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les_miserables2013-07-03 11:40 am
genarti) wrote in les_miserables2013-07-03 11:40 am
Entry tags:
Meta: the honeymoon suite
This is a crosspost from tumblr, edited slightly to be a coherent single post instead of a reblogging reply. (There's a thing called Brick!Club which is people reading through the book, one chapter per week, and blogging about their thoughts and meta and so forth; this comes from that.) The question that spurred it was about the fact that Valjean stays (reluctantly) in the honeymoon suite at the Thénardiers' inn when he comes to retrieve Cosette. The gist was (from ![[tumblr.com profile]](https://www.tumblr.com/favicon.ico)
vivelafizz and pilferingapples) along the lines of "Oh geez, does that mean what I think it means, if so that's UNNECESSARY AND SKEEVY, HUGO."
And then I waxed long-winded in reply, and thought it might be worth porting over here too:
Ahaha oh man, I hadn't even thought about symbolism in the honeymoon suite. Okay, here, let me think out loud for a bit, because my brain immediately popped up the phrase "bride of Christ" and I think there's something useful (and usefully non-skeevy) in that. LET'S SEE IF WE CAN FIX THIS.
(I have no idea exactly what symbolism Hugo was going for here. I'm inclined to always assume Hugo meant most of the symbolism, because there's JUST SO MUCH OF IT EVERYWHERE, but I'm also pretty sure that Hugo would be delighted to take credit for anything his fans found and liked, whether or not he'd actually meant to do any of it. "Why yes, I am just that much of a genius!!!" But whatever he meant, I am gonna go with the version of the symbolism that I like better, whenever I have a choice. I don't actually object to Valjean symbolically marrying Fantine if it's only on the symbolic plane and for the purposes of adopting her daughter; neither of these characters think in symbols anyway, so that's all a narrative thing that they can be happily oblivious to, and they'd both do a lot more than that for Cosette. But still, I think there are other angles one can take for this.)
The bride of Christ is the Church, in standard symbolism -- the Church as a whole the bride, Christ the bridegroom, the bride obeying her husband (because wheee medieval ideal gender roles) and the two united in love -- but what I always think of is nuns. Nuns, who voluntarily and formally give up all earthly romantic and sexual love, and wed themselves instead to the Church and to God with a vow of eternal fidelity, in life and in heaven. Valjean is yet another of Hugo's virgin men who seems chaste from utter disinterest as much as anything -- maybe asexual, maybe just traumatized from a dissociative prison experience and his lack of personal connections with other humans, maybe just the weight of symbolism. But if Enjolras's mistress is Patria, Javert's is Law or Orderly Social Structure, and Valjean's is Virtue or Saintliness. It's not that Hugo thinks romance and virtue are inseparable, obviously -- aside from the raging hypocrisy that would represent, there's Marius our protagonist with his happy ending of loving marriage, and several side characters who have wives or husbands or mistresses and aren't condemned for it -- but being married to an abstract virtue does seem to be A Thing in this book, and it's one that seems to preclude interest in (or at least emotional energy for) more carnal relationships for the human participant.
But as others have discussed, here we're still in the middle of Valjean's transition from the convict to the mayor to the saint. He's got the actions part of it down, at least to some extent: as Mayor Madeleine, he hasn't committed crimes (unless you count the breaking and entering for charity), he's given generously, he's been humble, he's tried his best to support a town singlehandedly. But as we see, that's fundamentally flawed, in two ways.
First, the personal: Valjean's heart is still withered, cold, locked up and sad and suffering. It's not until Cosette that he learns again how to weep and love. It's not until Cosette that he gets any kind of transformative catharsis for all he's suffered, and can start to heal his heart. Before that, part of him is still in prison. It's only that his hard labor goes to God instead of the State; he's given over hate, but he hasn't found anything to put in its place.
