The Hunchback of Notre Dame: A Metaphor of Patriarchy

I recently read The Hunchback of Notre Dame by Victor Hugo.

Two things: It’s a ridiculously long book. I confess I skipped a few pages…er chapters with unnecessarily detailed descriptions of buildings and scenery. (Like he literally had whole chapters of nothing but description!)

And it’s fucking dark and depressing.

It’s nothing like the Disney movie. I found none of the characters to be decent human beings, except Esmerelda.

Spoiler alert: she dies.

In the afterword of my edition, it talks about how Victor Hugo was trying to show the process of fate and how inescapable it is.

I didn’t see that.

I did see some interesting feminist themes though.

I was struck by how sensual yet virginal Esmerelda is. She belongs to no man. She chooses to marry a somewhat important character to save him from being “executed” by the court of fools, but she basically tells him to fuck off when he wants to consummate the marriage.

But her virginity isn’t one of chastity in the Christian sense.

She’s a dancer and seems very in touch with her body. She acknowledges having desires. She isn’t afraid to own her sexiness. In a way, her virginity seems more about her being in charge of her sexuality. She is in search of her mother (perhaps a symbol for the sacred feminine or crone) and doesn’t want to have sex until she has found her.

Therefore, I dubbed her the “wild feminine spirit.”

And in a patriarchal world, of course the wild feminine would be besieged from all sides.

There are two characters who want Esmerelda sexually. Phoebus, a playboy soldier, is one. Esmerelda develops a crush on him after he rescues her. Phoebus is named after a sun god, and in a way, I believe that Esmerelda is in love with what he should be rather than who he actually is. She is obsessed with his name but never really knows him.

Phoebus, the non-god, is a pretty douchey guy. He has a fiancée, but is bored with her. He finds sport in seducing women. When he sees Esmerelda, he decides he wants to have sex with her and sets about trying to seduce her with promises of love that he doesn’t mean.

He is a perfect example of objectification within patriarchy. He has no concern for her as an actual person and merely wants to possess her sexually. He tries to guilt her for not wanting to have sex. He promises her things that he never intends on following through on. Sound familiar?

Frollo, the priest mentioned above, is the other. He hates Esmerelda’s sexuality and craves her at the same time. He has spent his life in celibacy. When he becomes aroused by Esmerelda’s independent spirit, he blames her for his own arousal.

In other words, he’s purity culture incarnate.

Interestingly, he’s probably far worse than Phoebus. Phoebus doesn’t care about Esmerelda, but he also doesn’t see her as responsible for his own desires. Frollo, on the other hand, thinks she is the devil for the way he thinks about her.

He blames her and abdicates his own responsibility for his sexual desires. In doing so, he justifies stalking her, trying to kidnap her, trying to rape her, and ultimately murdering her.

Phoebus embodies the “boys will be boys” mentality of patriarchy.

Frollo embodies the “I can’t help it; she was asking for it” mentality of rape culture.

He even tries to convince Esmerelda, as she is languishing in a dungeon without food, warmth, or basic necessities of any kind, that he is suffering more than she.

He gets off on images of her being tortured until she confesses to being a witch.

Ultimately, when he cannot force her to love him, he abandons her to the gallows, allowing her to be executed as a witch.

In the end, Frollo acts the way his own god acts, demanding the submission and love of someone while threatening to punish them if they will not comply.

And the namesake of the book? Well, he’s definitely not as nice as Disney portrays him. Probably for good reason, he hates everyone in Paris except the man who raised him. Quasimodo attempts to help Frollo the first time he tries to capture Esmerelda. He gets caught and punished for the attempted kidnapping. When Frollo turns his back on him while he is in the stocks, Esmerelda shows him kindness by bringing him some water.

