A Tale of Two Cities : 精神的外傷とその影響

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A Tale of Two Cities (1859) is Dickens's 12th novel, serialized unillustrated in weekly parts in All the Year Round (April 30 to November 26, 1859). It was simultaneously issued in eight monthly numbers by Chapman and Hall, illustrated by Hablot K. Browne. It was published in one volume in 1859. The purpose of this paper is to show the theme of the traumatic impact and its influence on a man in A Tale of Two Cities. In this novel, Dickens brought out the contrast between the affairs of England and France in the eighteenth century and the traumatic impact of the French Revolution on private lives. He represented the interrelationship of past and present, and the interconnection between memory and the consequences of remembering, in both public and the private realms. Dickens showed readers how the past experience of Dr. Manette in the Bastille had an influence on his life after having left the prison. Doctor Manette was, in 1757, a physician in Beauvais who was taken by the Marquis St. Evremondes and his twin brothers and forced to attend a peasant girl who had been raped by the younger brother ; Dr. Manette also cared for the girl's brother, wounded while defending her honor. After the patients died, the Marquis St. Evremonde had the doctor, who knew too much, thrown into Bastille to keep him quiet. There he remained for 18 years. Two years after his imprisonment began, his English wife, Madame Manette, died and their orphaned infant daughter, Lucie, was taken to England by Jarvis Lorry, the family's financial advisor. A Tale of Two Cities begins when Manette is released from prison and recalled to life. Lorry escorts the 17-year-old Lucie, who has never seen her father, to Paris to bring the doctor back to England. At first the doctor, who has worked as a shoemaker in prison, fails to recognize Lorry or his daughter, but her loving care and her physical remembrance to his wife, especially her golden hair, gradually restore him. When Lucie marries Charles Darnay, a French emigre in England, however, the doctor temporarily reverts to his prison occupation as a shoemaker on learning that Darnay is really the Marquis St. Evremonde the nephew of the Marquis who had him imprisoned. When Charles is arrested in Paris, Manette works to save him, but a manuscript he wrote in prison describing the crimes of the St. Evremondes is revealed by Defarge and Darnay is condemned to death. Although Dr. Manette regains his own mental 'life' by meeting Lucie, his daughter again, he inevitably relapses into mental 'death', because he remembers the past imprisonment at Bastille. Dickens showed how the past trauma had a great influence on a man by representing the mental change of Dr. Manette and his trauma could not be erased from his mind if he were faced by anything which reminded him of his painful past.
2009-01-20

A Tale of Two Cities : 精神的外傷とその影響

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