preview

Madame Defarge Isolation

Good Essays

In A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens, isolation impacts Madame Defarge and Sydney Carton by altering their perception of life, influencing Madame to become obsessive with her vengeful goal of eliminating the aristocracy and damaging Carton by forcing him to contain his depressive emotions. Madame Defarge is first introduced as a stern woman with a rather ominous habit of knitting, with no indication of her bloodthirsty habits. However, it is later noted that Madame Defarge is actually knitting the names of the victims of the Revolution, and we find out that she wants to eliminate the aristocracy because the Marquis and his brother raped her sister and stabbed and killed her brother-in-law. She eloquently describes her destroyed childhood to the Vengeance and her husband at the tavern.“Defarge, that sister of the mortally wounded boy upon the ground was my sister, that husband was my sister’s husband, that unborn child was their child, that father was my father, those dead are my dead, and that summons to answer for those things descends to me (346)”. The key idea of this quote is how it illustrates Madame Defarge’s acceptance for her family’s misfortunes, and how she takes on the responsibility of finding the perpetrators. When Madame Defarge says “and that summons to answer for those things descends to me”, we can infer that she felt that it was her responsibility and duty to bring justice, mostly because it was her family who had been killed, hence “those dead are

Get Access