The song and the narrative space

“See my saw! I call it my Little Guillotine. La,la,la;La,la,la! And off his head comes!” The billet fell as he spoke, and he threw it into a basket. “I call myself the Samson of the firewood guillotine. See here again! Loo,loo,loo;Loo,loo,loo! And off her head comes! Now, a child. Tickle, tickle; Pickle, pickle! And off its head comes. All the family!” (Chp 5, Book 3, A Tale of Two Cities)

 ‘Maids in the warmth of a summer day Dream of love and of love always.’ Emma raised herself like a galvanized corpse, her hair undone, her eyes fixed, staring. ‘Where the sickle blades have been, Nannette, gathering ears of corn, passes bending down, my queen, to the earth where they were born.’ The wind is strong this summer day, her petticoat has flown away.’ (Chp 9, Part III, Madame Bovary)

  
  Though the wood-sawyer metaphor has been a persistent one throughout the novel which opens up with the mention of the “Wood-man Fate” who records “things terrible in history”, what I want to emphasis on here is the song, sung by the wood-sawyer, when Charles Darnay is in prison and then compare it with the blind man’s song in Madame Bovary, sung when Emma is dying. The interesting thing structurally is the placement of these songs at the crucial junctures in the novel as well as the locality where they are sung. While the wood man sings of the “Guillotine” right outside the Bastille, where Charles Darnay is imprisoned; the blind man in Madame Bovary sings outside Emma’s door of the “maids” who “dream of love”, when she’s taken arsenic and is waiting for death to come. The language of both the songs is also interesting; wherein the Wood -sawyer’s song employs biblical imagery (with the reference to “Samson”) and in a very humorous tone talks of the “Guillotine” (“See my saw! I call it my Little Guillotine”). What is really macabre in this singing is how the Guillotine as a subject matter is dealt with in such a jovial way by a common lower class fellow. There is then the presence of dark humour, and the whole idea of justice is deeply satirized (“Liberty, equality, fraternity, or death;—the last, much the easiest to bestow, O Guillotine!”).Also through the song Lucy’s fear for “her husband’s head” is juxtaposed with the ease with which the wood-sawyer sings of the “firewood Guillotine”.

  In Madame Bovary, as well, the language of the blind man’s song is extremely powerful. The song is indeed a comment on the life of Emma Bovary who “dreams of love and love away” and is consumed by this dream of love as well as her romantic mentality. Interestingly both the wood-sawyer and the blind man deal with the theme of death.

The commoner’s song then is used as a device, by novelists such as Dickens and Flaubert, placed at a crucial juncture in the narrative space, and is employed as an implicit commentary in a light hearted tone, on an otherwise serious subject.