Jean Valjean the Blocking Figure

(This is a 10-page pseudo academic essay I wrote just to process all my feelings about Valjean and Cosette. In the future I might write more in the same vein: e.g. “Javert the Obsessed Pursuer” or “Éponine the...” I’m not sure what, since she’s been reduced to so many things.)

The term “blocking figure” is one often heard in academia to describe a stock character of romantic comedy, both in the classical Roman plays of Plautus and Terence and in Shakespeare. This is the character, typically the father or guardian of one of the principle young lovers, who initially prevents those lovers from marrying, but is doomed to be thwarted in the end. He most often takes the form of the senex iratus – “angry old man” or “angry father.” In the classical Roman plays, he’s usually the father of the male lover, who disapproves of the female lover because she’s beneath their station. But in Shakespeare and in later examples such as Italian commedia dell’arte and opera buffa, he’s usually the girl’s father or guardian, who uses his patriarchal authority to withhold her from the boy. In some examples he knows about their love and actively opposes it; in others the lovers know instinctively that he will oppose it, forcing them to keep their romance a secret. This trope is hardly exclusive to comedy either and not even always male.

Marius and a Shakespearean trope (warning: long and rambling)

I've been listening to the podcasts of Dr. Emma Smith’s Approaching Shakespeare lectures from the University of Oxford. In the lecture on Much Ado About Nothing, she points out an interesting trope found in Shakespeare’s comedies – as well as a wider cultural idea – that I had never really thought of before, at least not in depth. The trope is this: that in a man’s youth, male friendships and social bonds are his most important relationships, but that as he matures, those bonds “must” lose importance in favor of romance and marriage to a woman.

Smith cites this trope in Much Ado About Nothing to explain just why Claudio trusts Don John and not Hero (in his culture and stage of life, male “friends” are inherently placed above women; in the end he matures by learning John’s deceit and reconciling with Hero) and to interpret Benedick’s character arc too (moving from a misogynistic, male friendship-centered life, to embracing his love for Beatrice, and to choosing that love over male friendship by agreeing to kill Claudio). She also discusses the similar “love vs. friendship” themes in Two Gentlemen of Verona, The Two Noble Kinsmen, Love’s Labour’s Lost, All’s Well That Ends Well, The Merchant of Venice, and in a tragic variation, Othello. While she doesn’t mention this theme in Romeo and Juliet, I thought instantly of two essays I’d read in the past that highlighted Romeo’s dilemma of “Juliet vs. Mercutio.” This is definitely a recurring Shakespearean theme.

I wish I were taking a literature course, because I want to write an essay about Les Misérables’s use of this trope in Marius’s character arc. Particularly in the musical, where Marius is much more “as one” with his friends than in the novel and “love vs. revolution” (which is implicitly “love vs. friendship” too) becomes a central dilemma for him. I already have so many thoughts on the subject, but no definitive conclusions.