This sample Victor Hugo Essay is published for informational purposes only. Free essays and research papers, are not written by our writers, they are contributed by users, so we are not responsible for the content of this free sample paper. If you want to buy a high quality essay at affordable price please use our custom essay writing service.
Victor Hugo is considered one of the leaders of the Romantic movement in French literature. Although chiefly known outside France for the novels Les miseérables (1862) and The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1831), he is famous in France for his revolutionary and controversial style as a poet.
Works in Biographical and Historical Context
Family and Early Years
Victor-Marie Hugo was born in Besançon, France, on February 26, 1802, less than fifteen years after the French Revolution. The French Revolution had been a revolt of the working class against the rule and power of the nobility and the clergy. Royalists, who supported the nobility and former king who had been overthrown, were stripped of much of their power and wealth, and control of the country was eventually taken by the military leader Napoleon Bonaparte.
Victor-Marie Hugo was the third son of Sophie Trebuchet, daughter of royalist sympathizers, and Joseph Hugo, member of the military under Napoleon. Hugo traveled extensively during his childhood until, when he was twelve years old, his parents separated, and he moved to Paris with his mother.
When Napoleon was forced into exile in 1814, Madame Hugo rejoiced; her lover had been executed because he had plotted to overthrow the military leader. Her reaction might account for Victor’s early hatred of Napoleon, his preoccupation with the death penalty, and the fascination with exile that appeared so often in his works.
First Works and the Beginnings of Romanticism
Hugo gained literary recognition at a young age from Louis XVIII, who ruled France after Napoleon’s exile, as well as from French writer Francois-Rene de Chateaubriand and other literary figures. He published his first volume of poetry, Odes et poesies diverses in 1822, which earned him a pension from Louis XVIII and enabled him to marry his childhood sweetheart, Adele Foucher. They would have five children together.
Hugo s home became a center of intellectual activity, and he counted among his friends the writer and critic Charles Sainte-Beuve and writer Theophile Gautier. During this period, Hugo wrote several novels and volumes of poetry that foreshadow his Romantic tendencies.
His 1826 poetry collection Odes et ballades was received with great enthusiasm. Though the royalist and Catholic press, disappointed with not seeing church and throne exalted, condemned the poems, they were loudly praised by the youthful Romantic school for their extravagance.
Hugo’s dramatic work began with the publication of the controversial preface to his lengthy and unstageable verse drama Cromwell (1827). This preface sought to establish a new set of dramatic principles that were to become the manifesto of the Romantic movement. Hugo demanded a new form of verse drama that abandoned the formal rules of classical tragedy. One of his most important principles concerns the necessity of portraying the grotesque as well as the beautiful. Since both are found in nature, and since all that is in nature should be in art, both should be presented in a play.
These precepts were put to the test in 1830, with the production of Hugo’s Hernani (1830). Its debut was referred to as the ”battle of Hernani’ because of the heated reaction of the theatergoers. Groups of Romantic writers and artists attended performances to demonstrate support for Hugo s revolutionary use of language and innovative dramatic techniques; traditionalists tended to denounce Hugo s disregard of the classic precepts of drama, including unity of time, place, and action.
The Hunchback of Notre Dame and Further Success
Hoping to benefit from this publicity, Hugo s publisher pressed him for a novel. Hugo returned to a novel he had begun researching in the late 1820s about Parisian life during the Middle Ages and completed the book in January 1831. It was published as Notre-Dame de Paris (the English title became The Hunchback of Notre Dame) that March.
The novel, set in Paris in 1482, recounts three men’s love and one woman s hatred for a young Gypsy dancer, who in turn loves a fourth man. Completed in the months immediately following the July Revolution of 1830, in which King Louis X was overthrown by his cousin, The Hunchback of Notre Dame also illustrates Hugo s views on numerous social and political issues, particularly the development of the common people as a significant political force.
During the production of Hernani, Hugo’s friend Sainte-Beuve had begun a lengthy affair with Hugo’s wife, and Hugo in turn began a series of affairs. His most lasting relationship began in 1833 with the actress Juliette Drouet; although he was unfaithful to her, their relationship continued until death.
