Just as the fates, woven throughout both Greek and roman mythology, asserted fear through their weaving, measuring, and cutting, Dickens has used Madame Defarge to spread fear among the citizens. Throughout A Tale of Two Cities Madame Defarge knits, her very presence dominating the scenes and controlling the plot of the entire novel. She presides over everyone, her aura of authority, judgment, death, and destruction maintains a stony reign over those who come near her. The knitting throughout the novel signifies a deeper meaning, and forecasts the mood of the time period. The knitting provides an excellent symbol of the ways in which killing occurred, the manner of vengeance among the people, and it shows how the peasants had a power that the aristocracy underestimated. The knitting also reflects the ancient stories of the fates throughout mythology, telling much the same stories, leaving the same trail of fear and hesitation throughout.
“Madame Defarge knitted with nimble fingers and steady eyebrows, and saw nothing.” (Book 1, Chapter 5, Page 35). As Madame Defarge knits deftly, thoughtlessly, skillfully, so the vengeance of the French Revolution proceeds. The mass executions that occur throughout the plot of the French Revolution become uniform, deft, performed over and over again. When Dickens says that Madame Defarge knitted deftly, it says that she has grown accustomed to the motions, moving the needles and yarn repeatedly in a way that she has grown accustomed to. This same concept applies to the guillotine, the object which beheaded people during the French Revolution. The knitters at the scene of the beheading during the novel counted the number of deaths by the guillotine each day as they completed row after row. The g...
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... of you than of these others.” (Book 3, Chapter 3, Page 273). Madame Defarge held the power, and maintained the fear necessary to have total control over the citizens. She holds the fate of the country between her fingers, and ascertains that she does not let it slip.
Throughout the novel Madame Defarge and her knitting have an important symbolic effect. Madame Defarge knits just as the Moirae and the Parcae weave, spinning fate and playing their own game of revenge. The knitting symbolizes the Revolution through the repetitive, common motion of something far from regular, and also symbolizes, along with Madame Defarge, the revenge that took place throughout the entire novel. Though knitting seems an extremely ordinary task, it has been filled with symbolism and death, just as France, though usually a calm ordinary city filled, one day, with the chaos of death.
The relationship formed between these two characters intensifies their ultimate intentions in support of the Revolution. With provocation from The Vengeance, Madame Defarge’s thirst for the execution of Lucie and her child and the Revolution as a whole is amplified. Madame Defarge, her cronies,and her stitches “knitted, in her own . . .symbols, [it] will always be as plain to her as the sun” (Dickens 303) play a significant role in the headway of the
On the subject of the French she says, “I am a subject of His Most Gracious Majesty King George the Third and as such, my maxim is, Confound their politics, Frustrate their knavish tricks…God save the King.” (338) Since she is such, she is the perfect foil for Madame Defarge. Madame Defarge epitomizes chaos and violence. With her unrelenting bloodthirstiness and unceasing desire for revenge she symbolizes the intensity and bloodiness of the French Revolution. “The Evrémonde people are to be exterminated, and the wife and child must follow the husband and father.” (418) Madame’s chilling certainty and willingness to kill an innocent mother and child show the hatred that makes up the revolution she personifies and the peasants that were a part of it. Although Madame Defarge and Miss Pross are foils they share a common ground. They both have an uncompromising sense of duty; Miss Pross to Lucie’s safety and happiness, and Madame to a new and better France. They are both willing to do anything for these causes, including lying down their lives. As Miss Pross says, “I don’t care an English Twopence for myself. I know that the longer I keep you here, the greater hope there is for my Ladybird.” (427) Dickens uses these similarities he suggests that even seemingly opposites can have underlying
“‘Is that his child?’ said Madame Defarge, stopping in her work for the first time, and pointing her knitting-needle at little Lucie as if it were the finger of Fate.” (Dickens 277). Is Madame Defarge just a scary old woman, about to poke little Lucie’s eyes out with her gargantuan knitting needles, or do Dickens’ words about the “finger of Fate” have more meaning than first meets the eye? Although many people who read Charles Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities come away with the impression that Madame Defarge is just a classic evil figure because all she does is look for revenge, Madame Defarge is also meant to represent the 3 Fates from Greek mythology through her knitting, and through bringing justice to France.
