House of Cards Season Five ended on a cliffhanger, which we probably all saw coming. At the end there, I was barely hanging on. The show's dramatic arc has approached near-incestuous levels--unless you watch with a notepad and access to a wiki, you're lost in ten minutes. What was the deal with Raymond Trask again and why is he back? How did the press get back on that murder story after it was cold for so long? What was on those files that the NSA guy sent that staffer and why can't we see them ourselves? And since when do senior staffers have booty calls after cutting each other's throats two episodes before?
But that's no big deal. The big picture is clear. By the time the credits are rolling, we've seen U.S. President Frank Underwood (Kevin Spacey) circled by a Congressional investigation led by Congressman Romero (James Martinez) and a looming expose in the Washington press to be written by veteran reporter Tom Hammerschmidt (Boris McGiver). There's turmoil on his staff, with LeeAnn Harvey (Neve Campbell) apparently dead on Underwood's orders after surrendering what leverage she had on his cyberattacks on the American people; he and his wife Claire (Robin Wright) are at odds and keeping secrets from each other; Russia is funding terrorism in Syria; and it's only a matter of time before the Secretary of State comes out of hospitalization to give her testimony about fraudulent terrorist attacks and rigged elections.
In the midst of all this, Chief of Staff Doug Stamper (Michael Kelly) has been asked to lay his head on the chopping block for the Underwoods, and Stamper has accepted. Frank and Claire have approached him for taking responsibility for the death of reporter Zoey Barnes (Kate Mara), who was pushed in front of a subway by Frank in Season Two and whom Hammerschmidt has taken a renewed interest in, coming within inches of pinning her death on the president. Stamper agrees to take the fall, possibly as a way to atone for his own murder of prostitute/love interest Rachel Posner (Rachel Brosnahan) in Season Three, a murder which haunts him still by any reasonable interpretation.
Given all of this, it's telling that Stamper has spent so much of his time with Charles Dickens's novel A Tale of Two Cities throughout the series. The novel is a sweeping melodrama taking place around the time of the French revolution. In it, aristocrat Charles Darnay flees his native country to take up a more honorable life in England and falls in love with Lucie Manette, daughter of political prisoner Doctor Manette, recently freed from the Bastille. Lucie and her father get wrapped up in the unspooling revolution in France and are assisted by several do-gooder lawyers in England, notably Jarvis Larry, who expedited Manette's release from France, and Sydney Carton, the alcoholic lawyer with a heart of gold.
Early in the House of Cards series, Stamper plays an audio recording of the novel while driving in his car. Right before Rachel brains him and leaves him for dead in Season Two, he has her pull up the novel's famous opening lines on her phone, telling her "My mom used to read it to me." And just before leaving his apartment to face the music for Frank and Claire, he listens to Sydney Carton's narration at the moment of his execution, in which he has a vision of the lives of those he has saved continuing on because of his own sacrifice:
"I see a beautiful city and a brilliant people rising from this abyss, and, in their struggles to be truly free, in their triumphs and defeats, through long long to come, I see the evil of this time and of the previous time of which this is the natural birth, gradually making expiation for itself and wearing out."This, incidentally, is the same passage Jim Gordon reads at Bruce Wayne's funeral in The Dark Knight Rises, only when applied to a post-Bane Gotham City, it makes a bit more sense. If Stamper thinks his going to prison is going to resurrect a nobler Washington than the corrupt city he's been making his way in lo these many years, he's stunningly naive. And since Stamper is anything but that, one wonders what the passage truly says about Stamper, about his relationship with the Underwoods, and about the series as a whole.
House of Cards is Dickensian in many ways, as has been pointed out by several critics. Its plot twists and turns are labyrinthine and often dependent on characters so grotesquely caricatured, they could have been sketched by Phiz, Dickens's illustrator, without too much of a stretch of imagination. The series blends legal and political intrigue with familial melodrama and psychological study, much like, say, Bleak House or Little Dorrit. That makes A Tale of Two Cities an interesting choice for Stamper to attach himself to. It's one of only two historical novels Dickens wrote; it's probably his most blunt moral polemic, besides maybe Hard Times; and its Christian themes constantly smack the reader in the face, page after page. Why would Stamper be so drawn to it?
For starters, let's keep in mind that Stamper is one of the more (perhaps the most) satisfyingly deep characters in the show's cast. He's an alcoholic, coldblooded and ruthless, which in this ensemble is about as remarkable as someone on Jersey Shore jumping into bed with someone else; but unlike Frank and Claire, Stamper visibly wrestles with his own demons and seems horrified at his own evil at times, making him a more multi-dimensional and believable character than the First Couple. Unlike Frank, who's always wheedling the audience with his fourth wall-breaking political rhetoric, Stamper is a cipher, his expression a constant poker face, his actions often contradicting his words and other actions. One minute he's breaking a phone so he can't contact Rachel, the object of his obsession; the next minute he's back to spying on and stalking her. He is a study of addiction.
Yet he also has an unwavering sense of duty to the Underwoods--he seemingly has no personal life and no interests or pursuits outside of work, which mainly consists of helping the Underwoods achieve as much power as they possibly can. When they ask him to take a murder rap for them, he's surprised, but not that surprised. Could it be that he sees himself as a Sydney Carton figure?
