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Nation and Generation in A Tale of Two Cities

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 December 2020

Albert D. Hutter
Albert D. Hutter*
Affiliation:
University of California, Los Angeles
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Abstract

A Tale of Two Cities, the French Revolution becomes a metaphor for the conflicts between generations and between classes that preoccupied Dickens throughout his career. Dickens uses a double plot and divided characters to express these conflicts; his exaggerated use of “splitting”—which the essay defines psychoanalytically—sometimes makes A Tale of Two Cities‘ language and structure appear strained and humorless. We need to locate A Tale of Two Cities within a framework of nineteenth-century attitudes toward revolution and generational conflict by using a combination of critical methods—literary, historical, psychoanalytic. This essay relates the reader's experience to the structure of the text; and it derives from Dickens’ language, characterization, and construction a critical model that describes the individual reader's experience while explaining some of the contradictory assessments of the novel over the past hundred years.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 93 , Issue 3 , May 1978 , pp. 448 - 462
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1978

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References

Notes

1 “Psychoanalysis and the Iconography of Revolution,” Victorian Studies, 19 (1975), 247.

2 Dickens considered “Two Generations” as a possible title for the novel. See Philip Collins, quoting from Forster's Life, in “A Tale of Two Novels,” Dickens Studies Annual, 2 (1972), 342.

3 Victorian People (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1970), p. 298. Fred Weinstein and Gerald M. Platt (The Wish to Be Free [Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1969]) combine psychological and sociological theories to discuss changing family and political patterns from the Enlightenment to the twentieth century. In Psychoanalytic Sociology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1973), Weinstein and Platt stress a “fundamental articulation between personality and society as action systems which stems from the ‘unconscious’ commitment in both systems to the same set of generalized symbolic codes” (p. 89). Neil Smelser's studies of revolutionary groups and patterns avoid “reductionistic or simplistic causal statements” while fully acknowledging the issues raised by competing methodological structures (“Social and Psychological Dimensions of Collective Behavior,” Essays in Sociological Explanation [Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1968], pp. 92-121, esp. p. 110). See also Smelser, Social Change in the Industrial Revolution (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1959); John R. Gillis, Youth and History (New York: Academic Press, 1974); and William J. Goode, “The ‘Fit’ between Conjugal Family and the Modern Industrial System,” World Revolution and Family Patterns (London: Collier-Macmillan, 1963), pp. 10-26.

4 In James and John Stuart Mill: Father and Son in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Basic Books, 1975), pp. 7-8, Bruce Mazlish writes:

Industrial and scientific revolutions, along with political ones, posed a problem of cultural transmission that was new in its intensity and placed an enormous strain on parent-child relations. In the nineteenth century the most dramatic form this took was in a heightened sense of father-son, i.e., generational, conflict. Much attention has been given, and rightly so, to class conflict at this time as a mechanism of social change. I am suggesting that generational conflict is at least of equal importance.

5 All quotations from Dickens' works are from the New Oxford Illustrated Dickens (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1947-59). All citations to A Tale of Two Cities are given parenthetically by book, chapter, and page.

6 Freud wrote that, if very young children witness parental intercourse, “they inevitably regard the sexual act as a sort of ill-treatment or act of subjugation: they view it, that is, in a sadistic sense.” He first used the term “primal scene” in the Wolf-Man case (1918), affirming that the child equates intercourse with parental aggression; the scene arouses the child's sexual excitement and leads to anxiety and guilt (The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, 24 vols., trans. and ed. James Strachey et al. [London: Hogarth, 1953-64], v, 585; vii, 196; xvii, 7-122; abbreviated hereafter as SE). An excellent modern discussion of the concept of the primal scene and its varied definitions is provided by Aaron H. Esman, “The Primal Scene: A Review and a Reconsideration,” Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, 28 (1973), 49-81.

7 Norman N. Holland's recent work, particularly Poems in Persons (New York: Norton, 1973) and 5 Readers Reading (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1975), demonstrates the personal base in all critical acts and the need for a more sensitive appreciation of reader response. Murray M. Schwartz argues convincingly that any interpretation describes something neither entirely within us nor “out there” in the apparently objective text, but in an intermediate space, the “transitional” space defined by the British psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott (“Where Is Literature?” College English, 36 [1975], 756-65). I am not persuaded, however, that each critic need describe in detail his psychological interaction with the text. In this essay, to locate the reader's experience “elsewhere” (in the text itself) does not constitute a “fallacy of misplaced concreteness” (Schwartz, p. 760). It is, rather, an attempt to generalize not only from my personal reading of the novel but from my understanding of a larger psychoanalytic and historical dynamic. I try to locate within the text a structure that seems to provoke a common response in many readers through different historical periods.

