#sydney carton

[femmehysteria]

I'm doing a series of "Best Character Named X" polls where all the characters have the same first name but are from completely different media, feel free to send in name/charcacter suggestions, I'm posting one poll a day, check my pinned post for active polls

#best character named x #poll #poll game #sydney adamu #sidney prescott #sid the sloth #sydney carton #cid ffxvi #sid toy story #the bear #scream #ice age #a tale of two cities #final fantasy #toy story

[oscarwetnwilde]

James Wilby as Sydney Carton in “A Tale of Two Cities” (1989)  

#James Wilby #A Tale Of Two Cities #Sydney Carton #1989 #Charles Dickens

[artist-issues]

How many times do we have to say:

Create characters with strength of virtue, not strength of skills.

I just finished A Tale of Two Cities with the character Lucie Manette, who "does" nothing but love the people around her and extend compassion toward everyone within her sphere of influence. She makes no "choices" that contemporary audiences would award the stupid badge of "giving her agency" to. She doesn't make a speech that saves Charles Darnay's life. She doesn't lead the victims of the French Revolution into a counter-revolt. She doesn't fight off the soldiers that come to take her husband, or beat up Madame Defarge when she threatens her child, or even come up with the escape plan to flee Paris.

She makes none of those kinds of choices. (You know who does? Madame Defarge. But the compare-contrast between those two can wait till another day.)

But she makes these kinds of choices:

She'll give her honest testimony in a trial for a potential traitor to the crown, and demonstrate her compassion and grief for a near-stranger, wearing that vulnerability on her sleeve in front of a huge court of people clamoring for blood.

She'll be compassionate toward Sydney Carton, even though he's rude, careless, and brings a bad attitude into her happy home.

She'll spend the energy of her life making that home happy.

She'll stand for two hours in any weather on the bloody streets of the French Revolution so her husband might have a chance of glimpsing her and getting some comfort from the prison window.

She'll trust the older men in her life when they ask her to.

She'll allow an old woman to care for her and go everywhere she goes, and treat her like a child, as long as it makes the old woman in question happy.

And what, WHAT is the consequence of these kinds of decisions, choices, that some ignorant people call "passive?"

That old woman is allowed to love Lucie Manette so much that she defeats the villainess in the climax of the story, holding Madame Defarge back from getting revenge with sheer strength that comes directly from that love.

Her father is allowed to draw strength from the fact that Lucie believes she can depend on him--because she chooses to let her father take the lead and do the work of saving her husband, Dr. Manette is fully "recalled to life;" he doesn't have to identify as a traumatized, mentally unstable victim anymore, because Lucie is treating him like he can be the hero.

Her husband does see her in the street, and does draw strength from that--just that--instead of losing his mind the way her father, starved for a glimpse of his loved ones, did during his own imprisonment.

Lucie's home is so full of the love and kindness that she fills it with that not only does her father return to remembering who he is after his long imprisonment--but Mr. Lorry, a bachelor with no family, can feel at home with a full life, there. Miss Pross, whose family abandoned and bankrupt her, has a home with a full life, there. Charles Darnay, whose life of riches and pleasure as a Marquis was empty, has a home with a full life, there. In Lucie's home, because she spends her life making it the kind of home others can find rest in.

Sydney Carton, a man whose whole life has been characterized by a LACK of "care" for himself or anyone else, suddenly cares about Lucie. When he thought it was impossible to. And he doesn't care about her because she's pretty. Her beauty was just a source of bitterness for him--one more pleasure he could've had but can't. Until he "saw her with her father," and saw her strength of virtue, of pity, of compassion, of self-sacrificial love--then he felt that she "kindled me, a heap of ashes, into fire." He started caring about life again, where it was associated with her, because she brought to life every good thing. Just by being a woman of good virtue. And we know what that inspiration led him to.

Without Lucie's strength of virtue, and the decisions that naturally came from that, none of the "active" choices other characters made would have happened. Sydney would not have been redeemed. Darnay would not have been saved. Her father never would've been recalled to life. Miss Pross and Mr. Lorry would've had no light or love in their lives. Even Jerry would've had no occasion to learn from his mistakes and resolve to stop abusing his family.

A character like Dickens' Golden Thread, who does what a woman should do, inspires the choices other characters make. That makes her more powerful, in her own way, than the heroes and any decisions they make. Because she's the cause. She's the inspiration. She's the representation of everything good, right, precious, worth fighting for.

