Madame DeFarge vs. Ursula

     When I picture Madame DeFarge I picture a human version of the disney character Ursula from "The Little Mermaid”. Ursula is a manipulative, lip-pouting octopus, that has a mean hobby of collecting souls so that they can suffer in misery for the rest of their existence. Madame DeFarge is a manipulative frenchwomen that had a hobby of collecting people so that they can suffer in misery for the rest of their lives, or she just kills them. Both are terribly evil women, that came off nice at first. In “The Little Mermaid” Ariel trusts Ursula because she seems nice and is helping her with what she wants, the first time the readers meet Madame DeFarge she seems nice and we like her because she is helping to hide Dr. Manette. 
     Two passages stuck out to me that show a more evil side of Madame DeFarge the first being on page 313 when Mr Barsad is rethinking his chat with Mrs. DeFarge it says,

        “He always remembered with fear and trembling, that that terrible woman had knitted when he talked with her, and had looked ominously at him as her fingers moved. He had since seen her, in the Section of Saint Antione, over and over again produced her knitted registers, and denounced people whose lives the guillotine then surely swallowed up.”

     “Ominously” means portending evil or harm; foreboding or threatening, and so we know she is looking at him with the idea of killing him, because she has this evil look on her face as she knits his name into her register, or “hit-list”. I think of the evil look Ursula gets once Ariel agrees to give her her voice. Even people who have never seen “The Little Mermaid” can imagine this vicious look because we read earlier that when Madame is knitting names, they are the names of people she wants to kill, so the look is this threatening glance of murder. 

     The second passage that stuck out to me was on page 278 when Madame DeFarge meets Lucie, 

               ’For my sake, then be merciful to my husband. For my child’s sake! She will put her hands together and pray you to be merciful. We ate more afraid of you than of these others.’

Madame DeFarge received it as a compliment, and looked at her husband. DeFarge, who had uneasily biting his thumb-nail and looking at her, collected his face into a sterner expression.”

     Madame has two “slaves” just like Ursula. Mr. DeFarge and the Vengeance seem to obey everything she says, and also seem to fear her. You can tell DeFarge has some fear towards his wife because of how he starts out uneasy, but quickly changes as she looks at him, clearly she has him under her command and he knows how he is supposed to look, which is stern and mean. We have hardly seen the Vengeance without Madame DeFarge, so I have a feeling she is forced to follow Madame under this “shadow” we see in this chapter then engulfs Lucie. We know why Lucie and her family would fear Madame over anyone, because she seems to have the most power, and clearly they should fear her because she denounces Lucie’s husband, Darnay a few chapters later. 

 These are two very evil female characters, but in the end of “The Little Mermaid” Ursula is destroyed, so I’m curious of what will come of Madame Defarge. In history most people who have had, what I call, “evil power” don’t last to long, but up to this point Madame DeFarge seems un-stopable, she has had hundreds of people killed, and even more working under her and for the guillotine, which I believe she is the leader of. The two characters have paralleled up to this point, so I wonder will Madame DeFarge have the same fate as Ursula? 

Sites:

http://www.squidoo.com/ursula-little-mermaid?utm_source=google&utm_medium=imgres&utm_campaign=framebuster

http://listverse.com/2009/06/09/top-10-most-evil-disney-villains/