A Tale of Two Cities 347Unlike the other characters in the novel who are left
behind to enjoy the rewards of their heroic actions,
Carton must paradoxically find the meaning of his
life in his death. Not only does he sacrifice himself
for Lucie, but he finally experiences a profound
connection with another human being when he is
able to bring comfort to the final moments of the
seamstress who is sent to the guillotine before him.
The heroism of the English protagonists of the
story stands in clear contrast to the dog-eat-dog
world of the French Revolution. While both can
arguably be said to be moved by laudable motives,
such as a desire to overturn oppression and avenge
or protect their loved ones, their actions take entirely
different shapes. Where the French heroism is
expressed in a too-ready willingness to sacrifice
others, the English are heroic in that they sacrifice
only themselves. Where the French engage in sav-
age slaughter, the English are represented as being
moved by a civilized sense of chivalry. The point
is not that the English are morally superior to the
French, but that violence and oppression only lead
to more of the same. Indeed, contemporary English
readers may have read A Tale of Two Cities as a cau-
tionary tale that exposes the dangers to be found in
the violence of lawlessness and finds heroism instead
in restraint, duty, and honor.
Marie Gonzalez-Posse
viOlence in A Tale of Two Cities
A Tale of Two Cities spares no detail when it comes
to the horrors of the French Revolution and the vile
abuses leading up to them. The novel presents two
sources of violence, the heartless and reckless disdain
of the nobility and the base savagery of the rebelling
masses responding to it. While a great part of the
novel is spent detailing the violence surrounding
the storming of the Bastille and the beginnings of
the Reign of Terror, the narrative is punctuated by
reminders of the kind of violent abuses that insti-
gated this anger in the first place.
Wine functions as a symbol for the shedding of
blood throughout the novel. One of the very first
scenes we see set in France is the breaking of a cask
of wine and the peoples’ response to it. As the con-
tents of the cask spill onto the ground, people scurry
to quench their thirst with the red fluid. What starts
as a game, however, soon turns into grim omen
when a man uses the wine to write “BLOOD” on
a wall with his finger, and the narrator comments
on how other streets will soon be stained. The wine,
we discover, has stained not only the ground but
also “many hands.” Some leave the street with wine-
smeared mouths, a mark clearly symbolic of their
willingness to regress to savage, animalistic impulse.
When the executions begin, the guillotine is pre-
sented as a thirsty machine that has been used so
many times that it, as well as the ground beneath it,
has become, a disturbing red. Like a vampire, it feeds
on the inmates of the prisons who are sacrificed to
“slake her devouring thirst.”
The same tendencies toward violence in the
mob are displayed in their dance of the Carmagnole,
which Lucie witnesses one day when she goes to
stand in front of the prison to be seen by Darnay.
There she sees hundreds of people “dancing like
five thousand demons” and “keeping a ferocious
time that was like a gnashing of teeth in unison.”
In the mob, people seem to lose their individual-
ity, becoming part of a large, unstoppable, whirling
motion. “No fight could have been as terrible as this
dance,” the narrator comments, because it is a “fallen
sport”—“a something, once innocent, delivered over
to all devilry.” What is so very frightening about the
dance, it seems, is its transformative and dehuman-
izing power.
Although Dickens is clearly critical of this vio-
lence, he also allows us to understand the history
from which it springs. The novel actually begins
and ends with a description of the nobility’s abuses
of the poor. The violence of the ancien régime is
symbolically represented in the character of the
Marquis Evrémonde. Early in the novel, we witness
him heartlessly running over an innocent child with
his carriage and killing him, only to respond “with
the air of a gentleman who has accidentally broken
some common thing, and had paid for it, and could
afford to pay for it.” Toward the end of the novel,
we also learn the reason behind Madame Defarge’s
thirst for revenge as it turns out that she was the
peasant girl whose family had been grievously mis-
treated (including rape and murder) by the brothers
Evrémonde.