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A Tale of Two Cities Critical Essay #2
In the following excerpt, Manheim uses Lucy and Dr. Manette as examples of roles female and male characters play in A Tale of Two Cities.
Lucie is basically only one more in the line of Dickensian virgin-heroines whom the critic Edwin Pugh [in The Charles Dickens Originals, 1925] felicitously called "feminanities." Yet, as Professor Edgar Johnson clearly saw [in his book Charles Dickens: His Tragedy and Triumph, Vol. II, 1952], there was a subtle distinction.
Lucie is given hardly any individual traits at all, although her appearance, as Dickens describes It, is like that of Ellen, "a short, slight, pretty figure, a quantity of golden hair, a pair of blue eyes,"_ and it may be that her one unique physical characteristic was drawn from Ellen too: "a forehead with a singular capacity (remembering how young and smooth It was), of lifting and knitting itself into an...
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This section contains 2,785 words (approx. 10 pages at 300 words per page) |
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