Comparing On The Waterfront And A Tale Of Two Cities

The novel A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens and the film On the Waterfront directed by Elia Kazan were not just a story of the French Revolution and a story of the mafia running the waterfront business. There was a recurring theme of how the power of love and wholesomeness will always overcome hatred and death in the end. In a Tale of Two Cities, there is a woman named Madame Defarge, and throughout the beginning of the book we see her as a woman who doesn’t say much and just observes the world around her “with a watchful eye that seldom seems to look at anything” (35), and “knitted with nimble fingers and steady eyebrows” (37). Madame Defarge is always watching and listening to what is going on around her, but never gets involved in it if she can help it. She is hiding in the background at this point of the story, and seems relatively harmless to anyone. However, as we see the revolution progress, we also see Madame Defarge’s character progress into a hateful and evil person, which is very unexpected considering how she seemed in the

However, Miss Pross had grabbed Madame Defarge’s waist, where the gun was, and had it “under her arm” (382). Once Miss Pross realized what Madame Defarge was looking for, she “struck at it, struck with a flash and a crash, and stood alone - blinded by the smoke” (383). It wasn’t until “the smoke cleared, leaving an afiliados stillness, it passed out on the air, like the furious woman whose body lay lifeless on the ground” (383) that we finally see that Miss Pross has prevailed over the hatred of Madame Defarge, as Dickens earlier writes “Miss Pross, with the vigorous tenacity of love, always so much stronger than hate” (382) which just goes to show that one of the main themes of the book was that love prevails over hatred and