Carton, let us remember, is also a drinker, though perhaps less functional than Stamper. When we first meet him in the novel, he's hung over and bilious at the Old Bailey, where Charles Darnay, French expatriate and related to the country's ruthless nobility, is standing trial for conspiracy. It's Carton who tells the defense team to play up Darnay's resemblance to himself, thus calling into doubt the prosecution's identitfication of him as a spy. It's Carton who, after a dinner with Darnay where he drunkenly provokes him and reveals his own jealousy over Lucie Manette's apparent romantic attachment to Darnay, goes back to the office to soak his head and do all the paperwork his legal partner apparently can't be bothered with. Like Stamper, Carton also has no life apart from work, except he doesn't seem to enjoy it at all. And like Stamper, Carton has an unattainable love interest, though Dickens's female prototypes tend to the virginal and waif-like, miles away from the hardened girl of the streets we see in Rachel Posner.
Later in the novel, Carton softens towards Darnay once he sees how much he and Lucie love each other, and through the myriad of plot twists and intercontinental political intrigue that draws Darnay back to postrevolutionary France to answer for his family's crimes, Carton comes to the rescue, taking Darnay's place at the guillotine and sacrificing his life so Darnay can escape. If there's a parallel here, it's that Carton and Stamper are both putting their lives up for something they see as greater than themselves. Of course, Carton makes his sacrifice out of love; Stamper is seemingly doing this out of loyalty, which is perhaps second cousin to what Carton feels, but a far cry from the altruism and denouement we see in the novel's resolution. (Stamper, it should be pointed out, at least gets laid by LeeAnn in Season Five, and also has his way with Rachel early in Season One, presumably before his obsession calcifies).
As for Rachel (who remains a strong presence in the series, even though she's presumably been dead for over a year), it's not hard to make a case for her being an inverse Lucie character. In the novel, Lucie Manette, like many of Dickens's female protagonists, is a bundle of contradictions: innocent yet aggrieved; emotional yet resilient; alluring yet pristine. Rachel, by contrast, is working to escape the seedy underbelly of Washington corruption she used to make her living in when Stamper hunts her down. She's cleaning her drug habit up, discovering her own true sexuality, and making an honest living in a small town before Stamper, in an inverted-courtly-love role, finds her and kills her, supposedly so as to tie up any loose ends and put to death his own humanity. It's Rachel that lives on posthumously in the House of Cards world, rather than any offspring she never had a chance to produce, only she lives on in Stamper's memory, as an instrument of torture rather than comfort. Neat little twist, that.
Should House of Cards extend to Season Six (and there's no reason to believe it won't, even as the plot continues to creak and gasp along), Stamper's character arc may continue along these lines. Carton, in A Tale of Two Cities' final pages, is given a hypothetical narration in which, if he could see the future, witnesses the fruits of his sacrifice blossoming into a happy family and his own name living on through Lucie and Charles's children. At this point in the show, Stamper is out, but he's not gone, and if he's going to leave any kind of legacy, we can only assume it will be quite an alternative one to Carton's saccharine-soaked testimonial delivers.
On the evening before taking the plunge to accept guilt for a murder he didn't commit, Stamper, sitting on the couch in his home, listens to Carton's words to Lucie in the middle of the novel. At this point, Carton has all but declared his love to Luce while reassuring her that he does not expect, and would not accept, her returning his feelings. He sees himself as beyond redemption, except in so far as he's able to help her:
"For you, and for any dear to you, I would do anything. If my career were of that better kind that there was any opportunity or capacity of sacrifice in it, I would embrace any sacrifice for you and for those dear to you. Try to hold me in your mind, at some quiet times, as ardent and sincere in this one thing. The time will come, the time will not be long in coming, when new ties will be formed about you—ties that will bind you yet more tenderly and strongly to the home you so adorn—the dearest ties that will ever grace and gladden you."
Once those words end, the show switches back to the halls of power in Washington, with the newly minted President Claire Underwood mulling over a Syrian military strike. But the novel's next words are the interesting ones. It's the passage where Dickens all but screams at us the eventual fate of his Byronic hero, his modern day Christ figure just waiting for a cross to be nailed up onto:
"O Miss Manette, when the little picture of a happy father’s face looks up in yours, when you see your own bright beauty springing up anew at your feet, think now and then that there is a man who would give his life, to keep a life you love beside you!”..."
In the novel, this is Dickens foreshadowing Carton's sacrifice for Lucie--Charles will escape the Reign of Terror and live happily ever after with Lucie, the woman Sydney loves but is no good for. In House of Cards, it's a peculiar line for Stamper to be dwelling on at this point in his career. Rachel is gone, so the only "life you love" that applies here is either Frank or Claire, right? Or is it a patriotic love? Or love of the power the Underwoods have sold their souls for? Or is this just a perverse recasting of the novel, designed to show us how depraved Stamper really is by comparing noble self-sacrifice and true social reformation to the sociopathy he and his bosses have been wallowing in for five seasons now?
I prefer the latter interpretation, though it's not without flaws. But if, in the next season, Stamper is locked up in a federal penitentiary with a beard down to his ankles only to discover he was an Underwood all along, we'll have even more literary indulgences to wallow in. All to the good.
