> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.rebindclassics.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # The Women of A Tale of Two Cities: Lucie, Pross, and Defarge - URL: https://www.rebindclassics.com/women-of-a-tale-of-two-cities/ - Published: 2026-07-28T22:09:25.000Z - Updated: 2026-10-02T18:28:47.000Z - Description: Atwood on Dickens's three women: only the childless can fight, and the villain Dickens loved most — Madame Defarge — is the novel's real heroine. - Author: Andrew Wessels - Tags: Margaret Atwood on Charles Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities, #context Charles Dickens gave *A Tale of Two Cities* three significant female characters. Lucie Manette: golden-haired, empathetic, the Victorian ideal made flesh. Miss Pross: plain, fierce, single, fiercely devoted to the family she serves. Madame Defarge: stout, watchful, [knitting a death register](https://www.rebindclassics.com/knitting-and-the-cage/) in a wine-shop in Saint Antoine. None of them are accidents. [Margaret Atwood’s Rebind commentary](https://www.rebindclassics.com/how-a-tale-of-two-cities-works/) on the novel is, among other things, a sustained account of exactly how deliberately Dickens designed each woman, and what the design reveals about the ideology he was both selling and quietly subverting. ## **Lucie Manette: The Angel in the House** In 1854, the poet Coventry Patmore published “The Angel in the House,” [the definitive statement of Victorian femininity](https://www.rebindclassics.com/the-angel-in-the-house/), which is to say pure, self-abnegating, the moral center of the household, incapable of independent action. Three years later, Dickens was writing out the contours of Lucie Manette: eighteen years old, golden-haired, fainting on cue. Atwood’s argument is that Lucie is not simply a type but rather a memory of a specific person: Dickens’s dead sister-in-law Mary Hogarth, who died at seventeen in his arms in 1837 and whose ring he wore for the rest of his life. “She was the unobtainable ideal, who then died,” Atwood says in her Rebind commentary. “So she remained a vision of perfection: unobtainable and also dead.” By the time he was writing the novel, Dickens was also falling for eighteen-year-old actress Ellen Ternan, and had just performed in a play called *The Frozen Deep*, in which a man sacrifices himself so the woman he loves can be happy with someone else. The triangle was on his mind. His life had embodied the archetype. The ideology behind Lucie goes back further than Patmore. Atwood traces the maternal ideal to Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s 1762 *Emile*, which argued that aristocratic wet-nursing was a civilizational failure and that mothers should breastfeed their own children. Rousseau invented maternal breastfeeding as moral ideology. The fashionable women of Monseigneur’s court, who have farmed their children out to wet nurses and gone to parties, are what Dickens is contrasting with Lucie. “Not one fashionable court woman is a real mother,” Atwood reads. “The leprosy of unreality. That’s what this is.” Lucie’s credential, in Victorian terms, is that she has not one but two children: a living daughter and an angelic dead one. The dead child matters enormously. “There were a lot of angelic dead children in Victorian life,” Atwood observes. For a Victorian reader, a mother who has suffered the death of a child has passed the ultimate test of maternal devotion. But Atwood refuses the reading of Lucie as merely passive. In the novel’s final third, Lucie has come to Paris during the Terror, stood daily in a woodcutter’s courtyard in case her husband Charles Darnay can see her from his cell, and held a domestic space together under revolutionary surveillance. “She’s not a weak person,” Atwood says. “She’s actually, in her own way, been pretty strong throughout this ordeal.” The Angel in the House was not a decoration. Florence Nightingale used exactly the role of the ministering angel (impeccable morality, upper-class) to make military bureaucrats bend to her will. ## **Miss Pross: The Woman Who Can Fight** Miss Pross, Lucie’s plain, fierce, devoted companion, exists, in Atwood’s reading, for one structural purpose: she is the only character in the novel who can physically confront Madame Defarge. And she can do this for one reason: she has no children. “Lucie Manette is the prototypical young Victorian ideal woman in that she’s very empathetic, very kind, very nurturing, very fainty, very clingy,” Atwood says. “And she wouldn’t have lasted one second against Madame Defarge. You need a Miss Pross to go up against Madame Defarge.” The Angel in the House cannot be a protagonist. She holds the center together but cannot throw a punch. Pross can. And the reason is the same reason that Defarge can: neither of them are mothers. [The fight between Pross and Defarge](https://www.rebindclassics.com/a-hand-at-cards/) in Chapter Fourteen of Book Three is engineered precisely. Two women alone in a Paris room. Neither speaks the other’s language. A pistol. Defarge makes for the door; Pross seizes her; they struggle. The gun goes off by accident. Defarge dies; Pross goes permanently deaf. “The gun has to go off by accident,” Atwood says. “Miss Pross cannot be a murderer. She cannot be an intentional murderer. Bang. Oh, what have I done?” Unlike Madame Defarge, who would have known exactly what she had done. ## **Madame Defarge: The Anti-Heroine** Madame Defarge is the novel’s most complex creation and its most revealing. She is the character who develops, as opposed to Lucie, who stays static from first page to last; Defarge is transformed across the novel’s three books. And she is, Atwood argues, the character Dickens actually loved. She is childless by design: if she had children, Dickens could not have made her who she is. “If Madame Defarge were a mother, Dickens would not allow her to be this other strong sort of person who cuts off somebody’s head,” Atwood says, “because she would have too much empathy as a mother.” Her childlessness is what gives her the register, the pistol, the freedom of movement, the crackling energy that is the novel’s real female power. Her doom is sealed by one decision: she extends the register to include Lucie’s child. “Cutting off the head of a child? No, can’t do that,” Atwood says. [In the actual Revolution](https://www.rebindclassics.com/tale-of-two-cities-historical-context/), public feeling turned against the Terror when entire families (including young children) were executed. Dickens knew this. Defarge’s willingness to contemplate a child’s execution is the signal that the novel cannot save her. And yet Dickens cannot stop admiring her. In Book Three, the prose describing her walk through the streets of Paris (pistol inside her dress, dagger in her belt, moving with the free gait of a woman who went barefoot in her girlhood) is the most alive writing in the novel. “This is Dickens’s moment of highest admiration for her,” Atwood says. “He’s built this woman. He’s built her from the stout, watchful figure behind the counter to this — this force with a pistol in her dress, walking with the free gait of her girlhood.” The villain is the heroine. That is [the secret of *A Tale of Two Cities*](https://www.rebindclassics.com/what-a-tale-of-two-cities-about/).