Ten Little Chances to be Free (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
tenlittlebullets) wrote2010-03-31 02:55 am
tenlittlebullets) wrote2010-03-31 02:55 am
More rambling about Sue and Mystères de Paris
I just finished the 1300-page monster known as The Mysteries of Paris. I've already written about how it relates to Les Mis, and I treated Fleur-de-Marie and her Victorian novel disease rather flippantly then, but the end of the novel centers around her and I ended up really liking her. TVTropes would probably have a field day with her, but she is fundamentally a subversion of a trope that's dear to a lot of people's hearts: the long-lost princess rescue fantasy.
In the fantasy, our heroine is a long-lost princess stuck in poverty and obscurity, mistreated but showing her royal qualities at every turn, too pure of heart to be tainted by her situation. Eventually, either someone swoops in to rescue her and restore her to her rightful place, or she earns it by going through trials and labors. And they all live happily ever after.
In the novel, Fleur-de-Marie is literally a long-lost princess. She's kept all her noble qualities--beautiful, charming, charitable, devoted to others, and generally too good for this sinful earth. BUT. Unlike in the fairy tale where her secret nobility would at least earn her some honest, laborious poverty, she meets the exact same fate as every other girl abandoned in Paris. When the novel opens, the Princess of Gerolstein is a shivering, cringing prostitute on the Ile de la Cité who has to be rescued from an ex-convict who wants to beat her, and she has (against her will) had carnal knowledge of every thief and murderer this side of Toulon.
Okay, that's subversive. But wait! Her father, on a charity mission in Paris, saves her without knowing who she is! Once the plot has been unravelled and the happy reunion takes place, doesn't she get her happily ever after?
...not really, because it's hard to just get over something like that. So she spends the rest of the book crushed under a burden of shame and repentance for what she once was, even though she was forced into it. 19th century ideas about purity figure into this, definitely, but it's more than that. At the point where all the other characters and most of Eugene Sue's readers are ready to smack her around the face and go "IT IS NOT YOUR FAULT, YOU DID NOT DO ANYTHING WRONG, YOU WERE THE VICTIM AND YOU HAVE NOTHING TO ATONE FOR, STOP BEATING YOURSELF UP" she bows her head and apologizes for being ungrateful, and continues being desperately unhappy.
In the end there are multiple reasons for this, all in a rather delicate balance. There are societal considerations: some stains are considered ineffaceable. She goes back to her father's court as a princess and gets the appropriate pomp and splendor and is universally liked on her merits, but she knows that if any of these people knew her past she would be considered unworthy of any respect. Her noble qualities didn't keep her from ending up in a brothel, but they do make her unwilling--in the name of honor and integrity--to stay in her father's court.
And underlying all of this is the fact that she's a frail sixteen-year-old who's been horribly traumatized.
It's couched in Victorian language of shame, stain, degradation, but on some level Eugene Sue gets it: she spent years shut up in a brothel in a Parisian slum being raped by any low-life who wanted her. She got rescued, she's a princess, her father loves her and wants her to be happy, but he doesn't really understand. There's a part near the end where he says what all the readers have been wanting to say for eight hundred pages: it's not your fault, you have nothing to atone for, stop beating yourself up. And she responds, essentially, "I know; it's not guilt, it's shame. This hurts. It's not ever going to stop hurting." She's been saying pretty much the same thing the whole novel, but this is the first time it's made clear that her suffering isn't misplaced guilt or a desire to atone for crimes she didn't commit. I had assumed the latter throughout the whole book, and I'd been kind of rolling my eyes at her as a character, but that made me stop in my tracks and reorder my whole perception of her and of how Sue was dealing with her.
She doesn't get her happy ending. Maybe if she were able to compromise her sense of integrity, she could've blithely forgotten the past. Maybe in a world where she didn't have to consider herself irreparably ruined, she could've married a nice young nobleman and lived quietly away from the court and taken some time to heal. But she doesn't live in that world, so she joins a convent and dies keeping a midnight vigil in an unheated church in the middle of January. It's kind of sudden as an ending, but only because Sue didn't leave enough Chekhov's guns lying around and it feels unexpected and un-foreshadowed. You get the sense that he had multiple possibilities for an ending in mind, and chose the most depressing one. But it fits. It doesn't feel inevitable, but it fits. It tears the long-lost-princess rescue fantasy to shreds: your goodness and nobility will not protect you from the evils of this world, and you won't be able to just take your rightful place on the throne without a thought for the past.
