Semaine 9: Alexandre’s Travels
Welcome back everyone!
The story of The Count of Monte Cristo opens into the grand port city of Marseilles, in Southern France; it is home not only to a bustling economy, but an immensely diverse demography too. When Dumas visited the city in 1843, himself awash in fame by then, he remarked all that stood out to him in his journal entries: the spectacle of arriving ships entering the harbor, the variety of costume and language among the citizens going about their day, and the imposing sight of the Fort Saint-Jean and the Château d’If. Inspired by the sights of the city, Dumas later will decide to make it the entry setting of The Count of Monte Cristo- but not just to start the plot with a sense of adventure; this city also serves to start the momentum for the heavy element of Orientalism present throughout the story, thanks to Dumas’ first-hand experience from his various travels.
Obviously, Marseilles lends to the character of Dantès his background as an experienced commercial sailor. But by being a cosmopolitan city it also sets up the diverse makeup of the characters in The Count of Monte Cristo- specifically, the variety of their personalities. The character’s cultural background can lend them an antagonistic nature; in the example of Fernand, his Catalan background adds a feeling of cultural betrayal to Mercédès (also a Catalan) loving and marrying a Marseillaise like Dantès over him, adding more depth to his participation in framing Dantès. Conversely, said background can give the character a supporting role to Dantès’ development; in the example of Abbé Faria, his Italian background propped up his profound intellect in science, history, languages and more, making his efforts at retaining such knowledge whilst imprisoned more personal than a simple desire to not go insane.
Dumas has a greater intention behind making cultural context impact characters’ personalities, decisions, and interactions. Besides making more complex characters, Dumas had to make Dantès stand out from the rest; to do this, he first needed to be introduced to a grand variety of people as examples of who, and who not, to be. Dumas resolves this by placing Dantès in the middle of cosmopolitan Marseille. Dantès then needs to learn why these people acted as they did leading up to his imprisonment. Dumas resolves this by having the Abbé Faria happen to dig a hole to Dantès’ cell, by then deprived of intellectual stimulus for years, and give the abbé a student to whom he can pass on all that he knows- and in the process uncover what exactly led to his arrest and indefinite imprisonment. With both needs filled by the time Dantès makes his escape (and with Dantès finding the forgotten treasure only the Abbé Faria figured out existed), Dumas can now differentiate Dantès from everyone in one simple manner: he chooses his identity.
“Choosing” identity isn’t as basic as what persona Dantès uses across the the story- such as The Count, the Abbé Busoni, or Sinbad the Sailor; it extends to the personality and mindset that Dantès develops. With his deep knowledge of the world’s cultures he naturally gravitated toward that identity that he felt best agreed with his thirst for revenge and need for secrecy: the “Oriental,” a term in this case describing specifically the French interpretation of the Orient- the Ottoman, Persian, and North African worlds. That this identity makes an impression on everyone around Dantès in Paris is reflective of the romanticization of this Orient in the imagination of learned Frenchmen. It is here that Dumas’ travels make evident their impact; his visits in the Ottoman territories, from Tunisia to Anatolia, gave him first-hand experience of the cultures and norms across the Middle East. Come to think of it, the lands Dantès canonically travelled to match up very closely with those places Dumas himself visited, which makes more credible that Dantès is to some extent Dumas’ self-insert.
Armed with these experiences, Dumas could hold them up against the French-imagined life of the Oriental, with Dantès playing up the expectations of his visitors and acquaintances in a manner of palpable dramatic irony. He engrosses his victims in the Oriental world they romanticized as exotic and mysterious, and so are attracted to by reason of its taboos, oblivious to his planning a very harsh revenge that they never conceived as part of this Orient- betraying a sense of superiority they feel over this unique but “antiquated” society, the same superiority they felt over Dantès concerning who ought to be a Captain (Danglars), who ought to marry Mercédès (Fernand) and who ought to be innocent of any implication with Napoléon (de Villefort).
Curiously, the only person who sees through this persona of orientalism and recognizes Dantès within The Count is his lost love Mercédès; through a culmination of her suspicions and her tests of The Count’s behavior, she deduces his real identity the night before he faces her son Albert in a duel. After a heart-wrenching debate on the morality of his actions where both share the pain they’ve felt during their long time apart, Dantès relents and agrees to not to kill him. Here we see once more the consciousness Dantès possesses over his identity in choosing to be merciful, while his enemies remain bitter until the completion of his revenge plan. This is another layer of the message Dumas wants to give through this metaphor of West vs. Orient: he who is wronged and dead set on absolute revenge will incur suffering against those he loves, even if unintentional. It is wiser to not give into such desire for revenge, but to “Wait and Hope” for the day of redemption- all that Dantès could do while imprisoned, and he was rewarded with his miraculous meeting with Abbé Faria.
Even though this topic deserves the depth for such a formational element of The Count of Monte Cristo, this is- surprisingly- not my final post. Next Wednesday I will summarize and conclude my studies in a post perhaps of similar length. Stay tuned for the finale!