Madame Defarge
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Madame Thérèse Defarge is a fictional character in the book A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens. She is a tricoteuse, a tireless worker for the French Revolution, and the wife of Ernest Defarge.
She is one of the main villains of the novel, obsessed with revenge against the Evrémondes. She ruthlessly pursues this goal against Charles Darnay, his wife, Lucie Manette, and their child, for crimes a prior generation of the Evrémonde family had committed. These include the deaths of her nephew, sister, brother, father and brother-in-law. She refuses to accept the reality that Charles Darnay changed his ways by intending to renounce his title to the lands to give them to the peasants who worked on them. After Charles' arrogant and snobbish uncle becomes the Marquis St. Evrémonde, the Marquis' arrogance causes the death of an innocent child, which makes him hated and helps legitimize Defarge's rage. Her consuming need for revenge against the Evrémonde family, including the innocent Darnay and his wife, brings about her fatal doom by her own weapon at the hands of Miss Pross.
Defarge symbolises several themes. She represents one aspect of the Fates.Template:Cn The Moirai (the Fates as represented in Greek mythology) used yarn to measure out the life of a man, and cut it to end it; Defarge knits, and her knitting secretly encodes the names of people to be killed. Defarge also symbolises the nature of the Reign of Terror during the French Revolution in which radical Jacobins engaged in mass political persecution of all real or supposed enemies of the Revolution who were executed on grounds of sedition to the new republic with the guillotine, particularly targeting people with aristocratic heritage.
