A Victorian Gothic Novel Binge

Outside of getting quite behind on Les Mis, I am currently having a bit of a Victorian Gothic Novel Binge, having recently finished The Pleasures of Men (Kate Williams) and The Somnambulist (Essie Fox). I’ve also recently started Hide Me Among the Graves (Tim Powers). I adore Victorian novels as well as Victorian Gothic Fiction, I think it probably has to be my favourite genre and I’d been looking forward to the two I’ve just read (I discovered Tim Powers in the library). This is the ideal time of year for snuggling up with something lurid about creepy secrets. 

Both of them ended up getting three stars. I liked them but neither of the books gripped me and I was glad I borrowed them from the library. I think Kate will probably get much better with her next novel, but at the moment her style is a little too self-consciously literary and the book ended up confusing at times. I ended up feeling like I should be studying it, not reading it for fun. I did like the way that she subverted the idea of the Victorian heroine, with the secretly wicked Catherine, but I think Michael Faber did much better with Sugar in The Crimson Petal and the White. Still, the descriptions of a London where people fear being murdered by the poor were very good. 

The Somnambulist was less self-conscious and contained less description of London, moving instead to the music halls and to Dinwood (Hampton) Court. I have to say I agree with the comments people made about the predictability of the plot at the beginning, but it didn’t really detract from the rest of the novel and I read it quite quickly. The ending was a bit rushed and strange, however. I can see that she wanted to end the book with a kind of symmetry, but it felt like she just stuck it in to finish the book quickly. I think she wanted the reader to be genuinely surprised by events, but I’m not sure I bought it.

Anyway, I shall carry on reading (or trying to read) the Tim Powers, alongside Umberto Eco’s new book which will have to go back to the library soon (it’s not thrilling me) as well as the other books I’m reading.

Victor and the Tale of Many Coincidences (and Political Viewpoints)

Part Three opens with an extended description of the life of a Paris urchin (or gamin), in this case, Gavroche, the homeless son of the Jondrette family, who are apparently the much reduced impoverished Thernadiers (although it is not clear at this stage who they are, only that they neglect him in favour of his sisters, as they did when they lived in the tavern).  Hugo portrays the gamin as suffering extreme poverty with a kind of bravery or insolence towards his situation; whereas Cosette is pathetic (in the sense that she inspires pity) in the way that the Thernadiers abuse her, Gavorche doesn’t recognise that what they are doing is abuse and neglect and seems to take poor treatment without complaining. However, it has affected him: “…while the laughter of his years was on his lips, there was only darkness and emptiness in his heart.” (p509). Nevertheless, Gavroche is free, an extremely important concept in the book. 

Again, Hugo seemingly digresses from the plot, and it’s only at the end of book one that we discover that Marius lives next door to the family.  The reader is then introduced to Monsieur Gillenormand, another seemingly unconnected character. If Gavroche represents the children of Paris, the urchins, Gillenormand represents the traditionalists, the bourgeois monarchists. Books two to five of part three explore the conflict between the political ideals of the Monarchists, the supporters of Napoleon and the Republicans. Gillenormand has two daughters, the living one a religiously bigoted spinster who looks after him, the other one dead who was married to a colonel in Waterloo, whom the old man is ashamed of. Marius is the old man’s grandson, the son of the colonel and the dead daughter. Gillenormand is harsh towards Marius and teaches him to hate his father by taking him to pro-monarchist anti-revolution salons, where the visitors revile Bonaparte.

In a third digression Hugo describes the town of Vernon where the old man’s son-in-law Georges Pontmercy lives. In one of a number of coincidences in the novel, Pontmercy is the man Thernadier robbed, who believed that Thernadier saved him. Hugo is criticised for the sometimes implausible coincidences in the plot, but according to Adam Thirwell, in his review in the Guardian (12^th July 2008), the main theme is that of the Infinite, there are no digressions because everything is relevant to the plot, the plot’s coincidences are “exaggerated” deliberately; “Hugo wants a plot that is at once about total randomness, and also predetermination.”  He does this through characters repeatedly failing to recognise each other and through the way that the narrator withholds information from the reader like what the significance of a character or an event is in the plot. The novel is partially naturalistic in the way that the poverty is described in a realistic way, yet the coincidences prevent it from being completely naturalistic in say the way that a modernist or post-modernist novel would be. 

