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’s implication of destruction and death, which is further reinforced during the course of the novel by the recurrent image of an innocent fly caught in a spider’s toxic web. Both individual and collective destiny hang under the iron, immutable weight of anankeè, as witnessed by the characters’ trajectories and the social and moral stagnancy that asphyxiates the world of the novel. As we come to learn, it is Claude Frollo, who is at once archdeacon and occult scientist, torn by the impossibility of a different situation (“Oh, to love a woman! to be a priest! [p. 318]), who has traced these letters, but their significance applies to all of the novel’s principal characters, themselves trapped in a web of impossible existence. Frollo loves Esmeralda, who despises him; Quasimodo also loves Esmeralda, who is horrified by the hunchback; and, in turn, Esmeralda loves Phoebus, who, morally bankrupt, is incapable of love. Maternal love and fraternal love are no less spared in this novel of unfulfilled passion: The suffering Paquette is reunited with Esmeralda, her long-lost daughter, only to have the girl immediately ripped away and put to death for her “crimes”; and Jehan Frollo, Claude’s adored brother, who rebuffs his sibling’s affection, meets his death at Quasimodo’s hand during the assault on the cathedral, as Frollo himself will when his “adopted” son holds him responsible for Esmeralda’s death. The oppressive hand of fate operates, by the novel’s close, a mass liquidation of characters—Dom Frollo, Esmeralda, Paquette, Jehan Frollo, and Quasimodo are all dead—while, in a contrast that underscores the irony of destiny, those of mediocre moral substance survive: Phoebus gets out unscathed and marries, as planned, Fleur-de-Lys de Gondelaurier; and Gringoire, perhaps the wisest of all in the area of self-preservation, finds companionship with a goat preferable to the perils of human contact.

To translate this vision of impossible love in an impossible world, Hugo creates a new kind of character to populate his new novel or, at the very least, a different kind of character than the one put in place by his contemporaries. Void of the psychological depth and unity of composition that was increasingly valorized over the course of the nineteenth century, Hugo’s characters, drawn from an archetypal model, are pure symbol. From Esmeralda, who is defined by her sublime state of physical and moral purity, to Paquette, on whom the primal maternal qualities of instinctive love and protection are transposed, to Phoebus, who, as his name implies, is brilliant on the exterior but lacks any true substance, they are larger-than-life representations. The characters of Claude Frollo and Quasimodo are larger than life as well, but they are complicated by the presence of a central duality through which universal man’s struggle is figured. In the case of Frollo, in whom the opposing forces of good and evil engage in a fierce and debilitating combat as he struggles with his growing obsession with Esmeralda, this duality has no possibility for resolution or transcendence: Simultaneously attracted and repelled by the enchanting gypsy, Frollo is the spider and the fly, rigidly trapped in a tortured state between priest and demon. This internal turmoil manifests itself not only mentally, as Frollo loses all interest in his intellectual pursuits and in his much-loved brother, but physically, as Frollo passes during the course of the novel from human to beast to monster, as witnessed by his reaction to Esmeralda’s hanging: “At the most awful moment a demoniac laugh—a laugh impossible to a mere man—broke from the livid lips of the priest” (p. 480). Just as occurs in the alchemy that Frollo investigates, he is literally transformed (changed from one form to another) by the novel’s end, his body, as the narrator notes following Frollo’s fall from the cathedral, found “without a trace of human shape” (p. 483).

In the case of Quasimodo, the central duality is that of the opposing poles of the sublime and the grotesque. From the beginning to the end of the novel,