Tale Of Two Cities Rhetorical Analysis

In France, the years between 1789 and 1794 are a time of thoughtless inhumanity and brutality toward fellow man. These inhumane acts are carried through by the Revolutionaries and the nobility of France in these years and the years leading up to the French Revolution. One of the foremost illustrations of the inhumanity felt and shown during this time is A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens. Dickens uses metaphors as symbols throughout this book to exemplify his theme of thoughtlessness toward people by other people. Dickens develops these metaphors throughout the novel and manipulates them to fit different circumstances. He uses everyday objects and ideas and makes them personifications of the Revolution and their unsympathetic mindsets

and agendas. The symbols of the scarecrows and the birds of fine song and feather, the sea, and the wine represent the theme of inhumanity in Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities.
The scarecrows and the birds of fine song and feather represent the relationship between the peasants and the nobles and the inhumanity of one towards the other.

The scarecrows are the emancipated and starved peasants who are hungry for revolution. The birds of fine feather little know that “the time was to come, when the gaunt scarecrows of that region should have watched the lamplighter, in their idleness and hunger, so long, as to conceive the idea of improving on his method, and hauling up men by those ropes and pulleys…”(Dickens 23). The birds’ necks will be wrung by the Revolution and they will be strung up on the lampposts in the coming years of the Revolution. The nobles take no warning of the scarecrows’ unrest, “and every Wind that blew over France shook the rags of the scarecrows in vain, for the birds, fine of song and feather, took no warning” (23). The nobles’ disregard for the peasants is a huge reason for the French Revolution, but an even bigger reason is the total savagery toward them. The nobles, sitting lavishly in their castles, are watching the peasants starve to death. For example, Dickens writes “what the few village scarecrows who, in their quest for herbs to eat and fragments of dead stick to burn, had borne in upon their starved fancy that the expression of the faces was altered”(135). The peasants are literally starving on the doorsteps of the nobles, but the nobles turn them away simply because of the difference in class levels. As inhumane as

the nobles are to the peasants, the peasants are just as inhumane in their assassination of the nobles during the Revolution.
The sea represents the wild nature and inhumanity of the revolution to those who they deemed guilty of crimes they may or may not have committed. The sea is a mass of peasants, none of them thinking for themselves. They are bloodthirsty and savage, especially when the death of a noble is involved. In the first trial of Charles Darnay “all the human breath in the place, rolled at him, like a sea, or a wind, or a fire” (44) because the punishment for his crimes is quartering, a barbarous punishment. The goal of the Revolution is to drown the nobles for the sins that the Revolutionaries perceive that they had committed. The French Revolution is at first “echoes from a distance” but they grow louder with time; “they began to have an awful sound, as of a great storm in France, with a dreadful sea rising”(164). The sea is a mighty force that threatened to swallow any goodness and compassion left in the heart of the French. The prisoners of the Revolution are little boats on the mighty ocean. On the day that Sydney Carton is murdered by the Revolution, “fifty-two were to roll that afternoon on the life-tide of the city to the boundless everlasting sea” (269). The Revolution carries the bodies of the innocent out to sea along with the bodies of those who committed the crimes charged against them. The Revolutionaries are so focused on having past evils paid for, they forget to make sure the right people were paying.
The wine represents the blood spilled in the revolution and the inhumanity of this spilling of blood.

This metaphor is introduced with a man scrawling “BLOOD” on a wall in the midst of frenzy in which peasants were scooping up wine that has spilled into the street outside the Defarge’s wine shop when a cask broke. Dickens explains, “The time was to come, when that wine was to be spilled on the street-stones and when the stain of it would be red upon many there” (22). This scene parallels two later scenes in which there is much bloodshed spilled via La Guillotine and the Revolution. The insanity that the Revolutionaries go through in the spilling of blood is the same insanity that the starved peasants go through when blood is spilling instead of wine. Everyone is a victim to the barbarism of the Revolution, no matter what they do or did not do. The killing of innocents is not a rare or unusual thing. Dickens states, “Every day, through the street, the tumbrils now jolter heavily, filled with Condemned…. all red wine for La Guillotine, all daily brought into light from the dark cellars of the loathsome prisons…”(213). The prisoners are little more than blood to the members of the Revolution. The same wine that is spilled in front of Defarge’s wine shop spills over and over from innocent and guilty people alike. There is a startling amount of this savage wine spilled each day by the Revolution. Dickens declares, “Six tumbrils carry the day’s wine to La Guillotine” (288). The

tumbrils carry prisoners of the Revolution to the guillotine, like the wine cask carries the wine before it spills. The tumbrils spoken of here are only the grapes for the wine of one day. When the peasants get their first taste of the spilled wine, they only want more. The same goes for the blood spilled by the revolution; once a little has been spilled, people will always be thirsty for more.
The theme of inhumanity in Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities is best represented by the symbols of the scarecrows and the birds of fine song and feather, the sea, and the wine. The scarecrows are the starving peasants and the birds of fine song and feather are the lucky nobles. These two are ruthless to one another from the beginning, with their conflicting interests. The sea and its mighty waves crash up onto the shores of the nobles and knock down their high horses. The sea is a wild force, and cannot be contained by human force. The wine is the blood of the Revolution and the insanity of the people who spilled it. Both the wine and the blood it represents give the drinker a sense of drunkenness. The inhumanity in A Tale of Two Cities can only be seen by those who know the future. In the time that the acts of inhumanity take place they seem like deserved acts, when in reality, they are malicious, heartless acts of savagery.