Madame Defarge Symbolism In Tale Of Two Cities

Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities tells a story of love, loss, and revenge during France’s Reign of Terror and, subsequently, the French Revolution. The novel follows a wide variety of characters from members of the privileged aristocracy to blood-thirsty peasants who call for the downfall of the First and Second Estates. One of these characters is Madame Defarge, the revolutionary wife of a wine shop owner, who carries obsession with vengeance for her family who was slain by the aristocracy many years ago. Though this longing for revenge and bloodshed is shown through some violent actions in the novel (as in the case of her actions during the Storming of the Bastille), this obsession is primarily expressed through the motif of knitting and the creation of her shawl of names. It also ties in strongly to the story of the Fates in Greek mythology and sets her up as an important and symbolic parallel to them throughout the course of the novel. Throughout the novel, we find Madame Defarge knitting in some of the

Eventually the reader discovers that the shawl is actually a register of names of people, mainly aristocrats, who are believed to be against the revolution. Madame Defarge is the only one who can read the shawl’s secret code, and once she knits a name into it, the idea of removing a name from it is inconceivable: “It would be easier [for a man] to erase himself from existence than to erase one letter of his name or crimes from the knitted register of Madame Defarge” (166). The idea of having a long list of anti-revolutionaries only further supports the notion that Madame Defarge is obsessed with bloodshed of those who fall under the same class as the Evremondes, and the way she creates this list through her yarn-work only makes the connection between the motif of knitting and her lust for revenge