“As
his eyes rested on a short, slight, pretty figure, a quantity of golden hair, a
pair of blue eyes that met his own with an inquiring look, and a forehead with
a singular capacity (remembering how young and smooth it was) of lifting and
knitting itself into an expression that was not quite one of perplexity, or
wonder, or alarm, or merely of a bright fixed attention, though it included all
the four expressions..”
If
one traces elements of the fairytale Charles Dickens skillfully knits into his
works, one would find an abundance of references to monstrous villains (Bill
Sikes), evil stepmothers (Miss Havisham) and fairy godmothers (or godfather, as seen with Magwitch). In ‘A
Tale of Two Cities’, a tightly regulated historical narrative is softened by
the innocent beauty and uncorrupted morality of Lucie Manette, whose “golden
hair” is her defining characteristic, highlighted whenever she enters the picture.
This reminded me of the Brothers Grimm classic 'Rumpelstiltskin', where an
innocent girl is shut up in a tower and forced to spin straw into gold for the
sake of her life. The parallel between this tale and Lucie Manette is
resounding, as the young heroine becomes the “golden thread” binding her family
together, selflessly “weaving the service of her happy influence through the
tissue of all their lives”. It’s no coincidence that the entire second book of
the novel is called “The Golden Thread”, paying testimony to the redemption and
transformation brought forth by Lucie’s angelic influence, as well as the
significance of this thread in tying the domestic sphere together with a power
that is able to penetrate into the public (and eventually lead to a chain of
events in the plot such as Charles Darnay’s classic escape).
This
ongoing metaphor is all the more symbolic as Lucie’s relationship with her
father is analyzed; she willingly subjects herself to a lifetime of
imprisonment by selflessly devoting herself to the service of her father. Her
only note of protest comes from the apprehension of such imposed parenthood (“I
have been free, I have been happy, yet his ghost has never haunted me!”), yet
she becomes the saving grace guiding Doctor Manette’s path to recovery. Mr.
Lorry sympathetically imagines her “flowing golden hair” to be “tinged with
gray” upon her new-found responsibility, but she rises up to the challenge with
a heroic morality quite novel in the ideal Victorian lady. She uses her golden
thread to detach Doctor Manette from a monotonous cycle of weaving (via shoemaking), as she
tells him, “If you touch, in touching my hair, anything that recalls a beloved
head that lay on your breast when you were young and free, weep for it, weep
for it!”. Very explicitly, Lucie becomes “the golden thread that united him to a Past beyond
his misery, and to a Present beyond his misery: and the sound of her voice, the
light of her face, the touch of her hand, had a strong beneficial influence
with him almost always".
When viewed
from a broader, political context, Lucie’s hybrid entity is emphasized the
second she is introduced to the reader; Mr Lorry contradictorily self-reflects,
“This is Mam’selle!”, but sees her as a “young English lady” in her “adopted
country”. This is developed as she becomes the device used to appropriate
French values with English morality, making her a representation of the best of
both worlds. One can see the virtue and redemptive goodness embodied by her
golden hair as the perfect blend of Paris and London, consequently becoming the
didactic novel’s subtle advocation of moderation through a new kind of feminine
gender. She is not the fragile, invisible homemaker conventionally portrayed as
the appropriate kind of womanhood of the age; she balances virtue with
selfhood, and uses action versus passivity to carry forth salvation and change
in the novel.
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