On Marxism

A Tale of Two Cities: Through A Marxist Lens

The range of emotions of the rich and the powerful, who have no experience of the hard work and drudgery of a working man, is narrow, limited, and insignificant compared to the range of feelings of the simple laborer. Full of constant discontent and turmoil of trivial events, a simple day of a rich being becomes complicated by insignificances; therefore, unworthy of praise. On the other hand, a peasant’s day is unembellished and ordinary so that a small description provides much detail. Charles Dickens’s famous phrase—“ It was the best of times, it was the worst of times” does not purge every characteristic of the French Revolution depicted in his novel A Tale of Two Cities; rather offers a Marxist perspective on the bloody events and social realities of eighteenth century England and France. The character of Charles Darnay becomes insignificant in the midst of manipulations of the bourgeois society in the area of politics, economy, government and acts as a tool for the unfolding of the events. The French Revolution—the seemingly main enterprise of this novel, is just a stylistic device, but its proximate and staggering causes and implications leave the reader metapmorphosizing her speculations. The novel dramatizes the natural and fundamental human need for liberation of social strains, the evils of capitalism, and the means by which the bourgeois keep the proletariat oppressed.

The lavish representation of a French Court authority’s family, called Monseigneur, paints the divided line with utmost clarity between the two societies—the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. Dickens’s social-exposure technique depicts the harsh reality of the lower classes’ dehumanization. Monseigneur’s narrow thoughts are satirized by Dickens in a moment of choice to further emphasize the ravages of class distinction: “Monseigneur had the other truly noble idea that the world was made for them” (106). Each action of the “noble” group embeds larger historical controversies—the “superior” beings only defined in terms of their class. This kind of consciousness fits into Marxian view of the masses and enforces the following analogy: “Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other: Bourgeoisie and Proletariat” (Marx and Engels 658). Being defined through property which has “every device of decoration that the taste and skill of the time could achieve” (Dickens 107), generates conflicts, a high to a low ratio, and an absurd differentiation. One of the guests at Monseigneur’s, named Marquis Evremonde further proves the above noted Marxian passage, by running over a little boy with his carriage and showing his “compassion” towards the lower class. Preceding the incident, Dickens describes the man as “handsomely dressed, haughty in manner . . . A face with transparent paleness; one set of expression on it” (110). Evremonde, taking his place in the respected and “excepted” class, is just a collection of atoms ornamented with abundant commodities. Despite the entire negative aura caused by the incident; the noble Evremonde only adds another vulgar and despising phrase as a result of his reaction to the incident: “It is better for the poor little plaything to die so, than to live” (Dickens 112). The fact that there are no common bonds of humanity, but only an obvious protection of status relations manifested in this dreadful event.

Charles Darnay’s (Marquis Evremonde’s nephew) return to France from England, most clearly dramatizes another implication by the great divide—the alienation in the area of family and relationships caused by the invisible, yet real borders between the two classes. However, unsurprising, the estrangement occurs in the bourgeois family and the conversation between an uncle and a nephew (the former has not seen the latter for a while) is anything, but familial or depicted with positive connotations. Evremonde’s seemingly indifferent advice, in the midst of the stupor conversation “a good opportunity for consideration, surrounded by the advantages of solitude might influence your destiny to far greater advantage than you influence it for yourself” (Dickens 123) further fits the Marxian notion of capitalism causing disaffection. The alienation depicted here is not a given, but it formulates via giving individuals certain titles as for instance referring to Darnay as “Evremonde’s nephew” and not by his real name. The situation is clearly depicted in The Communist Manifesto as “The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced the family relation to a mere money relation” (Marx and Engels 659). Evremonde’s impulses and hatred towards his nephew not only reveals the atrocity of his nature, but also elucidates the ruthlessness of the French influential classes on its dependants. In the stage-play of alienation, the players or the participants wear masks of the estrangement, in order to hide their real essences behind it; whether they are a slave, a master, or a master’s relative. Darnay’s realization of Evremonde’s “fine mask looking at him sideways” (Dickens 124) and of the evils of his uncle, slowly makes him to recede from his family and from the class where he originate. Evremonde’s other passages such as “repression is the only lasting philosophy” or “the dark deference of fear and slavery” (Dickens 124) only contributes to Darnay’s withdrawal from the structure. The main cause of the event is “the intensity of alienation in response to a problematic social reference” (Twining 421). Such response is a foreshadowing of the French peasantry’s rebellion.

