14
(p. 269)
“do its work!”:
In this image of the spider and the fly, we see
anankè
(the French rendition of the Greek word for “fate”) at work. A metaphor for his own unstoppable path toward calamity, this image will repeatedly come back to Frollo during the course of the novel.
15
(p. 318)
“pity upon me!”:
After the slow revelation of Frollo’s secret obsession with Esmeralda, this frenzied confession of his love reveals the depth of Frollo’s “misery.” The antithetical discourse employed by Frollo (abhorred/loved, torture/caress) further emphasizes the abyss that divides—and that will continue to divide—the priest from the gypsy.
16
(p. 339)
strength of God:
No longer the passive participant that he was during the Feast of Fools, his trial, and his torture, Quasimodo, with foresight and purpose, saves Esmeralda here from her imminent death. From this point on, he will remain active and even proactive in his behavior, seeking to protect Esmeralda at all costs.
17
(p. 360)
gipsy utterly amazed:
Like all of Hugo’s heroes, Quasimodo is unable to communicate in a way that allows him to connect to others. With the exception of Frollo, with whom Quasimodo converses using a rudimentary mixture of signs and gestures, he is literally (as a result of his deafness) cut off from the world around him. The failure of this effort to express his feelings to Esmeralda underscores his isolation, as his only recourse is to silence.
18
(p. 436)
“my good Bastille?”:
The answer to this question will, of course, come during the Revolution, when this Bastille, from which Louis XI so confidently monitors the vagrants’ uprising, is the location of a “successful” assault, one that signals the beginning of the end for the French monarchy.
19
(p. 438)
“It is myself!”:
With the threat of fissure ever present in his mind, Louis XI will be merciless in his repression of the vagrants. The difference in his attitude between the moment when he approves of the revolt (believing it to be against the Provost of the Palace and thus furthering his goal of eliminating decentralized power) and the moment when he does not (learning that it is against the Church, which is under his protection) highlights the unwavering tyranny of this king, who uses the people as a political instrument.
20
(p. 449)
“your deaf friend ...
who it could be?”: Once the unique object of Frollo’s love, Jehan, whose gruesome death at the hands of Quasimodo is relived here, has been all but forgotten by the priest during his increasingly relentless pursuit of Esmeralda. Yet no more than he could force his brother to yield to his wishes can he force Esmeralda to yield to his advances: Frollo-even when disguised, as he is here—continues to inspire only horror in her.
21
(p. 451 )
stolen away with the goat ... Rue Grenier-sur-l‘Eau:
Gringoire’s escape with Djali instead of Esmeralda again underscores the fact that the goat is her mistress’s double. But Djali represents for Gringoire a more “attainable” version of Esmeralda, one who will re turn his affection. This burlesque couple will be among the few to survive the mass evacuation of characters that is about to occur.
22
(p. 467)
was no longer there:
In spite of Esmeralda’s plea, no “help” will come from the guardsman. This final appearance—and disappearance—of Phoebus, which leads directly to Esmeralda’s perdition, accentuates, on the contrary, her complete and utter insignificance to him.
23
(p. 483)
“all that I ever loved!”:
Even if Frollo’s death is at Quasimodo’s own hand, this loss, coupled with that of Esmeralda, is overwhelming and indeed insurmountable for Quasimodo, who has received so little love in his life and knows nothing outside the protective enclaves of the cathedral.
24
(p. 483)
tragic end: he married:
This ironic commentary on Phoebus’s “fate” speaks to the moral emptiness, criminal indifference, and bourgeois mediocrity that define him. In opposition to the “marriage” that is the subject of the novel’s concluding chapter, this loveless union, through which Phoebus will link his name to Fleur-de-Lys’s fortune, cements Phoebus’s place and role in the social world depicted in the novel.
25
(p. 485)
crumbled into dust:
This “erasure” of all traces of Quasimodo—as his skeleton fantastically disintegrates into dust—brings the novel full circle back to the “absent” word
anankè
on which the story is “based.”
26
(p. 486)
are not new:
The chapters added to this eighth edition in 1832 are: “Unpopularity” (book 4, chapter 6),
“Abbas Beati Martini”
(book 5, chapter 1 ), and “The One Will Kill the Other” (book 5, chapter 2).
27
(p. 487)
creation ... of the poet:
In all of Hugo’s fiction, he cultivates the “other readers” to whom he refers in this paragraph—those who look beyond the plot to uncover the ideological content of the work. In a proposed dedication to
The Man Who Laughs
(1869), Hugo christens this reader
le lecteur pensif
(“the thoughtful reader”) and promises greater rewards to any reader who seeks to apprehend the meaning of the multiple and sometimes contradictory layers of his writing.
