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Dickens’s Gorgon and Two Cities

In A Tale of Two Cities (1859), Charles Dickens describes the ultimate undoing of the Ancien Régime as the work of a Gorgon ; this suggests that, for Dickens, the Gorgon describes both the French Revolution and his novel, insofar as the French Revolution is its privileged subject. With a focus on the Gorgons’ chthonic properties and the impact of those properties on the ideation of the Greek polis, especially of democratic Athens, I propose to analyze how Dickens’s two cities entail a similar political negotiation, to which the novel is instrumental as tragedy was instrumental to fifth-century Athens. The novel, I argue, responds to this negotiation with a story that curiously reenacts the Oedipus-Antigone narrative, not least its chthonic aspect, with Paris pointing to Thebes and London to Athens.

Charles Dickens, the novel, the French Revolution, democracy, Oedipus, Antigone

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