Dickens viewpoint on the personal peace and aristocracy of France flips midway between the his novel of A Tale of Two Cities. Beginning the plot the aristocracy had great personal peace. The nobles did whatever they pleased without a thought to the suffering commoners. One nobleman was even asked what to do with feeding the peasants and he said “Let them eat grass” (A Tale of Two Cites, 132). The affluence of the aristocracy demands more and more material items. This is evident with the greediness of the Monseigneur. Dickens riveting imagery describes their wants, “Yes. It took four men, all four ablaze with gorgeous decoration, and the Chief of them unable to exist with fewer than two gold watches in his pocket, emulative of the noble and …show more content…
Madame Defarge plots with her husband and fellow revolutionaries her plan of revenge. “Madame Defarge held darkly ominous council…the Evremonde people are to be exterminated, and the wife and child must follow the husband and father” (414,415). Many people throughout the countryside did not even know what they were still fighting and killing for, some did it for fun, some did it blindly, some did not know why they were doing it and others were so full hate that they did it out of revenge. Madame Defarge was one of the ones who killed out of sheer revenge and hate, a result of a lacking government. Additionally, Lady Guillotine was considered the secret to forcing justice and peace into a land full of terror and fear. “Far and wide lay a ruined country, yielding nothing but desolation…The horrible massacre, days and nights long…was to set a great mark of blood upon the blessed garnering time of harvest” (260,293). Resulting in quit the opposite, the massacres and the daily feeding of human lives to the mouth of the guillotine did not bring the peace and freedom the French citizens were striving for. It brought tears and tantrum, fear and untrustworthiness to almost every Frenchmen. The Tale of Two cities accurately depict the bloodiness of the Reign of
Aside from giving the guillotine a purpose, the Reign of Terror stands as a necessity in the story of French independence. It might not have been the proudest of times, but the Reign began on a strong premise: holding together a new government by purging the bad apples for the betterment of the whole cart. While the Reign of Terror developed into an overly excessive bloodshed, it was justified by the war stricken circumstances and necessity for the support of the ongoing revolution. Despite the extreme heights the Reign of Terror reached, it was necessary to maintain the fragile presence of the government and preserve the new liberty a majority of the population had been denied before. In a 1793 letter from Vendée —a major counterrevolutionary hub— local government was fending off on-going riots and rebellion while being invaded from the north by Prussia.
In the book A Tale Of Two Cities the ways that they would kill people were that they would behead them and they would hang them or they would let them rot in prison. Most of the people that were killed were innocents or they were people that were in the way of them trying to take down the city. In the book the main character, Charles Darnay was arrested and was falsely accused of treason and being an illegal alien. Madame Defarge was taking out her anger on the whole family in which she thought had killed her sister. So Madame Defarge was going after all of the Marquis no matter if they had anything to do with t...
In this passage, Dickens’ juxtaposition, personification, detail, and diction reinforce Dickens’ tone of empathy and pity for the social conditions of the people of lower class France. When a large cask of wine spills open on the streets of France there is a mad rush to collect a taste of the spoiled wine. The people’s reactions consisted of “...frolicsome embraces, drinking of healths, shaking of hands, and even joining of hands and dancing a dozen together.” This exciting and scene of much happiness is juxtaposed by the “gloom that gathered on the scene that appeared more natural than sunshine” that occurs after all the wine has run out. This juxtaposition of the momentary happiness that the peasants of St. Antoine experience provide a contrast
...l of men. The oppressed male peasants join together to form a group of Jacques, or soldiers, to overthrow the aristocracy. The Jacques use The Defarge's wine-shop as a meeting place. Throughout the story, Madame Defarge is either murdering someone or knitting. She is always "sitting in her usual place in the wine-shop, knitting away assiduously" (162). Her friends are a twisted as she. Her closest confidant is known as The Vengeance. Both Madame Defarge and the Jacques fight until the end.
...to revenge. She turned into this cold killer to kill the entire Evermonde family for what they had done to her family. She uses her power in the revolution to take revenge on the Evermonde family. Madame Defarge loses her true self and becomes someone who disregards the lives of people include hers. Dickens’s theme of how history repeats itself appears again when Madame Defarge kills innocent people similar to what the Marquis of Evermonde did.
