A Study On Storyarchetypes Of A Tale Of Two Cities

Charles Dickens is a famous British realistic writer in the nineteenth century.A Tale of Two Cities is a masterpiece in the late period of his creative life.As class contradictions in British capitalist society increasingly intensified at that time,Dickens wrote the novel with the use of Thomas Carlyle’s historical book,The French Revolution.And its aim is to warn British rulers to deal with domestic class conflicts correctly and not to allow the historical tragedy of France to repeat itself in Britain.In this paper,we will explore Dickens’ use of classical literary archetypes and its historical value and modern significance from the structural archetype,scene archetype,character archetype and plot story archetype in A Tale of Two Cities with the archetypal criticism of Northrop Frye,a Canadian scholar.The introduction presents the research purpose,literature review and the framework of the paper.The main part of the thesis can be divided into five chapters.In chapter one,we will introduce the origin and development of archetype criticism and Frye’s interpretation of the structure,scene,character and plot story archetype.In chapter two,we will analyze the use of the structural and scene archetype.The representatives of aristocrats,Charles Darney accords with Frye’s “U-shaped” structure.In other words,human development is a sacred comedy structure which follows the shape of exile--disaster and slavery--repentance.In addition,there are many revolutionary mass activities in the novel,such as dally with Foullon,wine-robbing game,sharpen broadswords,carmagnole and so on.Through making an archetypal comparison of the features of ancient ritual scenes and revolutionary activities,we can notice Dickens’ flexible use of classical ritual archetypes.In chapter three,we will focus on the archetype analysis of Dr.Manette,Mr.Cruncher and Mr.Carton.It can be seen that Dr.Manette’s life experience and personality are very similar to Job’s,they are both kind and honest.However,they both suffer innocently and protest painfully.At last,they both come back to their initial state of happiness.Mr.Cruncher shares a similar faith-change process with Saul and serves as a sort of medium for rescuing others from difficulties.Mr.Carton has a similar character and life experience to Jesus.Even thoughCarton is a libertine in the novel,he has a kind heart.It is just that his kindness is always misunderstood by other people.At the end of the novel,Carton completes his spiritual resurrection while helping others.In chapter four,we will emphasize on the analysis of the cross story,deluge story and wine-blood story archetype.For the cross story,we will start with the cross historical changes of meaning and then analyze Dickens’ concrete use of the cross punishment and redemption meaning in the contruction of the novel.As for the deluge story,we will capture the violent and uncontrollable feature of the deluge,and make an archetype comparison of the surging revolutionary wave to the deluge in Genesis.For the wine-blood story,we will compare and analyze some scattered plots in the novel,such as sharpen broadswords,wine game and guillotine killings with the wine-blood archetype in Revelation.For the rest part of this chapter,we will make an archetypal interpretation of Barmecide,dens of thieves,Babel story and some sentences which Dickens directly quoted from classical literary works.In chapter five,we will explore the significance of using archetype criticism to analyze A Tale of Two Cities.This chapter can be divided into three parts: In the first part,we will discuss the historical significance of using the theory in the novel.In the second part,we will probe into the inheritance significance of these literary archetypes.In the third part,we will discuss the modern value of these archetypes.The last part is the conclusion of the study.In this part,we will make a conclusive narration of this novel with the combination of current social events,so as to discuss the realistic meaning of the novel.In this thesis,Dickens makes a flexible displacement of classical literature archetypes to create this historical novel,which not only clearly expresses his own writing purpose,but also enriches the cultural connotation of this novel.Here we need to point out that this paper only analyzes this novel from the perspective of literature.We do not discuss other meanings of these archetypes.