Second, the societal: all of Madeleine's good deeds are inherently limited, because as soon as he leaves, so do they. Madeleine doesn't interact with people if he can avoid it; he shoves money at them and flees, he smiles to avoid saying anything, he leaves coins on tables in empty houses, he employs as many people as he can but doesn't check on how his managers interpret his policy and whether they fire poor women without sufficient cause, he wins legal arguments with "because I'm the mayor and I say so." What if the next mayor says something different? Well, then that something different will win, because the system hasn't been challenged at all. We just had an unusually charitable guy calling the shots for a while. Nobody really knows him, except for a handful of people, and they're the ones who defend his memory in a town that shrugs and moves on after the titillating gossip about the mayor who turned out to be an escaped convict has lost its spice of newness. I don't blame Valjean for this, because he hardly had the emotional toolkit to be a charismatic force of change. He was doing an amazingly good job with what he had: the impulses of a saint and the tool-bag of a criminal, to paraphrase Hugo (because I'm too lazy to look up the actual quote), and a whole lot of trauma and dissociation and guilt, and dim memories of trying to be a loving member of a family in which everyone was too desperately starved to have much energy to spare for kindness to themselves or each other. When you start out in a family where love means you surreptitiously slip the best bits of food from someone who has almost nothing to give it to someone slightly weaker who has almost nothing, and love means you say nothing when your sister slips your food to her child -- when you follow that with nineteen years of hard labor, abuse, no love or affection, no emotional nourishment, only a little schooling without much context for what good that schooling might do -- when you follow that with the life of an outcast, barely tolerated, with choices only between a miserable life and the worse punishment that would follow for rebelling against it, and then you drop into that one shining overwhelming example of kindness and charity, and lay out a new road through life without much in the way of instructions for following it -- of course the best Valjean can do, the heroic very best efforts of this heroic man, is for a long while to just shove money and (once it's thrust upon him) his own status at every problem that presents itself, without thinking about the long-term or the broader society. He's just keeping his head above water, morally speaking, at least so far as he can see it.
Okay, that got more long-winded than I meant, and I think it's kind of rehashing old ground anyway, in terms of brick!club meta. But the point was: Valjean has been doing the very best he can, but it's been limited, because in all these years what he's been doing is slowly coming to a point where his heart can open up again. It hasn't been open. He's done an amazing amount of good, albeit all short-term, but it's been from guilt and obligation and a confused, muddled desire to bring light instead of pain to the world and the humans around him, but he hasn't loved personally, on any level. Other humans have been a sort of undifferentiated mass to him, I think, coming into focus as they interact with him, slipping away back into the crowd as they leave. Some are more in focus than others -- Fantine for pity, Javert for fear, both of them for the longevity of their stay in his focus, maybe some others too in these years -- but it's still basically Valjean in one corner and The World in the other.
But now, his heart is opening. Now, he's coming to care for a person outside himself, for and as herself, and he'll continue to care for her from now till the end of his life. It's that that completes his journey back to the self he once was, at least as much as he can return to it: the affectionate pruner who patted the heads of the children he loved as much as he could. It's that that completes his journey from the convict (legally dead, emotionally dead) to the man of God, the man who has married himself to saintliness and virtue and a love of humanity, the man who does good without bullets. Basically: in the honeymoon suite, Valjean is symbolically marrying virtue in his heart now, really fully finally absorbing the Bishop's lesson here when Cosette allows him to take the step forward into understanding love and personal caring. Valjean is shown his room by the Thénardiers; then he sneaks into Cosette's room and leaves a gold coin in her shoe in pure Madeleine form; then he goes back to sleep in the honeymoon suite, and when he comes out in the morning, he says not "Why not let her play?" but instead "Suppose you were relieved of her?"
