Sodom gives Sodom and Gomorrah its organizing biblical image and its social geography. The city is less a setting visited in the narrative than a figure through which the narrator considers male same-sex desire: the distance between public identity and private life, the signals by which people recognize one another, and the stigma that makes concealment a condition of belonging. Its force lies in this double meaning. Sodom is imagined as a place from which its inhabitants were punished or escaped, yet the narrator also pictures its descendants as dispersed throughout ordinary society.

Biblical Figure and Epigraph

The section opens under the heading Sodom and Gomorrah, followed by the division title “The women shall have Gomorrah and” and the continuation “the men shall have Sodom,” attributed to Alfred de Vigny. The paired cities establish a biblical frame for the novel’s examination of sexuality, while the epigraph separates the subject into gendered domains. Sodom consequently functions from the outset as more than a geographical name: it is a cultural and moral reference through which the narrative approaches a hidden social world.

The biblical story remains active in the narrator’s account of the city’s descendants. Reflecting on the angels sent to learn whether Sodom’s reported conduct was true, he imagines that an investigator who belonged to the group being investigated would have recognized what conventional explanations concealed. In this comic reversal, Sodom is associated with knowledge unavailable to outsiders: the narrator makes recognition, rather than mere accusation, the decisive issue in interpreting the city and its people.

Charlus and the Discovery of a Hidden Identity

The narrator’s first major association of Sodom with a contemporary person follows his encounter with Baron de Charlus and Jupien. At first, he does not understand what he is seeing. Once the explanation becomes apparent, however, Charlus seems transformed: details of his appearance, voice, and earlier dealings with the narrator acquire a new coherence. The discovery changes not only the narrator’s view of Charlus but also his way of reading social relations. What had appeared to be separate or contradictory impressions can now be assembled into a legible pattern.

The narrator describes this change as the dispelling of an error that gives the observer an additional sense. Charlus’s identity had been present but unreadable to him, like writing that does not appear until one knows how to see it. The episode thus makes Sodom a figure for concealed identity and belated recognition: the relevant facts do not necessarily change when a secret is understood, but their place in the observer’s account of a person changes decisively.

Secrecy, Recognition, and Social Risk

The narrator’s reflections extend beyond Charlus to a broader population whose members, he argues, must navigate a society that treats their desire as shameful or punishable. Secrecy affects family life, friendship, and public standing. Relationships may be misread through conventional assumptions, while candor risks rejection. The account presents concealment not simply as an individual choice but as a response to social conditions that restrict what can safely be acknowledged.

Recognition nevertheless occurs through shared signs and experience. The narrator imagines a dispersed network whose members may identify one another across differences of rank and occupation, even when they do not openly associate. Shared needs, habits, dangers, and knowledge can create a form of mutual intelligibility that outsiders fail to perceive. The result is a community that is at once socially extensive and difficult to name: its members can remain unknown to the surrounding public while recognizing one another across boundaries that would ordinarily divide them.

The narrative also links stigma to misrecognition and rumor. In artistic circles, Charlus’s reputation is intensified by confusion with another man of a similar name, and stories about the other person are attributed to the Baron. At the same time, Charlus’s real sexuality is known to only a few in the Faubourg Saint-Germain, while it is discussed more freely outside the social circle in which he moves. Sodom therefore names a world in which information is unevenly distributed: some people know, some infer, some repeat mistaken accounts, and others preserve a public appearance that allows uncertainty to continue.

The Dispersed City and the Novel’s Social Vision

The narrator imagines the descendants of Sodom as numerous and established across the world, occupying many professions and social ranks. Their dispersal challenges the idea that the city can be contained within a single place or separated from ordinary society. He even pictures them as present in exclusive clubs, where condemnation may come from people who share the identity being condemned. The image makes public hostility and private concealment mutually entangled rather than opposites.

This imagined dispersion also gives the city a deliberately paradoxical relation to collective belonging. The narrator cautions against the idea of rebuilding Sodom as a separate community: in his account, its inhabitants would leave rather than risk seeming to belong there, returning only when circumstances compelled them. The city thus stands for a social condition that cannot be solved simply by assigning it a territory. Its inhabitants are already present in many places, while the pressure to deny membership helps keep that presence difficult to see.

Sodom’s narrative significance lies in the way it joins place, identity, and knowledge. The biblical city supplies a language of judgment and exile; Charlus’s discovery makes hidden identity newly visible; and the narrator’s broader reflections describe a dispersed community shaped by secrecy, shared recognition, and social danger. The name therefore marks both an imagined origin and a condition of life within the surrounding world, where belonging may be privately understood even as it must be publicly denied.