Week 9: Analyzing Madam Defarge

Where do you go, my wife?’

‘I go,’ said madame, ‘with you at present. You shall see me at the head of women, by-and-bye.’

Moreover the readers soon see her inciting the French women to storm the “The Bastille” alongside the men.

“To me, women!’ cried madame his wife. ‘What! We can kill as well as the men when the place is taken”

What this scene shows is pure rage and passion of a woman who is evoking feminist ideas in response to revolting against the monarchy. She could be seen as a woman who is emblematic of the French Revolution.

Moreover, the readers sees after the raid on the Bastille “down on the steps of the Hotel de Ville where the governor’s body lay-down on the sole of the shoe of Madame Defarge where she has trodden on the body to steady it for mutilation” It is not sufficient for her that the man has died, she needs to ensure that she has grotesquely mutilated the body in order the show her rage against the aristocracy.  

Futhermore, her predatory nature is depicted when Miss Pross closes the doors to hide Lucie’s departure, “Madame Defarge’s dark eyes followed her through this rapid movement, and rested on her when it had finished”

This is quite a contrary depiction of the same Madame Defarge who is introduced to the readers as a “stout woman” about her husband’s age, “with a watchful eye that seldom seemed to look at anything, a large hand heavily ringed, a steady face, strong features, and great composure of man­ner.”

She works with her husband at the wine shop and they share a balanced relationship with her always being on equal footing with him. She is shown to be constantly knitting which symbolizes an uncanny mixture of gentle domesticity and the meticulous drawing up in the knitting’s pattern itself of a death list of those who will die during the revolution.

Perhaps her acts could be considered those of heroism given the dreaded and violent past she has had, she tells her husband that

“I was brought up among the fishermen of the seashore, and that peasant family, injured by the two Evremonde brothers, as that Bastille paper describes, is my family. Defarge, that sister of the mortally wounded boy upon the ground was my sister, that husband was my sister’s husband, that unborn child was their child, that brother was my brother, that father was my father, those dead are my dead, and that summons to answer for those things descends to me”

These lines give an insight into her thirst for vengeance and the rage she internalizes for the aristocracy. It shows itself in the form of Madam Defarge mutilating the body of the governor. 

However, it is interesting that such negative connotations of wilderness and violence are associated with this particular French figure. Also, this figure is murdered by an English figure which again might symbolize English mission of rectifying the wrong. English with their high moral status were the only ones who could have curbed the strength of this creature.