Tale Of Two Cities Conflict Analysis

The poignant idealism of the French Revolution, “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, or Death,” demonstrates a major concept of Charles Dickens’ book, A Tale of Two Cities (245). Within his novel, Dickens illustrates the notion that human distress and pain can lead to the destruction of order within society through the use of conflict and symbolism. Among the most prevalent aspects of his novel, Dickens utilizes conflict to reveal the animosity between the lower class peasants and the nobility. When revolution begins, the laments of the peasantry serve as guidelines for justice. Scientifically, the speaker states, “Death is Nature’s remedy for all things,” which begs the question, if Nature fixes life with death, then “why not legislation”

For example, when a wine casket fell off a carriage and the wine spilled into the street, the peasants “had been greedy with the staves of the cask.” And in the midst of this frenzy, “a tall joker” dipped his finger into the wine- “BLOOD scrawled upon the wall”(Dickens 32). The wine, thus, represents the upcoming blood that would shed within the streets of Saint Antoine. In fact, the primary cause of this thirst for revenge stems from the serfs’ own lack of food and water. While the nobles are constantly lavished with more than the bare necessities, they fail to realize the detrimental effects that their social system may spawn a radical revolution. Dickens further exemplifies the tension within society as he compares the people of France to “heaps of flies”; when some of them “fell dead at the bottom,” their demise made no impact on the other flies until “they met the same fate” (Dickens 179). These flies, which suffered an earlier death, symbolize the French peasantry in the sense that they both suffer greatly without sympathy from the nobility, who are also represented by the flies ultimately facing the same fate. Symbolism within the novel continues with the use of an analogy to illustrate the reasoning behind the lower class’s violent nature toward the nobility throughout the Revolution. When presented with a hypothetical “great heap of dolls” to choose from for one’s “own advantage,” Monsieur Defarge claims that most people would select “the richest and gayest” (Dickens 173). For the people living amongst poverty, it seems to be common sense to abuse those living amongst power, wealth, and glory. This type of thought provokes “ordinary men and women...driven by their suffering to become implacable murderers of the aristocracy” (Kiran