Examples Of Duality Of Man In A Tale Of Two Cities

The Duality of Man

With their weapons and their suffering state, Charles Dickens, in the novel A Tale of Two Cities, shows the two sides of a revenge-driven and poor peasant life. Charles Dickens did not always have a good life, but he knew what was right and wrong. His family went through a number of troubles related to debt, but his struggle never led him to violence. In the beginning of the novel, Charles Dickens showed off the peasants as victims of circumstance, but as the plot rolled out, their villainy was shown and Dickens began to show them as the rats who had decided to bite back once they were pushed too far in a corner.

In both fictional literature and the real world, humans are told to believe that good will always triumph over

evil, as if to quell our fears of a horrendous life. Though it does give us hope, the endings that are received are often not completely skewed on one “good” end of the moral spectrum. Nothing can be perfectly good, and nothing can be purely evil, as there is no definition of objectively good or bad. As people, we need to find out for themselves what they believe in and how we look at the world. Dickens shows that though the guise of Madame Defarge’s sick sense of “justice.” Though she may believe that what she is doing with her pistol and her knives is something that will advance the commoner Frenchmen and quell the rich, the reality is that what she is doing can be considered as genocide. The twisted definition that the peasants have given justice shows that not everyone believes in what they think is the absolute good.
In the first line of the book, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times” (Dickens 1) a great parallel was drawn between the peasants and the noblemen.

The line can be interpreted as many things, but the most striking meanings are the two very different lives that the two classes of people live in. The meanings lead into each other during the book. For the peasants, it was a period of great struggle and sacrifice, but for the nobles, it was a breezy era. The line later means that it was the best of times for the peasants, who were finally striking back against those who had squashed them like ants who were only trying to live life without too much pain. Their revenge meant that the nobles would be slaughtered in a way that would send fear into the hearts of even the purest of imperial Frenchmen. The changing of the meaning in the book is to show that Dickens felt bad for the bumpkin struggle, but did not agree with the punishment of death that the wealthy and their families were struck down with. The first instance of fully inhumane abuse the peasants were subjected to was the death of a young child. Dickens writes in “Monseigneur in Town”, “He threw out a gold coin for the valet to pick up, and all the heads craned forward that all the eyes might look down at it as it fell. The tall man called out again with a most unearthly cry, ‘Dead!’” (Dickens X) The death of the child at the hands of the Marquis in the chapter “Monseigneur in Town” darkly parallels the

death of Sydney Carton. Sydney, who took the place of Charles Darnay, an innocent man, was killed simply for his blood relatives. Both the child and Sydney Carton (who was pretending to be Charles to save his life) were innocent but death was swiftly given to the both of them by the hands of the people who were misled to believe that life had it coming for them. This shows the mountain that Dickens’s pity for the peasants goes over. Though the peasants are shown to be sad and incapable in the beginning, the later section of the book shows how uncaring they can be. Dickens’s show of both sides of the coin shows that his opinions of the poor man's actions were beginning to become as sour as his opinions of the bad side of nobility.
Dickens also wrote only a few nobles as evil, but he also wrote many lower-class citizens as rabid.

While the only true evil nobles are the Marquis line and the older Evremondes, poor folk like Madame Defarge, The Vengeance, the Jaques, and the women who rioted down the streets are littered everywhere throughout the novel. Their actions, like ripping people apart, putting people underneath the blade of the guillotine, and stuffing people with grass, are more feral and uncaring than the type of evil that most nobles live in. Along with this, the scene where the wine is spewed onto the ground foreshadows that the humanity of the peasants goes out the window at the sight of something rare that they might be able to get. The fact that a man writes “blood” with the wine pounds this in further. Many nobles who live in excess do it without even realizing they do. Monseigneur lives a posh lifestyle, but it is all he knows. Charles Darnay, a noble who is highlighted in the book, treats his peers kindly and fairly. Even though he is an Evremonde, he shows that a noble does not have to be like their blue blood would suggest. The fact that more peasants were written to be out of their minds in the middle and latter thirds of the book shows that Dickens’s opinion was really slanted to the peasants being the real terrors from the

beginning.
Charles Dickens showed his initial pity towards the peasants, but gradually showed their barbaric side. Though they lived cruel lives, they were shown to be just as cruel as the nobles in the end. The deaths of many undeserving people were due to the hands of the enraged unfortunates of France. The suffering of the poor and the rich shows that Dickens had a moral in mind at the time he was writing the novel. Would you rather rise up in a way that would keep your standards in check, or would you lose humanity and become the villain?