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  • Essay / The Use of Wine as a Symbol in a Tale of Two Cities

    Falling out of the cart, hitting the dark gray stone, the barrel explodes onto the sidewalk, its contents seeping into the jagged cracks of the street. Perplexed by the event, the people watch closely before hastily running to the broken barrel and sucking up the red liquid, where they resort to mutilated earthenware and handkerchiefs to absorb every last drop. The liquid finally gone, people move quietly towards their daily tasks, indifferent to the recent demonstration. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why violent video games should not be banned”? Get an original essay In the above events, the spilling of wine brings out the carnal nature of people, causing them to abandon their daily tasks to drink the wine, treating it as a giver of life. Thus, the liquid embodies the dangerous nature of hope for those trapped in despair. In Charles Dicken's A Tale of Two Cities, wine serves as a symbolic image of blood and violence, foreshadowing the brutal actions of revolutionaries. Throughout the novel, Dickens draws parallels between wine and blood, with images of both illustrating the violent nature of revolutionaries. Dickens achieves this through the people's wild reaction to the wine spilling into the streets. For example, the author describes wine in relation to the carnal nature of people; he describes it as "red wine, [which] had stained the ground of the narrow street of the Faubourg Saint Antoine" (33; book 1, ch. 5), and he depicts the vain attempts of the people to drink the flowing wine . . In this description, Dickens highlights the savage reaction of people to the sight of flowing wine, much like the reaction of a ferocious predator to the sight of flowing blood. Wine displays the scarlet color and contaminating property often associated with blood, the physical analogy denoting its capacity to corrupt. Wine stains everything it touches, associating it with blood, blood which easily tarnishes anything it comes into contact with. To advance the physical similarities between wine and blood, Dickens then uses another image. He describes a graphic scene where unsightly people drink spilled wine outside the wine store, one person in particular "had a tiger spot around his mouth" (33; book 1, ch. 5). The word "tiger" in this image creates a connection between wine and blood by linking it to a violent beast, a possible source of death.] Additionally, the relationship between wine and blood is further represented at the millstone, where “the men were naked to the waist, with [wine] stains all over their limbs and bodies,” a clear allusion to a byproduct of violence, bloodstains. Immediately after wine corrupted men, Dickens says: "The hatchets, the knives, the bayonets, the swords, all brought to be sharpened, were all red with [the wine]" (271; book 3, ch. 2 ). His depiction of wine-stained weapons evokes images of violence through the similarity of wine to blood. The wine represents the inherently violent nature of the revolutionaries, which foreshadows their threatening acts of sedition. Throughout the novel, the citizens demonstrate their brutality in several scenes which all coincide with the presence of wine. First, the people display their violent behavior before storming the Bastille, where a fierce “vortex of boiling waters” encircles “the Defarge cabaret” in a “raging circle” (221; book 2, ch. 21). In a ferocious crowd, the revolutionaries surrounded the building before sweeping “Clearing the cabaret over the lowered drawbridge” (223; book 2, ch. 21) and committing various acts of violence. therefore, wine, as a symbol of brutality,..