Alongside the influentials and the elites, there are characters like Charles Darnay’s father-in-law, a poor man called Dr. Manette whose wheel of fortune turned dramatically from the once doctor to a shoemaker. The long imprisonment in Bastille, France of this now low-class being separates him from his daughter Lucie Manette and is representative of the fate of the proletariat, enclosed within the barricades of an incompliant social system. He is the dehumanized by the system and the result is a complete loss of the self. In order to find himself again, Dr. Manette busies himself with an every day task of shoemaking to fulfill his rather empty existence. Noted in The German Ideology as “what is animal becomes human and what is human becomes animal” (Marx and Engels 655) describes the absurdity of such oppression which destroys the “naturalness” of an individual. The shift from the human to a machine is evident; the single effectual cause that differentiates one person from another; one set of ideologies and beliefs that goes against another, Marx believes is the result of the economic environment. Manette; therefore, is that deprived individual whose “essence,” as Isaiah Berlin notes in his understanding of Marxism “as a human being is to be social in order to develop freely and fully” (100). Nonetheless, Manette’s miserable state is uninfluenced by his will and is due to the economic structure of the given (French) society because of which his machine-likeness and desensitization emerge: “ . . . and the haggard eyes had looked up again: not with any interest or curiosity, but with a dull, mechanical perception” (Dickens 43). The events that the “crazy” man witnessed as a prisoner in Bastille, are laid out in court as an accusation against Marquis Evremonde: “We were so robbed by that man who stands there, as all we common dogs are by those superior Beings—taxed by him without mercy, obliged to grind our corn at his. . . I had never before seen the sense of being oppressed” (Dickens 323). Manette also tells the story of a woman who is raped by Evremonde, also implying that the kind of deed is another form of social exploitation. Evremonde’s absolute power to commit any deed with no punishment angers the peasantry against the rulers at an instance, where revolution is inevitable.

Darnay’s continuous imprisonments and punishments due to his going against the social norms, the elite, and for trivial matters, is a fitted depicting of Michel Foucault’s philosophy of mechanism and theories behind the penal systems. The jails are epitomes of oppression and a place for rulers to deprive the weak. The coldness and ugliness of jails in Dickensian descriptions reflect upon the rigid-clod detachment of souls.The absurdity of courts is manifested in the courtroom where Darnay has to be found guilty in order for the court to prove its superiority over such trivial beings as him: “Mr. Attorney-General concluded on the faith of his solemn asseveration that he already considered the prisoner as good as dead and gone” (Dickens 69) and the jury “must positively find the prisoner Guilty” (Dickens 65) seemingly it having mandatory connotations. Darnay’s fault rests upon his return to France from England and arrested as an emigrant. Foucault’s passage of “the power that applied the penalties now threatened to be as arbitrary, as despotic, as the power that once decided them” (129) is appropriate for such court dealings. There is the restorative construct of a right to disciple that belongs to society as a whole. The relationship of a prisoner and an authority is comparative with the class relationship of the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. Those who secure the means of production (the rich) oppress those who are the producers. In the same manner, those who secure their seats in the high ranks of society (the authority) are able to control the lives of those who lack such seats. Hence, those who govern a given society, who grow wealthy and therefore powerful, dominate many influential institutions, possessing much control.

The subjectification and materialization of not only the prisoners, but also any class members as being prisoners of that particular class, advances ideologies in certain social structures. Madame Defarge’s and her husband’s wine-shop is a representation of the evils of capitalism and the tumult of the French revolution. Her quiet knitting in the wine-shop depicts her oppression by Darnay’s aristocratic clan. The vengeance she carries towards the oppressor Evremondes makes her another oppressor, subjectifying her being as a mere tool of Repressive Ideological Apparatuses, in the hands of police to capture the revolutionaries. Her knitting consists of the secret names of the revolutionaries that ought to be executed and along those is Darnay’s name. In the court “placing the [knitting] in her leutienant’s hands,” (Dickens 358) makes Madame Defarge a subject and a possession of that authority. The high ranking officials at the court where Darnay is executed to death are the bourgeois themselves who make their system to appear as the only logical one, trapping weak and irrational beings like Madam Defarge. Her conformity to the State Apparatus, which Louis Althusser defines as “in the form of distinct and specialized institutions . . . that function massively and predominantly by repression” (1344), shows the repressive characteristics of such apparatuses and their causes of the clash between the two main classes. Unlike other characters who rebel against the capitalist evils, thus establishing the “self,” Madame Defarge is and dies as the repressed conformist, not escaping her ideology—the cherished idea of her taking vengeance against the Evremondes and the other oppressed. She is trapped in an institution that uses her as a tool. These institutions do not only exist as social mechanisms, but also penetrate into the very essence of their preys, making substantive modifications impossible. They operate according to their own inner logic and not to satisfy the individual’s needs.

