Sacrifice In Charles Dickens A Tale Of Cities

A novel can display multiple reasons for portraying the objective or lesson that it withholds in its binding. Charles Dickens is an English writer who tells an amazing story of controversy and struggle during the French Revolution. Throughout the novel, A Tale of Cities, Charles Dickens displays casuistry and sacrifice, through the ambiguity of his characters, Madame Defarge and Sydney Carton, by referring back to the novels message of how change is inevitable even though the majority of people will believe the era of bliss is everlasting. Through political feuds that are displayed in the book, the continuous struggle to decipher right and wrong and what is just and unjust is evident throughout the novel and the characters. The struggle …show more content…
She is the woman that sits in the corner knitting and knitting a registry of names. The names that she knits are those who are condemned to die in the name of the republic. This includes mainly the aristocrats. There is no love for her for she seems cold and shows no amount of empathy. However, that is incorrect. Her vengeance is out of passion. She is doing what needs to be done to make the people who made her life miserable, pay the price. Casuistry is displayed with her when the reader sees her as evil, but then realizes her past is what is motivating her to take these actions. Are her action justifiable, is the true question. The constant back and forth about what is right or wrong displays the obscurity of the characters and the novel. She seems ruthless and inhumane when she continues to execute people. “Well, well, “reasoned Defarge,” but one must stop somewhere. After all, the question is where,”(Dickens, 297). This displays the malcontent anger that she is made up of, however one can be mislead by this and assume that she is an evil character. There cannot be a stolid stand on whether a character is good or evil. Despite, what the novel says about the character the reader needs to comprehend and fathom that each character has a role. They are undermining the meaning of the novel, how change is going to occur. From the beginning of the novel, where Defarge is a …show more content…
She was the girl that was taken away so she could be safe. Being alone and without carte blanche gives a person extensive amount to think. She was taken from her family no longer with them. Defarge is a very ambivalent character because her terrible and fastidious past, however in the present she is displaying to be a debauch character. This also contributes to the novel of how, change whether in a person, setting, or personality, is going to occur and when it does, it will wreak havoc or bliss. Society might believe that everything will be euphoria, and hard times are just hard times that humans have to persevere through. This is foreshadowed in the book, when the red wine is spilled and people drink it from their hands. Blood was going to be spilled and that was the doing of Defarge. She didn’t stop until the revolution occurred. It started with her vengeance for the Marquis, for they were the reason for the ill fate of her family. “But, imbued from her childhood with a brooding sense of wrong, and an inveterate hatred of a class, opportunity had developed her into a tigress. She was absolutely without pity. If she had ever had the virtue in her, it had quite gone out of her,” (Dickens, 317). Displaying all the casuistry of whether she is a just character or she is over reacting. Continuously the prevalent wait for change is shown throughout the