Pontmercy’s final message to his son is to protect Thernad at all costs. Pontmercy’s death affects Marius in that he begins to change his political ideas from those of his grandfather to the ideas of his father, becoming fanatical about Napoleon and changing his name to Baron Marius Pontmercy (a title awarded to his father by Napoleon which is unrecognised by the restored monarchy).  Hugo describes how he falls into a mystical trance contemplating the Battle of Waterloo; it is almost like a Damascene conversion. He worships Napoleon even more than his father did. Through Gillenormand getting his great nephew Theodule to spy on Marius, the old man discovers that Marius has been visiting his father’s grave and throws him out. 

In another apparent digression, we are introduced to the ABC Society, representative of the Republican/Revolutionary viewpoint. The Society’s mission is universal education but it serves as a counterpoint to the kind of salons Marius grew up in, a place where a great many different subjects can be discussed freely. Marius meets Leigle (or Bossuet) at school, and then he becomes friendly with Courfeyrac who introduces him to the society, which causes Marius to change his political views once more.  

Perhaps Hugo tries not to have a bias towards any one political viewpoint in the novel. He believes that Napoleon’s defeat was inevitable, the character who supports the monarchy is portrayed as being rather cruel towards his nephew and here Grantaire represents the ABC Society with a speech he gives when drunk. Hugo dismisses his attitude: “Scepticism, that dry-rot of the intellect, had left him without a whole thought in his head.” (p565). Graintaine is dismissive of everything. 

Marius argues fervently for Napoleon and the idea of the French Empire, but Combferre causes him to check his words by talking succinctly of the ideals of freedom and the sacred mother the Republic. It is telling that Marius himself is motherless; this is true of many of the characters who either have absent (for whatever reason) or abusive mothers.  Hugo uses imagery of the earth being furrowed for the sowing of seed, or a wound to describe how Marius feels. He fears that embracing this philosophy will lead to him losing his father and becoming even more isolated. 

What is worse is that he is penniless, but like Valjean before him he is determined to control his own destiny by working hard and not getting into debt. The poverty he endures then overcomes affects his personality in that he becomes “aloof...withdrawn to the point of surliness.” (p587). He is “inclined a little too much to the side of contemplation.” (p591), and avoids certain financial security for the sake of his freedom. 

During his poverty Marius had searched for the Thernadiers without success, but Hugo drops in another apparently insignificant event where Marius takes pity on the “wretchedly poor” Jondrette family (p598), the reader is still unaware of their identity.

In the final chapter of Book 5 Gillenormand rages against Marius, the Republicans and romanticism, particularly the idiots who attended the play Hernani (by our very own Victor Hugo). “The story is set in 16th-century Spain and extols the Romantic hero in the form of a noble outlaw at war with society, dedicated to a passionate love and driven by inexorable fate.” (Encyclopaedia Britannica), similar to Les Miserables? Gillernormand both fears and derides the young and their philosophy, but doesn’t seem to want Theodule to criticise Marius. 

End of Part 2 - Victor and Religion

Whereas there is a conscious effort to distance the reader from the author in modernist and postmodernist works, in the work of nineteenth century authors it is often apparent that it is important who was writing and why.  There is no possibility of dismissing Hugo’s voice in Les Mis as he directly addressed readers on one of the central theme of the book, the issue of religion. So far the reader has encountered some religious figures and characters associated with religion including the Bishop and his sister and Madame Victurnien. Now, the reader is given a fuller understanding of Hugo’s philosophy.

