Lucie Manette: Rumpelstiltskin’s “golden thread”

“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.