Revenge: A Dish Best Served Cold

“Revenge is a dish best served cold” is a popular phrase, used in many cultures and in entertainment. It is commonly remembered from the movie Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan as a Klingon proverb, but how many actually know what it means, or where it comes from? It was actually first noted from a novel in 1782, called Les Liaisons Dangereuses by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos; the phrase went “La vengeance est un plat qui se mange froid”. It is said to mean that emotional detachment and careful planning is the best for taking revenge – and the proverb is closely followed by the character Madam Defarge from A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens. When she is first introduced, she is seen watching and waiting –waiting to take “revenge” on those who had wronged her. However, what exactly is revenge, and how is it different than, say, justice? Is it different from justice, or is it simply the same, but with a different connotation? Although it is up to one’s opinion to decide the difference between revenge and justice, the character Madam Defarge surely proves that there is a line between the two – and how crossing it is one of the most inhumane things one can do.

“There was a character about Madam Defarge, from which one might have predicted that she did not often make mistakes against herself in any of the reckonings over which she presided” (40). One of the first descriptions of Madam Defarge even mentions that there is more to her than meets the eye. She is seen in the wine shop, watching for who comes in and making signals to her husband, Monsieur Defarge, about who came in. Immediately, she is seen as intelligent and sure of what she is doing; she was crafty about her signals and she appeared to know exactly what she was doing and...

... middle of paper ...

...ocent man was to die for the sins of his forefathers; she saw, not him, but them. It was nothing to her, that his wife was to be made a widow and his daughter an orphan; that was insufficient punishment, because they were her natural enemies and her prey, and as such had no right to live” (354). The idea of the murder of an innocent obviously had no effect on her whatsoever.

Would things have been different if Madam Defarge actually had a sense of the wrong she was committing as she sought her revenge? Would she have not tried to do what she did? Would it have been justified then, if she had not gone to extreme lengths and tried to commit coldblooded murder? Would the fight between Miss Pross not end in her demise if she had only realized how wrong she was, or realized how she was only letting her hate cloud her judgment? Perhaps revenge is a dish best served cold.