Lucie goes to see her father shortly after they speak of her impending marriage. She goes to him in the dark while he is sleeping. This scene is very similar to the scene in which Lucie first meets her father. They are in a dark room. She advances towards him in the dark. Both passages portray her as a spectral figure moving through the dark like an angel of light. For example, in the passage where Lucie first meets her father the novel describes how the light shifts from the face of Doctor Manette to the face of Lucie (51). She becomes “like a spirit beside him” (51). The later passage in which Lucie is checking on her father in the middle of the night she places a “needless candle” to one side and continues “creep[ing]” forward leaving the “shadow[s] at a distance” (231). Lucie is the figure that creates commonality between the two scenes. She is the ethereal creature that appears at the side of the Doctor when he most needs her. She is a guiding force out of the darkness. She is the light. However, in the first scene she is the light arriving and in the latter she is the light leaving.
Lucie’s ethereal nature as a light has an impact on the mental health of others, particularly her father. The Doctor is unconscious in both situations of Lucie’s appearance. He is “unconscious of the figure [Lucie] that could have put out its hand and touched him” when she moves toward him in the room above the wine-shop (51). He moves from a state of being unconscious of her presence to being cured by it. The second scene is less psychological in his unconscious; he is physically asleep (231). However, the second scene has the Doctor moving from a consciousness of Lucie, their conversation about her upcoming marriage, to an unconscious state. The move from conscious to unconscious, unlike the move from unconscious to conscious, causes a reappearance of Doctor Manette’s illness for the nine days after she departs for the first half of her honeymoon. I believe Lucie’s ability here described in two paralleling cases concerning the mental health of her father, could also potentially be used in relation to other characters like Charles Darnay or Sydney Carton, though future research will have to be done in order to verify if these suspicions are reasonable or fanciful.
The way you describe Lucie, using terms like “spectral,” and the texts referral to her as “a spirit,” it makes me wonder about the way we describe the ghosts of their novel and their function. Doctor Manette is clearly haunted by his time in prison, and Lucie is a key factor in resurrecting him from those memories. As you mention, when Lucie leaves her father after her wedding, her father relapses. Is Lucie’s “light” then a counteraction to ghosts and haunting? Or could she be a ghost in some ways herself? The text referring to her as a “spirit” does attribute her a ghostly quality. Lucie seems to her father to serve as a ghost of the past, but in this case, a past that is far more pleasant than the more immediate past that attempts to haunt him much more deeply.
I think it was really interesting how you referred to Lucie as a “guiding force out of the darkness,” especially since a lot of our class discussion has been about how she is a flat character–however, I definitely see your point here. Even though she isn’t the most interesting or detailed character per se, I think she has a greater purpose than readers give her credit for, especially in this intimate scene with her father and in her backstory. This made me think of what we talked about in class on Tuesday–how in TOTC, there’s definitely a ghost-like presence, especially when it comes to Lucie’s character–I’d like to see if there were any other scenes in the novel that might have suggested this.
You make an interesting argument here, viewing Lucie as bringing the light to other characters, specifically her father. I particularly like your use of the quotation describing her as a spirit. I, too, wrote about Lucie in my blog post and the effects she had on other characters. I agree with your portrayal of her as a light, but I think that this provides more examples of her being used as a tool instead of an actual character of substance. Her most important role in the novel comes from her effects on others, not her character itself.