Enamoured with his beautiful young wife, he makes tentative advances but is swiftly rejected. Falling into the hands of the Truands at the Court of Miracles, he is saved by Esmeralda, who agrees to marry him out of pity, thereby giving him a place within the Court. Gringoire, the philosopher and playwright with whom the novel begins, falls into the “coward” category. This sets up a problematic dichotomy between ‘unmanliness’ and sexual aggression within the novel. These admirers, though individually very different, fall either side of a seemingly quite rigid framework: they are either portrayed as weak and cowardly or as sexually threatening and potentially violent. There is the philosopher Pierre Gringoire, the playboy Captain Phoebus, the repressed archdeacon Claude Frollo, and the eponymous hunchback, Quasimodo. A parentless gypsy of fifteen or sixteen, Esmeralda captures the interest of four very different admirers.
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