To support a major theme of this novel, scarecrows and birds of fine song and feather, wine and knitting, all represent the theme of man’s inhumanity toward his fellow man. The Revolution was a tragically devastating time full of senseless and meaningless violence, deception of neighbors as well as treason towards the government, and blissful ignorance of the surroundings. Many scenes and dialogue from this novel point out what contributed to make the revolution a period of intense political destruction. In A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens includes many themes pertaining to the French Revolution and the moralities and immoralities that goes with violence, betrayal, and ignorance, by using many different types of symbolism.
The blue flies, Madame Defarge’s knitting, and the sea are just three of Dickens’ many symbols that develop the theme of man’s inhumanity to his fellow man in A Tale of Two Cities. Although Revolutions are not particularly humane in themselves, the individual characters and the majority of the peasantry in this book took inhumane to its extreme. Because the revolutionaries follow their ruthless leader, Madame Defarge, they do not question the humanity or morality of the massacre of the aristocracy. In a Revolution meant to free peasants, peasants should be last on the list of those being murdered, and this injustice should be realized. In the French Revolution as well as A Tale of Two Cities, the oppressed become the oppressors and the main cause behind the revolution is lost.
When in the wine shop, Sydney Carton had overheard what the Defarges were planning. He quickly confessed to Lorry saying that Lucie’s family is in danger. Carton desperately states, “They are in great danger. They are in danger of denunciation by Madame Defarge. I know it from her own lips. I have overheard words of that woman’s, to-night, which have presented their danger to me in strong colours. I have lost no time, and since then, I have seen the spy” (Dickens 349). Madame Defarge’s knitting creates an atmosphere where the people who are put on her registry are set in danger. As Carton states in the quote, “Denunciation by Madame Defarge”, the reader knows that Madame Defarge is out to kill the people that she knit into her registry. As the novel progresses, the reader can conclude that Madame Defarge is able to communicate to others through her knitting. It also allows her to secretly plan revenge against others. Tom Lloyd explains that the novel, A Tale Of Two Cities blinds most characters by false words to try and obtain vengeance on others. He establishes that Sydney Carton, Dr. Manette, and Mr. Lorry are in need of establishing an identity, unlike Madame Defarge who tries to destroy identities. Lloyd states, “Indeed, even M Defarge clings to language and meaning in the presence of his
A very violent scene given to the reader by Dickens is when he describes the crazed revolutionists sharpening their tools on the grindstone, “The grindstone had a double handle, and, turning at it madly were two men…and their hideous countenances were all bloody and sweaty,” (Dickens 272). Dickens paints in the readers mind that the revolutionists are savages and crazed for blood, they won’t stop killing until the job is done. It is known to the readers that Madam Defarge is the most blood crazed of them all. She and her husband are conversing when Defarge is wondering when it will all stop (the reader can tell that he is starting to feel remorse for what he has started), but Madam Defarge replies with “At extermination,” (Dickens 353). Such a small quote, but it means so much to the novel, it shows that Madam Defarge will not stop what she is doing until all aristocrats have been put to death because of what had happened to her as a young child. This is the point in Dickens’ novel when the reader can tell that Dickens’ point of view on the Revolutionary has changed, it is now evident that he believes that the Revolutionists are taking what they are doing too far. It’s important to the novel as a whole because it helps to picture the unjust of how far the revolutionists go to “get back” at the
The theme of fate is shown in the symbol of knitting through Mme. Defarge. She is “always knitting” and “not watching”, but Mme. Defarge is actually knitting a hit list. Dickens describes her, “Pointing her [Mme. Defarge’s] knitting needle at Little Lucie as if it were the finger of fate” (Dickens 207). The words “finger of fate” is foreshadowing the purpose of Mme. Defarge’s knitting and how she is actually determining who will die. Because of this, she is the one is can determine a person’s fate, whether a person will die or live. At the end of the novel, when the little seamstress dies, it is read, “She goes next before him [Carton]-is gone; the knitting-women count Twenty-Two” (292). These “knitting-women” count the number of deaths, including the little seamstress’; they are the ones who symbolically determine the fate of a person’s life. These “knitting-women” are like the Fates in Greek mythology. The Fates spin the thread of life for each person and cut ...
