The French Revolution as a Tragedy in British Literature: a Talk over the Century
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.17072/2073-6681-2023-1-113-128Keywords:
the French Revolution; historical novel; tragic character; English literature; Charles Dickens; Elizabeth Gaskell; Hilary Mantel.Abstract
The article examines the artistic interpretation of the French Revolution of 1789–1794 in the British literature of the 19th – 20th centuries on the basis of the works by Charles Dickens (A Tale of Two Cities, 1859), Elizabeth Gaskell (My Lady Ludlow, 1858), and Hilary Mantel (A Place of Greater Safety, 1992). As a result of the analysis of each of the three works, the study reveals a certain constant in the literary and artistic interpretation of the event that determined the course for the development of the political and social history of Western Europe in the following centuries. The article also explores a significant emphasis on the moral component in the literary depiction of the revolution and its participants. The similarity between the three authors, but especially Dickens and Mantel, in understanding the causes and socio-political inevitability of the revolutionary explosion in France at the end of the 18th century is highlighted. The reasons for the Revolution and its imminence are shown on the basis of different social material due to different historiographic positions and artistic principles that are unique to each author.In the analyzed literary works, the Revolution is mainly represented as a personal, national and universal tragedy, and the central characters are portrayed as steadily turning into tragic ones. In the novel by Gaskell, this evaluation is given in a conventionally personal story-memoir of the main character, whose image is created on the basis of artistic techniques of realistic typification; in the novel of Dickens – in a large-scale realistic narrative with elements of romantic and sentimental-symbolist approaches; in Mantel’s work – in the best British traditions of the historical novel, but with an original narration, where the function of the omniscient author-historian is largely entrusted to the document, and the attention of the narrator-psychologist is focused on the inner world of the three leaders of the Revolution – Desmoulins, Danton, and Robespierre: large-scale revolutionary events are presented through the range of personal relationships of the characters, as a test for their friendship and personal qualities.References
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