Dickens Cruelty Between Classes In A Tale Of Two Cities

A Tale of Cruelty between Classes Dickens is anything but subtle, doing things such as capitalizing the important symbols in his novels and naming some of his characters after their most prevalent trait. While this technique seems like it would soften the universal implications of his novels because they are so easily apparent, instead his unique and blunt writing style is able to carry across many meaningful themes, most easily recognizable, but others not. Dickens unique style is especially prevalent in A Tale of Two Cities, a novel that switches between covering events in London and Paris over the course of the first French revolution. When the book begins, revolution is brewing in France due to cruel oppression by the aristocracy and

At first, violent brutality of the peasants on the aristocracy is look at as revenge for years of discrimination, such as when the Marquis is killed. “. Driven home into the heart of the stone figure attached to it, was a knife. Round its hilt was a frill of paper, on which was scrawled: Drive him fast to his tomb. This, from Jacques.” (Dickens 99). This one act opens the floodgates for much more of this type of malice, with the peasant mob becoming less justified with each one. When Madame Defarge is able to get revenge on Foulon, she does so in an excessively cruel fashion, “Madame Defarge let him go—as a cat might have done to a mouse—and silently and composedly looked at him while they made ready, and while he besought her: the women passionately screeching at him all the time, and the men sternly calling out to have him killed with grass in his mouth.” (Dickens 173). At first when power shifts in French society, the reader feels like the peasant mob is obtaining justice when they commit acts of violence on those that used to be higher up than them. John Kucich says in his article, “Acceptable and Unacceptable Violence in A Tale of Two Cities”, “The purity of self-violence clearly belongs at first to the lower classes, who “held life as of no account, and were demented with a passionate readiness to sacrifice it (II,21). Thus, the concrete effects of the revolutionaries’ violence as an annihilation of their humanity—and, therefore, a violation of their human limitations—are actualized before us.” (Kucich 41) As the mob commits act after act, however, it becomes apparent that these heinous acts serve no other purpose but to fill the Peasants huge appetite for violence, further alienating the classes from each