Staging an Encounter: Citizenship and Resistance

Abstract

Maxim Gorky’s ‘Mother’ has been hailed as a timely intervention by a writer in exile that succeeded in rallying the flagging hopes of a citizenry that was reeling under the failure of the first Russian Revolution. The novel offers a different perspective on the ways in which women resisted attempts at repressing revolutionary voices across classes. This paper attempts to look at the differences in the depictions of the Russian and French Revolutions in Gorky’s Mother and Dickens’ ‘A Tale of Two Cities’ respectively. Comparisons will also be drawn between the two novels as ones that vary in their representation of women as participants in a revolution. The paper also proposes to scrutinize the strikingly unusual manner in which the French Revolution itself has been presented by Dickens with a very deep-rooted patriarchal agenda that aims at disempowering women’s agency through characters such as Madame Defarge, La Vengeance, Miss Pross and Lucie Manette. The paper will seek to validate the position that Dickens’ representation of the French Revolution unlike Gorky’s depiction of the Russian Revolution is guilty of a stark gender bias that is evidenced in his “extreme portrayal and rejection of Madame Defarge and his exaggerated depiction of Lucie as a desired feminine form” that also demonstrates patriarchal anxiety about powerful women and a fear of revolution itself (Robson: 329).