On page 224, Dickens writes, “A white flag from within the fortress, and a parlay-this dimly perceptible through the raging storm, nothing audible in it-suddenly the sea rose immeasurably wider and higher, and it swept Defarge of the wine shop over the lower drawbridge, past the massive stone outer walls, in among the eight great towers surrendered! So restless was the force of the ocean bearing him on, that even to draw his breath or turn his head was impracticable as if he had been struggling in the surf of the south sea.”
This passage is describing the “sea” of people that are attacking the Bastille jail. Dickens is clearly using the motif of water to describe the mad crowd of peasants in their vengeful revolution. Large bodies of water have the power to grow and move wherever they want to go, and this is the same for the mob of people. They are so powerful that they can “sweep” people off their feet and force them to move with them. If one is caught in a rip tide, it is nearly impossible to escape it. The best advice is not to struggle against it but to go with the flow. This is exactly what Mr. Defarge is forced to do when they crowd swallowed him up. This passage also shows how crowds are very unpredictable. All of a sudden, at a random signal, they decided to attack and flow at a great rate. Even Mr. Defarge was not ready for their powerful “flowing”.
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3 comments:
That's a really cool idea! It also speaks to why Dickens starts the passage with the Bastille raising the white flag of surrender. This works with your analogy of the sea as the crowd of peasants because a raging sea has no sympathy and is relentless, hence the total ignorance of the white flag. Dickens clearly connects the sea to the crowd of peasants on page 229 when he writes, "The remorseless sea of turbulence swaying shapes, voices of vengeance, and faces hardened in the furnace of suffering until the touch of pity could make no mark on them". The "faces" are "hardened" as Dickens described because the peasants no longer have any mercy towards the aristocracy after the aristocrats have neglected the peasants' suffering suffering for so long.
"'To me, women!' cried madame his wife. 'What! we can kill as well as the men when the place is taken!' And to her, with a shrill thirsty cry, trooping women variously armed, but all armed alike in hunger and revenge" (224).
In this quote, Madame Defarge is rounding up the women to attack Bastille, Dr Manette's former prison in France. Dickens, having earlier described the revolt as a "sea," as Abbey commented on, continues the water motif by describing Madame Defarge's cry as "thirsty." Dickens is making a connection between Madame Defarge's basic needs, such as thirst, and the violent, bloody revoltuion, the hurricane, for thirst can only be quenched by water (or Gatorade...but that's most water anyway). He is saying that she needs justice (or revenge, depending on how you looks at it) to keep herself functioning on a day-to-day basis.
You guys are on a roll, here. Good insights!
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