The Woman Thing, Part 1

A Tale of Two Cities, and a tale of two strong women

Women’s March on Versailles

If you read my last post — a playlist of the French Revolution — you may well have asked yourself, “Why on earth did she spend time doing That?”

Here is how it came about. I was maundering around as usual when I got a query from a new online platform called Rebind https://www.rebind.ai . Its idea is: match up living authors with classic books —Percival Everett on Huckleberry Finn, for example — and have them do a blow by blow read-through of it, explaining their enthusiasm and the book at the same time. Each would do a charming video intro; then would come the text. The chapter by chapter, plot twist by plot twist, line by line deep dive would follow. It would be the text of the book, and moments when the reader would interact with the commentator by — for instance — asking questions. (“What just happened?”) The answers would be provided from the reams of babble the commentator had recorded, prompted by the Rebind team, then run through an AI to make them — let’s just say “more succinct.” Deep-dive reading was how my generation learned literature — it used to be called “explication du texte” — so I was up for this.

So of course I chose A Tale of Two Cities, by Charles Dickens. (It is due to launch on Rebind at the end of this month, in case you want to see me in action, as it were.) I devoted two or three weeks to this intensive program. Why did I pick the TOTC, as we took to fondly calling it? 1) It’s set durimg the French Revolution, and we now live in revolutionary times 2) I studied it in high school as a set text, but did not understand it in the many-layered way I do now, partly because we didn’t talk much about context, just the book 3) It bears directly on the Woman Question, a subject of very active debate during the Victorian era, once my field of study. Hey. It gave us Bloomers.

In the course of my work on this book — Dickens’s best-seller, and also his most tightly plotted novel — I compiled my playlist of French Rev music and music related to it. I also discovered that those of younger generations (i.e. almost everyone) found some things about the heroine, Lucie Manette, kind of icky. I had myself, someto think of it. All that fainting and clinging. So I set to work, and wrote up some notes on the women in TOTC and how they fitted in with ideals of, say, the late 1850s, when Dickens wrote the book. I will now share these notes with you.

Some Notes on the Women in A Tale of Two Cities: A Mid-Victorian Dilemma

Far from being a manifestation only of the late 19^th C and the early 20th, the “Woman Question” plagued the entire century and even earlier, beginning from before the Revolution – Rousseau kicked it off, as he kicked off much. In his view, women were to be domestic caretakers of men and children, and, above all, breast feeders. Hence the procession of breast-feeders at Robespierre’s Festival of the Supreme Being. (This is not as nutty as it sounds. Dickens himself, in TOTC, attacks the pre-Revolutionary French court for aristocratic women’s refusal to breastfeed so their figures would remain youthful. Wet nurses and baby farmers were widely employed – the rich didn’t want to breastfeed, and the poor could not afford to, since they needed to work. Infant mortality was high, and some baby farmers were in fact “angel makers” – they killed the babies in their charge by starving them and keeping them quiet with gin and opium.). The 1830 Delacroix painting, “Liberty Leading the People,” shows the revolutionary “Marianne” figure with her top falling off well-equipped to breast-feed: she’s nourishing, as a good Victorian mother ought to be.

What kind of women feature in A Tale of Two Cities – which is not an 18^th C novel but a mid-Victorian one? What possibilities for female heroines were open to Dickens, considering the conditions when he was writing the book? He has some noteworthy women among his creations – the creepy Miss Havisham and Pip’s hardfisted sister in Great Expectations, Lady Dedlock in Bleak House – but his romantic-lead heroines are not among them.

1.Weepers, Fainters, Clingers, Nurturers, Centres of the Domestic Sphere, Ideals who Inspire

Background reading:

“The Angel in the House”. Coventry Patmore. 1854 and 1856. His idealization of the proper duties on women.

Mrs. Beeton’s Book of Household Management. 1862. Read intro. Right in period. The woman is the “general” of the house.

John Ruskin: https://www.bartleby.com/lit-hub/on-womanhood/ The separate spheres of man and woman. The classic formulation. 1865. Woman is to care for the domestic sphere and be the nurturer – the “loaf-giver.” Man is to sustain the household and guard it. Basically it’s the arrangement among female and male whales described in Moby-Dick.

Tale of Two Cities was published April 1859 to November 1859 – at the height of the mid-Victorian ideal of the loving, caring, angelic, domestic woman.

Two Ideals:

Lucie Manette: The perfect embodiment of the mid-Victorian ideal. We first see her fainting becomingly, then mothering her mad father, then fainting again at Darnay’s London trial, thus giving Sidney Carton his first chance to rescue her. Then – having been further beatified by becoming a mother – she is portrayed as his redemptive ideal. She creates a little bower of domestic order and felicity. (Nothing against that, by the way: we all like those.) The “Golden Thread” of the title of Book 2 is – in part – her hair; two strands of her dead mother’s identical hair are found on Dr. Manette in the Bastille, preserved during his time in prison.