Lucie Manette's not the only character like this. Cinderella. The original Disney Jasmine. The original Disney Ariel. Lady Galadriel. Jane Eyre. Amy March.

"Behind every great man is a great woman," indeed! Absolutely! Bravo!

Hang on! Hang on to those kinds of characters. Those a real "strong female" characters. The muses, the inspirations, the reminders of The Greater Good. The people who make fighting the dragons worth it at all. Who cares about fighting the dragon? That's not so great, without her.

Don't forget those kinds of characters! Reading Dickens just makes me desperate for our generation to keep up the reminder: make characters that the next ten generations can learn from: strength of virtue is much more important than silly little strength of skill.

#Dickens #Charles dickens #writing #storytelling #behind every great man is a great woman #strong female characters #strong woman #Lucie Manette #a tale of two cities #classics #writing advice #feminism #feminism is poison #Christianity #Christian fiction #tropes #Sydney carton

[sydney-carton-of-sour-milk]

these are my friends

see how they glisten

(porcelain figurines of Sydney Carton from 1940s Japan)

#see this one shine how he smiles in the light etc. #Sydney Carton #A Tale of Two Cities #AToTC #dickens #classic literature #memorabilia #vintage #antiques #doing these png edits is very fun i must say #kind of time-consuming but a much more fun way to post about these vintage items #also such a great way of showcasing all the variations!! which is a good chunk of the intrigue for me #and by the way #we are actually now almost completely through my memorabilia archives... #gonna try to find a few more at some point to pad the way through most of the rest of 2023 #so that in 2024 i can start posting that new genre of post that i was talking about👁️👄👁️

[blebbloom]

getting executed in an hour and a friend has dropped in to visit me in prison! for some reason, he really wants us to swap outfits before i go to the guillotine, haha. just normal guy things, i guess ^^

#a tale of two cities #atotc #charles darnay #sydney carton

[chaoticpoeticlife]

i’m just a girl thinking about sydney carton on a daily basis

#dark academia #dark academic aesthetic #dark romanticism #charles dickens #dickensian #tale of two cities #sydney carton #will herondale #tessa gray

[alongwaytostar]

Mr. Carton and little Lucie

WE ARE ALL STILL PERFECTLY FINE ABOUT THIS BOOK FROM 1859 RIGHT. YEAH.

I’ll go sob

#a tale of two cities #sydney carton #my art

[secretmellowblog]

You know how Nick/Gatsby and Holmes/Watson and Enjolras/Grantaire are super popular gay classic lit ships? I’m genuinely surprised there’s not a slash-shipping community around Sydney Carton and Charles Darnay from a Tale of Two Cities…like. I get the reason Darnay/Carton isn’t popular is because no one cares about A Tale of Two Cities but their relationship is so bizarrely homoerotic for literally no reason! It’s like Built to be some Dark Academia tumblr ship! I think Carton/Darnay should be in the tumblr gay classic lit canon, repping Dickens and the way Dickens’ misogynistic inability to write convincing heterosexual relationships results in his characters seeming extremely gay.

I could write an entire essay on why A Tale of Two Cities makes more sense if you ignore Dickens’ intent and read Carton as gay (with quotes supporting my point) but like. Carton insists he’s in love with Darnay’s wife Lucie but spends much more of his page-time talking to/flirting with Darnay (to the point where he’s never had an on page conversation with Lucie until he “confesses his love” to her in a scene where he also immediately rejects himself for her, and insists that their relationship would be Impossible for Reasons and that his heart isn’t Capable of feeling things the way it should, as if he’s chosen to convince himself he’s in love with her because she’s unattainable and he will never have to be in a relationship with her.) Darnay and Carton have all these tense charged snarky interactions that feel like fanfic. Darnay’s thing with Lucie is pretty bland but there’s this huge emphasis on the fact that he and Carton are “counterparts.” Whenever Dickens tries to write Carton as being sad that Lucie loves another man it generally comes across as Carton being jealous of Lucie, because he’s almost never had a full conversation with Lucie and spends most of his time instead having these very sad clingy desperate pathetic conversations with the men who love her. Carton has a weird homoerotic thing going on with his jock law partner Stryver, who he sacrifices everything for and spends all his time with and lets invade his personal space/walk all over him for reasons he refuses to explain (all while Stryver repeatedly mocks Carton for being incapable of falling in love with women). Carton ultimately sacrifices his life for Darnay by forcibly taking off Darnay’s clothes and disguising himself as him….like?