Unlike every other character, who are products of their classes, the peculiar character of Sydney Carton, an attorney who later saves Darnay from execution, disguising himself in Darnay’s clothes, breaks the social barriers which enclose and keep him in the limits of bourgeois society. Carton’s “breaking away” is portrayed in his extraordinary deed on the day of Darnay’s execution, in his evasion from the forces of bourgeois individualism. Carton is the individual, that Antonio Gramsci speaks of in his The Formation of the Intellectuals, who “puts [himself] forward as autonomous and independent of the dominant group” (1003). Carton, possessing no other character, than his own, partakes in an operation, overpassing the smothering barricades of the bourgeois self. He is described by Dickens as someone “with wonderful quickness, and with strength both of will and action that appeared quite supernatural, he forced all these changes upon him” (348). In difference with other characters, who are constantly deprived by social strains, lacking the fundamental entity of will, Carton possesses the aims and desires to make a change. The French Revolution’s imperativeness and message lays in the actions of this man, as he withdraws from the repressor class. He sees the disintegration of the conventional barriers, insuring the safety of the other oppressed characters like Darnay, his wife, and Dr. Manette.

Considering the Marx’s perspective on Sydney Carton’s dynamic character; rather viewing him from Gramsci’s lens, completely shifts the interpretations of his actions. Carton’s execution in the end of the novel, manifests his self-destruction because he does not flow along the class where he originated. In Isaiah Berlin’s passage on historical Marxism, the idea comes to be more lucid: “if you know in what direction the world process is working, you can either identify with it or not; if you fight it, you thereby compass your own certain destruction, being defeated by the forward advance of history” (114). However, looking at Carton’s decisions as merely independent is a fallacy because his actions might also derive from the oppression of his own class—being the lawyer whom no one trusts, working for an influential law firm that regards him as an instrument who accomplishes the “dirty” work. Carton’s suicidal nature and unhappiness with his being and life comes into surface in his conversation with Charles Darnay at a bar: “Nothing in life! I am a disappointed drudge . . . no man on earth cares for me” (Dickens 87). Perhaps his martyr actions toward Darnay (taking his execution on his shoulders) are a result of his deprived state and not his will. Nonetheless, even if these events are “indispensable and independent of [his] will” (Marx and Engels 662) and as Marx puts it—“men are themselves the product of objective conditions” (qtd. in Berlin 100), those actions still create patterns of change. This change is brought forward by Carton’s death. His public execution is an ineffective way to try to control the revolutionaries, as it only encourages more rebellions. As Foucault notes in his Discipline and Punish, this kind of execution is just another way for the highly ranked classes to manifest their power: “in a penalty employing public torture and execution is to show the sovereign power that mastered it” (93). Using power to strain the masses evidently reveals the suppression of the “weak” class by the “superior class,” however, in the novel; the revolution does not stop with Carton’s execution, proving such punishment as just another nonsensical action by the upper class.

Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities paints the atrocious reality of eighteenth century England and France rather obviously through the events of the bloody French Revolution. The characters of this novel, from the two main classes within the Marxian framework—the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, are caught in an inexorable tsunami of historical and social proceedings that dehumanize and destroy their very essences. Charles Darnay, his wife, Dr Manette, and Madame Defarge are oppressed by societal evils like Marquis Evremonde who manipulate every social institution. To people like Evremonde, society is something that is based on commodities, rather than values or ideals. The constant conflict, between the two groups is depicted in massive imprisonments of the low-ranking class members such as Charles Darnay. The social turbulence is a direct result of the revolutionaries’ rebellion; however, even more directly— is a response to the inhumanity of aristocracy and the exploitation of the poor. In the novel, the Marxian lens (including Marx’s, Engel’s, Gramsci’s Althusser’s philosophies) overlaps with Michel Foucault’s structural perspective and his understanding of social institutions, their categorizations, and the penal systems which Dickens portrays here with constant recurrences of jail imagery. The forces between the two classes become stronger, emphasizing the line of division in between. The individual’s actions are a result of the dictations of their own class. The point is clearly manifested in Engel’s passage: “In nature these forces are physical, chemical, biological: in society they are specifically economic and social” (qtd. in Berlin 92). The individuals are left to act upon not on their will but as products of the system.

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