So that's one layer of symbolic consummation going on here. But also, of course, the honeymoon suite shows the Thénardiers' deceit and maybe mocks their caring for each other: Madame Thénardier loves and submits to her husband, but does he love her back? (Does he love anyone? He doesn't really show it, whereas she at least loves her husband and her own daughters. I grant that she's a terrible person and not a great mother to even those daughters, but she loves them in her own way, and I can't remember any evidence that Thénardier cares about anyone but himself at any point.) They sleep in another chamber just like this one, Thénardier tells the mysterious rich stranger, meaning to impress. The honeymoon suite is the fanciest room: the largest, the most expensive, the one that's supposed to be a shrine to future happiness and to earthly joy, and a rare indulgence. When you're traveling with your husband, you stay in whatever room you can afford, but oh, when you're traveling with your new bridegroom, in the first flush of love and joy (and socially permitted sex), you use the money you've saved up or been given by friends and relatives, and you stay in the nicest room there is, and it's all a testament to your joy and a celebration to tuck away in your heart and remember later. Even if you can't travel, maybe you go to the inn in town, and you spend that night in a lovely room that's nicer than anything in your house, where someone else will light a good fire and turn down the blankets and burn fine wax candles and clean up in the morning, because the celebration of your future deserves one night that's more special than your own house where you'll have to sweep and do the chores every day yourself. That room, in the Thénardier's inn, is (Hugo makes sure to tell us), all a lie: Thénardier bought the cheap inn with this room already furnished, he found the flowers, he made them into a little display and called it his wife's wedding cap because he thought that would add respectability where it was lacking.
I think it's also relevant that Valjean tries to sleep in the stable -- humbly, and with incredibly blatant Holy Family metaphors inherent in the choice even before we bring in the fact that it's Christmas and he's adopting a child who will transform his life and finish the redemption of his heart -- and the Thénardiers prevent it. They insist: no, you have money (you have the gold of kings and wise men, you have the silver of the Romans in your pocket), you must sleep in the best room. You must sleep in the room that's a sham all through: its interior decoration of a bridal cap that Thénardier bought along with the building, the inflated price it isn't worth, its celebration of a holy religious and civil rite that you've never participated in and never will show any interest in. Valjean sleeps there, but he isn't touched by it. He would have preferred the stable; in his heart, it's all the same to him, it's all the stable anyway. He goes into the Thénardiers' honeymoon suite a chaste saint, and he emerges just as chaste, and perhaps even more saintly. He goes into this shrine of deceit, reluctantly, and he emerges to purchase his Christmas child with gifts and the payment of all debts (with a greater sum than they ever even were), and carries her to a convent to raise her up in virtue and solitude, until she can pass into an earthly life of love and happiness, her past griefs forgotten, and transform others' lives too with her love.
And then I waxed long-winded in reply, and thought it might be worth porting over here too:
Ahaha oh man, I hadn't even thought about symbolism in the honeymoon suite. Okay, here, let me think out loud for a bit, because my brain immediately popped up the phrase "bride of Christ" and I think there's something useful (and usefully non-skeevy) in that. LET'S SEE IF WE CAN FIX THIS.
(I have no idea exactly what symbolism Hugo was going for here. I'm inclined to always assume Hugo meant most of the symbolism, because there's JUST SO MUCH OF IT EVERYWHERE, but I'm also pretty sure that Hugo would be delighted to take credit for anything his fans found and liked, whether or not he'd actually meant to do any of it. "Why yes, I am just that much of a genius!!!" But whatever he meant, I am gonna go with the version of the symbolism that I like better, whenever I have a choice. I don't actually object to Valjean symbolically marrying Fantine if it's only on the symbolic plane and for the purposes of adopting her daughter; neither of these characters think in symbols anyway, so that's all a narrative thing that they can be happily oblivious to, and they'd both do a lot more than that for Cosette. But still, I think there are other angles one can take for this.)
The bride of Christ is the Church, in standard symbolism -- the Church as a whole the bride, Christ the bridegroom, the bride obeying her husband (because wheee medieval ideal gender roles) and the two united in love -- but what I always think of is nuns. Nuns, who voluntarily and formally give up all earthly romantic and sexual love, and wed themselves instead to the Church and to God with a vow of eternal fidelity, in life and in heaven. Valjean is yet another of Hugo's virgin men who seems chaste from utter disinterest as much as anything -- maybe asexual, maybe just traumatized from a dissociative prison experience and his lack of personal connections with other humans, maybe just the weight of symbolism. But if Enjolras's mistress is Patria, Javert's is Law or Orderly Social Structure, and Valjean's is Virtue or Saintliness. It's not that Hugo thinks romance and virtue are inseparable, obviously -- aside from the raging hypocrisy that would represent, there's Marius our protagonist with his happy ending of loving marriage, and several side characters who have wives or husbands or mistresses and aren't condemned for it -- but being married to an abstract virtue does seem to be A Thing in this book, and it's one that seems to preclude interest in (or at least emotional energy for) more carnal relationships for the human participant.
