A Tale of Two Extremes: Paradox in Dickens
by Marilyn Green Faulkner

Marvel with the “Best Books Club” at the paradoxical classic that is A Tale of Two Cities.

After the very famous opening paragraph of A Tale of Two Cities (best of times, worst of times, etc.) Dickens sums up the state of two great nations in two great sentences: “There were a king with a large jaw and a queen with a plain face, on the throne of England; there were a king with a large jaw and a queen with a fair face, on the throne of France. In both countries it was clearer than crystal to the lords of the State preserves of loaves and fishes, that things in general were settled for ever.”

From the very start we have a taste of Dickens’s blending of the comic and the tragic; he appreciates the fact that life is never completely funny or completely serious. Here his emphasis on the faces and jaws of the monarchs draws our thoughts to the terrible separations of these appendages (at least the French ones) to come through the guillotine. When, at last, the reign of terror commences, Dickens connects the tragic with the comic through one descriptive word, “fair.” “Now, breaking the unnatural silence of a whole city, the executioner showed the people the head of the king – and now, it seemed almost in the same breath, the head of his fair wife which had had eight weary months of imprisoned widowhood and misery, to turn it grey.” (283) Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, famous for excess and their exploitation of the poor, are alternately lampooned by Dickens and then made objects of our pity.

And so it goes in Dickens, who uses his narrative skill to manipulate our emotional response. In the opening chapter he describes the atrocities committed by the French aristocracy in a detached, even cynical voice: “Under the guidance of her Christian pastors, she entertained herself, besides, with such humane achievements as sentencing a youth to have his hands cut off, his tongue torn out with pincers, and his body burned alive, because he had not kneeled down in the rain to do honour to a dirty procession of monks which passed within his view…” (6) Later Dickens grabs us as it were by the collar and throws us right into the square as a member of the aristocracy is murdered by the mob: “Down, and up, and head foremost on the steps of the building; now, on his knees; now, on his feet; now, on his back; dragged, and struck at, and stifled by the bunches of grass and straw that were thrust into his face by hundreds of hands; torn, bruised, panting, bleeding, yet always entreating and beseeching for mercy…the women passionately screeching at him all the time…Once he went aloft, and the rope broke, and they caught him shrieking…” (234) It goes on in graphic detail until the man’s severed head is on a pike, and all comic distance is gone. We suffer with the sufferer, whether guilty or innocent, and finally watch in horror as the murderous mob returns home to quietly play with their children with bloodstained hands.

Dickens’s paradoxical treatment of human suffering is found, not only in his use of narrative distance, but in his shaping of the plot. The simple melodrama of A Tale of Two Cities is made infinitely more complex and interesting by a setting in which the heroes are also the villains. Darnay is both a fine man and the cursed offspring of the most evil members of his class. Carton is a drunk and a wastrel, but also gives his life for another. Manette is the abused prisoner but also the unwitting executioner of his own son-in-law, against whom he has such a suppressed rage that it literally drives him back to insanity to see his daughter married to him. It is here, during these shifts from the comic to the tragic and from obvious melodrama to subtle psychological drama, that Dickens shines. We may wince during a scene where the little son of Lucie and Charles says, “Dear papa and mamma, I am very sorry to leave you both, and to leave my pretty sister; but I am called, and I must go!” (219) This is Dickens playing to the crowd, not attempting to place us in a believable scene. But the same Dickens can take us into a moment like the one where Mr. Lorry watches over Dr. Manette as he relapses into insanity after the marriage of his daughter: “With a hope ever darkening, and with a heart always growing heavier and heavier, Mr Lorry passed through this anxious time…he could not fail to observe that the shoemaker, whose hand had been a little out at first, was growing dreadfully skilful, and that he had never been so intent on his work, and that his hands had never been so nimble and expert, as in the dusk of the ninth evening.” (204)

Life is rarely made up of grand gestures with accompanying grand speeches. Most of us will not stand on the scaffold and intone, “it is a far, far better thing I do, than I have ever done, etc.” But most of us have stood helpless while disease or sin claimed the mind and body of someone we love, and no one captures these moments with more compassion than Dickens. We have murderous scenes of terror in our own history, and have been victims of the mob’s rage. Yet we sense our own dark side when Dickens says, “In seasons of pestilence, some of us will have a secret attraction to the disease – a terrible passing inclination to die of it. And all of us have like wonders hidden in our breasts, only needing circumstances to evoke them.” (292) These small moments of insight are the great ones for me in Dickens; they keep me reading.

What did you like about A Tale of Two Cities? We will have an online chat about A Tale of Two Cities on Friday, December 15, at 11 a.m. Pacific Standard Time. For further details send an e-mail to join the book club. I’ll be sending a notice to all the members on Thursday.