Male vengeance and female unvengeance: looking for female rage in The Count of Montecristo (1844-46)
Classic, literary fiction
This review discusses elements of the plot and ending of The Count of Montecristo by Alexandre Dumas. Be advised.
The Count of Montecristo is a story that regards the theme of revenge as just, moral, and sacred—as acting the very will of God. As he’d come to have doubts that perhaps, his revenge had passed some moral limit, Montecristo went to visit his old prison1: there, in the cell of his first master, the Abbé Faria, he found some words from the Old Testament that strengthened his long-held belief that he’d been, all along, the hand of God; the words are not an exact quote of the Bible, but part of it seems to come from Psalm 582, which ends with the verses
PSALMS 58:10-11 The righteous shall rejoice when he seeth the vengeance: he shall wash his feet in the blood of the wicked. / So that a man shall say, Verily there is a reward for the righteous: verily he is a God that judgeth in the earth.
“He is a God that judgeth in the earth”. Only Edmond Dantès-turned-Count of Montecristo is ever afforded this dignity; only he is elevated to the role of vengeful god, standing above other men, as he is remarked to be throughout the text. His life had been taken from him; if not for his resourcefulness and the great knowledge he’d gained in prison, he would’ve died there, innocent and alone; his old, beloved father died while he was in prison: Edmond deserves to exact his own revenge. However, was his life the only one whose course was derailed by a handful of envious men acting in the shadows? Mercédès, his fiancée, saw the love of her life taken away from her, and soon believed him dead; she later married her “best friend”, Fernand, not knowing that he’d been one of the architects of Edmond’s false accusation and imprisonment; and throughout their unhappy life together, he also hid from her his true character and nefarious actions. Her life, too, was taken from her the day Edmond was imprisoned; her hopes, her dreams. Did she not deserve to accede to the status of vengeful goddess, for her own sake?
For most of the novel, Mercédès is shown to be Edmond’s mirror image: from the same low class as him, she is elevated to riches and nobility; pure of heart and innocent, she’s somewhat marred by sin—marrying Fernand—just like Edmond is by his vengeful thoughts; with money, she gains wisdom and erudition, showing interest and aptitude in various fields of knowledge, becoming as accomplished as Edmond had in prison; cleverer and more insightful than anyone else, she is the only one to recognise Edmond in the Count of Montecristo.
Why, then, the distinction? Why her silence when faced with her old lover? Why does the narrative, in an uncharacteristic misogynist turn, make her suddenly old, and therefore unlovable? Why is she not given the right to revenge? Women can be angelic in Montecristo (Valentine), yes, but they can also be wicked (Mme de Villefort), as well as free-spirited (Eugénie Danglars), exceptionally talented (Louise d’Armilly), homosexual (both Eugénie and Louise), unfaithful (Mme Danglars), faithful and wrathful (Haydée)… there’s no reason for one in the position of Mercédès to not be vengeful, too, unless it is to be found in some moral of the century that impedes “good” women to make their own vengeance—to desire it, even. She is destined by the narrative to “die a woman with grieving”—and nobody to exact her vengeance, because she does not even ask for it. Revenge is man’s province. Edmond uses his hand for more than swearing his love by it, like Benedick; but he does it for himself.
BEATRICE I cannot be a man with wishing, therefore I will die a woman with grieving.
BENEDICK Tarry, good Beatrice. By this hand, I love thee.
BEATRICE Use it for my love some other way than swearing by it.3
The hashtag #femalerage collects thousands of posts on social media filled with bookreading young women like Instagram and Tiktok; “female rage” became such a buzzword that a Google search for the term will yield results from publications as different as Lithub, Hollywood Reported, NY Times, Stylist UK (the first related search is, of course, “female rage books”); Phoebe Waller-Bridge herself mentions the concept in her video interview with Vogue while talking about the inspiration behind her enormously successful Fleabag.
Surely, Mercédès deserves to have a say in the punishment of the men who manipulated her life? Agency in the punishment of the man who only gained access to her bed with deceit, knowing he would never honestly win her hand or her love? In the punishment of the man who gave her a child and never told her the truth about himself? Or in the punishment of the man whose idea it was, first, to have her fiancé imprisoned? Not only has her life been filled with sadness and melancholy; it was founded in lies. For a novel that often touches on subtler feelings, it’s never mentioned how Mercédès might feel about this long, continuous deceit—about having been personally, directly wronged, by her own husband most of all. Perhaps hers might be a uniquely female rage that didn’t resonate with the man Dumas, who did not write about it because he failed to even consider it; but this is hard to believe of a man writing in a post-Merteuil French literary world, hard to believe of the author of Milady de Winter. Moreover, it simply cannot be true when Dumas makes Edmond say to Danglars “I am the one whose fiancée you prostituted”4 (MC 116). It cannot be supposed, then, that Dumas was ignorant of all the ways Mercédès was wronged—even the darker, sexual ones. So why is her rage unacknowledged?
The answer to this question might be found in a simple literary need: Dumas knew he couldn’t touch on Mercédès’ rage and need for vengeance without making her Montecristo’s equal, and he wanted no equal for his great and terrible hero, alone and Byronic in his godly purpose. Mercédès is therefore dealt a bad fate: a womanly death, in solitude and despair, with no acknowledgement of any desire for revenge: she is given an unvengeance, the absence of a righteous vengeance. She, unlike her old lover, cannot ‘wash her feet in the blood of the wicked’. She is left bloodless.
