Lightness+vs+Darkness

Light vs Dark and Shadows are **motifs** in A Tale of Two Cities.
====**A motif is a recurring structure, contrast, and literary devices that can ****help to develop and inform the text's major themes. **====

=
 Throughout the novel A Tale of Two Cities the symbols Lightness vs Darkness are always present. Whether the chapter deals with literal figures of Lightness of Darkness or symbolically. Throughout the novel, shadows are always present. The shadows are there to represent the gloomy and dull times during the Revolution. Shadows are apart of the first scene, where the mail carrier is on its journey, in the dark. The darkness is compared to an evil spirit in a simile. The way it "moves" through the air is compared to the way "waves of an unwholesome sea" do; =====

=
"There was a steaming mist in all the hollows, and it had roamed in its forlonness up the hill, like an evil spirit, seeking rest and finding none. A clammy and intensely cold mist, it made its slow way through the air in ripples that visibly followed and overspread one another, as the waves of an unwholesome sea might do. It was dense enough to shut out everything from the light of the coachlamps but these its own workings, and a few yards of road; and the reek of labouring horses steamed into it, as if they had made it all," (6). =====

=
Two chapters have the word "shadow" in them, "The Night Shadows" and "The Substance of the Shadow." In "The Night Shadows," the narrator thinks about secrets and mysteries. Shadows can represent the secrets of people because secrets are hidden from the "light," or rest of the world. The first line of the chapter is the narrators thoughts about secrets =====

=
"A wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other. A solemn consideration, when I enter a great city by night, that every one of those darkly clustered houses encloses its own secret; that every room in every one of them encloses its own secret; that every beating heart in the hundreds of thousands of breasts there, is, in some of its imaginings, a secret to the heart nearest to it! Something of the awfulness, even of Death itself, is referable to this," (12). =====

=
Two of the main characters in the story, Lucie Manette and Madame Defarge, very much represent light and darkness. Lucie is a happy and good spirited person, while Madame Defarge has an evilness to her. Madame Defarge is essentially envious of Lucie, and "casts shadows" on her hopes and dreams. =====

In Chapter 5 of book 3, Lucie and Madame Defarge's appearances are compared as they walk through the streets during winter. As Lucie is walking through the pure, white snow, often kissing the prison where her husband is being held. Madame Defarge, however is "like a shadow over the white road," (284).