Marius and Some Problems Therewith
May. 1st, 2014 07:28 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
thjazi posting in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
les_miserablesI think part of our problem with Marius-- and by " our" I mean " you and me" not some generic reading audience-- is that we are personally VERY MUCH NOT 19C Middle Class Dudes.
Like, we fail to be any of that in any way at all. And of course many of the Amis are ALSO rocking that social status, but at the same time they're challenging it both politically and in the way they choose to carry out their personal lives, and on the grounds of People Actually Engaging With Social Theory I can recognize them. But Marius is really really not fighting the system on a personal level-- I think the closest he comes is his contentment with his low-paying job for the sake of his free time, but that's more out of the convenience of the moment than any real philosophy--and on a political level, of course, he's totally fine about King Pear until the barricade is suddenly convenient to his drama. Marius to a large extent WANTS the standard package he's been raised to want, and that's not necessarily BAD-- not everyone can Live The Revolution, and all-- but it IS necessarily a whole world of unexamined expectations I can't even access, even with being pretty steeped in the handed-down Lore of The 19th Century Dude. Which I think may be part of that " seems like an obnoxious customer" vibe you're getting; he's unavoidably a child of superprivilege, socially, however screwed up his personal family life is. As such, I suspect a lot of his more baffling maneuvers would make more sense to Hugo's expected (I don't say intended, exactly, but you can see in every reference he makes to the reader that he EXPECTED a certain kind of reader with a certain set of social experiences) audience. But for me, and I'm guessing for you too, there's a lot Marius does that is like-- okay, I'm already annoyed with the modern version, and HERE IT IS CRANKED UP TO ELEVENTY, and I CAN'T look at that behavior and recognize myself because I am not an upper middle class (able bodied! well educated!) guy, and it's never been an OPTION for me, so in that line the idea of Marius as any sort of reader surrogate just doesn't work for me at all, and ends up stomping on a lot of the same sore spot I have from dealing with his modern equivalents.
(Which doesn't at all mean that I'm innocent of The Violence Inherent In The System myself, of course- if ditching it were THAT easy it wouldn't BE The System-- but it does mean I've had to think about it in a way Marius doesn't and mostly doesn't choose to, at least not in any way we actually see as opposed to being told about (and I am increasingly not sure that those bits aren't a bit of an affectionate eyeroll from an old guy thinking about his younger certainties). )
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Date: 2014-05-01 01:52 pm (UTC)And yeah, I think this is a big factor. We've had to think about it in some ways, and in some ways the expectations of privilege HAVE changed in the details -- not that it's gone away, FOR SURE, but there are base assumptions of The 19th Century Rich Dude that are different than the base assumptions of The 21st Century Rich Dude, so that's a gap too.
It's the old problem of the everyman reader-surrogate protagonist. If you're not from that group, it can be really alienating, instead of a window in to set you at ease. But in this case there's that historical distance, too, so sometimes it's hard to tell exactly what we're supposed to see as Ah Yes, The Standard Expected Thing and what we're supposed to see as Marius Being The Pontmercy Friend and what we're supposed to see as Marius Screwing Up.
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Date: 2014-05-01 02:56 pm (UTC)Also, I really think a lot of 19th-century middle class dudes would have been perfectly capable of treating Valjean better at the end of the novel. Yes, there was intense prejudice about convicts. There was also an understanding about the importance of family love, and there were Christian ideas about forgiveness and redemption floating around, and if he had WANTED to accept Valjean he certainly had arguments available at hand to fall back on as support.
tl;dr: yes, it can be hard to tell which of Marius's behaviors are just to be expected and which aren't, but I think a good many of them aren't.
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Date: 2014-05-01 04:50 pm (UTC)I feel like most of the specific things you are discussing there (his tendency to forget to treat people as people, when he's trying to Be The Man His Father Was) are things that I wrote off less as being a 19th Century Middle-Class Dude and more as Being A Boy, tbh. Those are pretty universal Being A Boy problems.
But I also feel like - this is less directly related to what you were discussing on Tumblr - but I think there's also a tendency to see Marius in a harsher light than the other characters because he never really sees himself as that badly off, he sees himself as making free choices, even when he's really just as constrained by sucky life circumstances as other characters, and I think because Hugo's identifying so hard with him, he's given more agency in his bad choices in the narrative, too.
I was thinking about this when brick!club had a tumblr discussion about Marius and Choosing To Be Poor, and how it's not the same at all as Really Being Poor, and in a way, that's true.
But on the other hand, at the same time that discussion was happening, there were *multiple* people in my DW/tumblr circles, most of whom came from what we'd consider middle-class backgrounds, who were asking for donations from the internet to help them escape abusive family situations.
