A Tale of Two Cities is replete with
imagery and motifs; in addition, Charles Dickens uses a couple of strong
symbols:
THE BROKEN WINE
CASK
As the people scramble to lap up the wine that flows
through the streets of Saint-Antoine, squeezing rags dripping with the wine into the
mouths of their babies and dipping cups into it for themselves, the scene is symbolic of
the desperate hunger of the French during the setting of the
Revolution.
Then, after they have drunk, some of the people
with "cadaverous faces" have their faces stained with this red wine, stains that
symbolize the blood that will be shed in the forthcoming
revolution:
Those who had been greedy with the staves of the
cask, had acquired a tigerish smear about the mouth and one tall joker so
besmirched...scrawled upon a wall with his finger dipped in muddy wine
lees--BLOOD.
KNITTING
The
incessant knitting of Madame Defarge symbolizes the coldblooded vengefulness of the
revolutionaries as Madame Defarge stealthily knits in the registry of names of those
condemned to die. With a flower in her hair and "seeing nothing," Madame Defarge
appears harmless in her knitting, but she is deadly as she really sentences to death
those whose names she knits. Likewise, this knitting represents the
sang-froid and bloodlust of the other revolutionaries, simple
peasants who appear harmless, but rise up to massacre countless
aristocrats.
The knitting also suggests a relationship
between the vengeance of the peasants and fate. For, as in Greek mythology, the three
sisters of fate knit and weave, controlling human life. At the executions, the peasant
women sit and knit mechanically, just as the guillotine brings about the victims'
fateful ends.
THE
GRINDSTONE
The grindstone, on which the blades of death are
sharpened also represents the fateful end to those whom the revolutionaries have
condemned. It also represents the "mill that grinds young people
old."
THE MENDER OF ROADS
This
character with his blue cap represents the fickleness of the crowds that cheer and then
punish. The mender of roads has been encouraged to cheer the queen and the king as they
pass so that they will not realize how dissastified the people are; later, the crowd
releases Darnay only to have him rearrested.
THE STONE
MARQUIS
The face on the chateau of the Marquis d'Evremond
changes after his assassination and the stone has two dints in the nose just like those
of the live marquis. This stone image represents the cold-heartedness of the First
Estate, a corrupt social order, as they ignored the poor and hungry. No longer human,
they are but
stone.
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