I think the death of the child is another tableau, a sentimental Victorian set piece that would have had a certain popular appeal to Victorians and that just does not work for modern readers-- and didn't even work for all Victorian readers. But I can't help having a niggling feeling that he is somehow setting up something that happens later in the book. Though I'm not sure what it is.
I wonder if it isn't setting into play the idea of a happy death, that death isn't the end and that a happy death is not a tragedy -- this will be a key idea later in the novel. I also wonder at the connection between the dead child and Carton. Dickens has Carton in a memorable scene later with Lucie the younger and I can't help but think one of the things he's doing is trying to show Carton as tied into the fabric of the family.
Dickens' sentimentality doesn't bother me much nor diminish my pleasure in his work mostly because I think I just accept it as of its time.
I don't have a pro-sentimentality defense to make but only want to claim the same superpower as Sean. I do think there was a slight purpose in "Echoing Footsteps," and that is to contrast the tranquiIity of a typical London home with the "headlong, mad, and dangerous footsteps" of Paris. I forgive Dickens those overly sentimental moments and see them as of lesser importance than his insights into people as individuals and in society. For example, when he writes this. "It was too much the way of Monseigneur under his reverses as a refugee, and it was much too much the way of native British orthodoxy, to talk of this terrible Revolution as if it were the one only harvest ever known under the skies that had not been sown -- as if nothing had ever been done, or omitted to be done, that had led to it -- as if observers of the wretched millions in France, and of the misused and perverted resources that should have made them prosperous, had not seen it inevitably coming, years before, and had not in plain words recorded what they saw." (Ch. 24) He doesn't even let the British off the hook! The significance of the French Revolution cannot be overstated and extended beyond his own times.
Just found a poem by Timothy Murphy titled "The Track of a Storm, Bastille Day, 1995" that goes with this section's reading. The poem is in Contemporary Catholic Poetry: An Anthology.
The Track of a Storm
Bastille Day, 1995
We grieve for the twelve trees we lost last night,
pillars of our community, old friends
and confidants dismembered in our sight,
stripped of their crowns by the unruly winds.
There were no baskets to receive their heads,
no women knitting by the guillotines,
only two sleepers rousted from their beds
by fusillades of hailstones on the screens.
Her nest shattered, her battered hatchlings drowned,
I also laughed at the poor boy’s death speech. Definitely a discordant note in a book I otherwise enjoy. I also found the child’s death in Viper’s Tangle too idealized and sentimental for my taste.
And we know that Dickens can portray the tragic death of a child effectively. I was completely emotionally engaged by the death of the unnamed child only represented by a bump and a limp bundle that the Marquis’ carriage runs down.
Does anyone say DAR-nay, instead of Dar-NAY? I always said “Dar-NAY”, but the audiobook I listened to said “DAR-nay” and I LOVED it. Especially toward the end when you get the repeated phrases of “Charles….called DAR-nay”….the music of it was perfect.
And yes! Book the third is the real story. But to go back to my Must See TV argument, every TV drama is 2/3 filler and 1/3 action. It’s like this book is the original soap opera.
Yeah as amusing as this was to listen to, I think there are ways to understand the death of the baby rather than just Dickens being a….dickens. 😬 Heidi is right that that family appears idealized, but only until the death of the baby, which yanks them right down to reality. It serves to show that they are not untouched by suffering - which Dr Manette should show as well, but he’s turning out OK, so there needs to be some suffering that is irreversible. There’s a bit of a theme, I think, of the difference between tragedy (or suffering) that is final and suffering that can be endured and overcome, and how the different characters face that suffering. And I think Lucy doesn’t cry angry tears, but she does cry. “Those were not tears of all agony…” I read it as a portrait of surrender to the Divine Will. Sure it’s sort of sentimental, but so is the rest of it. This shows us Lucy’s spirit of surrender, and trust in Providence. That becomes really important later on.
Sure, I suppose I buy much of that, but one of the great debates about Dickens’ work is whether the sentimentality often at its core is a flaw. This has been debated since it was first released. Even Mark Twain talked about it. One can even say he accomplishes what he wants to do, but that it fails as an aesthetic achievement.
Fair enough. But why, exactly, is it a flaw? How is that argument articulated?