At that moment, he falls in love with her, in a different way from the others. He doesn’t want to own her or force her sexually. He longs to be loved by her but sees her as a person. Even then, he is pretty despicable. He protects her from rape one night, but when he realizes he’s fighting off his master, he cowers down, basically saying, “Go ahead and rape her, but please kill me first so I don’t have to feel bad about it (my paraphrase).”

So Quasimodo has glimmers of being able to be a good character, but ultimately cannot stand up to patriarchy and power enough to be good.

I went back and forth as to whether I saw Quasimodo as a symbol for the deformity of healthy masculinity, which cannot fully develop in a patriarchal, misogynist culture or whether I saw him as the alienated and tortured “good” potential of Frollo, twisted by the church, suppression of his own sexuality, and his lust for power.

Probably Quasimodo is both.

Eventually he redeems himself slightly by killing Frollo, but only after he has been rudely awakened to Frollo’s evil when he sees Esmerelda hanging and Frollo laughing in delight.

Frollo certainly spouted off plenty about fate, so I can see where readers might think he is speaking for the author, but I was struck by how fate was often the name he gave his own inability to take responsibility for his desires, needs, and vices. Externalizing his desire and viewing his sexuality as evil set the stage for his dehumanizing Esmerelda and blaming her for the abuse he carried out.

Throughout the story, for all of the men who bemoaned “fate,” the only person who was literally powerless, imprisoned, and at the mercy of other people’s choices was Esmerelda. (Well, the only main character). The others who felt “powerless” to fate were only powerless insofar as they refused to own their choices and actions in the events.

And Frollo, in feeling the most powerless, was the one with his hand on all the strings.

The Hunchback of Notre Dame is probably one of the most depressing books I have ever read, but I can’t say that it was a terrible book. There was so much there symbolically to analyze, and I was mesmerized by the way that it seemed to map out how patriarchy crushes a woman’s attempt to own her own body and sexuality. While I might have been happier with a different ending, I can see how no other ending would have carried the impact. In the end, it’s a story of the feminine being betrayed and murdered for refusing to submit.

 

 

If Virginity is a Myth, Then What Did He Take From Me?

Trigger Warning (obviously): Discussion of sexual abuse and purity culture. I promise I’ll have something a little lighter the next few weeks. 

Purity culture taught me that my virginity was the greatest gift I could give my husband. It taught me that losing virginity made me discardable—like used gum or dirty water. It taught me that my value lay in my purity.

Purity culture also taught me that I was responsible for men’s sexual thoughts and actions towards me. It taught me that I could prevent rape by being pure—and if I was raped, it was better for me to die than to live with my tainted purity.

When I rejected purity culture years ago, I also rejected the concepts of virginity, purity, and sexual innocence along with it. I needed to in order to begin to come to terms with my sexual abuse. I needed to be able to believe that they were just constructs—myths—in order to slough off the guilt and self-hatred that I felt over having been violated.

More recently, I’ve been trying to give myself space to access some of the deeper veins of my grief around my sexual abuse. But I found I can only name that grief with the very constructs I rejected.

Innocence. Purity. Virginity.

Certainly the innocence I was taught I’d lost is not the innocence I grieve. Feminism has done its job. I do not feel culpable in any way for what happened to me.

But there’s a different kind of innocence whose loss I feel intensely.

I’ve come to think of it as the Peter Pan innocence.

It’s what I lost when I was forced into an awareness of sexuality—a violent understanding of affection and love—at an age when I could barely understand that some people had different body parts from others.

It’s the innocence that allowed me to believe that those who claimed to love me were safe, the innocence that gave me a sense of autonomy and belonging to my body, the innocence that assured me that monsters were make-believe and nightmares weren’t true. And it was ripped away from me when I was five years old, leaving in its place a shattered little girl who convinced herself that she was bad in order to continue to believe that her spiritual leaders were good.

And just as I know that I’m not responsible for what my abuser did, I also know I’m not bad because of what he did. But the purity that I lost has nothing to do with good or bad.

It’s the purity of separation.

