A Tale of Two Mimeses: Dickens'sA Tale of Two Citiesand René Girard

Abstract

Though Wilkie Collins's The Frozen Deep and Thomas Carlyle's history of French Revolution are two important sources (1) for A Tale of Two Cities, Dickens's more general admission that all my strongest illustrations are derived from New (qtd. in Ackroyd 504) should perhaps loom larger. Historical novel, socio-political reflection, A Tale of Two Cities surely is. (2) But it may also be profitably understood as a narrative mimesis of Gospel texts. Such a mimetic impulse toward Bible narrative, and New Testament in particular, (3) is not confined in Dickens's oeuvre to A Tale of Two Cities. His The Life of Lord represents most obvious example, but Bible plays a formative narrative, as well as thematic, role in several other books. (4) Biblical-narrative mimesis can be rightly seen as a pervasive textual strategy in Dickens's work as a whole. It is achieved in a most harmonious and masterful way, however, in A Tale. Dickens's religious orientation and his use of Christianity have generally been seen, within context of Victorian cultural developments, as a secularizing of sacred and naturalizing of supernatural. Peter Ackroyd has referred in this connection to Dickens's faith as established upon practical philanthropy and conventional morality and his religion as one of natural love and moral feeling (507). This kind of reading would see Dickens's mimetic desire toward Gospel discourse as a Victorian attempt at appropriating moral and ethical weight of New Testament in an increasingly scientific, mechanical, and empirically based society? Although this secularization reading remains credible, anthropology of Rene Girard may point to a more complex process: a stripping away of ritualistic crust of Gospels to get at its core, mimetic desire, mimetic love and war, and scapegoat mechanism. Dickensian biblical mimesis, then, should be seen not only as a thematic imitation of Gospel or an imitation of spirit of Gospel message, but perhaps most preeminently as a mimesis of structural principle of Gospel texts. A Tale of Two Cities imitates unique element of Gospels, and of Bible more generally, manner in which they dramatize and expose scapegoat mechanism. (6) As Dickens's famous opening both parallels and contrasts best and worst, wisdom and foolishness belief and incredulity Light and Darkness spring of hope and winter of despair, Heaven and the other (I.1.5)--all binaries of biblical tradition--so too does novel draw together and distinguish love and war in their most primordial and vital senses. Kenneth M. Sroka has written on novel's connection with Gospel of John, showing how both texts construct similar dichotomies of light and darkness, good and evil, progress and regression: the movement opposing progress from darkness to light and lifelessness to resurrection is, similarly, a dia-bolic counter-movement toward 'extermination' specifically personified in Madame Therese Defarge and in representative French aristocrats, Monseigneur and Monsieur Marquis (152). As Girard might put it, in a way far more amenable to Dickens's sensible religious naturalism, novel represents dynamic of collective violence, mimetic contagion, but in contrast with foregrounding of mimetic war's opposite, conversionary mimesis and sacrificial renunciation. And just as in Gospels, horrors of collective violence and murder are exposed for what they are by transformative power of agape, self-sacrificing love. For those who see violence of novel as caricature (Cotsell 13) or for others who cannot seem to forgive Dickens's embarrassing sentimentalism, or still others who might feel novel's ending forced (Gross; Hutter), a thoroughly Girardian reading of novel can help to uncover seriousness and human depth of A Tale. …