But as others have discussed, here we're still in the middle of Valjean's transition from the convict to the mayor to the saint. He's got the actions part of it down, at least to some extent: as Mayor Madeleine, he hasn't committed crimes (unless you count the breaking and entering for charity), he's given generously, he's been humble, he's tried his best to support a town singlehandedly. But as we see, that's fundamentally flawed, in two ways.
First, the personal: Valjean's heart is still withered, cold, locked up and sad and suffering. It's not until Cosette that he learns again how to weep and love. It's not until Cosette that he gets any kind of transformative catharsis for all he's suffered, and can start to heal his heart. Before that, part of him is still in prison. It's only that his hard labor goes to God instead of the State; he's given over hate, but he hasn't found anything to put in its place.
Second, the societal: all of Madeleine's good deeds are inherently limited, because as soon as he leaves, so do they. Madeleine doesn't interact with people if he can avoid it; he shoves money at them and flees, he smiles to avoid saying anything, he leaves coins on tables in empty houses, he employs as many people as he can but doesn't check on how his managers interpret his policy and whether they fire poor women without sufficient cause, he wins legal arguments with "because I'm the mayor and I say so." What if the next mayor says something different? Well, then that something different will win, because the system hasn't been challenged at all. We just had an unusually charitable guy calling the shots for a while. Nobody really knows him, except for a handful of people, and they're the ones who defend his memory in a town that shrugs and moves on after the titillating gossip about the mayor who turned out to be an escaped convict has lost its spice of newness. I don't blame Valjean for this, because he hardly had the emotional toolkit to be a charismatic force of change. He was doing an amazingly good job with what he had: the impulses of a saint and the tool-bag of a criminal, to paraphrase Hugo (because I'm too lazy to look up the actual quote), and a whole lot of trauma and dissociation and guilt, and dim memories of trying to be a loving member of a family in which everyone was too desperately starved to have much energy to spare for kindness to themselves or each other. When you start out in a family where love means you surreptitiously slip the best bits of food from someone who has almost nothing to give it to someone slightly weaker who has almost nothing, and love means you say nothing when your sister slips your food to her child -- when you follow that with nineteen years of hard labor, abuse, no love or affection, no emotional nourishment, only a little schooling without much context for what good that schooling might do -- when you follow that with the life of an outcast, barely tolerated, with choices only between a miserable life and the worse punishment that would follow for rebelling against it, and then you drop into that one shining overwhelming example of kindness and charity, and lay out a new road through life without much in the way of instructions for following it -- of course the best Valjean can do, the heroic very best efforts of this heroic man, is for a long while to just shove money and (once it's thrust upon him) his own status at every problem that presents itself, without thinking about the long-term or the broader society. He's just keeping his head above water, morally speaking, at least so far as he can see it.
Okay, that got more long-winded than I meant, and I think it's kind of rehashing old ground anyway, in terms of brick!club meta. But the point was: Valjean has been doing the very best he can, but it's been limited, because in all these years what he's been doing is slowly coming to a point where his heart can open up again. It hasn't been open. He's done an amazing amount of good, albeit all short-term, but it's been from guilt and obligation and a confused, muddled desire to bring light instead of pain to the world and the humans around him, but he hasn't loved personally, on any level. Other humans have been a sort of undifferentiated mass to him, I think, coming into focus as they interact with him, slipping away back into the crowd as they leave. Some are more in focus than others -- Fantine for pity, Javert for fear, both of them for the longevity of their stay in his focus, maybe some others too in these years -- but it's still basically Valjean in one corner and The World in the other.