28
(p. 489)
clumsy architecture ... Renaissance:
This theme will be further amplified in Hugo’s “Guerre aux démolisseurs” (“War on Those Who Demolish”), published in 1834 in
Litterature et philosophie mêlées
(“Literature and Philosophy Mingled”), which builds upon his 1825 musings in “Sur la destruction des monuments en France” (“On the Destruction of Monuments in France”), a piece on the unnecessary demolition of historical monuments.
Inspired by The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Victor Hugo’s
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
has been brought to the screen an extraordinary number of times, including two silents titled
Esmeralda
(1905 and 1922), Jean Delannoy’s 1957 version starring Anthony Quinn, a BBC TV play (1977), a 1982 made-for-television production starring Anthony Hopkins as Quasimodo and Derek Jacobi as Claude Frollo, and another television adaptation simply titled
The Hunchback
(1997), starring Mandy Patinkin and Salma Hayek.
The first full-screen production of Hugo’s classic was the silent 1923 film
The Hunchback of Notre Dame,
starring Lon Chaney as Quasimodo. Director Wallace Worsley faithfully re-creates medieval Paris, in particular the majestic cathedral of Notre Dame. But the one-eyed Chaney, wearing a hairy body suit, a leather harness to prevent him from standing upright, and a seventy-pound hump on his back, is the film’s most memorable spectacle, giving a sensitive performance as the grotesque, misshapen bell ringer. Chaney’s portrayal of the deaf, hideous, but ultimately kind “monster” predicts the pathos of later films centered around an outsider—especially those in the golden age of horror such as
Frankenstein
(1931) and
Dracula
(1931). The scene of Quasimodo’s public flogging, followed by Esmeralda’s (Patsy Ruth Miller) offering him water to drink, is particularly moving.
The next exemplary film
of The Hunchback of Notre Dame
was William Dieterle’s lavish, all-star adaptation of 1939. Shot on location in Paris, with large-scale fifteenth-century sets, the film features grand camera sweeps of Notre Dame Cathedral and captures the swarming crowds and the ominous public square, perfectly setting the medieval stage on which Church and State grapple for dominance.
In the role of Quasimodo is a terrifically made-up and stooped Charles Laughton, who also appeared in another Hugo film adaptation, Les
Misérables
(1935). The grotesque Laughton cuts a stunning figure as he peers out from the spires of Notre Dame sandwiched between gargoyles. Nineteen-year-old Maureen O‘Hara, in her screen debut, shines as the gypsy Esmeralda, charming the audience along with Quasimodo, Claude Frollo (Cedric Hardwicke), and even King Louis XI (Harry Davenport), who watches, positively enthralled, as she dances. Hardwicke’s Frollo, with his ghastly pallor and ghoulish repugnance, emerges as the story’s true monster, who, surprisingly for the period in which this film was made, threatens Esmeralda with decidedly licentious intent. Supporting these actors are Edmond O’Brien (another film debut) as the poet-playwright Gringoire and Walter Hampden as Frollo’s brother.
The year 1939 is often remembered as the grandest moment in American cinema with the release of such renowned films as
Gone with the Wind, The Wizard of Oz, Stagecoach,
and
Wuthering
Heights. Yet even with this stiff competition, Dieterle’s
Hunchback
garnered Oscar nominations for sound and Alfred Newman’s score.
Exceedingly popular is Disney’s 1996 animated feature The Hunchback
of Notre Dame,
featuring the vocal talents of Tom Hulce, Kevin Kline, and Demi Moore. Directors Gary Trousdale and Kirk Wise, who explored a nearly identical theme in Disney’s Beauty
and the Beast
(1991), struggle to carry off a production interesting to both children and adults. Hulce (best known for his vir tuosic performance as Mozart in 1984’s
Amadeus)
lends his voice to Quasimodo, playing him more youthfully than his predecessors. When “Quasi” finds himself pelted with objects at the Feast of Fools celebration, the fiery Esmeralda (Moore) comes to his rescue, forever endearing herself to the hunchback. Kevin Kline portrays the film’s other hero in love with Esmeralda: the punning Phoebus, captain of the Guard. Together they lead a heroic crusade against prejudice and persecution.
Typical of Disney’s safe approach to classics is a chorus of three gargoyles, animated to provide a bit of forced comic relief. And not surprising is the removal of Hugo’s bleak-hearted pessimism from the tale’s conclusion. However, the animation, aided by some computer-generated imaging, is wonderful, particularly the pleasingly dark landscapes and Notre Dame’s intricate architecture. Disney’s
Hunchback of Notre Dame
was nominated for an Academy Award in the Original Musical or Comedy Score category for its roster of songs by Alan Menken and Stephen Schwartz.
