Open Prompt: Wine on the Streets

2009. A symbol is an object, action, or event that represents something or that creates a range of associations beyond itself. In literary works a symbol can express an idea, clarify meaning, or enlarge literal meaning. Select a novel or play and, focusing on one symbol, write an essay analyzing how that symbol functions in the work and what it reveals about the characters or themes of the work as a whole. Do not merely summarize the plot.

One of the biggest driving force in society is its insatiable appetite, restaurants account for a portion much of any developed country's revenue, taking food in, putting out new inventive entrees and in any underdeveloped country; people would kill for a meal. However, in A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens takes hunger to a whole new level. From one simple scene, the dropping of a wine crate in the middle of the street, Dickens characterizes the societal needs, wants and motivation during the book's setting.

A Tale of Two Cities is set around the late 1700s in either Paris or London, where there is conflict between the aristocratic class and the suffering peasants that work beneath them that eventually leads to the French Revolution. In the streets of France, outside of a wine shop a wine casket is broken, where red wine is split into the streets and its peasants begin to lap up the split wine like wild, untamed animals. 

Dickens describes the scene as chaotic and provides a grotesque and disturbed attitude towards the crowd that is swarming simply for wine. This chaotic hunger for a liquid is meant to represent the hunger that the peasants have for food, literally, and for freedom. In the book, the aristocratic characters are described to be evil, foreboding characters that have no sympathy towards anyone that works beneath them, especially the peasants. They are described to the overworked and under appreciated muscles of France, dying from hunger. The hunger is then taken metaphorically when the reader realizes that the setting is during the French Revolution, when peasants became rebels, trying, starving for the freedom that French higher class and royalty has taken from them.

The mad scene in which hordes of people are crowding around food, lapping up red wine is also meant to represent the mob mentality which plays out later in the book. The red wine symbol can also be extended to mean blood, which is exactly what Dickens wants the reader to realize when a peasant, hand soaked in wine write 'blood' on the walls of the street. Indeed, the symbolism in the fallen win crate, the mob mentality and blood, is then realized when the peasants join together quiet literally spill the blood of the French royalty and their suppressors on the streets in which the wine had been split earlier in the novel. 

Charles Dickens grew up during a time that was barely making its way out of the French Revolution and he himself came to critique the society of his time, where a frenzied mob with the same motivations held the same amount of weight as it did in his novel. Dickens uses the split wine to embody the hunger for justice and freedom of people who were ignored and at the same time, extends his metaphor to show the mob mentality through the red wine's color and the actions taken to obtain it and what was done with it.