One of their first interactions is Carton heroically saving Darnay’s life, then drunkenly calling himself Darnay’s “counterpart” and asking him on a date.

Like.

Hm.

This feels like the banter you’d find in an Enjolras/Grantaire fanfic:

Fellas is it gay to

But yeah! The main thing people remember about A Tale of Two Cities are the cool peasant women revolutionaries, who Dickens is trying to portray as villains but who are actually the best characters in the book. And if I’m going to be mean to my high school self (who was obsessed with ATOTC for some reason) I’d say that the central melodrama between Carton/Darnay/Lucie is a weakness of the novel because Carton’s arc has nothing to do with the political French Revolution stuff, so his sacrifice feels thematically disconnected from all the book’s attempts at political commentary. HOWEVER. I think it works better if it’s gay.Also the Vengeance and Madame Defarge are gay, but people aren’t ready for that conversation!

So yee!! people on tumblr love ships that are like “hot goody-two-shoes classic lit boy in a suit x hot snarky classic lit sadboi in a suit”, but so few ppl remember Carton and Darnay, who were repping that all the way back in the 1790s 😔😔😔😔😔

#posts made for a max audience of 2 people #ALSO Sydney Carton is who people want Grantaire to be. he’s fanon Grantaire #but that’s another post #A Tale of two cities #Sydney carton #Charles Darnay #carton x Darnay #I was talking on discord about this the other day but. YEE #anyway carton was my first poor little meow meow #he did nothing wrong #if high school me was on tumblr I would’ve written so many posts about him being my poor blorbo #he’s just a very sad wet pathetic creature

[shittygaypornmagazine]

classic literature memes when

#a tale of two cities #sydney carton

[oscarwetnwilde]

An appreciation of James Wilby's beauty in A Tale of Two Cities.

#James Wilby #The first one is my favorite #Sydney Carton #Charles Dickens #It was the best of times it was the worst of times #A Tale Of Two Cities (1989) #Period film #Period Drama

[artist-issues]

#🥲 #one of my all time favorite characters suddenly sprang into my awareness here recently #in case you couldn’t tell #Sydney carton #it is a far far better thing that I do than I have ever done. #a tale of two cities #quote #book quote #Charles dickens #Lucie Manette

[sydney-carton-of-sour-milk]

I saw 2012 Les Mis again at a local movie theater last night.

#(so this is who I am for a while) #Sydney Carton #A Tale of Two Cities #AToTC #Les Mis #Les Misérables #classic literature #crossover #lyricstuck #is that my lyrics tag I can’t remember but it is Now #Waffle Art #digital #iPad #I’m assuming there’s a good deal of Les Mis crossover among the people who follow me so I’m assuming this works without more context😌☺️ #seriously this is gonna be but one of many #I LOVE Les Mis. I hadn’t listened to it let alone seen the movie in YEARS. I have been reawakened #Les Mis is one of my few beloved pieces of media that came before A Tale of Two Cities #and I mean it came RIGHT before. like I think the same year. So #my god…it’s probably been ten years now that Les Mis has been…ahem…‘In My Life’☺️

[sage-green-kitchen]

Sydney Carton is one of the most underrated fictional men

#sydney carton #a tale of two cities #books #literature #light academia #chaotic academia #dark academia #books and reading

[gothlit-sexyman-contest]

#henry clerval #sydney carton #frankenstein #a tale of two cities #goth lit #gothlit sexyman contest #round 1

[bethanydelleman]

“I wish you to know that you have been the last dream of my soul.”

-Sydney Carton, A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens

I'm not sure what I'm supposed to do with this, but Sydney Carton's story is so depressing. I guess he gets to have a kid named after him, but dying in the place of the husband of your unrequited love? Bleak.

#question response #a tale of two cities #charles dickens #sydney carton #quotes #he got Second Male Lead syndrome #It was fatal

[comma-after-dearest]

Broke: Darnay and Carton speak English to each other

Woke: Darnay and Carton speak to each other in their own languages (aka they have bilingual conversations)

Bespoke: Darnay and Carton speak to each other in their own brand of Franglish that only they can understand

#a tale of two cities #atotc #sydney carton #charles darnay