Page 122-123
“The Gorgon had surveyed the building again in the night, and had added the one stone face wanting; the stone face for which it had waited through about two hundred years.”
To me this sentence is about ending the line of royalty and discontinuing the name Evremond. The Evremond line caused the people a lot of hurt for two-hundred years and finally it was about to end. The word gorgon in the beginning of this sentence and in the chapter title “The Gorgon’s Head” foreshadows that the Marquis will die.
I figured this out by looking up what the word gorgon meant, dictionary.com said it was “any of three sister monsters commonly represented as having snakes for hair, wings, brazen claws, and eyes that turned anyone looking into them to stone.” This definition led me to believe that the Marquis was supposed to represent the gorgon and that he would become the stone face.
I think that the stone face represented more than the foreshadowing of the Marquis death, I think it represented the fear that the Marquis gave to people. For example, when he ran over the boy and showed no emotional remorse, it shocked the bystanders and me as the reader. Personally, the body language and facial emotions associated with feeling shock makes me stand completely still with a wide eyed look. This is what I imagine as having a stone face and I also think that this was the face the Marquis made when he died.
I didn’t think that this was the only definition of gorgon so I went back to the internet and looked up other definitions. Wikipedia said that it was “a fierce, frightening or repulsive woman.” I immediately thought back to the woman who threw the sack of coins back at the Marquis after he had ran over her son. To the Marquis this woman was repulsive but to her peers this woman was fierce and frightening. She was able to stand up to the Marquis and because of this, she could’ve been the karma or the gorgon that had killed him.
The Marquis death was symbolic because it supposedly ends the Evremond line since Darnay does not wish to continue it. This gives the people hope for a new leader and hope for a new kind of ruling. Dickens might be trying to say that the Marquis death was long overdue because he had been abusing his power and taking advantage of others misfortunes. From the people’s point of view, the Marquis death was “the one stone face wanting.” The people had been awaiting the death of the Marquis but more specifically the end of the unfair rulers.