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NOTES ON ISSUE 15: ALLUSIONS
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Six tumbrils roll along the
streets. Change these back again to what they were, thou powerful
enchanter, Time, and they shall be seen to be the carriages of absolute
monarchs, the equipages of feudal nobles, the toilettes of flaring
Jezebels, the churches that are not my father’s house but dens of
thieves, the huts of millions of starving peasants!
Jezebel was the notorious wife of Ahab, king of Israel (of 1 Kings
16:31 and 19:1, 2 Kings 9:30-37, etc.). Thus, “a Jezebel” is,
after
the original, “a wicked, impudent, or abandoned woman (cf. Revelations
2:20) or … a woman who paints her face” (Oxford English Dictionary).
The reference
to “churches that are not my father’s house but dens of thieves” echoes
Christ’s words in Mark 11:17: “And he taught, saying unto them, Is it
not written, My house shall be called of all nations the house of
prayer? [B]ut ye have made it a den of thieves.” Dickens represents the
abuses detailed here – abuses of feudal privileges by the
nobility and clergy – as the impetus behind the revolutionary tumbrils.
The nobility and the clergy were, of course, two of the “Estates”
which, prior to the Revolution, oppressed the third (the “Third Estate”
composed of the common people).
“If thou be changed into this shape by the will of
God,” say the seers to the enchanted, in the wise Arabian stories,
“then remain so!”
The Arabian Nights are full of stories of magical
transformations. In the “Second Calender’s Tale,” for instance, a man
who has been turned into an ape is returned to his original shape by a
Princess: “‘By virtue of the Truth, and by the Most Great name of
Allah, I charge thee return to thy former shape,’” she says, “And
behold, I shook and became a man as before” (Burton 136). The story
puts considerable emphasis on the will of God (Allah), since the
Princess’ good deed ends with her death by fire:
Then she called upon Heaven for
help and ceased not to implore relief from the fire; when lo! a black
spark shot up from her robed feet to her thighs; then it flew to her
bosom and thence to her face. When it reached her face she wept and
said, “I testify that there is no god but the God and that Mohammed is
the Apostle of God!” And we looked at her and saw naught but a heap of
ashes by the side of the heap that had been the Ifrit [whom the
Princess burned up to reverse the spell on the ape]. We mourned for her
and I wished I had been in her place, so had I not seen her lovely face
who had worked me such weal become ashes; but there is no gainsaying
the will of Allah. (Burton 136-7)
If she had ever had the virtue
in her, it had quite
gone out of her.
In Luke 6:19, a “whole multitude sought to touch him [Christ]: for
there went virtue out of him, and healed them all”; and in Luke 8:46,
“Jesus said, Somebody hath touched me: for I perceive that virtue is
gone out of me.” In Madame Defarge’s case, the virtue of pity and the
ability to heal (even her own wounds) is permanently disabled, if
indeed it had ever had a chance to develop under the injustices of the ancien
régime.
“You might, from your appearance, be the wife of
Lucifer,” said Miss Pross, in her breathing.
Lucifer is the archangel who rebelled against God and fell from Heaven,
generally identified with Satan or the Devil (OED). He appears
in Isaiah 14:12 and is the anti-hero of Milton’s Paradise Lost,
but does not – in either of these versions – have a wife. Madame
Defarge, in Miss Pross’ view, would find the connection congenial.
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