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A TALE OF TWO CITIES - CHAPTER 14-17 (B)
Summary: Chapter 14: The Honest Tradesman
One morning outside Tellson’s Bank, Jerry
Cruncher sees a funeral pass by. Jerry asks a few questions and learns that
the crowd is preparing to bury Roger Cly, a convicted spy and one of the men
who testified against Darnay in his court case. Cruncher joins the motley
procession, which includes a chimney-sweep, a bear-leader and his mangy bear,
and a pieman. After much drinking and carousing, the mob buries Cly and, for
sport, decides to accuse passers-by of espionage in order to wreak
“vengeance on them.” At home that night, Cruncher once again harangues his
wife for her prayers. He then announces that he is going “fishing.” In
reality, he goes to dig up Cly’s body in order to sell it to scientists.
Unbeknownst to Cruncher, his son follows him to the cemetery, but runs away
terrified, believing that the coffin is chasing him. The next day, he asks
his father the definition of a “Resurrection-Man”—the term describes men
like Cruncher, who dig up bodies to sell to science. He announces his
intentions to have this job as an adult.
Summary: Chapter 15: Knitting
In Paris, Defarge enters his wine-shop
with a mender of roads whom he calls “Jacques.” Three men file out of
the shop individually. Eventually, Defarge and the mender of roads climb
up to the garret where Doctor Manette had been hidden. There they join
the three men who recently exited the shop, and whom Defarge also calls
“Jacques.” The mender of roads reports that, a year ago, he saw a man
hanging by a chain underneath the Marquis’s carriage. Several months
later, he says, he saw the man again, being marched along the road by
soldiers. The soldiers led the man to prison, where he remained “in his
iron cage” for several days. Accused of killing the Marquis, he stood to
be executed as a parricide (one who murders a close relative). According
to rumor, petitions soon arrived in Paris begging that the prisoner’s
life be spared. However, workmen built a gallows in the middle of town,
and soon the man was hanged.
When the mender of roads finishes his
recollection, Defarge asks him to wait outside a moment. The other
Jacques call for the extermination of the entire aristocracy. One points
to the knitting-work of Madame Defarge, which, in its stitching,
contains an elaborate registry of the names of those whom the
revolutionaries aim to kill. He asks if the woman will always be able to
decipher the names that appear there. Later that week, Defarge and his
wife take the mender of roads to Versailles to see King Louis XVI and
Queen Marie Antoinette. When the royal couple appears, the mender of
roads cries “Long live the King!” and becomes so excited that Defarge
must “restrain him from flying at the objects of his brief devotion and
tearing them to pieces.” This performance pleases the Defarges, who see
that their efforts will prove easier if the aristocrats continue to
believe in the peasantry’s allegiance.
Summary: Chapter 16: Still Knitting
The Defarges return to Saint Antoine
later that evening. A policeman friend warns Defarge that a spy by the
name of John Barsad has been sent to their neighborhood. Madame Defarge
resolves to knit his name into the register. That night, Defarge admits
his fear that the revolution will not come in his lifetime. Madame
Defarge dismisses his impatience and compares the revolution to
lightning and an earthquake: it strikes quickly and with great force,
but no one knows how long it will take to form. The next day, Barsad
visits the wine-shop. He masquerades as a sympathizer with the
revolutionaries and comments on the horrible treatment of the peasants.
Knowing that Defarge once worked as Doctor Manette’s servant, he reports
that Lucie Manette plans to marry, and that her husband is to be the
Marquis’s nephew, Darnay. After Barsad leaves, Madame Defarge adds
Darnay’s name to her registry, unsettling Defarge, the once loyal
servant of Manette.
Summary: Chapter 17: One Night
It is the eve of Lucie’s marriage to
Darnay. Lucie and her father have enjoyed long days of happiness
together. Doctor Manette finally has begun to put his imprisonment
behind him. For the first time since his release, Manette speaks of his
days in the Bastille. In prison, he passed much time imagining what sort
of person Lucie would grow up to be. He is very happy now, thanks to
Lucie, who has brought him “consolation and restoration.” Later that
night, Lucie sneaks down to her father’s room and finds him sleeping
soundly.
Analysis: Chapters 14–17
Of the many shadows throughout the novel,
that of death looms most largely. Given the novel’s concern with
resurrection, death acquires an inevitable presence. Although young
Jerry Cruncher’s aborted trip to the cemetery at the heels of his grave-robbing
father serves little dramatic purpose, it functions as an important
tableau. As the boy runs home with visions in his head of Roger Cly’s
coffin chasing behind him, Dickens creates a suggestive symbol of the
death that overshadows and pursues everyone.
As critic G. Robert Stange has noted, “the
tableau technique” plays an important role in the novel. “Dickens tends
throughout to make important episodes into set-pieces which are more
visual than strictly dramatic.” Chapter 14
opens with such a tableau—that of Cly’s funeral scene. In the scene’s
emphasis on bizarre and freakish imagery, we see a clear example of
Dickens’s characteristic sense of the grotesque. The scene’s importance
also lies in its depiction of the throng attending Cly’s funeral. Here,
Dickens continues his criticism of mob mentality. Although Dickens intends
the scene as largely comic, he also prepares the reader for his later,
darker scenes of mindless frenzy and group violence in Paris. For example,
as Cruncher participates in the burial of a man he does not know, his
spirited condemnation of the deceased testifies to the contagious nature
of the crowd’s anger and excitement. Indeed, once the body is interred,
the mob’s energy remains unexhausted. Thus the group sets off to harass
casual passers-by. Dickens later taps into the same frightening group
psychology in the tableaux that portray the French revolutionaries as they
gather around the grindstone (in Book the Third, Chapter
2) and dance the Carmagnole (in Book the
Third, Chapter 5).
The comedic atmosphere effected by Cruncher
quickly lapses into a tone of ominous danger as the story comes to focus
on Madame Defarge. For this woman possesses a vengeance and hatred that
exceed all bounds. Indeed, the preceding scene presages her vindictive
nature: the funeral-goers’ boisterous accusations of espionage against
innocent passers-by, which they voice for the sake of “vengeance,”
foreshadow the sweeping tide of hatred that consumes the revolutionaries,
and Madame Defarge in particular. Two of the chapters in this section
center around her knitting, her symbolic hatred of the aristocracy. When
one of the Jacques inquires as to whether Madame Defarge will always be
able to decipher this register, his query presages a time in which the
woman will seek death even for those objectively innocent of any
oppressive behaviors, a time in which her monomaniacal bloodlust will
drive her to murder without heed of her scrupulous register.
Dickens derived his knitting motif from
historical record: many scholars have recorded that women of the period
would often knit as they stood and watched the daily executions. In the
hands of Madame Defarge, however, the pastime takes on symbolic
significance. In Greek mythology, the Fates were three sisters who
controlled human life: one sister spun the web of life, one measured it,
and the last cut it. Dickens employs a similar metaphor. As Madame Defarge
weaves the names of the condemned into shrouds, her knitting becomes a
symbol of her victims’ fate, their death at the hands of a vengeful
peasantry.