8 See particularly Ernst Kris, “The Recovery of Childhood Memories in Psychoanalysis,” Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, 11 (1956), 54-88; see also Joseph Sandler, “Trauma, Strain, and Development,” Psychic Trauma, ed. Sidney S. Furst (New York: Basic Books, 1967), pp. 154-74. The Hampstead Research Group explains the term “retrospective trauma” in this way: “By this we mean that the perception of some particular situation evokes the memory of an earlier experience, which under the present conditions becomes traumatic…. The ego's sudden perception of …a link between present fantasy and the past memory may be a traumatic experience. Here the memory functions as a present perception” (Sandler, p. 164). Freud uses the terms “retrospective fantasies” (Zurückphantasien) and “deferred action” (Nachträglichkeit). For a full discussion of these terms and their history, see J. Laplanche and J.-B. Pontalis, The Language of Psycho-Analysis, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York: Norton, 1973). Kris argues that “the further course of life seems to determine which [early] experience may gain significance as a traumatic one” (p. 73). Furst stresses the importance of this concept because “in some instances trauma can be diagnosed only in retrospect” (“Psychic Trauma: A Survey,” Psychic Trauma, p. 32).

9 In an article on the “Medusa's Head,” Freud writes that the horror of seeing a Gorgon's head is associated with the “horror” of sexual discovery (specifically a child's first view of female genitalia); Freud's interpretations here are readily connected with the primal-scene experience. At times he seems almost to be describing the particular horror experienced by young Jerry Cruncher, as I show later. “The sight of Medusa's head,” writes Freud, “makes the spectator stiff with terror, turns him to stone” (SE, xviii, 273-74).

10 Self-Help; with Illustrations of Character and Conduct (1859; rpt. London: John Murray, 1862), p. 7.

11 The mob is “a monster much dreaded” (ii, xiv, 149) in England as well as in France. But the English version is softened by narrative point of view and by relatively mild defining images. We observe the English mob at the mock burial of Cly or the bloodthirsty crowd at Darnay's London trial through the disarming comic vision of Jerry Cruncher. But our impression of the French crowd is either unmediated or mediated in a more frightening way, as when Lorry, appalled by the awful scenes at the grindstone and desperate to prevent Lucie from witnessing them, intensifies the reader's own emotion (iii, ii). The British crowd at Darnay's trial is “ogreish” (ii, ii, 59), and on Darnay's acquittal its members are “baffled blue-flies …dispersing in search of other carrion” (ii, iii, 73). However ugly and disturbing, the metaphor suggests a diminutive and controlled menace, in contrast to the descriptions of the French mobs (“wolfish,” “insatiable”). The French are more terrifying in their celebration of Darnay's initial release than are the English in hoping for a conviction; and when Darnay is finally convicted in France, the crowd raises “a sound of craving and eagerness that had nothing articulate in it but blood” (iii, x, 315).

12 Weinstein and Platt argue that a critical change between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries turns on a “capacity for emotional withdrawal” manifested through the world of business: “business generally became the special province of men…. The relationship of father to son …became more conscious; centered in the ego, it was therefore capable of a higher degree of control. This control permitted critical examination of the father's position, and on this basis the first steps were taken toward the inclusion of the sons in the family structure” (Wish to Be Free, pp. 13-14). French society before the Revolution could not appropriately resolve the inevitable tensions of generational change: the choice was sharply drawn between passive acceptance of authority and active rebellion. (As we have seen, Darnay creates a false, third solution in attempting to flee his country and his fathers.) The postrevolutionary world of business could, however, resolve both national and family conflict within the psyche of the individual. Dickens' contrasting images of France and England, however crudely drawn, accurately reflect, respectively, the historical and social conditions for revolution and stability suggested by Weinstein and Platt. See also “On Social Stability and Social Change,” in Psychoanalytic Sociology, pp. 91-122.