From 1834 until 1862, Hugo concentrated on the theater, poetry, and politics. Hugo was very successful in the theater during the 1830s, focusing on historical drama. While certain themes—fate, virginity, death, and class conflict—recur in his plays, Hugo’s dramas differ from his novels through their emphasis on political power.
Hugo’s literary achievement was recognized in 1841 by his election to the Academie française and in 1845 by his elevation to the peerage. During the latter half of that decade, he devoted most of his time to politics, delivering a number of political speeches condemning the legal system and society s persecution of the poor.
In 1849, he was elected to the National Assembly. Because of his opposition to Louis Napoleon’s dictatorial ambitions, he was forced to leave France following Napoleon’s coup d’etat of 1851. He initially fled to Belgium but finally settled on the British island of Guernsey.
Les Contemplations
While exiled, Hugo published Les Contemplations (1856), poems centered around the 1843 death of his daughter Ixopoldine. The volume contrasted lighthearted, lyrical works in one section called Autrefois (Before) and more pessimistic, philosophical works in the other part, Aujourd’hui (Today). Both question the poet’s relation with others and God. This collection is often considered his poetic masterpiece.
Les misérables
After publishing several other volumes of poetry, Hugo published Les misérables (1862), which was an amazing financial success. It is the story of a released convict, Jean Valjean, who faces repeated hardships despite his efforts to reform. Valjean’s tragic history is a condemnation of unfair legal penalties, and his life in the underworld of Paris illustrates Hugo’s conviction that social evils are created and fostered by existing laws and customs. Les miseérables was influential in the movement for legal and social reform in nineteenth-century France.
Upon his return to France in 1870, Hugo received widespread public recognition. Though nominated for public office, he took little further interest in national affairs. His death from pneumonia on May 22, 1885, warranted national mourning. He was buried in the Pantheon in Paris, an honor reserved for only the most significant figures in French history and art.
Works in Literary Context
Some say that Victor Hugo had no “followers.” More specifically, French poet Charles Baudelaire once announced that what influence Hugo had was harmful, sapping the originality of those who came too close. Certainly Hugo never created a new aesthetic, such as the one begun by Baudelaire and continued by Stephane Mallarme and Paul Valery. He may have simply lived too long: by the time he died, those who would have taken up where he left off were already dead or had been left behind.
A Stylistic Revolution in Poetry
Hugo’s 1826 poetry collection Odes et ballades marked a stylistic revolution. The ballad form freed Hugo from the constrictions of classical lyric and allowed him to articulate the poetics announced in Odes et poesies diverses, one based not on form but on idea. In this regard, he may be considered the precursor of both Surrealism and Symbolism, movements that opposed Realism and Naturalism in their attempt to portray the particular and the true, not through description and specifics but through symbolic imagery.
The Dark Power in Hugo’s Dramatic Poetry Although critical attention to Hugo’s work diminished shortly after his death, he has always been distinguished as an outstanding poet whose technical virtuosity advanced French poetry. In fact, in 1855, a critic for the North American
Review suggested that Hugo’s dramatic poetry ”inaugurated a new era in French literature” because of his intensity and break with convention. Hugo sought to express ”the real” in drama and embraced characters and themes that were grotesque or sublime, an unusual practice that disgusted much of the literary public. He saw beauty in what was traditionally considered dark and disturbed. This interest in exposing truths normally hidden spilled through his other writings, from his political commentary about the Revolution of 1848 to his well-known prose.
Works in Critical Context
It has often been claimed that Hugo’s works are fantastic and that they fail to achieve the psychological or descriptive truth characteristic of the novel. Richard B. Grant, writing about Hugo’s early books, argues that roman should be translated as ”romance,” not ”novel.” While the novel tries to represent ”real people” through the analysis, description, and evolution of character, the romance deals in archetypes and tends toward myth. Hugo sought to represent a general, archetypal reality, more similar to myth than to modern novels.
