People are primarily judged on their appearances, rather than their internal characters, in The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Victor Hugo argues, however, that appearances can be deceiving, and that judging people based on how they look can often cause people to be treated unfairly and even ostracized by society. This alienation from society often causes people to reject society because it has rejected them, and in turn to behave in malicious ways. This behavior seems to confirm society’s view of these ostracized individuals, but it is actually a symptom of social alienation and not a reflection of their true character. Furthermore, a society which focuses primarily on what people appear to be, rather than what they really are, is likely to be exploited by hypocrites, who pretend to be virtuous in public while being selfish or malevolent in private.
Hugo paints a portrait of medieval society as a place where external appearance is believed to reflect people’s inner personalities. The people of Paris reject the hunchback Quasimodo because of how he looks. When he appears in public he is jeered at, and people believe malicious rumors about him, including the idea that the sight of him causes pregnant women to miscarry. This suggests that people in medieval Paris are willing to trust appearances and speculate based on superficial factors. Although the people of Paris do briefly accept Quasimodo, during the “Feast of Fools,” they only do so in order to crown him the “Fool’s Pope,” a derogatory title which signifies that he has the most hideous face in all of Paris. It is clear from this that they view Quasimodo as a spectacle or entertainment because of his unusual appearance. They do not empathize with him or see him as a person with feelings. Esmeralda is also frequently judged on her looks by the people of Paris. Although the beautiful Esmeralda seems to be the opposite of Quasimodo, in fact she and the hunchback have a great deal in common in this sense. When Fleur-de-Lys, a young noblewoman, and her friends invite Esmeralda to join them after they see her dance in the square, the young women belittle and sneer at Esmeralda because she is poor and badly dressed. In reality, the women are jealous of Esmeralda’s beauty (especially Fleur-de-Lys, whose fiancée, Phoebus, is present and is clearly attracted to Esmeralda). Esmeralda has done nothing to provoke this criticism and is ostracized by the women purely because of her appearance. Her beauty is later used against her when she is tried as a witch and is accused of using her looks to lure men to their deaths. Like Quasimodo, Esmeralda is a virtuous character inside, and she is unfairly judged based purely on the way she looks, which demonstrates that appearance is more important than behavior in medieval society.
In Quasimodo’s case, being constantly judged and rejected based on his appearance leads him to become alienated from society. Because he is not accepted by society and is treated cruelly whenever he goes among people, Quasimodo has grown up in almost total isolation inside Notre Dame. Hugo notes that the cathedral is “the whole of nature” to Quasimodo, which implies that it has become his natural environment. He can imagine very little of the outside world and this makes it harder for Quasimodo to integrate into society, as he lacks basic knowledge of etiquette and social grace. The cruelty that society demonstrates towards Quasimodo also teaches him to be “vicious” in return. Quasimodo behaves violently towards several members of the crowd during the “Feast of Fools” and this confirms the crowd’s belief that he is dangerous. However, Quasimodo only behaves like this in response to the crowd’s mockery. Even if they are not mocking him at the time, he has come to expect this treatment from them because it is what he has consistently experienced throughout his life. This suggests that people are products of their environments, and that cruel behaviors are not often the result of innate badness but rather of social issues. Quasimodo’s true nature is revealed later in the novel when he falls in love with Esmeralda and saves her from being executed. Quasimodo is kind to Esmeralda because she has been kind to him (she offered him water while he was undergoing a brutal public punishment), and he cares for her while she hides in the cathedral. This suggests that Quasimodo’s true nature is not vicious but rather gentle, and that he is capable of love and kindness when he is shown these traits and can learn by example, as he does with Esmeralda. Through their relationship, Hugo suggests that cruelty breeds cruelty, whereas people who are treated kindly are more likely to be kind themselves.
In contrast to Quasimodo and Esmeralda, who are unfairly judged by society because of how they look, other characters in the novel use their appearances to hypocritically hide their true natures. Although Phoebus appears dashing and virtuous, his looks disguise the fact that he is selfish and thoughtless. His heroic outward appearance, however, causes Esmeralda and many other women to fall in love with him and demonstrates that people are easily taken in by appealing appearances. Unlike Quasimodo, who appears to be ugly but who genuinely cares for Esmeralda’s wellbeing, Phoebus is only interested in seducing her. This suggests that beauty can hide internal ugliness and vice versa. This hypocrisy also shows up in the character of Claude Frollo, who appears to be holy (he is a priest) when, really, he is driven by lust and ambition. Hugo suggests that, when society judges people based on appearance rather than behavior, it is easy for hypocrites to hide their true intentions, while virtuous people are often shunned and unfairly treated because of how they look.