13 Dickens himself confirmed the connection between generational struggle and the Carton-Stryver episode of A Tale of Two Cities. Before 1856 Dickens had conceived of a story to be “centered on ‘Memory Carton,’ jackal to a legal lion, the action to span ‘Two Generations’” (Collins, “A Tale of Two Novels,” p. 342).

14 Hedva Ben-Israel, English Historians on the French Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1968), p. 98; William Oddie, Dickens and Carlyle: The Question of Influence (London: Centenary, 1972), pp. 63-71; Michael Goldberg, Carlyle and Dickens (Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press, 1972), p. 103. Most recently, Gordon Spence has argued that “Dickens appears to have been out of sympathy with the French people, except when they were oppressed victims: he was not stirred by their revolt, but his imagination was stimulated by his loathing when they committed atrocities” (“Dickens as a Historical Novelist,” Dickensian, 72 [1976], 21). Dickens' sympathy, or lack of it, is best explained here on psychological rather than political grounds. When the French people are oppressed, they merit Dickens' lavish sympathy for all the oppressed children of his novels. But when the French justifiably revolt, their aggression implies the ultimate atrocity—patricide— and must be repudiated.

The source material for A Tale of Two Cities reveals Dickens' unstated, and probably unconscious, conservative view of the family. Both Oddie and Goldberg show Carlyle's influence on Dickens and the influence of a shared culture, and a common iconography, on both men. Dickens had read one of Carlyle's sources, Mercier's Tableau de Paris, which describes the sacrifice of General Loiseroilles, who assumes his son's place at the guillotine and dies for him. If Dickens conceived Carton's substitution for Darnay from this story, he has transformed the disguised iconography of revolution into a conservative parable. In Mercier's account, and in Carlyle's repetition of it, the father is sacrificed so that the son may live and grow; this supposedly real event lends itself to an imaginative splitting and identification on the part of the audience, who can attribute aggression to the “filial” revolutionaries while identifying themselves with the guiltless son. In Dickens' novel Carton assumes the position of the son—in relation to Lorry, in identification with Christ—and dies for a universal sin as well as for the particular sin that makes Darnay an Evrémonde and a representative of the ancien régime. In addition to Goldberg and Oddie, see Collins, “A Tale of Two Novels,” and J. A. Falconer, “The Sources of A Tale of Two Cities,” Modern Language Notes, 36 (1921), 1-10.

15 Quoted in John Forster, The Life of Charles Dickens (London: Chapman and Hall, 1872-74), iii, 329.

16 “A Tale of Two Cities,” Twentieth Century Interpretations of A Tale of Two Cities, ed. Charles E. Beckwith (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1972), p. 26.

17 “A Tale of Two Cities is admittedly one of the most strained of Dickens' works, and [Fitzjames] Stephen has little trouble in exposing the mechanism of its grotesqueness which he does with sadistic relish” (George H. Ford, Dickens and His Readers [1955; rpt. New York: Norton, 1965], p. 104).

18 In Charles Dickens: The World of His Novels (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1958), J. Hillis Miller sees another, larger meaning in the resurrection theme. He argues that it suggests a “direct contact with the transhuman.” On this basis Miller is able to connect the revolutionary and love stories of the novel, noting the limitations of plot but noting, as well, Dickens' success “in seeing the act of self-sacrifice from the inside” (p. 248).

19 Schizophrenia is itself derived from the Greek term for a “splitting of the mind”; the term was first introduced into psychiatry by Eugen Bleuler in 1911. Freud was concerned primarily with the splitting of the ego, and he applied “splitting” (Spaltung) in a far more specific way than Bleuler. See particularly “Fetishism” (SE, xxi, 152-57); “An Outline of Psychoanalysis” (SE, xxiii, 144-207); “Splitting of the Ego in the Process of Defense” (SE, xxiii, 275-78). See also Laplanche and Pontalis under “Schizophrenia” and “Splitting of the Ego.” According to the theory of object relations, splitting is an essential reaction of the infant to ambivalence and anxiety. The infant splits its own emotions and projects them onto another person (or “object”) and then internalizes the now split object. These theories were developed from Freud primarily by Melanie Klein; see particularly Contributions to Psycho-Analysis (London: Hogarth, 1948) and Developments in Psycho-Analysis, ed. M. Klein et al. (London: Hogarth, 1952). Robert J. Stoller's Splitting (New York: Dell, 1973) relies on Freud's definition: Stoller describes splitting as “a process in which the ego is altered as it attempts to defend itself” (p. xvi). However, Stoller's subtle and comprehensive case history of a multiple-personality patient also draws significantly on modern object-relational theory.

