A Tale of Two Cities

The image of a golden thread is the counterweight to Madame Defarge’s sinister knitting. It first emerges as a reference to Lucie Manette’s blonde hair, which itself symbolizes her purity and kindness; during her reunion with her father, for instance, the narrator describes “his cold white head ming[ling] with her radiant hair, which warm[s] and light[s] it as though it were the light of Freedom shining on him” (48). As this passage makes clear, the golden thread is a symbol not only of Lucie’s goodness, but also of the effect that that goodness has on those around her, which is often to inspire them to better things or (as in Doctor Manette’s case) to “recall them to life.” By “winding the golden thread” (218), then, Lucie creates a kind of fate that works against the one Madame Defarge is plotting—most obviously by inspiring Sydney Carton to make the sacrifice that he ultimately does.

Light and darkness is perhaps the most basic motif that runs through A Tale of Two Cities, where it often functions (as is typical in literature) as a way of symbolizing good and evil in all their forms. Madame Defarge, for instance, is repeatedly likened to a “shadow” (278), while Lucie’s blonde hair serves as a shorthand for the goodness and purity that save her father from insanity and penetrate even the “cloud of caring for nothing, which overshadow[s] [Sydney Carton] with such a fatal darkness” (155). The name “Lucy,” in fact, derives from the Latin word for “light.” As this contrast between Lucie and Madame Defarge demonstrates, Dickens often uses the juxtaposition of light and dark to explore other pairs of opposites in the book: for instance, the darkness of death (literal or symbolic) and the light of life.

However, just as these other apparent opposites often prove to resemble each another more than one might think, Dickens’s use of light and dark imagery is ultimately not entirely straightforward. For instance, the novel frequently refers to the revolutionary practice of hoisting the executed up in place of lamps, as in this passage from Chapter 5:

The time was to come, when the gaunt scarecrows of [Saint Antoine] 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, to flare upon the darkness of their condition (33-34).

Although the comparison of bodies to lamps seems to flout the typical association of light and life, it brings hope to the “darkness” of Saint Antoine. The passage therefore speaks to France’s disarray in the years leading up to the Revolution; the situation in the country is so dire that morality itself becomes distorted and ambiguous.

Wine plays a central role in Christian religious services, where it functions (symbolically or literally) as the blood shed by Jesus to save humanity. Dickens identifies the association between wine and blood in A Tale of Two Cities, using it as a motif to explore themes of vengeance and redemption. Early in the novel, for instance, wine casks breaks in the streets of Saint Antoine, and as the starving residents flock to taste it, one of them (Gaspard) uses the spilled wine to write “blood” on a wall. This call for revolution against France’s oppressive aristocracy is answered many years later, but the bloodshed—far from saving the country—quickly becomes a new moral stain on it. When the citizens of Paris storm the Bastille and execute its guards, the narrator says that they are “headlong, mad, and dangerous; and in the years so long after the breaking of the cask at Defarge’s wine-shop door, they are not easily purified when once stained red” (230).

As time goes on, then, the novel’s association of wine and blood begins to seem like a distortion of Christian teachings, with the revolutionaries wrongly believing they can secure a new and better world by indiscriminately killing innocent people: “Lovely girls; bright women, brown-haired, black-haired, and grey; youths; stalwart men and old; gentle born and peasant born; all red wine for La Guillotine” (285). Ultimately, the narrator does suggest that the bloodshed of the Revolution will give rise to a “reborn” France, but he does so only in the final moments of the novel while recounting Sydney Carton’s last thoughts. It takes Carton’s voluntary, Christ-like self-sacrifice to (in his words) “expiate” (389) the sins of the Revolution.

In various, images of burial, imprisonment, and debt all underscore A Tale of Two Cities’ ideas about redemption. Burial is perhaps the most prominent of the three motifs, which isn’t surprising given that Dickens often speaks about redemption in terms of resurrection. The novel even contains a literal burial scene (the funeral of Roger Cly), followed by a more symbolic resurrection (not just Jerry Cruncher’s graverobbing, but also the revelation that Cly faked his own death). More commonly, however, the idea of burial is used metaphorically; Lorry, for instance, repeatedly refers to Doctor Manette’s time in the Bastille as being “buried.”