Comments & Questions
In this section, we aim to provide the reader with an array of perspectives on the text, as well as questions that challenge those perspectives. The commentary has been culled from sources as diverse as reviews contemporaneous with the work, letters written by the author, literary criticism of later generations, and appreciations written throughout the work’s history. Following the commentary, a series of questions seeks to filter Victor Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame through a variety of points of view and bring about a richer understanding of this enduring work.
Comments
FOREIGN QUARTERLY REVIEW
Notre Dame de Paris
has already, within a few months of its publication, run through several editions; and as long as a taste remains for the extraordinary, or perhaps it should be called the tremendous, such works must be popular. They appeal to an appetite which is shared by the peer with the peasant. Victor Hugo is not a writer in whose hands the power of moulding the human sympathies is likely to be idle. He is eloquent, his fancy is active, his imagination fertile; and passion, which gives life and energy to the conceptions of a writer, and which, acting upon ideas as fire does upon the parched woods of America, sets the whole scene in a flame, is in him readily roused. Hugo may be called an affected writer, a mannerist, or a horrorist, but he can never be accused of the great vice, in modern times, the most heinous of all—dullness. A volume of Hugo is an active stimulant.
—July 1831
THE ATHENÆUM
It is especially in
Notre Dame de Paris—a
terrible and powerful narrative, which haunts the memory with the horrible distinctness of a nightmare—that M. Victor Hugo displays, in all their strength, at once the enthusiasm and self-possession, the boldness and flexibility of his genius. What varieties of suffering are heaped together in these melancholy pages—what ruins built up—what terrible passions put in action—what strange incidents produced! All the foul-ness and all the superstitions of the middle ages are melted, and stirred, and mixed together with a trowel of mingled gold and iron. The poet has breathed upon all those ruins of the past; and, at his will, they have taken their old forms and risen up again, to their true stature, upon that Parisian soil which toiled and groaned, of yore, beneath their hideous weight, like the earth under Etna. Behold those narrow streets, those swarming squares, those cut-throat alleys, those soldiers, merchants, and churches; look upon that host of passions circulating through the whole—all breathing, and burning, and armed!
—July 8, 1837
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
The moral end that the author had before him in the conception of
Notre Dame de Paris
was (he tells us) to “denounce” the external fatality that hangs over men in the form of foolish and inflexible superstition. To speak plainly, this moral purpose seems to have mighty little to do with the artistic conception; moreover it is very questionably handled, while the artistic conception is developed with the most consummate success. Old Paris lives for us with newness of life: we have ever before our eyes the city cut into three by the two arms of the river, the boat-shaped island “moored” by five bridges to the different shores, and the two unequal towns on either hand. We forget all that enumeration of palaces and churches and convents which occupies so many pages of admirable description, and the thoughtless reader might be inclined to conclude from this, that they were pages thrown away; but this is not so: we forget, indeed, the details as we forget or do not see the different layers of paint on a completed picture; but the thing desired has been accomplished, and we carry away with us a sense of the “Gothic profile” of the city, of the “surprising forest of pinnacles and towers and belfries,” and we know not what of rich and intricate and quaint. And throughout, Notre Dame has been held up over Paris by a height far greater than that of its twin towers: the Cathedral is present to us from the first page to the last; the title has given us the clew, and already in the Palace of Justice the story begins to attach itself to that central building by character after character. It is purely an effect of mirage; Notre Dame does not, in reality, thus dominate and stand out above the city; and any one who should visit it, in the spirit of the Scott-tourists to Edinburgh or the Trossachs, would be almost offended at finding nothing more than this old church thrust away into a corner. It is purely an effect of mirage, as we say; but it is an effect that permeates and possesses the whole book with astonishing consistency and strength. And then, Hugo has peopled this Gothic city, and, above all, this Gothic church, with a race of men even more distinctly Gothic than their surroundings. We know this generation already: we have seen them clustered about the worn capitals of pillars, or craning forth over the church-leads with the open mouths of gargoyles. About them all there is that sort of stiff quaint unreality, that conjunction of the grotesque, and even of a certain bourgeois smugness, with passionate contortion and horror, that is so characteristic of Gothic art. Esmeralda is somewhat an exception; she and the goat traverse the story like two children who have wandered in a dream. The finest moment of the book is when these two share with the two other leading characters, Don Claude and Quasimodo, the chill shelter of the old cathedral. It is here that we touch most intimately the generative artistic idea of the romance: are they not all four taken out of some quaint moulding, illustrative of the Beatitudes, or the Ten Commandments, or the seven deadly sins? What is Quasimodo but an animated gargoyle? What is the whole book but the reanimation of Gothic art?