And, you know, if someone I knew right now was telling me about how they got kicked out of their grandfather's after he went through their things and burned their only letter from their father, and then said they could never come back until they agreed with his ultra-right-wing-politics, and then casually mentioned that he'd also been going through their mail to cut them off from the rest of their family, and some of the other stuff that had happened in that house - and then said that their aunt, who also lived there and was terrified of her father, had offered to send them money, but they really didn't want to feel like they were still dependent on that household - we would not accuse him of "choosing to be poor." We would say "OMG Marius stay the hell away from there, do you you need a place to stay for awhile, we will put out a call for donations, here is a list of ways to get low-cost therapy in your area, I understand that you're having trouble working full-time, getting your head together just as important right now."
Marius has ALL THE ISSUES, but he has good reasons for having them, and the thing is, Hugo doesn't use any of the terminology, or write any of the explicit narratives, that we expect for an abuse-recovery story, because those narratives didn't really exist yet, and because that's not really the focus of what Hugo is doing with Marius. So it's easy to see Marius as just being made of Pontmercy. But all the same, it's actually a really realistic description *of* someone trying to recover from abuse without making it the focus of the story. The way it's presented is shaped by the 19th century, but the story itself - well, when I say I've seen people going through the same stuff, I mean the exact same story to a scary level of detail, just with internet fandom as their support network instead of drunk revolutionaries.
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Date: 2014-05-01 05:49 pm (UTC)I also wrote much of Marius' issues off as Being An Immature Person sort of problems. (Because, I mean, I'm a girl, and I had a pretty inflexible and immature worldview when I was a teenager too! I like to think I've improved since then. And I actually do think Hugo is making a point about how we all have to get through our inflexibilities and immaturities.)
But also, on your last point: on my last reread I remember feeling a sort of horrified sympathy for kid!Marius, who was isolated from anyone even slightly his own age and got no affection whatsoever. I mean, it rather makes perfect sense that he had a lot of trouble interacting with his peers, that he really had no idea how to carry on any kind of relationship at all (be it friendship, romantic, or familial), and that he had an odd and inflexible worldview in general.
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Date: 2014-05-01 06:30 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-05-01 06:56 pm (UTC)But yeah, the whole Cosette thing, can't help you there. I mean, I'm still willing to give him some "yes, you have no practice in actual human interaction" slack, but the narrative seems to think what he's doing is fine, which... not so much.
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Date: 2014-05-01 08:08 pm (UTC)And, yeah, it's totally okay to look at a person, and say, "This person is an abuse survivor and they are working very hard to Be Better and also they terrify the shit out of me and I'm going in the other direction." I have known plenty of people like that, too.
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Date: 2014-05-01 07:44 pm (UTC)(or maybe I've just been subjected to more than my fair share of modern boys who are trying to be antique gentlemen. That is definitely a possibility.)
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Date: 2014-05-01 08:02 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-05-01 05:54 pm (UTC)(also, thanks for digging up the Tumblr link)
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Date: 2014-05-01 06:22 pm (UTC)And if it's affectionate eyerolling from Hugo then, honestly, it's all kind of going over my head. Not that that might not be what he's doing, it's just that it's a bit too Old White Dude for me to see, much less appreciate.
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Date: 2014-05-01 07:02 pm (UTC)Yeah, I'd argue that Hugo agrees with you: that he's showing the terrible, horrible, consequences of thinking that way. Because what happens to Valjean is, in fact, horrible, and it's in some sense the first time Marius has had to confront that his life outlook has consequences.
But yes, it's pretty common not to understand people who aren't like oneself. I mean, that probably accounts for the vast majority of the drama in the world in general, right? (I may be sensitive to this because my mom regularly does the "But of course no one can think about this at all differently from the way I do," by which I mean, many times a day, about things ranging all the way from general philosophy of life to her specific taste in kitchen decor.)
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Date: 2014-05-01 10:27 pm (UTC)His story is structured like a coming of age tale, but he doesn't seem to learn much. After four years of being friends with a revolutionary, after seeing abject poverty first hand, after going through the barricade, he still reacts to Valjean's story like a conservative bourgeois. If it happened early in his story, if we saw how much he had to learn, then saw him learning, I'm sure I'd feel differently, but it's the end of his on page story. Maybe he does learn a vital lesson, but we don't get to see it, and that feels like strange storytelling.
And as others have said it's hard to be sure how much of his behaviour we're supposed to find wrong. I don't think we're meant to be on board with how he treats Valjean, but some of the stuff with Cosette I just don't know if it's meant to be messed up, or if Hugo thinks it's fine and that makes for uncomfortable reading. Either way I find I'm not very confident about their future at the end.
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Date: 2014-05-03 03:47 pm (UTC)I'm curious now what the general attitude towards common criminals was among the republicans of his time. From what I can remember earlier on during the French Revolution there was a strong judgmental strand among many radicals towards them, but perhaps in the 1820s and 1830s things had changed.
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Date: 2014-05-06 06:52 pm (UTC)