As this example suggests, however, the burial motif often overlaps with a second: that of imprisonment. This motif again appears in literal terms throughout the novel, but also crops up in less expected places; when describing the French aristocracy, for instance, the narrator remarks that “the exquisite gentlemen of the finest breeding wore little pendent trinkets that chinked as they languidly moved; these golden fetters rang like precious little bells” (112). In this case, the implication is that the French aristocracy are actually “fettered” by their own wealth, which blinds them to the plight of the poor and therefore seals their own deaths under the French Republic.

More broadly, the novel’s use of imprisonment as a motif reflects Christian ideas about sin and despair as constraining, and even as a form of living death. This lays the groundwork for the eventual redemption of Sydney Carton, who is effectively imprisoned by his own alcoholism and depression. In fact, the novel at one point makes this connection explicit: “Mr. Lorry’s eyes were again attracted to [Carton’s] face. Taking note of the wasted air which clouded the naturally handsome features, and having the expression of prisoners’ faces fresh in his mind, he was strongly reminded of that expression” (322).

Finally, A Tale of Two Cities also draws on images of repayment to illustrate its ideas about redemption (which, in a nonreligious context, involves buying something back or settling a debt). Both the literal and spiritual meanings of the term appear in an exchange between the Marquis and a widow from his village; the Marquis assumes the woman’s husband “cannot pay something” only for her to return that “he has paid all […] He is dead” (122). Her reference is to the idea that death is the “price” the human condition (and, in Christianity, of sinfulness in particular). The Marquis and his peers, however, fail to grasp that their crimes come at a cost; the Marquis is murdered shortly after this exchange, and his nephew Darnay nearly ends up “paying” for his family’s crimes with his own life as well. As in Christian tradition, Darnay is saved only because someone else (in this case, Carton) “pay[s] the forfeit” on his behalf by trading places with him (386).  

As Dickens depicts it, the Ancien Régime is not simply unfair or unequal but actively exploitative: the French aristocracy secures its wealth and pleasure at the expense of the lower classes. In order to capture the violence of this system, the novel turns repeatedly to a motif of predators and prey. The narrator likens the Marquis St. Evrémonde, for instance, to “a refined tiger” (131) and suggests that much of the same equipment he uses to hunt animals has also been used to terrorize peasants: “Monsieur the Marquis crossed a hall, grim with certain old boar spears, swords, and knives of the chase; grimmer with certain heavy riding-rods and riding-whips, of which many a peasant, gone to his benefactor Death, had felt the weight when his lord was angry” (124). Elsewhere, the narrator draws a more symbolic parallel between predation and the heavy taxes levied on the French lower classes, saying that “the wonder was, that there was any village left unswallowed” (119).

Once the Revolution is underway, however, the roles of predator and prey reverse themselves; the narrator likens the jurors Darnay faces during his second trial to “dogs empannelled to try the deer” (328), and Jacques Three “[speaks] like an epicure” (373) when he discusses the possibility of executing Lucie Manette—that is, like someone who plans on eating her. Most significantly of all, Madame Defarge herself is described as a “tigress” (375), which makes her the female counterpart to the Marquis she loathes. The implication is that the lower classes’ suffering has morally twisted them to such an extent that once they find themselves in power, they merely become a new generation of oppressors. 

When describing large crowds of people, the narrator often likens them to an ocean or flood; for instance, when the spectators in the Old Bailey turn to look at the defendant (Darnay), “[a]ll the human breath in the place, rolled at him, like a sea” (64). Later in the novel, Dickens associates this kind of imagery more specifically with the mobs of revolutionaries who storm the Bastille, take part in the September Massacre, and gather at the guillotine to watch the executions of their enemies. Here, for instance, is Dickens’s description of the group that captures the Bastille: “The sea of black and threatening waters, and of destructive upheaving of wave, whose depths were yet unfathomed and whose forces were yet unknown” (229). The comparison suggests that the Revolution is being driven less by individual actions and more by larger-than-human forces. In other words, the motif ties into the novel’s depiction of the French Revolution as the inevitable backlash against the Ancien Régime, and (more broadly) to its depiction of the world as governed by sweeping historical forces akin to laws of nature.