Tale of Two Cities
Dicken's Tale of Two Cities deals extensively with the tragedies andexcesses of the French Revolution, in which the peasantry arose against thearistocracy. Because the revolution was a war between a farming class andthe upper class, Dickens acquaints its work with the work of farming.Throughout the book he uses farming imagery to describe the work of theguillotine and the appearance of the revolutionaries. At the beginning of the book, Dickens describes the revolution as theFarmer Death. He speaks throughout the book about the inevitability of therevolution, and the way it had been gestating and taking seed in the land
The farmers are condemned for their excesses, but the readerunderstands the fact that the so-called victims are in many cases deservingof their fate. For this revolutionary fact, Dickens uses the metaphor ofreaping what one sows (which is just more farming imagery). 21) Rather than take a sheerly sympathetic view towards the farmers ortheir victims, Dickens seems to keep a certain degree of balance betweenthem. '" (9) The farming imagery in this novel powerfully serves to accentuate thebasic moral messages of the story. earts of the people long before it came to fruit. Even the youngEvremond recognizes this sad truth. In ChapterOne he writes: "It is likely enough that in the rough outhouses of sometillers of the heavy lands adjacent to Paris, there were sheltered from theweather that very day, rude carts, bespattered with rustic mire, snuffedabout by pigs, and roosted in by poultry, which the Farmer, Death,hadalready set apart to be his tumbrels of the Revolution. " a vast dusky mass of scarecrows heaving to and fro,with frequent gleams of light above the billowy heads, where steel bladesand bayonets shone in the sun. " (ch 1) He consistently describes the revolutionaries themselves asscarecrows. " 'Sir' said the nephew, 'we have donewrong, and are reaping the fruits of wrong. 5) Sureenough, by the end of the book the scarecrows have risen up and startedkilling the birds. He explains his reasoning behind the metaphor himself,suggesting that the revolutionaries are scarecrows and that the aristocratsare the birds that should have learned their lesson and fly away.
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