There are days when I feel like I carry my abuser with me wherever I go, like an invisible residue. No amount of assuring me that I’m not dirty is going to take that feeling away because the “dirty” doesn’t stem from me. It’s his dirt, his perversion. I know that, but I’m still tortured by the visceral sensations.

Sometimes it feels like I share my marriage with him—the unwanted third-party who lurks in the corner waiting for an opportunity to pop out again and remind me that my first sexual encounter was traumatizing and invasive. The beauty of consensual sex—that amazing experience of soul-sharing—is so easily interrupted by flashbacks, as if my abuser can walk into our bedroom and whisk me away to my childhood whenever he wants.

It tears me up that he was the one who stole my virginity. I don’t give a rat’s ass about the value judgments society tries to place on being a virgin or not being a virgin. Virginity, to me, has nothing to do with the hymen. It’s not an object. It’s just pre-sexuality, like pre-menstrual.

I envy the choice that others have to end their virginity.

Beautiful, romantic, irresponsible, silly, uninformed, embarrassing—I’d give anything for my first sexual encounter to be any of those—a stage of growing up and discovering my sexual self. By rights, I should have been able to choose when to end my virginity, where, and with whom. I’m sure I would have made mistakes, but at least they would have been mistakes from my choice.

But I didn’t get that choice. The end of my virginity was forced on me. My first sexual experience was forced on me.

It doesn’t matter that the patriarchal value of innocence, purity, and virginity is bullshit. What I lost goes deeper. It’s the loss of a childhood naivety, the loss of discovery, the loss of choice, and the loss of first times.

I can’t get those back, and to make matters worse, I find that I can’t even properly grieve them without the words that were used to blame me for their loss.

Perhaps one day I’ll be able to find a way to turn that grief and loss into something positive. Grief has always been a Phoenix process for me, and I’m sure this one will be the same. But right now, all I have are the tears, the rage, and the emptiness. All I have for myself and my readers this morning is the rawness of truth telling without any flowery ways of making it sound okay.

This is the grief I wasn’t allowed to feel when I was five.

The Dystopian Girl’s Guide to Forbidden Romance

As I’ve mentioned before, I love dystopian fiction, especially the young adult novels that have swept the scene in the last few years. But I have one pet peeve that really, really irks me—the ignorance and stupidity in portraying romance within a purity culture.

I love falling in love with a character.

I love those butterflies I get when a romantic scene arises.

I want to hate but begrudgingly love the heart-wrenching suspense of whether the protagonist will end up with her love interest.

But all of that is ruined so easily when the purity construct is thoughtlessly abandoned as soon as the first kiss happens.

As the protagonist of a dystopian plot, the main character is presumably smarter than the other people around her—or at least she’s more aware. She has to be in order to carry the plot of rebellion forward. So why is it that when a boy comes on the scene, she suddenly loses any and all sense of discretion, caution, or intelligence?

If part of the dystopian atmosphere involves a purity culture that punishes physical contact between the sexes, then it’s basic common sense that out in public is NOT the place for two people to explore their feelings for each other. When you live in an environment where violating purity standards could lead to the ruination of your reputation (at the very least) or expulsion, physical punishment, or execution, you don’t really forget about that threat. Whenever I read about a character who just throws herself at a pair of deep blue eyes right out where others can see her, my suspension of disbelief is shattered immediately, especially if she’s already actively fighting against the authorities as it is. No matter how strong the urge to kiss someone is, it’s rarely strong enough to override the need for self-preservation.

The Scarlet Letter–a mild example of what purity culture does to women who violate standards.

Having lived in a dystopian environment, I feel I actually have reasonable experience to speak on this subject. Whether you are writing a dystopian novel yourself or living a dystopian life, there are some basic things you need to know about romantic contact.

