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Tale of 2 cities: comparison of madame defarge + the furies

 

            The book "A Tale Of Two Cities", by Charles Dickens, takes place before andduring the outbreak of the French Revolution. In the French Revolution, the citizens of France had overthrown their king and reestablished there government as a republic. Through this book we are able to see that the citizens were bound together in a brotherhood of revolutionaries. The revolutionaries were led by, mainly, one superior figure, Madame DeFarge.
             A cruel revolutionary whose hatred of the aristocracy fuels her tireless crusade, Madame Defarge spends a good deal of the novel knitting a register of everyone who must die for the revolutionary cause. Unlike her husband, she proves unrelentingly blood-thirsty, and her lust for vengeance knows no bounds. There is a similarity, as you may know and as Dickens had mentioned, between Madame Defarge and the furies of ancient roman mythology.
             The Furies of Greek and Roman religion and mythology were daughters of Mother Earth, conceived from the blood of Uranus, when Kronos castrated him. They were powerful divinities that personified conscience and punished crimes against kindred blood, especially matricide. They were usually represented as winged women with serpent hair. Their names were Megaera, meaning jealous, Tisiphone ,which means blood avenger, and Alecto, which means unceasing in pursuit. When called upon to act, they hounded their victims until they died in a "furor" of madness or torment.
             "The Vengeance, uttering terrific shrieks, and flinging her arms about her head like all the forty Furies at once, was tearing from house to house, rousing the women." (pg. 202) as Dickens explains in this quote, the women revolutinaries were figures to be feared. The most feared of the Revolutionaries was Madame Defarge.
             What actions does Madame Defarge take to allow us to assume her furie like persona? First off, there is the "registry", the quilt that she is continuously threading.


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