Clearly there’s almost 200 years worth of people who love every word he drips onto the page. So what is the actual problem? Hallmark has built an entire empire on sentimentality and it’s not slowing down. Is it that “sentimentality” is a cheap and lazy appeal to pathos? That’s why I don’t like it, but I always assumed that was *my* problem, my preference. Is the argument against Dickens just that he should “do better”? That’s what the argument seems like to me, but it doesn’t quite seem fair. What does “do better” mean, other than “don’t yank at my heartstrings so obviously!”? He’s been wildly successful since day one and we’re still talking about him; he doesn’t (didn’t?) need to do anything differently.
The question reminds me of an article I read years ago when the film of Les Mis came out. I think it was by Martin Cothran? I forget. But the argument was that the film was being skewered because it was too earnest, too “un-ironic”, and as a society we are too jaded, too in love with irony, to enjoy or appreciate that. That reminds me of the way the anti-sentimentalists talk about Dickens: as if they are too smart for such a cheap shot. When I read the last words of the dying baby, I rolled my eyes and dismissed it. To me, it was unrealistic to the point of ridiculous - the underlying assumption being that I am immune to Dickens’ appeal at that point (“that won’t work on me you lazy thing”). Has anyone read that scene and just loved that line? Are there champions for the death of Little Nell?
To be honest, I'm not 100% I totally follow your argument. I might need some help. But what I would argue is that sentimentality in art is a question of excess. Today it typically is suggestive of shallowness, or lack of depth. Over-Reliance on sentimentality itself--and the emotions of the reader--to create drama. It's essentially to tell the reader you don't trust them. Of course, this is also why sentimentality has a certain degree of popularity. Because it is easy to consume.
That's perhaps a different conversation though, especially as relates to Dickens.
The fascinating thing about Dickens is that for as much as people have long loved him, he's also been disliked since he first began publishing. He had a few significant critics who supported him and several who lampooned him. Twain went back and forth between liking him and making fun of him. There are very few writers who stand in that gap to the degree that he does.
No, that’s very helpful! That’s exactly what I was wondering: why sentimentality “fails as an aesthetic achievement” - it’s an over-reliance on emotions to create drama.
So, in the end, it *is* that we are too smart for this; but it’s ok to admit that? 😂
ha! I don't think it's a matter of pride to be thoughtful about aesthetic standards. Of course, it can be a matter of pride to be unwilling to change your mind or think your conclusion is the only one. but that's the point of dialogue IMO.
But still: the people who love him…do they love the sentimentality? Is there any case to be made that the sentimentality is NOT an aesthetic failure, or is it just that people who love him accept that failure as part of the package?
There might not be any satisfying explanation to Dickens' treatment of the death the baby, but it kind of matches the shallow, cardboard cut-out of an idealized mother we have in Lucie. I wondered if he was trying to make a point by lining up that singular death against the massive amount of anonymous suffering and death that begins in the next two pages? Not saying this was successful, but there might have been some intention there? Is there something in the (laughable) sentimentalizing versus the real horror of the storming of the Bastille?
I wonder if Dickens is trying to emphasize the contrast between Lucy and Madame Defarge. Lucy is saintly in the face of suffering, bowing to a hard providence and not allowing it to disturb her serenity. Madame Defarge is twisted by bitterness and driven to brutal action because of the suffering she has faced. I don't think he necessarily pulls it off but maybe that's what he is trying to do.
Perhaps that also connects to his answer to poverty and injustice. I feel like this book is saying that revolution is not the answer. If only the rich and the poor could become the respectable middle class then all would be well.
Lucy would never run after Charles. It's not the way a respectable English lady would behave. She is a Jane not a Lizzy. 😊
Don’t worry Heidi, I was chuckling at the dead child/serene mother scene as well! So ridiculous.
I also feel like the story has culminated to a launching point now as Charles is launching across the channel (though hopefully not off a building or from a lamppost), and I like that.
I can see Charlize Theron or Robin Wright as an HBO Americanized Madame Defarge.
I think the death of the child is another tableau, a sentimental Victorian set piece that would have had a certain popular appeal to Victorians and that just does not work for modern readers-- and didn't even work for all Victorian readers. But I can't help having a niggling feeling that he is somehow setting up something that happens later in the book. Though I'm not sure what it is.