I’m not foreign to the hormonal drives of youth, and I’m well aware of the titillating allure of forbidden touch. It’s intoxicating and wonderful. In fact, I indulged in it quite a bit when I was at Bob Jones University. With chaperones patrolling every public area to ensure that at least six inches were between male and female students and brainwashed bojes (spies) ready to tattle on you at every turn, it wasn’t easy. But I never got caught. Why?

I used my brain.

Granted, as far as plot development goes, it may be important for a character to get caught, but it doesn’t have to happen in an irritatingly stupid way. There are some brilliant ways to arrange for clandestine meetings. By following a few tips, you can provide the utmost protection possible and, if discovery has to happen, at least comfort yourself that the discovery was inevitable rather than due to oversight. That little difference may not seem so important in the grand scheme of having actually gotten caught, it makes a big difference in the odds of survival.

First, be aware of your surroundings. Don’t think about locking even a pinky with someone without first ascertaining where danger lies. If people are present, determine what they can see. This requires stepping outside of your own perspective, which is harder than you might think. I often saw couples sitting together at the university library tables, their legs tangled underneath the tabletop. Perhaps they thought they were being discreet since they themselves couldn’t see their legs, but for anyone entering the library, it was laughably obvious. If need be, actually do a test yourself if you can do so without arousing suspicion. Take  a stroll around the area in question and note which spots are sheltered and which ones aren’t.

If people aren’t present, figure out how likely someone is to enter and, again, what they would be able to see. This is where dystopian novels make their biggest mistake. Just because no one happens to be with the couple doesn’t mean that it’s a safe place. If there are wide open spaces, windows, doorways without doors, or any other type of quirk about the location that would put you in a compromising position if a passerby happened to pass by—you can’t let your guard down.

Remember, you can never know where someone else might be innocently headed. Don’t assume the world stops because you are overcome with passion . . . unless you’re Adelice from Crewel and can pause time.

If, after analyzing the environment, you find it suitable enough to risk some sort of affectionate exchange, you still need to identify which kinds of affection are feasible. A deserted stairwell might be appropriate for a stolen kiss, but it doesn’t make a great place to have a picnic. A draped coat might allow for two people to hold hands, but it’s not going to protect them from scrutiny if they lock lips.

A good rule of thumb for intimate exchanges is that the more intimate the exchange, the greater the risk; the greater the risk, the greater the need for protection. If you’re just interested in some light flirting or mildly serious kissing (and don’t underestimate the power of such touches in a purity culture), look for places where you will hear people coming before they can see you as well as places where you can assume less incriminating stances if need be. One of my and my partner’s favorite places was a particular hallway where we could pretend to be heading to or from a class if someone came clomping down the stairs.

However, if you want to do more intimate things, you need to find places where you are less likely to be stumbled upon. These would be places where passersby are completely unlikely and the only people who would catch you are the ones deliberately looking for you. Of course, in this instance, you can’t exactly finagle your way out of anything if you do happen to get caught, but at least you need to be under suspicion in the first place. This would be the equivalent to sneaking off campus if you happen to attend a dystopian-esque university like the one I attended (we had some lovely Sunday afternoons hiding in deserted parking lots) . . . or sneaking to a rented room, as the characters in 1984 did.

The lovers indulging in behaviors illegal for Anti-Sex League members, from 1984, the film.

I will caution you though—this isn’t something you would want to do with just any attractive person who walks by (another pet peeve of the dystopian young adult novel, the character who falls into the arms of every boy in the book). These rendezvous are the ones that should be reserved for some serious lovers because . . . well, if you’re going to risk everything for the chance of lying entwined in someone’s arms, wouldn’t you want to know that the risk was worth something greater than what you can get by just masturbating?

Lastly, just remember that no matter how smart you are, when you’re rebelling against a system, sooner or later that rebellion will be unearthed. In a purity culture, romance is never just romance, it’s always rebellion. So whether you rebel over a lover or over a principle, you better be willing to pay the price. In a true dystopian environment, your bridges burn as you cross them.

From the Handmaid’s Tale film . . . the arrest.