Tale Of Two Cities Essay

“Crush humanity out of shape once more, under similar hammers, and it will twist itself into the same tortured forms. Sow the same seed of rapacious license and oppression over again, and it will surely yield the same fruit according to its kind” (Dickens 3.15.1).That is to say, human suffering, as long as inequality and violence exist, will continue to be a contemporary issue, not a historical one. Dickens encompasses this idea most efficiently in his work A Tale of Two Cities. Accordingly, from a critical perspective, Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities, therefore, becomes a social critique. Modern society has found Dickens’ claims to be true. Inequality has long served the elite to exclude and dehumanize the inferior. Large populations are oppressed in this manner, specifically women. Patriarchy, a social construction and unjust social system that is oppressive towards the feminine and all that is considered subordinate, can be credited as the root cause of the latter. It is historically accurate to claim the aforementioned. Patriarchal ideologies dominate modern society and have empirically destroyed life; Auschwitz, Dresden, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Vietnam, Iran, Iraq, and Afghanistan serve as explicit examples. However, does Dickens contribute to that same oppression he attempts to indict? From a Feminist perspective one might find the latter to be true.