Areesha's Post:

*submitted on time

As an anthropology student in a literature class, I kept feeling lost due to all the fancy literature-ness that was going on. Dickens finally gave me a chance to apply my own major to this course. So hear me out.

Arnold van Gennep talks about the three stages of a ritual: the phase of separation, the liminal phase and the phase of reintegration. The phase of separation is the state where a certain social categories and certain rules and regulations are being given up or being separated from. The phase of separation is transformed into phase of reintegration where the rules and social categories change and new ones are put into place. The phase of liminality is the state when the transformation between the phases is occurring. Claude Levi-Strauss took this analysis further to mythological stories.

Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities also has characteristics of van Gennep’s structure. For this blog post, I’m going to talk about the second phase i.e. the phase of liminality with reference to the French revolution and the figure of Jacques. Victor Turner, building up on van Gennep’s analysis, gives the few dominating characteristics of the liminal phase which are sexless-ness, anonymity and homogeneity.

All the French peasants partaking in the revolution are called Jacques. This not only signifies the homogeneity that is to say that every French peasant at that point is of equal standing and exactly equal to one another but also it ensures the anonymity of the revolutionaries.

Moving on to the point of sexless-ness which Turner emphasized with sexual continence is also present here. During the revolutionary movement, gender plays a secondary role to the class identity and the Jacques-ness becomes more important. Madame Defarge tells the women

“We can kill as well as the man when the place is taken!”

Gender then takes a backseat and what becomes important is the revolution.

Finally, the main idea behind the liminal phase is that it overthrows the current social order and identities such class and the power attached to those identities no longer define people’s behavior. The revolution becomes the liminal phase where the peasants finally rise up against the existing social order and the power and authority of the French aristocracy no longer limits or dictates the actions of the French peasantry.