How does dickens represent the French Revolution in A Tale Of Two Cities?

How does dickens represent the French Revolution in A Tale Of Two Cities?

                                                                                                                                Answer By Student Help on Demand.

·        Despite recognizing its inevitability and the aristocracy’s responsibility in precipitating(causing) it, Dickens does not justify the revolution, far less sympathize with it.

·        On the contrary, Dickens conceptualizes the events culminating in the revolution almost entirely in Carlylean (In term Of author Thomas Carlyle who was a Scottish essayist and historian)terms.

·        In A Tale of Two Cities, as in Carlyle's work the revolution is above all a reaction to aristocratic oppression; the terrible crop that grows out of the seed that the aristocracy have sown, and as such incorporates the worst features of what it seeks to overthrow.

·        As Dickens puts it in the last chapter of the novel: Crush humanity out of shape once more, under similar hammers and it will twist itself into the same tortured forms. Sow the same seed of rapacious licence and oppression once again, and it will surely yield the same fruit according to its kind.

·        In A Tale of Two Cities Dickens uses a whole range of techniques to paint the revolution in the most lurid of colours, the blood-wine imagery is introduced somewhat ambiguously. When the impoverished inhabitants of St. Antoine rush to lap up the red wine spilt on the streets, we respond above all to their poverty and when a "tall joker", dips his finger in.the red wine and scrawls the word "Blood" on a nearby wall we assume that a justifiable connection is being made between an oppressed people and a bloody revolution.

·        On the other hand, however, the new connotation that wine acquires already implicates the people in the act of blood drinking, and when Dickens speaks of "the tigerish(representing tiger) smear about the mouth" of one of the revelers it becomes impossible to separate the notion of the revolutionary masses from the idea of cannibalism.

·        As the novel progresses, the blood imagery is systematically delinked from its more positive connotations, such as liberation, sacrifice or the idea that revolution is a justifiable response to oppression, and associated more and more with predatoriness.

·        In Dickens's direct descriptions of the events in France, blood becomes the staple diet of La Guillotine !

·        This conception of the revolution as nothing more than a protracted orgy of bloodletting(murder and chaos), provides Dickens with the justification of projecting the revolution not as a sequence of real events but as a nightmare. In the scene in which the men and women come to the grindstone to sharpen their weapon.

·        In A Tale of Two Cities, as in so much of the conservative writing on the French Revolution, the events of the 1790s are associated not just wit? blood and gore but also with the complete breakdown of order, both civic and natural. The idea that the revolutionary legislators were in "a violent haste" to pull everything down was of course at the heart of Burke's idea of the revolution. In A Tale of Two Cities this breakdown of "order" is manifest in the functioning of the revolutionary courts.

·        In these circumstances it is not surprising that the jury precipitates the most "unnatural" of situations where the testimony of Darnay's own father-in-law becomes the means of condemning him.

·        Almost all the conservative writers on the French Revolution had reacted with horror at the "desexualizing"(loss of the native characters of a sex) of women during the revolution Burke had written with loathing about the unnatural acts of women "lost to all shame", and Carlyle of tllc violent speech and gestures, of the "manly women " from whose girdle "pistols are seen sticking". In A Talc of Two Cities the embodiment of this kind of "unnatural" woman is of course Mme Defarge.