Gold is associated with alchemy, God, and humanity’s quest for knowledge throughout The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Alchemy was a medieval form of natural science which was interested in the transformation of certain metals into other elements or substances. In particular, in literature and art about the medieval period, alchemy is associated with the search for the philosopher’s stone, which provides the ability to make gold. Alchemists in the medieval period did not understand how gold was created or how it appeared underground, and many experiments were carried out to try and achieve these ends. The assumption was that, since the presence of gold underground could not be explained or easily achieved by man, then it must be divine and placed there by God. Common theories included the idea that gold was sunlight transformed into metal and that sunlight was a manifestation of God. The ability to create gold, therefore, represented the ability to unlock divine knowledge, to understand the ways of God, and, possibly, to achieve eternal life. In the novel, Claude Frollo, a priest turned alchemist, becomes obsessed with his quest to understand God. Frollo connects gold to fire and believes that, using sparks, he can create gold and understand God. Frollo himself undergoes a metaphorical transformation as he grows more and more obsessed with Esmeralda, a gypsy girl whom he is infatuated with. Frollo is frequently described as having fire in his veins as he wrestles with his feelings for Esmeralda and this suggests that, just as he tries to change other substances into gold, Frollo’s passion transforms him into something else. But just as he fails to make gold, Frollo’s obsession turns him into a monster rather than making him divine, so gold symbolizes both the desire to understand God and the dangers of trying to do so.
Gold Quotes in The Hunchback of Notre Dame
‘No,’ said the archdeacon, seizing Compere Tourangeau by the arm, and a spark of enthusiasm rekindling in his lifeless pupils, ‘No, I don’t deny science. I have not crawled all this time on my belly with my nails in the earth, along the countless passages of the cavern without glimpsing, far ahead of me, at the end of the unlit gallery, a light, a flame, something, doubtless the reflection from the dazzling central laboratory where the wise and the patient have taken God by surprise.’
He, who wore his heart on his sleeve, who observed none of the world’s laws except the law of nature, who allowed his passions to escape through his inclinations, and in whom the reservoir of strong emotion was always dry, so many fresh drains did he dig for it each morning, he had no idea of how the sea of human passions rages and ferments and boils once it is refused all outlet, of how it accumulates and increases and flows over, of how it scours the heart and breaks out into inward sobs and dumb convulsions, until it has torn down its dykes and burst its bed. Jehan had always been deceived by Claude Frollo’s austere and icy exterior, that chill surface of precipitous and inaccessible virtue. That this seething, raging lava bubbled deep beneath the snowclad brow of Etna had never occurred to the cheerful student.
Gold Symbol Timeline in The Hunchback of Notre Dame