The Seamstress (in Carton’s last scenes, prior to the guillotining of both of them). Contradicts the general idea that it was only aristocrats who got killed. Dickens had done his homework – only 15 percent of the executed were aristos + clergy, whereas 85 % were commoners. The Seamstress – besides her occupation being quintessentially female, as is Mme Defarge’s knitting – is little, weak, clingy, and noble of spirit. She also gives Carton another chance – however brief – to be helpful to someone else. She is what Lucie would have been like if condemned to the guillotine. She is the human-sacrifice substitute for Lucie, as Carton is for Darnay.

2. Two Strong Women

Background reading:

Mary Wollstonecraft. Deeply involved in the French Rev and wrote about it. A Vindication of the Rights of Women. 1792.

Olympe de Gouges: lost her head in the Rev, partly for being so “impudent’ as to write A Declaration of the Rights of Woman and of the Female Citizen,1791. Equality for women was not one of the ideals of the Rev, even though women had played so important a part in it. The Revolutonaries stuck with Rousseau: liberty, equality, and fraternity, but not for women.

“The Princess,” Tennyson, 1847. Tennyson grappled with The Woman Question, as he grappled with everything of his time. The heroine wants to withdraw from men to form an intellectual society of women, giving up traditional home and family. It being Tennyson writing, this scheme does not work out as planned. Eek: along comes Love! Love is of the valley, in among “the murmuring of innumerable bees” – tidy housekeepers and nurturers, bees.

The problem for the novelist: Ideally ‘feminine’ Victorian female characters, thus lacking in physical strength, cannot plausibly take part in the action-packed parts of the novel, insofar as this would involve (for instance) fighting and mob violence. Nor would a typical mid-Victorian ideal woman contemplate cutting off the head of an innocent little girl, as Mme Defarge does. Lucie Manette cannot be ruthless. She’s too susceptible to the suffering of others. Her virtues are empathy, compassion, and pity. And nurturing.

Mme Defarge

She is the antagonist, and is very strong – she is implacable in her vengeance, which up to a point is more than justified, as Dickens takes pains to make clear. She does not flinch from shedding blood herself (see the Bastille scene, where she decapitates the prison governor), bosses around the men in her life, including her husband – a more merciful character than she is – and is physically strong as well. Dickens falls in love with her over the course of the book – at the beginning she is “stout” and not particularly attractive, though clever and wily. And, by the way, she’s an excellent businesswoman—it is she who counts the money. How male of her. But later, as she strides through the streets of Paris, she crackles with (dare we say) sexual energy, is beautiful, and radiates freedom. A tigress. A force of nature. Lucie Manette would not stand a chance against her in a hand-to-hand fight. She would just weep and faint.

Miss Pross

Who, in the novel, is the hero who can play Beowulf to the formidable Defarge monster? In accordance with the “twinning” in the rest of the book, that hero has to be a woman. Miss Pross is described, when Mr. Lorry first meets her, as being possibly a man. She is not above physical contest – right at the outset she forcefully shoves Lorry out of the way. She is strong in her devotion to Lucie and family – thus Lorry places her higher on the ladder towards the angels than many better-looking, more “feminine” women that he knows. She does cry once – confronting Mme D. – but they are tears of anger. She is the only woman in the book who can cage-fight Mme D. with a hope of winning.

Neither of these Amazons have children, so they can battle to the death without depriving an innocent child of a mother. That would have been a dubious plot twist in the eyes of the Victorians.

Heroes have to risk or sacrifice something for the good of others. Miss Pross risks her life and sacrifices her hearing.

Dickens idealizes Type 1, but he admires Type 2. There’s a difference. William Blake: “Milton was of the Devil’s part without knowing it.” Dickens is of Mme Defarge’s part, whether he knew it or not.

For a novelist, passive goodness is hard to portray in an interesting way, as Robert Louis Stevenson well knew.

Blanche Yurka in her blistering portrayal of Mme D. in the 1930s movie. Grrr!

Next time, The Woman Thing, Part 2, in which we will consider why forcing women to carry dead and decaying babies around inside themselves is not only stupid, unethical, and potentially fatal, but also — for true Christians — heretical. Meanwhile, below the line, there’s a very basic reading list of the French Revvie. All $ goes to the Pelee Island Bird Conservatory, and after we do The Woman Thing, Part 2, I will give you a cheerful update on that. It is the best of times, it is the worst of times, and we’ll get around to that, too.