with commentary by Margaret Atwood
“Margaret, what book would you like to talk about for ten hours?”
She didn’t hesitate. A Tale of Two Cities. Because, she said, we are living through a period of paradigm shift. Burn it all down. Build something new on the rubble. Margaret Atwood has spent her career imagining exactly what gets built, and it is rarely what the revolution promised. When I listened to her read Charles Dickens across those ten hours, I kept hearing, underneath the Victorian prose, the sound of a door closing.
The door closes on women. It always does.
Dickens gave his most powerful women no children so they could act — and then punished them for it anyway. This is the argument Atwood builds across her commentary on the novel, carefully, without ever quite stating it as bluntly as that. She notices that Madame Defarge has no children and that this is not accidental. “Her verbal and physical aggressiveness are only permissible because she is not a mother,” Atwood observes. “She would have had to be more empathetic.” The same is true of Miss Pross, the other woman in the novel who does something: who fights, who holds the line, who makes the escape possible. Also childless. Also freed, by that absence, to act. Lucie Manette, the mother, can only wait outside the prison window each day and hope her husband might see her. She creates a cozy domestic space in revolutionary Paris because that is the only form of action available to the woman who has children. She is the golden thread. She holds things together. She does not change anything.
Atwood is too precise a reader to call this Dickens’s failure. She calls it his ideology. He was a man of his time, and his time believed that motherhood required softness, and softness disqualified you from power. So the women who exercise power in this novel (who organize the underground network, who rally the women of Saint Antoine, who encode the names of the condemned in knitting, who stare down the Marquis when everyone else looks away) must be placed outside the category that defines women. Freed from it, they are formidable. Defarge is the female center of the book, Atwood says, the structural counterpart to Sydney Carton. She runs the wine shop, manages the money, directs her husband, maintains the register. She is, if you are reading the novel on its own terms, its most impressive intelligence.
The knitting is not a domestic detail. Atwood traces it back to the Fates, the Greek figures who spin the thread of life, weave it, and cut it. Defarge is doing all three simultaneously, in a wine shop in Saint Antoine, while the revolution builds around her. She is not participating in history. She is recording it, shaping it, deciding who lives and who dies. The register woven into the wool is more powerful than any document in the novel. When she finally casts her shadow over Lucie and the child, Mr. Lorry tells Lucie there is no substance in it. He could not be more wrong.
And then the revolution wins. And then the pattern begins.
“In the end, revolutions tend to pull people forward and then shove them right back where they were before.” — Margaret Atwood
Atwood describes the moment with characteristic precision: “Women were eventually banned from public galleries at the National Convention for being too disruptive, and the promises of equality faded.” The Night Witches, Soviet women aviators who flew undetectable plywood planes and terrified the Germans, were absent from the victory parades. Rosie the Riveter was “stuffed right back into the home,” dressed in “poofy dresses and formal gowns with wired strapless tops and high heels.” The American revolutionaries told Martha Washington she wouldn’t get the vote. Napoleon codified female powerlessness into law.
Dickens understood this too, even if he could not say it as clearly as Atwood does. Defarge does not get pushed back. She is killed. Miss Pross shoots her in a struggle that is the novel’s most honest scene: two women who were freed from motherhood to become instruments of opposing forces, destroying each other while the men escape. After the gun goes off, Miss Pross is deaf for the rest of her life. She wins and loses simultaneously. The revolution needed both of them. The settlement needed neither.
I made the connection Atwood was careful not to make across our conversations — perhaps because her memoir was appearing at the same time, perhaps for reasons that are none of my business. But it seems to me that The Handmaid’s Tale is the novel that answers the question A Tale of Two Cities leaves open. What happens after the revolution sends the women home? Atwood spent forty years imagining the answer, and it is Gilead: the theocratic republic that doesn’t merely push women back to the domestic sphere but makes the domestic sphere a prison, codifies female powerlessness as sacred law, and calls it protection.
The connection is structural, not metaphorical. In Gilead, women are enslaved precisely for what freed Defarge: their relationship to children. The handmaids are valued because they can bear them. The women who cannot are sent to the Colonies to die. Defarge was powerful because she had no children. In Gilead, having them is the cage and not having them is the death sentence. Atwood understood both ends of the same trap, across two centuries and two novels, without ever needing to say so directly.
There is also this: both novels are built around what women cannot say openly. Defarge encodes her revolution in knitting because the register cannot be spoken aloud. Offred records her story in secret, on cassette tapes, found decades later by academics who interpret and contextualize and annotate: the same gesture as the letter hidden in the Bastille wall, found by Defarge, read aloud at the trial. Both women leave a record in the only form available to them. Both records are found too late to save them. The witness speaks from concealment. That is what women’s testimony looks like in both novels, and it is what it has looked like across the entire history Atwood traces in her ten hours on Dickens: from the women of Saint Antoine knitting with their heads bent, to the Night Witches absent from the parade, to the handmaids whose names are not their own.
The knitting records the names of the condemned. Nobody records the women.