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# The Knitting and the Eagle
- URL: https://www.rebindclassics.com/preview/the-knitting-and-the-eagle/
- Published: 2026-08-25T22:36:43.000Z
- Updated: 2026-08-26T17:13:39.000Z
- Description: Nietzsche had a name for what Dickens’s most terrifying woman is doing.
- Author: Andrew Wessels
- Tags: Margaret Atwood on Charles Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities, Clancy Martin on Friedrich Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra, #preview, #no-series

*What Nietzsche knew about Dickens’s most terrifying woman*

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, 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 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.

Clancy Martin, in his Rebind commentary on *Thus Spoke Zarathustra*, reaches for Nietzsche’s most compressed image to explain it:

> Those who practice master morality are like eagles. Those who practice slave morality are like sheep. And those who practice master morality, those eagles do not despise sheep. On the contrary, there’s nothing they like more than a nice, good, tasty, crunchy sheep.

The eagle does not hate the lamb. It simply takes it. There is no moral calculation, no elaborate system of grievance, no patient register of wrongs. Madame Defarge is what the lambs do when the eagles have been eating them for two hundred years.

Her knitting is the most precise image of *ressentiment* in all of Victorian fiction, and Atwood reads it with the care it deserves. “Madame Defarge’s knitting is like that,” she says. “It’s a record she’s keeping of everybody whose head she’s going to chop off later. And as they get chopped off, of course, they get unknitted.”

The rage is legitimate. The register is exact. She is not wrong about the eagle. What *ressentiment* does, Nietzsche argues, is let that rage metastasize into a total system, and the full essay follows Madame Defarge to the end of exactly that road: the expanding register, the moment the novel can no longer save her, and the one thing Dickens could not give her.

*The full essay, and the two series it draws on, open with Rebind Classics this fall.*