or Charles Darnay? was it Sydney Carton? was it Dr. Manette? was it Madame Defarge? I can see an argument for all of them. But in the end I think the cities themselves were the main characters - or rather Paris, with London in a supporting role.
The thing that was so heavy about A Tale of Two Cities for me was my complete ignorance about the French Revolution. In the beginning I felt compassion for the poor French people, but Dickens slowly makes them so animal-like that the horror of it all became evident. I thought this exchange between Lucie and Madame Defarge was illustrative of one of the main themes of the book - plain depravity:
"As a wife and mother," cried Lucie most earnestly, "I implore you to have pity on me and not to exercise any power that you possess, against my innocent husband, but to use it in his behalf. O sister-woman, think of me. As a wife and mother!"
Madame Defarge looked, coldly as ever, at the suppliant, and said, turning to her friend The Vengeance:
"The wives and mothers we have been used to see, since we were as little as this child, and much less, have not been greatly considered? We have known their husbands and fathers laid in prison and kept from them, often enough? All our lives, we have seen our sister-women suffer, in themselves and in their children, poverty, nakedness, hunger, thirst, sickness, misery, oppression and neglect of all kinds?"
"We have seen nothing else," returned The Vengeance.
"We have borne this a long time," said Madame Defarge, turning her eyes again upon Lucie. "Judge you! Is it likely that the trouble of one wife and mother would be much to us now?" 1
In spite of this the ending of A Tale of Two Cities is inspiring and hopeful. Dickens elevates the character of Sydney Carton dramatically by his self sacrifice and love. I suppose in this sense, it might seem that Carton was the main character, but to me he seems to be hiding in the backdrop until the last few chapters. No, as much as I grew to hate her, I think Madame Defarge was the main human character. She was the enemy of so many of the other characters and her character was consistantly in the spotlight throughout the book.
I like to read books and usually fiction is light, but this fiction was hard to read because it was based on true events. I was stunned to see how it all happened that this low class of people rose up together Marx-like and beheaded their king and entire ruling class. It made me wonder if it could happen like that again - not necessarily with a guillotine - but could a group of oppressed people band together in such a unity that would remove their oppressors? I think as Americans it's hard to imagine what drove them to it, it was hunger - they were starving. I am reminded of Robinson Crusoe, who tamed a wild goat by trapping it and starving it into submission. I guess it is true that a way to a man's heart it though his stomach.
1 Book 3 Chapter 3