But now, his heart is opening. Now, he's coming to care for a person outside himself, for and as herself, and he'll continue to care for her from now till the end of his life. It's that that completes his journey back to the self he once was, at least as much as he can return to it: the affectionate pruner who patted the heads of the children he loved as much as he could. It's that that completes his journey from the convict (legally dead, emotionally dead) to the man of God, the man who has married himself to saintliness and virtue and a love of humanity, the man who does good without bullets. Basically: in the honeymoon suite, Valjean is symbolically marrying virtue in his heart now, really fully finally absorbing the Bishop's lesson here when Cosette allows him to take the step forward into understanding love and personal caring. Valjean is shown his room by the Thénardiers; then he sneaks into Cosette's room and leaves a gold coin in her shoe in pure Madeleine form; then he goes back to sleep in the honeymoon suite, and when he comes out in the morning, he says not "Why not let her play?" but instead "Suppose you were relieved of her?"
So that's one layer of symbolic consummation going on here. But also, of course, the honeymoon suite shows the Thénardiers' deceit and maybe mocks their caring for each other: Madame Thénardier loves and submits to her husband, but does he love her back? (Does he love anyone? He doesn't really show it, whereas she at least loves her husband and her own daughters. I grant that she's a terrible person and not a great mother to even those daughters, but she loves them in her own way, and I can't remember any evidence that Thénardier cares about anyone but himself at any point.) They sleep in another chamber just like this one, Thénardier tells the mysterious rich stranger, meaning to impress. The honeymoon suite is the fanciest room: the largest, the most expensive, the one that's supposed to be a shrine to future happiness and to earthly joy, and a rare indulgence. When you're traveling with your husband, you stay in whatever room you can afford, but oh, when you're traveling with your new bridegroom, in the first flush of love and joy (and socially permitted sex), you use the money you've saved up or been given by friends and relatives, and you stay in the nicest room there is, and it's all a testament to your joy and a celebration to tuck away in your heart and remember later. Even if you can't travel, maybe you go to the inn in town, and you spend that night in a lovely room that's nicer than anything in your house, where someone else will light a good fire and turn down the blankets and burn fine wax candles and clean up in the morning, because the celebration of your future deserves one night that's more special than your own house where you'll have to sweep and do the chores every day yourself. That room, in the Thénardier's inn, is (Hugo makes sure to tell us), all a lie: Thénardier bought the cheap inn with this room already furnished, he found the flowers, he made them into a little display and called it his wife's wedding cap because he thought that would add respectability where it was lacking.
I think it's also relevant that Valjean tries to sleep in the stable -- humbly, and with incredibly blatant Holy Family metaphors inherent in the choice even before we bring in the fact that it's Christmas and he's adopting a child who will transform his life and finish the redemption of his heart -- and the Thénardiers prevent it. They insist: no, you have money (you have the gold of kings and wise men, you have the silver of the Romans in your pocket), you must sleep in the best room. You must sleep in the room that's a sham all through: its interior decoration of a bridal cap that Thénardier bought along with the building, the inflated price it isn't worth, its celebration of a holy religious and civil rite that you've never participated in and never will show any interest in. Valjean sleeps there, but he isn't touched by it. He would have preferred the stable; in his heart, it's all the same to him, it's all the stable anyway. He goes into the Thénardiers' honeymoon suite a chaste saint, and he emerges just as chaste, and perhaps even more saintly. He goes into this shrine of deceit, reluctantly, and he emerges to purchase his Christmas child with gifts and the payment of all debts (with a greater sum than they ever even were), and carries her to a convent to raise her up in virtue and solitude, until she can pass into an earthly life of love and happiness, her past griefs forgotten, and transform others' lives too with her love.
no subject
I replied: "Heh, you’re not slow; I’m arguing in two different directions without remembering to come back to the center. But yes, thank you for articulating that.
What I mean, I think, in the synthesis of these two interpretations, is that Valjean is rising above what the Thénardiers make of a honeymoon room. They are (narratively/symbolically) giving him a bridal chamber of deceit and material greed; he sleeps in it, but his heart is in the stable, and he makes of that chamber a union with and commitment to virtue and selfless love.
(Of course, being Valjean, what he would say would be that it was a bed to sleep in and a fire to sleep by, that’s all, and the stable would have suited him better than their hamhanded attempts at flattery and extortion. But Valjean wouldn’t be himself, and wouldn’t be half so interesting, if he were aware of his own symbolism.)"