London as a ‘Heart of Darkness’

Abstract

The archetypal opposition between holy city and sin city is rooted in the Bible, where Jerusalem, the seat of the Temple, is contrasted with nests of wickedness such as Babel, whose punishment for the erection of its tower — an emblem of impious pride — is a relapse into a primordial chaos of languages, or Sodom and Gomorrah, which are destroyed by ‘brimstone and fire’ (Genesis, 19: 24). Western culture is imbued with this rhetoric of the urban space, pivoting on the contrast between holiness and sin or between the metaphors of light and darkness. London has often been described as embodying these contradictory terms, that is to say as a beacon of civilisation and a harbour of vice, two dimensions that have also been regarded as coinciding with the diurnal and nocturnal faces of the city.KeywordsUrban SpaceAmerican WriterCruel BeastLondon StreetHoly CityThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.