Brick Club 4.8.1, 4.8.2
Marius and Cosette are in love, but pure and chaste love only! Any other type gets you killed in stories like this. “One of the magnanimities of woman is to yield.” Hugo very much frames their relationship through easily identifiable gendered tropes, “Marius felt a barrier, the purity of Cosette, and Cosette felt a support, the loyalty of Marius…She refused nothing and he asked nothing. Cosette was happy and Marius was satisfied.” Hugo very much makes it sound like Marius is the one steering the relationship, and that he’s almost inconvenienced in some way by its limitations, but we’re only told this by Hugo, never by Marius himself through any of his thoughts or actions. He’s clearly much more than “satisfied,” and it doesn’t occur to him at all to want or need more. I’ll chalk this up to pervasive heteronormativity coloring the writing.
Cosette is described as “pellucid,” which works in so many ways. Cosette is unabashedly open with her affection compliments, she knows what she wants and she says what she thinks. You don’t have to guess at her nature and she makes no attempt to hide it. “She made no mistakes, and saw clearly.” It’s such a two-way thing and I like it immensely. In being a light for the people around her, Cosette herself is lit up for other people to see.
Marius and Cosette’s relationship reads like an impossible dream, the depiction of an unreachable platonic ideal of “love.” They exist outside of the real world, in a suspended state of chaste happiness, content to stay exactly as they are…for now. I espy a chapter titled “Shadow Commences” on the horizon which is pretty ominous.
There’s a lot of the same, Marius and Cosette live in a happy bubble away from the world and, in part, away from their own past baggages. “The universe about them had fallen out of sight…They had told all, except everything.” Also, what a perfect illustration for this chapter.
I do wish we had gotten to see Cosette react to anything of the Gorbeau incident. It feels a little like she exists on an island that the plot never touches directly and no one lets her dip her toes in the water ever.
“it is a strange demand for men to ask that love should anywhither.” This is a silly thing to say, but I can’t tell if Hugo’s being sarcastic or not. I’m mostly just charmed by the translation of “quelque part” to “anywhither.”