Partly due to the old woman’s spying, partly due to Valjean’s unfortunate generosity to a beggar who is also a police informant and also to do with the Thernadiers gossiping about Valjean ‘abducting’ Cosette; Javert manages to find them, making it necessary to leave in a hurry. The excitement of the pursuit of the pair is partly hampered by Hugo’s insistence on describing parts of Paris, but is nevertheless quite a thrilling part of the book. Valjean and Cosette eventually find themselves at the convent of Petit-Picus, where Fauchelevent, a man whom Valjean previously saved, works as a gardener. Again, there is a sense that destiny or fate is at work here, that Valjean is rewarded for his saving of a man at peril of being recaptured. Also, the political situation of the time affects the narrative in that Valjean escapes Javert again as the Police Inspector fears arresting the wrong man due to the police being censured in the press for false arrests (he has trouble recognizing Valjean, who has aged considerably in a short period of time). 

Hugo goes into great detail about the convent of the Order of Perpetual Adoration and the school attached, a somewhat strict Benedictine order. There is a sense that he is careful to describe the practices due to the sense that it is shortly to become obsolete. There are already a number of nuns inhabiting the ‘little convent’ outside the main convent, who are refugees from the Revolution. At the end of Book Six Denny has appended Book Seven to the end of the book, which is understandable as it interferes somewhat with the narrative flow. Book Seven continues and expanded information about the convent and Hugo’s ideas about religion. 

Hugo had a complex relationship with religion. Having been brought up as Catholic (but never baptized) he began questioning his faith after he lost his daughter, son-in-law, uncle and cousin in a boating accident. “Grief made him doubt God’s goodness, and yet he struggled to affirm his belief,” (Algis Valiunas, ‘The Sacred Heart of Victor Hugo’, First Things, August 2007). He turned to spiritualism, firstly in an attempt to contact his daughter, but later to contact religious figures such as Moses. Like Voltaire, he considered himself a rationalist deist, with a belief in God but rejecting the Church, in particular the Catholic Church.  This is clear in the way that he views monasteries, convents and other religious orders, as a ‘leprosy’, ‘filled with the dark light of death’ (p1203), consuming valuable resources and causing impoverishment. 

He describes the Spanish convent using grotesque imagery of death and torture.  The use of the medical term ‘recrudescence [of asceticism]’ highlights the way that he considers this type of religion to be like a disease, furthered with adjectives associated with decay: ‘rancid scent’, ‘rotten fish’ and finally ‘the tenderness of corpses returning to embrace the living’ (p1205).  Yet he respects the equality of men and women living in communities and believes that ‘[T]he denial of the Infinite leads straight to nihilism’ (p1210). What he abhors is the kind of religion where men and women are cloistered away from other people. As his portrayal of the Bishop and his sister (and the way that they affect Valjean) shows, he is far from being against religion itself, only that it must be a kind of faith that can be practically demonstrated with good works, charity and mercy towards the poor, and Les Mis did inspire people (including Napoleon III) to do charitable work and to enact social legislation that affected the poor.  However, the Catholic Church took a dim view of the book and Les Mis and Notre Dame de Paris were both part of the Index Liborum Prohibitorium, a list of books banned by the Catholic Church, until 1959, probably due to the way that Hugo viewed religion and also for the portrayal of Fantine. 

In another desperate situation Valjean is almost buried alive when he is hidden in a coffin and smuggled into the convent. In the process he undergoes another spiritual re-birth, becoming Ultime Fauchelevent by disguising himself as Fauchelevent’s brother and losing his any kind of pride he was in danger of developing as Pere Madeleine. Fauchelevent is feted as a hero and Cosette attends the convent school, gaining an education and the good will of the nuns who believe she will become a nun herself because “she will be plain.” (p485). Valjean contemplates the life of a nun, comparing it to that of a prisoner, realizing that the nuns undergo a worse suffering voluntarily for the sake of their souls.