20 The use of one aspect of splitting—the “double”— has been noted extensively in literary criticism, and it is an important concept in the French school of psychoanalytic structuralism. Perhaps the best-known example is Jacques Lacan's study of “The Purloined Letter,” in which Dupin and the Ministre D. are described as mirror images (see “Seminar on ‘The Purloined Letter,’” Yale French Studies, 48 [1972], 38-72). Robert Rogers’ A Psychoanalytic Study of the Double in Literature (Detroit: Wayne State Univ. Press, 1970) describes a variety of literary doubles, particularly in contemporary literature. Rogers, however, uses the term “splitting” either with specific reference to narcissism (pp. 18-30) or in a general sense as interchangeable with “doubling,” “fragmentation,” and “decomposition” (p. 4). Leonard Manheim applies the term “multiple projection” to A Tale of Two Cities in “A Tale of Two Characters: A Study in Multiple Projection,” Dickens Studies Annual, 1 (1970), 225-37. Manheim effectively demonstrates the connection between what he calls the “novel's leading male character” (Carton-Darnay) and the Jekyll-Hyde feelings of the author, particularly over the affair with Ellen Ternan. His combination of psychoanalysis and biography has different explanatory assumptions and goals from my own, but his evidence and conclusions support the textual analyses of split objects here. Harry Stone traces the relations between psychological biography and one specific fictional pattern throughout Dickens' career in “The Love Pattern in Dickens' Novels,” in Dickens the Craftsman: Strategies of Presentation, ed. Robert B. Partlow, Jr. (Carbondale: Southern Illinois Univ. Press, 1970), pp. 1-20. Other critics have analyzed doubling and splitting on broader social and moral grounds. Joseph Gold, for example, writes that in A Tale of Two Cities “the desire to analyze and integrate the damned and the redeemed in metaphor is the cause of the doubleness which is at the centre of this novel.” See Charles Dickens: Radical Moralist (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1972), p. 232. Georg Lukács sees a profound split—a total dissociation, in fact—between the moral-political and the personal-psychological dimensions of this novel. By using psychoanalytic concepts of splitting to discuss both personal and political aspects of the Tale, I am offering an alternative to Lukács's negative judgment; I am also attempting to explain more fully the successes and weaknesses—derived from a common source—that have prompted Lukács to claim that “Dickens …weakens the connection between the problems of the characters' lives and the events of the French Revolution” (The Historical Novel, trans. Hannah Mitchell and Stanley Mitchell from 2nd German ed. [Boston: Beacon, 1963], p. 243).

21 Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, “A Tale of Two Cities,” rpt. in The Dickens Critics, ed. George H. Ford and Lauriat Lane, Jr. (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press, 1961), p. 45; letter from Dickens to F. J. Régnier (15 Oct. 1859), in The Letters of Charles Dickens, ed. Walter Dexter (Bloomsbury: Nonesuch, 1938), iii, 125-26. Dickens wrote to Régnier, however, on first completing the book, commenting, “I hope it is the best story I have written.” Philip Collins wonders whether Dickens meant to stress the word “story,” because, notes Collins, it may have been “his best effort, as a story, but no one then, and surely no one since, has regarded it as his best novel” (“A Tale of Two Novels,” p. 336).

22 “Some Stylistic Devices in A Tale of Two Cities,” in Dickens the Craftsman, p. 185.

23 In spite of Fitzjames Stephen's obvious bias, he did identify the novel's major problems. Shaw simply dismissed the book as “pure sentimental melodrama from beginning to end” (Introd., Great Expectations [Edinburgh: R. & R. Clark, 1937], p. vi), while Chesterton, who liked the Tale, echoed a common complaint that both Dickens and Carlyle represent the French Revolution “as a mere elemental outbreak of hunger or vengeance” (Charles Dickens [1906; rpt. New York: Schocken, 1965], p. 231). George Gissing was one of the first to call the book uncharacteristic in order to apologize for the sense of “restraint throughout.” Dickens “aimed …at writing a story for the story's sake…. Among other presumed superfluities, humour is dismissed” (Charles Dickens [London: Blackie and Son, 1898], pp. 54-55). Gissing anticipated a now common failure to connect the larger thematic implications of the story line to the psychological and political meanings of the text.