In the fantasy, our heroine is a long-lost princess stuck in poverty and obscurity, mistreated but showing her royal qualities at every turn, too pure of heart to be tainted by her situation. Eventually, either someone swoops in to rescue her and restore her to her rightful place, or she earns it by going through trials and labors. And they all live happily ever after.
In the novel, Fleur-de-Marie is literally a long-lost princess. She's kept all her noble qualities--beautiful, charming, charitable, devoted to others, and generally too good for this sinful earth. BUT. Unlike in the fairy tale where her secret nobility would at least earn her some honest, laborious poverty, she meets the exact same fate as every other girl abandoned in Paris. When the novel opens, the Princess of Gerolstein is a shivering, cringing prostitute on the Ile de la Cité who has to be rescued from an ex-convict who wants to beat her, and she has (against her will) had carnal knowledge of every thief and murderer this side of Toulon.
Okay, that's subversive. But wait! Her father, on a charity mission in Paris, saves her without knowing who she is! Once the plot has been unravelled and the happy reunion takes place, doesn't she get her happily ever after?
...not really, because it's hard to just get over something like that. So she spends the rest of the book crushed under a burden of shame and repentance for what she once was, even though she was forced into it. 19th century ideas about purity figure into this, definitely, but it's more than that. At the point where all the other characters and most of Eugene Sue's readers are ready to smack her around the face and go "IT IS NOT YOUR FAULT, YOU DID NOT DO ANYTHING WRONG, YOU WERE THE VICTIM AND YOU HAVE NOTHING TO ATONE FOR, STOP BEATING YOURSELF UP" she bows her head and apologizes for being ungrateful, and continues being desperately unhappy.
In the end there are multiple reasons for this, all in a rather delicate balance. There are societal considerations: some stains are considered ineffaceable. She goes back to her father's court as a princess and gets the appropriate pomp and splendor and is universally liked on her merits, but she knows that if any of these people knew her past she would be considered unworthy of any respect. Her noble qualities didn't keep her from ending up in a brothel, but they do make her unwilling--in the name of honor and integrity--to stay in her father's court.
And underlying all of this is the fact that she's a frail sixteen-year-old who's been horribly traumatized.
It's couched in Victorian language of shame, stain, degradation, but on some level Eugene Sue gets it: she spent years shut up in a brothel in a Parisian slum being raped by any low-life who wanted her. She got rescued, she's a princess, her father loves her and wants her to be happy, but he doesn't really understand. There's a part near the end where he says what all the readers have been wanting to say for eight hundred pages: it's not your fault, you have nothing to atone for, stop beating yourself up. And she responds, essentially, "I know; it's not guilt, it's shame. This hurts. It's not ever going to stop hurting." She's been saying pretty much the same thing the whole novel, but this is the first time it's made clear that her suffering isn't misplaced guilt or a desire to atone for crimes she didn't commit. I had assumed the latter throughout the whole book, and I'd been kind of rolling my eyes at her as a character, but that made me stop in my tracks and reorder my whole perception of her and of how Sue was dealing with her.
She doesn't get her happy ending. Maybe if she were able to compromise her sense of integrity, she could've blithely forgotten the past. Maybe in a world where she didn't have to consider herself irreparably ruined, she could've married a nice young nobleman and lived quietly away from the court and taken some time to heal. But she doesn't live in that world, so she joins a convent and dies keeping a midnight vigil in an unheated church in the middle of January. It's kind of sudden as an ending, but only because Sue didn't leave enough Chekhov's guns lying around and it feels unexpected and un-foreshadowed. You get the sense that he had multiple possibilities for an ending in mind, and chose the most depressing one. But it fits. It doesn't feel inevitable, but it fits. It tears the long-lost-princess rescue fantasy to shreds: your goodness and nobility will not protect you from the evils of this world, and you won't be able to just take your rightful place on the throne without a thought for the past.
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(I like what you're saying about Mysteries of Paris. It's always wonderful to realize that a nineteenth-century author Gets It. this is why I adore Hardy.)
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