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Appearances, Alienation, and Hypocrisy Quotes in The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Hanged by the populace for waiting, hanged by the cardinal for not waiting; either way he could see only the abyss, that is a gallows.
He always went about in the midst of a small court of bishops and abbots of good family, who were bawdy, lecherous and great carousers should need arise; more than once the good worshippers at Saint-Germain d’Auxerre had been shocked, when passing of an evening beneath the lighted windows of the Bourbon mansion, to hear the same voices they had heard chanting vespers during the day intoning, to the clink of glasses, the bacchic proverb of Benedict XII, the pope who added a third wreath to the papal tiara: Bibamus papaliter.
There was something about this spectacle which made the head spin, it had some peculiar power to bewitch and intoxicate hard to convey to a reader of our own day and from our own salons. Picture to yourself a succession of faces displaying all the known geometrical shapes one after the other, from triangle to trapezium, from cone to polyhedron; every known human expression, from anger to lust; every age of man, from the wrinkles of the newly born to the wrinkles of the dying crone; a whole religious phantasmagoria, from Faunus to Beelzebub; every kind of animal profile, from jaws to beaks and from muzzles to snouts. It was as if all those mascarons on the Pont-Neuf, nightmares turned to stone by the hand of Germain Pilon, had taken on life and breath and had come, one by one.
It must be said that a gibbet and pillory, a ‘justice’ and a ‘ladder’ as they were then called, stood permanently side by side in the middle of the paving and helped not a little to avert people’s gaze from that fateful square, where so many human beings full of life and vigor had met their death, and where, fifty years later, ‘Saint-Vallier’s fever’ would be born, that sickness of the terror of the scaffold and the most monstrous of all sicknesses because it comes not from God but from men.
Around her, all eyes were fixed and all mouths agape; and as she danced, to the drumming of the tambourine she held above her head in her two pure, round arms, slender, frail, quick as a wasp, with her golden, unpleated bodice, her billowing, brightly-colored dress, her bare shoulders, her slender legs, uncovered now and again by her skirt, her black hair, her fiery eyes, she was indeed a supernatural creature.
[…] it was lit by the harsh red light of the bonfire, which flickered brightly on the encircling faces of the crowd and on the dark forehead of the girl, while at the far end of the square it cast a pale glimmer, mingled with the swaying of the shadows, on the black and wrinkled old facade of the Maison-aux-Piliers on one side and the stone arms of the gallows on the other.
This was the first taste he had ever had of the delights of vanity. Hitherto, he had known only humiliation, contempt for his condition and disgust for his person. And so, stone deaf though he was, he relished the acclamation of the crowd like a real pope, that crowd which he had detested because he felt it detested him. What did it matter that his people was a pack of fools, cripples, thieves and beggars, it was still a people and he its sovereign. And he took all the ironic applause and mock respect seriously, although it should be said that mixed in with it, among the crowd, went an element of very real fear.
In this city, the boundaries between races and species seemed to have been abolished, as in a pandemonium. Amongst this population, men, women, animals, age, sex, health, sickness, all seemed communal; everything fitted together, was merged, mingled and superimposed; everyone was part of everything.
As you use our kind among you, so we use your kind among us. The law you apply to the truants, the truants apply to you. If it’s a vicious one, that’s your fault. We need now and again to see a respectable face above a hempen collar; it makes the whole thing honorable.
So it was that, little by little, developing always in harmony with the cathedral, living in it, sleeping in it, hardly ever leaving it, subject day in and day out to its mysterious pressure, he came to resemble it, to be incrusted on it, as it were, to form an integral part of it. […] One might almost say that he had taken on its shape, just as the snail takes on the shape of its shell. It was his abode, his hole, his envelope. So deep was the instinctive sympathy between the old church and himself, so numerous the magnetic and material affinities, that he somehow adhered to it like the tortoise to its shell. The gnarled cathedral was his carapace.
‘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.’
In those days they saw everything thus, without metaphysics, without exaggeration, without a magnifying glass, with the naked eye. The microscope had not yet been invented, either for material things or for the things of the spirit.
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.
