Abstract
On the Feast of Fools, 1482, at the Palais de Justice, in Victor Hugo’s Notre-Dame de Paris (1831), the eye of Pierre Gringoire is fixed upon La Esmeralda, whose dancing has captured the restive audience for his mystery play, The Right Judgement of the Virgin Mary. The vision of the dancer closes a prefigurative cycle of supernatural femininities from sainted Virgin to gypsy girl. Later, in a gypsy ritual overseen by Clopin at the Court of Miracles—the countersphere where the gypsies are enumerated as a violent tribe—Esmeralda saves Gringoire’s life by marrying him. But she has also attracted the vengeful lust of Frollo, a witch-hunting priest and alchemist, who directs his servant Quasimodo, the hunchbacked bellringer, to abduct her. Phoebus, the knight, rescues her, and Quasimodo is severely punished on the pillory. During an assignation with Esmeralda, Phoebus is stabbed by Frollo and Esmeralda is arrested, tortured, and wrongly convicted for murder and witchcraft. Quasimodo rescues her from the gallows and takes her to asylum in the cathedral of Notre-Dame, but Frollo pursues her again until she is hanged. The story concludes with Quasimodo’s disappearance from Notre-Dame and the discovery long after of two skeletons in an embrace, in the vault where Esmeralda’s corpse was laid.
“Truly … it’s a salamander, a nymph, a goddess, a bacchante from Mount Menelaus!” At that moment, one of the “salamander’s” plaits of hair came down and a yellow copper coin … rolled to the ground. “Ha! No it’s not,” he said, “it’s a gypsy girl!” All illusion had vanished.
Victor Hugo, Notre-Dame of Paris 1
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Notes
Victor Hugo, Notre-Dame of Paris, trans. and ed. John Sturrock (1831; London: Penguin, 2004), 82; hereafter cited parenthetically. The quoted words are Gringoire’s.
Kathleen Coyne Kelly and Tison Pugh, “Introduction: Queer History, Cinematic Medievalism, and the Impossibility of Sexuality,” Queer Movie Medievalisms, ed. Kathleen Coyne Kelly and Tison Pugh (Surrey: Ashgate, 2009), 1–17, at 5.
Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, ed. Michael Holquist trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981).
To adapt Susan Aronstein, Hollywood Knights: Arthurian Cinema and the Politics of Nostalgia (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 4.
Lucy Moore, Liberty: The Lives and Times of Six Women in Revolutionary France (London: Harper Perennial, 2007).
David Magill, “Spectacular Male Bodies and Jazz Age Celebrity Culture,” Framing Celebrity, ed. Su Holmes and Sean Redmond (London: Routledge, 2006), 129–43.
Kathryn Grossman, “From Classic to Pop Icon: Popularizing Hugo,” French Review 74.3 (2001): 482–95, at 488.
Kathryn Grossman, “From Classic to Pop Icon,” 482. For comment on French audiences’ reception of Disney’s Hunchback, see Jacques Guyot, “France: Disney in the Land of Cultural Exception,” Dazzled by Disney? The Global Disney Audiences Project, ed. Janet Wasko, Mark Phillips, and Eileen Meehan (London: Leicester University Press, 2001), 121–34.
For example, see Robert Mack, “Cultivating the Garden: Antoine Galland’s Arabian Nights in the Traditions of English Literature,” The Arabian Nights in Historical Context, ed. Saree Makdisi and Felicity Nussbaum (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 51–81.
Amy Davis, Good Girls and Wicked Witches: Women in Disney’s Feature Animation (Eastleigh: Libby, 2006), 219.
Vern Bullough, “On Being a Male in the Middle Ages,” Medieval Masculinities, ed. Clare Lees (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), 31–46, at 41–42.
Janet Wasko, Understanding Disney: The Manufacture of Fantasy (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2001).
J. P. Telotte, “The Changing Space of Animation: Disney’s Hybrid Films of the 1940s,” Animation 2 (2007): 245–58, at 252.
Anne Ducille, “Dyes and Dolls: Multicultural Barbie and the Merchandising of Difference,” Differences 6.1 (1994): 48–68, at 49.
See Alan Nadel, “A Whole New (Disney) World Order: Aladdin, Atomic Power, and the Muslim Middle East,” Visions of the East: Orientalism in Film, ed. Matthew Bernstein and Gaylyn Studlar (New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1997), 184–203.
Christine Algrant, Madame Pompadour: Mistress of France (London: HarperCollins, 2003).
Victor Hugo, qtd. in Susan McClary, Georges Bizet: Carmen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 30.
Marina Warner, From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers (London: Chatto & Windus, 1994).
Eric Faden, “Crowd Control: Early Cinema, Sound, and Digital Images,” Journal of Film and Video 53.2/3 (2001): 93–106.
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© 2012 Tison Pugh and Susan Aronstein
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Craven, A. (2012). Esmeralda of Notre-Dame: The Gypsy in Medieval View from Hugo to Disney. In: Pugh, T., Aronstein, S. (eds) The Disney Middle Ages. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137066923_13
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137066923_13
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