Charles Dickens, the author of A Tale of Two Cities portrays the aristocracy as an oblivious body of self-entitled people that wholeheartedly believe in their destiny of wealth. Their understanding of the poor people’s fate as stepping stools to their success allow them to injure and even murder them without any repercussions. This constant abuse of the rich to the poor fuels the fire that is the French Revolution. The Marquis St. Evrémonde shows an extreme sense of ignorance when, after running over an innocent child, he simply, “threw out a gold coin” as a token
During a time of conflicting warfare, a person’s social position and temperament play a significant role in the ideals of society. A Tale of Two Cities manifests society’s response to the French Revolution. Times like this result in two options, either to keep moving on with life, or give in to the vengeance. Charles Dickens portrays both sides of humanity through his characterization. Madame Defarge is the most prominent character that represents the inability to resist violence during the Revolution. In Madame Defarge’s quest for revenge, her continuous knitting and dominance prompt her character development, establishing her character as the antagonist.
In society today, all people determine their lifestyle, personality and overall character by both positive and negative traits that they hold. Sydney Carton in Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities was a drunken lawyer who had an extremely low self-esteem. He possessed many negative characteristics which he used in a positive way. Carton drastically changed his life and became a new man. Sydney is not the man he first appeared to be.
With imagery revealing the poor straits and desperation of the peasant class of France, Dickens influences the reader to pity them. He writes, “The cloud settled on Saint Antoine, which a momentary gleam had driven from his sacred countenance, the darkness of it was heavy—cold, dirt, sickness, ignorance, want were the lords waiting on the saintly presence—nobles of great power all of them; but most especially the last” (Dickens 22). Through hunger, want, etc. being personified and compared to nobles through language such as “nobles” and “lords”, Dickens shows the extent of the suffering of the peasants, their deserving to be pitied, and the human nobles’ apathy towards them. The peasants of Saint Antoine suffer in the 1770s, and the town’s name is made into a play on words with “saintly presence”, with the cloud of cold, dirt, sickness, ignorance, and want looming forming the imagery of irony. Another description of the peasants’ plight is revealed in the quote saying, “Ploughed into every furrow of age and coming up afresh, was the sign Hunger. It was prevalent everywhere...Hunger was the inscription on th...
In A Tale of Two Cities, Dickens seems to love to demonstrate how rich the rich actually are. One guy even needs four servants to make his hot chocolate every morning in the book. It’s this sort of excess wealth that breeds discontent –especially when the poor are on their hands and knees in the street licking up drops of spilled wine. The French Revolution began as a critique of the aristocracy; as Dickens demonstrates. However, the "classless" formation of the new French Republic becomes yet another form of class violence. Someone’s always in power. And the powerless always suffer.
The French Revolution was a period of time when the entirety of France went against the monarchy. King Louis XVI was taken down by the people at this time. The change brought along a replacement for the monarchial society (French Revolution 2). The now formed republic run by the people is now forever an example of what can happen to those whom live in places run by kings and queens, and that those who wish to escape tyranny can always make a change. The tyranny that was present brought along the eventual execution of the two royalties (2). This is evident in Dickens’s novel, in which the story centers around the revolution. Madame Defarge exists as on...
Throughout the book, Dickens portrays his objectivity between the classes through a series of graphic descriptions. For example, the horrid events that occur when the Marquis murders the child is a time when Dickens most definitely favors the rebels. Dickens’s attitude when Jacques kills the Marquis is that justice has been supplied. There is a definite tone of approval in his voice after these actions. On the other hand, Dickens’s attitude towards the mutineers is not always one of endorsement. When the activists nearly kill Gabelle and burn the Chateau, Dickens’s attitude changes from one of approval to one of disbelief. His disposition is almost one of sorrow for all the beauty being carelessly destroyed. As the reader can see, Dickens’s opinion varies greatly in accordance to the portion of the story the person is reading.
History has not only been important in our lives today, but it has also impacted the classic literature that we read. Charles Dickens has used history as an element of success in many of his works. This has been one of the keys to achievement in his career. Even though it may seem like it, Phillip Allingham lets us know that A Tale of Two Cities is not a history of the French Revolution. This is because no actual people from the time appear in the book (Allingham). Dickens has many different reasons for using the component of history in his novel. John Forster, a historian, tells us that one of these reasons is to advance the plot and to strengthen our understanding of the novel (27). Charles Dickens understood these strategies and could use them to his advantage.
In Dickens novel, society’s idea of a gentleman is perceived as someone of great affluence
...human nature” makes for a bare-bones human existence, replete with crime, immorality, greed, and as especially demonstrated in Louisa’s case, unhappiness. Mr. Sleary’s compassion gives voice to Dickens’s hope for a more unselfish perspective on human motivation. His critique concludes that the success of government lies in realistically evaluating humanity in all of its general and idiosyncratic tendencies. As Nussbaum says in her essay, Dickens does not call for a “relativistic” approach to governance but one more in touch with the realities and complexities of being human.