Dickens wrote A Tale of Two Cities during his time of fascination with the French Revolution. The French Revolution was a time of inequity. There are many occasions in the novel where the problems of the Revolution are displayed. The human race is shown at its worst. Throughout the novel, man’s inhumanity towards fellow man, whether from a different social class or their own neighborhood, is shown through the metaphors of wine symbolizing blood, water symbolizing life, and blue flies symbolizing townspeople buzzing around death.
At first, violent brutality of the peasants on the aristocracy is look at as revenge for years of discrimination, such as when the Marquis is killed. “. Driven home into the heart of the stone figure attached to it, was a knife. Round its hilt was a frill of paper, on which was scrawled: Drive him fast to his tomb. This, from Jacques.” (Dickens 99). This one act opens the floodgates for much more of this type of malice, with the peasant mob becoming less justified with each one. When Madame Defarge is able to get revenge on Foulon, she does so in an excessively cruel fashion, “Madame Defarge let him go—as a cat might have done to a mouse—and silently and composedly looked at him while they made ready, and while he besought her: the women passionately screeching at him all the time, and the men sternly calling out to have him killed with grass in his mouth.” (Dickens 173). At first when power shifts in French society, the reader feels like the peasant mob is obtaining justice when they commit acts of violence on those that used to be higher up than them. John Kucich says in his article, “Acceptable and Unacceptable Violence in A Tale of Two Cities”, “The purity of self-violence clearly belongs at first to the lower classes, who “held life as of no account, and were demented with a passionate readiness to sacrifice it (II,21). Thus, the concrete effects of the revolutionaries’ violence as an annihilation of their humanity—and, therefore, a violation of their human limitations—are actualized before us.” (Kucich 41) As the mob commits act after act, however, it becomes apparent that these heinous acts serve no other purpose but to fill the Peasants huge appetite for violence, further alienating the classes from each
In the first book of the novel, the goal of Madame Defarge includes exterminating the noble race. She is constantly knitting in the wine shop she owns. The knitting shows a passive way to express her hatred towards others. “Her knitting was before her, but she had laid it down to pick her teeth with a toothpick” (Dickens 55). The quote shows how even in her first showing in the book, she is knitting. Her knitting and constant plotting brings frequent fear to her husband, Ernest Defarge, and all other wine shop patrons. Considering even her own husband is afraid for his life, Defarge keeps death in secrecy and shows extremely negative qualities. Defarge knits a register for the intended killing of the revolution in secrecy to show her hatred towards certain people. She has negative characteristics in regard to the loss of her family and her plot to kill all of her enemies. Madame Defarge lasts as the leader attributed to all women fighting in the revolution and
While Madame Ratignolle, Madamoiselle Reisz and Edna are very different characters, all of them are unable to reach their potentials. Madame Ratignolle is too busy being the perfect Louisiana woman that she no identity of her own; her only purpose in life is to care for her husband and children. Madamoiselle Reisz is so defiant and stubborn that she has isolated herself from society and anyone she could share her art with. Edna has the opportunity to rise above society’s expectations of females, but she is too weak to fight this battle and ultimately gives up. While these three characters depict different ideas of what it truly means to be a woman and what women’s role in society should be, none of them can reach their full individual potential.
...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.
Throughout the novel, Dickens employs imagery to make the readers pity the peasants, have compassion for the innocent nobles being punished, and even better understand the antagonist and her motives. His use of personified hunger and description of the poor’s straits made the reader pity them for the situation caused by the overlord nobles. However, Dickens then uses the same literary device to alight sympathy for the nobles, albeit the innocent ones! Then, he uses imagery to make the reader better understand and perhaps even feel empathy for Madame Defarge, the book’s murderous villainess. Through skillful but swaying use of imagery, Dickens truly affects the readers’ sympathies.
In his “A Tale Two Cities”, Charles Dickens uses the characters of Lucie Manette and Madame Defarge as two strong women that contrast against the rather manly group of characters. These women are both driven to do what they believe is right. Although Lucie and Madame are strong willed and independent, they both use these strengths differently. Lucie is a woman who is driven by love and affection. Whereas Madame Defarge is driven by hate and rebellion. Both these women, although similar, have such significant differences.