24 The classic description of this splitting of women is in Freud's “On the Universal Tendency to Debasement in the Sphere of Love,” SE, xi, 179-90.

25 As both Goldberg and Oddie demonstrate, Dickens drew on Carlyle's French Revolution for many of his most vivid incidents and images, including the terrifying figure of Madame Defarge, who was based on the real-life Demoiselle Théroigne described by Carlyle. See Thomas Carlyle, The French Revolution, Vols. ii-iv of the Centenary Ed. of The Works of Thomas Carlyle, ed. H. D. Traill (London: Chapman and Hall, 1896), esp. ii, 254-55; iii, 288, 293; and iv, 154. Carlyle characteristically combines sexual and violent images in some of his most intense portrayals of revolutionary emotion: “Will Guards named National thrust their bayonets into the bosoms of women? Such a thought, or rather such dim unshaped raw material of a thought, ferments universally under the female nightcap; and, by earliest daybreak, on slight hint, will explode” (ii, 250). See, generally, Bk. vii, “The Insurrection of Women,” esp. ii, 251-54, 278.

26 Madame Defarge in “The Wine-Shop” (facing p. 160) resembles Lucie “After the Sentence” (facing p. 318) and during “The Knock at the Door” (facing p. 266); Lucie's expressions are naturally quite different, but the features of the two women are similar— both women are young and attractive. What appear to be mirror images of the two women are placed opposite each other on the wrapper of the original edition. Carlyle describes Demoiselle Théroigne as “brown-locked, light-behaved, fire-hearted” and as a “Brown eloquent Beauty …with the figure of a Heathen Goddess” (ii, 135, 264).

Madame Defarge begins to age soon after Dickens' death. The “Household Edition” (New York: Harper, 1878), for example, shows a square-jawed, muscular Madame Defarge, looking very much like a man, on the title page. She looks older, heavier, and uglier by the end of the novel (p. 154), but is at her worst on p. 79, where she bears a remarkable resemblance to the aging Queen Victoria.

27 This last passage is noted by Michael Steig and F. A. C. Wilson (“Hortense vs. Bucket: The Ambiguity of Order in Bleak House,” Modern Language Quarterly, 33 [1972], 296), and they indicate that the image “points forward to Mme. Defarge.” Hortense herself appears to have been modeled on Maria Manning, a murderer whose beauty and splendid mode of dress brought thirty thousand people to her execution. See Philip Collins, Dickens and Crime, 2nd ed. (London: Macmillan, 1965), pp. 235-40.

28 On Copperfield see Leonard Manheim, “The Personal History of David Copperfield,” American Imago, 9 (1952), 21-43.

29 For David's behavior see particularly Gwendolyn B. Needham, “The Undisciplined Heart of David Copperfield,” Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 9 (1954), 81-107. Some of Needham's conclusions are questioned by William H. Marshall in “The Image of Steerforth and the Structure of David Copperfield,” Tennessee Studies in Literature, 5 (1960), 57-65.

30 Julian Moynahan and Harry Stone were the first critics to point out in detail the role of Orlick as heroic alter ego. See Moynahan, “The Hero's Guilt: The Case of Great Expectations,” Essays in Criticism, 10 (1960), 60-79, and Stone, “Fire, Hand, and Gate: Dickens' Great Expectations,” Kenyon Review, 24 (1962), 662-91. In my “Crime and Fantasy in Great Expectations,” Psychoanalysis and Literary Process, ed. Frederick Crews (Cambridge, Mass.: Winthrop, 1970), pp. 25-65, I attempt to extend this view of the hero's guilt while analyzing the father-son conflicts (and resolutions) that characterize the novel and determine its structure. One temporary resolution of generational struggle in Great Expectations is achieved through the comedy of Wemmick and his “Aged P.,” which is in turn based on the psychological conflicts implicit in the world of Victorian business.

31 Charles Dickens: His Tragedy and Triumph (New York: Simon, 1952), ii, 979.