Madam Defarge.

This is a female reading of Madam Defarge and her desire to avenge the rape of her sister and the subsequent devastation of her family.

The fact that Charles Dickens uses the incident of a rape says a lot about the plot in general and why Madam Defarge was so excessively driven to avenge the suffering of her family and to instigate a revolution against the aristocracy in particular. What this means is that it was necessary for Dickens to use rape and not any other heinous crime for Defarge to play a central role in ‘knitting’ a revolution. Any other atrocious act would not have quite made the same impact precisely because Madam Defarge was a female. No matter cold and heartless she had later become it was because she could intensely feel and understand as a female what rape means and the terrible invasion of the body that a rape represents that she vowed to take revenge no matter how long it takes or how difficult it becomes. This is most clearly evident when she declares, “Tell the Wind and the Fire where to stop; not me!”

Following the same line of argument, I think that it was justified when Defarge claimed that she wanted the whole ‘race’ to be exterminated. From an objective standpoint, she was unable to draw the line as to when to stop avenging the rape of her sister but from a female standpoint, I do not blame her at all. In fact, it is precisely from the female perspective that I find myself actually championing Madam Defarge because if I were she, I would feel the same way. The race had to be exterminated to make sure that the act did not happen again. 

And so I feel that the novel did not really do justice to Madam Defarge. The novel does try to uphold justice and morality by saving the innocent Darnay and Lucy but as a female reader it did not satisfy my expectation from the novel as given the sheer hatred that Madam Defarge felt, killing Marquis wasn't enough. The race wasn't properly punished let alone exterminated.