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A Tale of Two Cities

by Charles Dickens

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Madame Defarge's Vengeance Against Aristocrats in A Tale of Two Cities

Summary:

In A Tale of Two Cities, Madame Defarge's vengefulness towards the aristocrats is rooted in personal trauma and political ideology. Her family suffered greatly due to the Evremonde brothers, leading to the deaths of her sister, father, and brother. This personal vendetta fuels her revolutionary zeal, seeking not only to destroy Charles Darnay, a descendant of the Evremondes, but to obliterate the entire aristocratic class. Her relentless pursuit of vengeance ultimately leads to her downfall.

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In A Tale of Two Cities, why is Madame Defarge so vengeful towards the aristocrats?

Madame Defarge is a radical supporter of the French Revolution and is depicted as a villain for the majority of Charles DickensA Tale of Two Cities. Her vendetta against the Evremondes seems unfounded until the reader discovers her tragic backstory. Despite this backstory, it’s difficult to empathize with Madame Defarge because she relentlessly goes after innocent people.

Madame Defarge intensely despises the aristocracy because she blames it for the deaths in her family. Defarge’s sister was raped by the Marquis de Evremonde in her youth, a crime that resulted in both her father and brother’s deaths because of their respective grief and quest for revenge.

For Madame Defarge, it isn’t enough to have punished her sister’s rapist; she wants to destroy his entire bloodline. This is best exemplified in the following quote:

It was nothing to her, that an innocent man was to die for the sins...

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of his forefathers; she saw, not him, but them. It was nothing to her, that his wife was to be made a widow and his daughter an orphan; that was insufficient punishment, because they were her natural enemies and her prey, and as such had no right to live.

This shows the depths of Madame Defarge’s hatred, and although she might have a reason to hold a grudge, her nefarious plans transcend what is rational. Madame Defarge blames the aristocracy for her own pain and suffering, and she will not stop until she wipes them out of existence. Of course, this hatred is her own kind of flaw since it also causes Miss Pross to kill her.

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Why did Madame Defarge kill Charles Darnay in A Tale of Two Cities?

Madame Defarge does not actually kill Charles Darnay, who is replaced on the guillotine by Sydney Carton. But she hates Darnay because he is a member of the aristocratic St. Evrémonde family. Though Darnay has fled to England to escape his haughty aristocratic past, Defarge, an angry, bloodthirsty sans-culottes woman, becomes obsessed with his destruction.

It emerges that her hatred for Darnay is not born out of revolutionary zeal, but out of a terrible history between her family and the St. Evrémondes. The actions of some of Darnay's uncles directly contributed to the deaths of several Madame Defarge's family, including her sister and her father. So her hatred is not simply of aristocrats but of the bloodline of the St. Evrémondes themselves, and Darnay, as their living representative, becomes the target of her vengeance. She schemes to have him arrested and brought to trial, and she dies in the end attempting to murder Darnay's wife, Lucie, and their daughter. It is, then, out of revenge for past wrongs to her family by Darnay's estranged family that Madame Defarge schemes to have him executed. But the Darnay family escapes, as Carton selflessly goes to the guillotine in the end.

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