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  • Marier les destins: une ethnocritique des 'Misérables'
  • Bradley Stephens
Marier les destins: une ethnocritique des 'Misérables'. Par Guillaume Drouet. Nancy: Presses universitaires de Nancy, 2011. 306 pp.

This 'ethnocritical' study seeks to provide a fresh reading of Hugo's monumental novel by articulating the ways in which its hero, Jean Valjean, is constituted through a polyphony of cultural voices. These voices help cast Valjean as at once a bogeyman, a deliverer of souls, a matchmaker, and a pastor, all helping to reveal his status as a mediatory figure who stands at the threshold of numerous binary oppositions within the text — adulthood and childhood, men and women, rural and urban, the living and the dead, savagery and domesticity. Such positioning confirms Valjean as a popular hero, both from and for the people in Hugo's eyes, whose characterization is driven by belief, superstition, and legend at the heart of a vast network of misérables. Dividing his analysis into four main sections in line with his central thesis, Guillaume Drouet constructs a series of carefully observed and well-researched readings that consider contemporary popular discourse on its own terms rather than solely as an antagonist [End Page 568] of the official bourgeois culture of the day. Indeed, much of the strength of Drouet's study lies in his belief that various readings of Les Misérables have tended either to overlook or to fetishize the popular in Hugo's narrative fiction (although his bibliography is exclusively francophone, save for the quasi-obligatory references to Bakhtin). Consequently, Drouet draws on his intelligent and precise familiarity with the novel to highlight aspects of Valjean's story that could otherwise have remained implicit, such as the fervent resistance of fear to reason and the fairy-tale intertexts that frame Cosette's journey towards womanhood. Notwithstanding these engaging observations, the study overall would have benefited both from a clearer sense of the wider contexts in which the novel unfolds and a sharper focus on popular readerships at the time of its writing in the mid-nineteenth century. Ethnocriticism as an interpretative strategy is not fully explained or given a firm theoretical underpinning in Drouet's Introduction, leaving its objectives of cultural comparison and literary poetics somewhat hesitant in the reader's mind. A closer engagement with previous readings of Hugo's novel would also have been welcome in this respect, not least, perhaps, to have developed further the intriguing considerations of Valjean's androgynous characterization and his aversion to violence. Likewise, Drouet's discussion of the rural belief systems and identity formations that feed into Valjean lacks extensive historical illustration, preventing the reader from situating Les Misérables squarely within a material nineteenth-century culture. The fascinating question of what Hugo himself actually made of popular folklore and customs, especially as regards the writing of a literary work, is curiously overlooked as a result. A slightly frustrating structure in each chapter, reliant on frequent and sometimes confusing subheadings, compounds these concerns by stalling the pace of the overall argument. Beyond those strategic and structural shortcomings, however, remains what is essentially a pertinent character study of one of French literature's most memorable heroes, which should be of great interest to those returning to, or arriving at, Hugo's novel on its one hundred and fiftieth anniversary this year.

Bradley Stephens
University of Bristol
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