Featuring commentary from Clancy Martin and Margaret Atwood
Midway through A Tale of Two Cities, Madame Defarge’s husband confesses to discouragement. The revolution is taking too long. They may not live to see it. And she answers him with one of the most arresting speeches in the novel: “But how long does it take to prepare the lightning? How long does it take to prepare the earthquake? You don’t even know that, because you don’t see it. And people aren’t seeing us either, but we’re doing it, and it’s coming, and it’s on the road. It’s inevitable. It will come.”
Margaret Atwood, reading the passage in her Rebind commentary on A Tale of Two Cities, pauses on those sentences. She is not applauding them; she is watching something build that she already knows will destroy its builder.
Friedrich Nietzsche had a name for what Madame Defarge is doing in that speech, and in every scene before it. He called it ressentiment, a French word he kept in French because no German or English equivalent quite captured it. Resentment is too weak. Ressentiment is a philosophy. It is what happens when the capacity for direct action is blocked, and the blocked energy turns inward, accumulates, and eventually produces a complete inversion of values: the values of those who oppressed you become evil, and the values forged in opposition to them become good. The knitting is not just a record but a moral system, built stitch by stitch across years of enforced patience.
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