The Gorgons Head and The Fountain of Peirene

Underlying this chapter are direct as well as indirect references to Greek mythology.  The chapter’s title refers to a Gorgon, which in Greek mythology is a female monster with snakes for hair and a horrible visage that turns anyone who looks at it into stone. The fact that the Gorgon is a feminine monster can be used to interpret the gorgon’s head as symbolizing that of Madame Defarge, who had been present earlier when the Marquis had accidentally run down a peasant child, and who was the only one amongst the crowd to look the Marquis squarely and defiantly in the face.  That look had sealed the Marquis’s fate;

“-when the one woman who had stood conspicuous, knitting, still knitted on with the steadfastness of fate.”  

Thus, Madame Defarge is the Gorgon’s Head, who turns the Marquis to stone just by her look.

By beginning this chapter with a description of the chateau of the Marquis as made up entirely of stone, comprising a stone courtyard, stone steps, stone balustrades, Dickens perhaps intends to illustrate the stone quality of the heart of its inhabitant. The ruthless Marquis earlier in town had accidentally killed a peasant’s (named Gaspard) baby and had shown no remorse for it whatsoever. However, Gaspard and Madame Defarge who was one of the witnesses of this horrible incident were to have their revenge. In a scene of wonderful imagery Dickens describes the murder of the Marquis by drawing a parallel between the stone fountain in the stone courtyard of the Marquis’s chateau and the fountain in the village square.  The water in both continues to flow unseen and unheard, but the water in the stone fountain at the chateau soon reflects a bloody hue with the rise of dawn and the stone faces of the statues at the chateau become crimson in the light of the sun. The significance of the fountains can be interpreted in light of the Greek myth of the fountain of Peirene, where Peirene was a woman who became a spring because of her tears shed in lamentation for her son Cenchrias, who was unintentionally killed by Artemis.  Hence the fountains represent Gaspard’s anguish at the death of his child and the stone fountain’s turning red represents his fury rising to consume the Marquis in its hatred. Greek poets would also travel to the fountain of Peirene to drink from it and to receive inspiration and the stone fountain of blood can be seen as symbolizing the blood of the aristocrats which the peasants so badly wanted and from the spilling of which the Revolution gained momentum.