I wonder if it isn't setting into play the idea of a happy death, that death isn't the end and that a happy death is not a tragedy -- this will be a key idea later in the novel. I also wonder at the connection between the dead child and Carton. Dickens has Carton in a memorable scene later with Lucie the younger and I can't help but think one of the things he's doing is trying to show Carton as tied into the fabric of the family.
Dickens' sentimentality doesn't bother me much nor diminish my pleasure in his work mostly because I think I just accept it as of its time.
I don't have a pro-sentimentality defense to make but only want to claim the same superpower as Sean. I do think there was a slight purpose in "Echoing Footsteps," and that is to contrast the tranquiIity of a typical London home with the "headlong, mad, and dangerous footsteps" of Paris. I forgive Dickens those overly sentimental moments and see them as of lesser importance than his insights into people as individuals and in society. For example, when he writes this. "It was too much the way of Monseigneur under his reverses as a refugee, and it was much too much the way of native British orthodoxy, to talk of this terrible Revolution as if it were the one only harvest ever known under the skies that had not been sown -- as if nothing had ever been done, or omitted to be done, that had led to it -- as if observers of the wretched millions in France, and of the misused and perverted resources that should have made them prosperous, had not seen it inevitably coming, years before, and had not in plain words recorded what they saw." (Ch. 24) He doesn't even let the British off the hook! The significance of the French Revolution cannot be overstated and extended beyond his own times.
Just found a poem by Timothy Murphy titled "The Track of a Storm, Bastille Day, 1995" that goes with this section's reading. The poem is in Contemporary Catholic Poetry: An Anthology.
The Track of a Storm
Bastille Day, 1995
We grieve for the twelve trees we lost last night,
pillars of our community, old friends
and confidants dismembered in our sight,
stripped of their crowns by the unruly winds.
There were no baskets to receive their heads,
no women knitting by the guillotines,
only two sleepers rousted from their beds
by fusillades of hailstones on the screens.
Her nest shattered, her battered hatchlings drowned,
a stunned and silent junko watches me
chainsawing limbs from corpses of the downed,
clearing the understory of debris
while supple saplings which survived the blast
lay claim to light and liberty at last.
–Timothy Murphy
I also laughed at the poor boy’s death speech. Definitely a discordant note in a book I otherwise enjoy. I also found the child’s death in Viper’s Tangle too idealized and sentimental for my taste.
And we know that Dickens can portray the tragic death of a child effectively. I was completely emotionally engaged by the death of the unnamed child only represented by a bump and a limp bundle that the Marquis’ carriage runs down.
He had me flipping back and forth trying to do math. "Surely this child can't be older than two?"
Does anyone say DAR-nay, instead of Dar-NAY? I always said “Dar-NAY”, but the audiobook I listened to said “DAR-nay” and I LOVED it. Especially toward the end when you get the repeated phrases of “Charles….called DAR-nay”….the music of it was perfect.
And yes! Book the third is the real story. But to go back to my Must See TV argument, every TV drama is 2/3 filler and 1/3 action. It’s like this book is the original soap opera.
Yeah as amusing as this was to listen to, I think there are ways to understand the death of the baby rather than just Dickens being a….dickens. 😬 Heidi is right that that family appears idealized, but only until the death of the baby, which yanks them right down to reality. It serves to show that they are not untouched by suffering - which Dr Manette should show as well, but he’s turning out OK, so there needs to be some suffering that is irreversible. There’s a bit of a theme, I think, of the difference between tragedy (or suffering) that is final and suffering that can be endured and overcome, and how the different characters face that suffering. And I think Lucy doesn’t cry angry tears, but she does cry. “Those were not tears of all agony…” I read it as a portrait of surrender to the Divine Will. Sure it’s sort of sentimental, but so is the rest of it. This shows us Lucy’s spirit of surrender, and trust in Providence. That becomes really important later on.
Sure, I suppose I buy much of that, but one of the great debates about Dickens’ work is whether the sentimentality often at its core is a flaw. This has been debated since it was first released. Even Mark Twain talked about it. One can even say he accomplishes what he wants to do, but that it fails as an aesthetic achievement.
Fair enough. But why, exactly, is it a flaw? How is that argument articulated?
