A Tale of Two Mimeses: Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities and Rene Girard

Though Wilkie Collins's The Frozen Deep and Thomas Carlyle's history of the 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 the New Testament" (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 the Gospel texts. Such a mimetic impulse toward Bible narrative, and the New Testament in particular, (3) is not confined in Dickens's oeuvre to A Tale of Two Cities. His The Life of the Lord represents the most obvious example, but the 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 the context of Victorian cultural developments, as a secularizing of the sacred and naturalizing of the 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 the moral and ethical weight of the New Testament in an increasingly scientific, mechanical, and empirically based society? Although this secularization reading remains credible, the anthropology of Rene Girard may point to a more complex process: a stripping away of the ritualistic crust of the Gospels to get at its core, mimetic desire, mimetic love and war, and the scapegoat mechanism. Dickensian biblical mimesis, then, should be seen not only as a thematic imitation of the Gospel or an imitation of the spirit of the Gospel message, but perhaps most preeminently as a mimesis of the structural principle of the Gospel texts. A Tale of Two Cities imitates the unique element of the Gospels, and of the Bible more generally, the manner in which they dramatize and expose the 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 way" (I.1.5)--all binaries of the biblical tradition--so too does the novel draw together and distinguish love and war in their most primordial and vital senses. Kenneth M. Sroka has written on the novel's connection with the Gospel of John, showing how both texts construct similar dichotomies of light and darkness, good and evil, progress and regression: "the movement opposing the 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 the representative French aristocrats, Monseigneur and Monsieur the Marquis" (152). As Girard might put it, in a way far more amenable to Dickens's sensible religious naturalism, the novel represents the dynamic of collective violence, mimetic contagion, but in contrast with the foregrounding of mimetic war's opposite, conversionary mimesis and sacrificial renunciation. And just as in the Gospels, the horrors of collective violence and murder are exposed for what they are by the transformative power of agape, self-sacrificing love. For those who see the violence of the novel as "caricature" (Cotsell 13) or for others who cannot seem to forgive Dickens's embarrassing sentimentalism, or still others who might feel the novel's ending forced (Gross; Hutter), a thoroughly Girardian reading of the novel can help to uncover the seriousness and human depth of A Tale. …