Madame+Defarge

Madame Defarge
In //A Tale of Two Cities//, Charles Dickens portrays Madame Defarge as an evil person during the revolution. Throughout the story, Madame Defarge is the bad women, but the audience does not really know why she is so terrible until the end. Madame Defarge can also be considered smart and determined, for always having a plan and sticking with it. Dickens describes her as having "a character about her, from which one might have predicted that she did not often make mistakes against herself in any of the reckonings over which she presided" (33). At the end of the book, you learn of a cruel act that put Madame Defarge in hatred of anyone related to the Marquis. The majority of her presence in the novel includes her knitting a register which lists the names of the revolutionaries intended to die; however, Madame Defarge also has a role in accusing Darnay and sentencing him to death, her sister and brother were victims of the many people that the Marquis killed, and her own death in the end.

It seemed like every time Madame Defarge was engaged in some activity, it was her knitting the register of names of all the people that should be killed during the revolution. At some points, Defarge would be talking to the Jacques, and Madame Defarge would be knitting in the corner. She especially does not like Charles Darnay because of his cruel relatives, so she knits him and Lucie Manette into her list. When she heard that John Barsad, an English spy, was in town, she knitted his name in right away. Madame Defarge says, "Eh well! It is necessary to register him" (178). Madame Defarge was so intense about knitting because she really wanted to overthrow the aristocracy.

When Darnay was put on trial the second time after returning home for one night, he was taken back to prison because he had three accusers: Defarge, Madame Defarge, and Doctor Manette. The reason that Madame Defarge hates Darnay and his family so much is because Darnay's uncle and father killed her brother, sister, and potentially her father; therefore, she wants Darnay and his family dead. The book talks about how the girl's sister was hiding, and then we find out in the end that the sister was Madame Defarge. You did not know that Madame Defarge was the sister of the girl that the Evremonde harrassed until the end of the book, so you do not really have any sympathy for Madame Defarge. The acts of the Evremonde essentially was the reason for Madame Defarge's bitter mood.

At the end of the story, Madame Defarge arrives where Lucie Manette is residing in France. She wants to kill Lucie for marrying Darnay. When she gets to the house, Madame Defarge had "a loaded pistol lying hidden in her bosom. Lying hidden at her waist, was a sharpened dagger" (367). Fortunately, Lucie had already left for London. Miss Pross was at the house and noticed Madame Defarge's hidden gun. As she was pushing it away, Madame Defarge shot and killed herself. Even though she was an evil character, Madame Defarge was determined in the way that she kept knitting up until the very end.