Abbas's post

As per Ancient Greek traditions, the Moirai, also known as the Fates, were the weavers and tailors of the thread of life, which they intricately spun to dictate the destiny of humans and gods alike. They were perceived as rigid old women, cold and precise in their judgments with a detachment from the whirlpool of emotions and sentiments that human actions are grounded in. They knit. Slowly, deliberately and carefully, they capture the complex trajectory of a life in a pattern. And when the time comes for the inevitable termination of a life, one of the three sisters, Atropos, cuts the thread. Therese Defarge is, as Homer put it in the Iliad, the Moira Krataia/ Powerful Moira. She sits in her chair and calmly knits; knits the names of the people she seeks to destroy and the track that the Revolution is going to take. And verily, the people whose names are knitted by her needles almost invariably end up finding their thread snipped very neatly by the storm that the admirable lady has created and is maintaining. She is ruthless, precise and scarily callous, indifferent to the pleas of those who are in her line of fire. As is nicely put in the concluding chapters of the book, she lacks pity, not feeling it even for herself. What drives this woman is a sense of retribution against one individual and the millions associated to him by class, lineage, ideological inclinations, friendship, or any other bond, be it strong or weak. She is Lady Justice, wearing a blindfold and carrying a sword. But unfortunately, this blindfold has literally made her unable to distinguish between the culpable and the blameless, leading to her justice being disproportionate and indiscriminate. She sought to kill even the Manettes because the entire expansive spider’s web of relationships linking to the Marquis St. Evremonde must burn. Moreover, Madame Defarge, in line with my conception of her as a divine allotter of destiny and justice, is less a human and more a force of nature. The destructive earthquake, the consuming fire, the purging water and the ferocious wind; all are similar to her furiously torrential and permeating justice. In fact, in a very climactic scene, she tells her husband that she is unstoppable by saying that he should tell the wind and the fire where to stop but not her. Her dispensation of justice, previously analogized to a formidable force of nature, transcends even that and attains an almost divine quality. In addition, I personally sympathize with her causes as she underwent a great personal tragedy but I cannot help but credit her with hijacking the revolution and nearly destroying the country that she claimed to have been salvaging by devolving it to utter anarchy, violence and injustice. It is only fitting, then, that she meets her end in a struggle, with her own gun killing her. The Fate spun more than she could or should, and ended up burning her entire Loom.