Clearly there’s almost 200 years worth of people who love every word he drips onto the page. So what is the actual problem? Hallmark has built an entire empire on sentimentality and it’s not slowing down. Is it that “sentimentality” is a cheap and lazy appeal to pathos? That’s why I don’t like it, but I always assumed that was *my* problem, my preference. Is the argument against Dickens just that he should “do better”? That’s what the argument seems like to me, but it doesn’t quite seem fair. What does “do better” mean, other than “don’t yank at my heartstrings so obviously!”? He’s been wildly successful since day one and we’re still talking about him; he doesn’t (didn’t?) need to do anything differently.
The question reminds me of an article I read years ago when the film of Les Mis came out. I think it was by Martin Cothran? I forget. But the argument was that the film was being skewered because it was too earnest, too “un-ironic”, and as a society we are too jaded, too in love with irony, to enjoy or appreciate that. That reminds me of the way the anti-sentimentalists talk about Dickens: as if they are too smart for such a cheap shot. When I read the last words of the dying baby, I rolled my eyes and dismissed it. To me, it was unrealistic to the point of ridiculous - the underlying assumption being that I am immune to Dickens’ appeal at that point (“that won’t work on me you lazy thing”). Has anyone read that scene and just loved that line? Are there champions for the death of Little Nell?
What is the pro-sentimentality argument?
To be honest, I'm not 100% I totally follow your argument. I might need some help. But what I would argue is that sentimentality in art is a question of excess. Today it typically is suggestive of shallowness, or lack of depth. Over-Reliance on sentimentality itself--and the emotions of the reader--to create drama. It's essentially to tell the reader you don't trust them. Of course, this is also why sentimentality has a certain degree of popularity. Because it is easy to consume.
That's perhaps a different conversation though, especially as relates to Dickens.
The fascinating thing about Dickens is that for as much as people have long loved him, he's also been disliked since he first began publishing. He had a few significant critics who supported him and several who lampooned him. Twain went back and forth between liking him and making fun of him. There are very few writers who stand in that gap to the degree that he does.
No, that’s very helpful! That’s exactly what I was wondering: why sentimentality “fails as an aesthetic achievement” - it’s an over-reliance on emotions to create drama.
So, in the end, it *is* that we are too smart for this; but it’s ok to admit that? 😂
ha! I don't think it's a matter of pride to be thoughtful about aesthetic standards. Of course, it can be a matter of pride to be unwilling to change your mind or think your conclusion is the only one. but that's the point of dialogue IMO.
Exactly
But still: the people who love him…do they love the sentimentality? Is there any case to be made that the sentimentality is NOT an aesthetic failure, or is it just that people who love him accept that failure as part of the package?
I don't know. I have been thinking about this actually. That's not something I can answer.
There might not be any satisfying explanation to Dickens' treatment of the death the baby, but it kind of matches the shallow, cardboard cut-out of an idealized mother we have in Lucie. I wondered if he was trying to make a point by lining up that singular death against the massive amount of anonymous suffering and death that begins in the next two pages? Not saying this was successful, but there might have been some intention there? Is there something in the (laughable) sentimentalizing versus the real horror of the storming of the Bastille?
I wonder if Dickens is trying to emphasize the contrast between Lucy and Madame Defarge. Lucy is saintly in the face of suffering, bowing to a hard providence and not allowing it to disturb her serenity. Madame Defarge is twisted by bitterness and driven to brutal action because of the suffering she has faced. I don't think he necessarily pulls it off but maybe that's what he is trying to do.
Perhaps that also connects to his answer to poverty and injustice. I feel like this book is saying that revolution is not the answer. If only the rich and the poor could become the respectable middle class then all would be well.
Lucy would never run after Charles. It's not the way a respectable English lady would behave. She is a Jane not a Lizzy. 😊
Don’t worry Heidi, I was chuckling at the dead child/serene mother scene as well! So ridiculous.
I also feel like the story has culminated to a launching point now as Charles is launching across the channel (though hopefully not off a building or from a lamppost), and I like that.
I can see Charlize Theron or Robin Wright as an HBO Americanized Madame Defarge.
“Hopefully not off a building or from a lamp post” 😂
🙋🏻♀️ Uh, Wisconsin has a Village of Oregon and we pronounce it fine. 🤦🏻♀️😂
😂