Desire and Disgust in Hugo’s Prose
Hugo’s deviation from French dramatic and literary tradition challenged critics and readers alike. His predilection for violent, gritty language, often considered a form of ”bestiality,” as noted by a reviewer for the Edinburgh Review in 1865, confronted conventional literary standards and morality. But this same style also intrigued and excited readers, and a few years before Les miserables was even published, public gossip proclaimed that Hugo’s new novel would ”sap the foundations of Imperialism, and shake society to its very centre.” Hugo’s work was the proverbial forbidden fruit, and everyone wanted a taste. The novel’s title alone alluded to the deviance within; the entire book was about les misérables, or the wretches, the wretched. In the preface to the novel, Hugo writes that Les misérables reflects the way contemporary ”laws and customs” create a ”social damnation” that leads to ”artificial hells in the middle of civilization.”
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Contemporary French reviewers were generally unimpressed by this novel when it was published. Max Bach has attributed this to the partisan concerns of various groups of critics, including those who objected to the absence of religion in the novel and those who believed that Hugo had slighted the middle class. Critics agree that it is not the plot, but the evocation of the Middle Ages that constitutes the center of the novel’s interest, and the statement that the cathedral is its main character is of great validity.
Les Contemplations
A lyric meditation on mortality, love, and the fate of humankind, this collection was characterized by Suzanne Nash as an allegory of evolving spiritual awareness, each book disclosing a new level of metaphysical insight, progressing from nature, love, and social awareness to suffering, duty, and prophetic clairvoyance. Other scholars— John Frey, for example—dispute this assessment, arguing that since there is no clear resolution to the problems posed by the poems in the collection, if Les Contemplations is an allegory, then it is of failure, not of progress. All agree Les Contemplations combines passion and faith in an intensely personal drama of loss and salvation.
References:
- Baudelaire, Charles P. ”Victor Hugo.” In Baudelaire, as a Literary Critic. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1964.
- Bloom, Harold. ”The Breaking of Form.” In Deconstruction and Criticism. New York: Seabury, 1979.
- Brombert, V. H. Victor Hugo and the Visionary Novel. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984.
- Brooks, Peter. The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1976.
- Grant, Richard B. The Perilous Quest: Image, Myth, and Prophecy in the Narratives of Victor Hugo. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1968.
- Josephson, Matthew. Victor Hugo: A Realistic Biography of the Great Romantic. New York: Doubleday, 1942.
- Nash, Suzanne. “Pes Contemplations” of Victor Hugo: An Allegory of the Creative Process. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1976.
- Brombert, Victor. ”Victor Hugo s Condemned Man: Laughter of Revolution.” Romanic Review 70 (1979): 119-32.
- Cooper, Barbara T. ”Parodying Hugo. European Romantic Review 2, no. 1 (1991): 23-38.
- Haig, Stirling. ”From Cathedral to Book, from Stone to Press: Hugo’s Portrait of the Artist in Notre-Dame de Paris.” Stanford French Review 3 (Winter 1979): 343-50.
- Holdheim, W. Wolfgang. ”The History of Art in Victor Hugo s Notre-Dame de Paris. Nineteenth-Century French Studies 5 (Fall/Winter 1976/1977): 58-70.
- Nash, Suzanne. ”Writing a Building: Hugo s Notre-Dame de Paris.” French Forum 8 (May 1983): 122-23.
- States of Guernsey Tourist Board. Guernsey’s Official Victor Hugo Website. Retrieved May 14, 2008, from http://www.victorhugo.gg.
- Victor Hugo Online. The Life and Work of Victor Hugo. Retrieved May 14, 2008, from http://www.hugo-online.org/index.html. Last updated on May 17, 2007.
See also:
Free essays are not written to satisfy your specific instructions. You can use our professional writing services to order a custom essay, research paper, or term paper on any topic and get your high quality paper at affordable price. UniversalEssays is the best choice for those who seek help in essay writing or research paper writing in any field of study.