Further reading
Le saphisme en filigrane : décryptage des amitiés particulières dans le roman du premier xixe siècle by Nicole G. Albert
Dumas déplace habilement le curseur de la moralité et nous peint la relation des deux amies comme pure et sincère au milieu d’un monde régi par le mensonge, la vénalité et la cupidité. Sous sa plume, l’immoralité, la perversité, sont l’apanage de personnages socialement conformes. […] [Eugénie] échappe au(x) mariage(s) et embrasse l’homosexualité en même temps que la liberté.
Dumas skilfully shifts the mark of morality and paints the relationship of the two friends as pure and sincere in the midst of a world governed by lies, venality and cupidity. In his work, immorality and perversity are the prerogative of socially conforming characters. […] [Eugénie] escapes from her marriage(s) and embraces homosexuality at the same time as freedom.
The Cult of the Imperfect by Umberto Eco
The Count of Monte Cristo is one of the most exciting novels ever written and on the other hand is one of the most badly written novels of all time and in any literature. The book is full of holes. […] We are well aware why Dumas did this. Not because he could not write. […] Dumas wrote that way for financial reasons; he was paid a certain amount per line and had to spin things out. Not to mention the need—common to all serialized novels, to help inattentive readers catch up on the previous episode—to obsessively repeat things that were already known, so a character may recount an event on page 100, but on page 105 he meets another character and tells him exactly the same story—and in the first three chapters you should see how often Edmond Dantès tells everyone who will listen that he means to marry and that he is happy: fourteen years in the Château d’If are still not enough for a sniveling wimp like him.
Let’s go back to the initial statement. The Count of Monte Cristo is one of the most exciting novels ever written. With one shot (or with a volley of shots, in a long-range bombardment), Dumas manages to pack into one novel three archetypal situations capable of tugging at the heartstrings of even an executioner: innocence betrayed, the persecuted victim’s acquisition—through a stroke of luck—of a colossal fortune that places him above common mortals, and finally, the strategy of a vendetta resulting in the death of characters that the novelist has desperately contrived to appear hateful beyond all reasonable limits.
On this framework there unfolds the portrait of French society during the “Hundred Days” and later during Louis Philippe’s reign, with its dandies, bankers, corrupt magistrates, adulteresses, marriage contracts, parliamentary sessions, international relations, state conspiracies, the optical telegraph, letters of credit, the avaricious and shameless calculations of compound interest and dividends, discount rates, currencies and exchange rates, lunches, dances, and funerals—and all of this dominated by the principal topos of the feuilleton, the superman. But unlike all the other artisans who have attempted this classic locus of the popular novel, the Dumas of the superman attempts a disconnected and breathless state of mind, showing his hero torn between the dizziness of omnipotence (owing to his money and knowledge) and terror at his own privileged role, tormented by doubt and reassured by the knowledge that his omnipotence arises from suffering. Hence, a new archetype grafted on to the others, the Count of Monte Cristo (the power of names) is also a Christ figure, and a duly diabolical one, who is cast into the tomb of the Château d’If, a sacrificial victim of human evil, only to arise from it to judge the living and the dead, amid the splendor of a treasure rediscovered after centuries, without ever forgetting that he is a son of man. You can be blasé or critically shrewd, and know a lot about intertextual pitfalls, but still you are drawn into the game, as in a Verdi melodrama. By dint of excess, melodrama and kitsch verge on the sublime, while excess tips over into genius.
You can read more of this essay in the Paris Review article linked above, or in Umberto Eco’s On the shoulders of giants (2019), or in Sulle spalle dei giganti (2017) or Sugli specchi e altri saggi (2001, 2018).
“‘Oh, my second father,’ he said. ‘You who gave me liberty, knowledge, riches; […] take away this remaining doubt that, if it does not become a certainty, will turn into remorse.’
The count bent his head and clasped his hands.
‘Here, Monsieur!’ said a voice behind him. He started and turned around. The concierge was holding out […] the manuscript of Abbé Faria’s great work on the monarchy in Italy.
The count seized it eagerly and the first thing his eyes met was the epigraph, which read: ‘You will pull the dragon’s teeth and trample the lions underfoot, said the Lord.’
‘Ah!’ he cried. ‘There is my answer! Thank you, father, thank you.’” (MC 113, trans. Robin Buss)
« Oh ! mon second père, dit-il, toi qui m’as donné la liberté, la science, la richesse ; […] enlève-moi ce reste de doute qui, s’il ne se change en conviction, deviendra un remords. »
Le comte baissa la tête et joignit les mains.
« Tenez, monsieur ! » dit une voix derrière lui. Monte-Cristo tressaillit et se retourna. Le concierge lui tendait […] le grand ouvrage de l’abbé Faria sur la royauté en Italie.
Le comte s’en empara avec empressement, et ses yeux tout d’abord tombant sur l’épigraphe, il lut : “Tu arracheras les dents du dragon, et tu fouleras aux pieds les lions, a dit le Seigneur.”
« Ah ! s’écria-t-il, voilà la réponse ! Merci, mon père, merci ! » (MC 113)
Shakespeare, William. Much Ado About Nothing, 4.1
“[…] je suis celui dont vous avez prostitué la fiancée […]” (MC 116)
just finished reading this book and this was also one of my gripes too; in mercedes last moments in the book she is described as old, when her and edmond are (i think) the same age, and yet throughout the book he has been described as handsome. definitely a deeper theme of women and how they 'age quicker' compared to men.