Staging Dickens’s doubles: a tale of two actresses

Dickens’s fascination with the idea of the double has been an enduring focus of scholarly attention. In a 1959 article in The Dickensian, Lauriat Lane, Jr., contended that “[t]he archetypal figure of the double appeals to a fundamental human belief . . . that within every man are two beings, the saint and the sinner, eternally contending for control of the outer man” (1959, 47). Within every woman, there are also two beings, presumably, but Dickens’s female doubles “are usually constructed according to the imperatives of the male gaze,” reinforcing “stereotypes as for social acceptability” (Paganoni 2008, 73–74). Angelic figures like Esther Summerson and Lucie Manette are fixtures in the house and home – Esther guards the keys of the Jarndyce home, while Lucie sits “in the still house in the tranquilly resounding corner” (Dickens 2003, 218). Dickens contrasts these socially acceptable characters with women associated with the street; Lady Dedlock haunts the streets of London searching for her dead lover’s grave, and Madame Defarge takes to the streets during the storming of the Bastille. While Lucie winds the symbolic “golden thread” that binds her family together, Madame Defarge takes the domestic occupation of knitting and turns it into a symbol of violence. The resolution of the plots of Bleak House and A Tale of Two Cities depends on the expulsion of bad doubles: “the ascendancy of uncorrupted womanhood can only follow the expulsion of debased womanhood” (Nord 1995, 85). Dickens portrays women who can disguise and transform themselves as deviant or dangerous. For Dickens, female doubling is a threat to be managed. Dickens’s use of doubling reveals the formative influence of the theater, and of melodrama in particular. Like many scholars of the Victorian novel, Maria Cristina Paganoni argues that “the most vital expressions of current drama in a period where the theatrical technique declined are to be found in other genres,” such as the novel (2008, 57). Dickens certainly used the theater as a source of inspiration, but theatrical adaptations of Dickens’s novels, in turn, brought his stories to new audiences and infused his characters with new life. Scholarly considerations of doubling in Dickens have neglected the key role of theatrical adaptations in shaping audience reception of Dickens’s female characters. Actresses cast in double roles reinterpreted, and in some cases redeemed, Dickens’s dark female doubles. This essay draws attention to two actresses who played double roles in stage adaptations of Dickens’s novels: Madame Céline Céleste portrayed Madame Defarge and her sister Colette DuBois in Tom Taylor’s 1860 adaptation of A Tale of