Literature Discussion Group: December 2014

18 December 2014

"All for one and one for all!"

The 1999 Modern Library edition.

After hearing those famous words so many times, it's kind of thrilling to read their source material: Alexander Dumas' novel, The Three Musketeers—a novel which has been famous since it was first published.

NEVER A WALLFLOWER

Over the years, Dumas' novel has remained popular enough that it has never been out of print. Indeed, the copies we're reading in our house were published in 1999 and 2006, and a quick search of Amazon.com shows that there were new paperback versions published in both 2013 and 2014. Take that, Twilight!

ONE CHAPTER AT A TIME

Like many of Charles Dickens' novels, The Three Musketeers was initially published serially, meaning that it came out one chapter at a time in the Parisian newspaper, Le Siecle (The Century), between March 14 and July 1, 1844. On the days when chapters were slated to appear in the newspaper, lines at newsstands were lonnnnng. People loved it from the beginning.

And the swashbuckling heroes of the novel are no less popular today, having inspired numerous movies—one of which stars Charlie Sheen and Kiefer Sutherland. Yikes. (There's a better one from 2011 with Legolas as the Duke of Buckingham and Christoph Waltz as Richelieu.)

The 2006 Penguin Classics Deluxe edition.

MAKING HISTORY SEXY

One of the things that made Dumas' novel so popular (and which keeps it popular today) is that it is a combination of history and romance; it contains both historical fact and high emotion, a combination that compels historians who might not read a pure romance and romantics who might not read a pure history to read—and enjoy—the book.

This take on the historical novel ushered in a new genre. You know it today as historical fiction, but if you'd walked into Longfellow Books 1884, there would have been just one book in that section: The Three Musketeers.

A LITTLE CONTEXT

Knowing these details may help you better understand the novel.

D'Artagnan, "the Gascon," is from Gascony, a region of southwestern France. Bearn is part of Gascony.

Cardinal Richelieu, Anne of Austria, Louis XIII, and Monsieur de Treville were all real people, and Dumas presents them fairly accurately.

The Cardinal was, in fact, an advisor to the King;
Treville and the Cardinal were, in fact, adversaries (obviously, since Treville was banished by his buddy the King in 1642 for attempting to have the Cardinal assassinated);
The marriage of Anne and Louis was a troubled one (they were married for political reasons when they were both 14—it wasn't exactly a Match.com love story);
There was, in fact, a lot of tension between Anne and the Cardinal (he declared war on her brother in 1635 and accused her of treason in 1637, probably because she really did surreptitiously correspond with her brother).

The three Musketeers (Aramis, Athos, and Porthos) are all based on real Musketeers, as is D'Artagnan (really Charles de Batz-Castlemore), although D'Artagnan's time frame has been shifted a little. Castlemore served with Louis XIV and Cardinal Mazarin—not Louis XIII and Richelieu.

The romance between Anne and the Duke of Buckingham is entirely fictional, and the character of Lady de Winter (how interesting that we have another de Winter so soon!), though based on an amalgamation of a few real people and stories, did not exist.

YOUR ASSIGNMENT OPTIONS (FINALLY!)

Please complete ONE of the following and bring it to our next discussion (preferably in a tangible format—not just in your head):

Many of the novel's characters are described in great detail. I'm kind of partial to the description of the police commissioner, Monsieur le Commissaire, "a man half-ferret, half-fox." Draw/sketch/paint one of them in the medium of your choice.
Throughout the novel we keep hearing not only that women are essentially the downfall of man, but that "woman is a weak vessel." Keep track of these and consider them all together. Do you think Dumas really believes women are problematic and immoral, or is he being satirical? Explain why you believe as you do.
We tend to think of the three Musketeers—Athos, Porthos, and Aramis—as heroes. Are they? Take a good look at the way they are first introduced and their development over the course of the novel. In what ways are they heroic? In what ways may they be less than heroic? What's your ultimate verdict: heroes or ... something else?
One element of the Romance is that it typically uses "stock characters," which are more or less stereotypes. Today you might find the computer geek, the punk-rock female hacker, or the out of touch school principal as stock characters in novels. They're characters that rely on stereotypes instead of true character development. Do you see any examples of "stock characters" in The Three Musketeers? Who? And what makes him/her/them stereotypes or over-simplifications instead of well-developed characters?
Allusions abound in this novel—we even have a Circe reference in chapter XXXVI! Pick a few allusions that you notice and and explain their presence. What is Dumas trying to accomplish by invoking these particular names?

Happy reading (and happy holidays)! See you in 2015!

Looking For Hamlet Scholar Talk

This is another event at the PPL in March in honor of the First Folio Exhibit, and it's on Wednesday, March 9th from 12-1:30pm in the Rines Auditorium.

"Focusing on Hamlet, University of Southern Maine Professor Ben Bertram will examine the way editors, directors, actors, teachers, and scholars choose among folio, quarto, or conflated versions of the plays. He will also be accompanied by actors who will perform Hamlet’s soliloquies and join in a discussion of how Shakespeare’s words make it from the page to the stage."

Get the full description here.

Definitions and Clarifications

pneumatic, adj. - literally, full of air. This term is often used to describe women in BNW, and seems to suggest that a woman like Lenina, who's "wonderfully pneumatic," is buxom, curvy, shapely, and yes, even bouncy. But pneumatic could also have a second meaning here, and that is to indicate that someone is a bit of an air-head, light on the intellectual matter, or not bogged down by weighty matters or considerations.

viviparous, adj. - a creature that is viviparous gives birth to live young that develop inside the body, as in the way mammals reproduce. Humans are viviparous (at least, they were until A.F. 632).

Malthusian, adj. - based on the beliefs of Robert Thomas Malthus, a British economist who argued that "population tends to increase faster than food supply, with inevitably disastrous results unless the increase in population is checked by moral restraints or by war, famine, and disease." - The Free Dictionary

Pavlovian Conditioning, n. - also called Classic Conditioning, it's a way of getting a subject to make certain associations between two previously unrelated things; Ivan Petrovich Pavlov was the psychologist who discovered that if he always rang a bell right before feeding his dogs, they came to associate the sound of the bell with getting fed, and therefore would start to drool upon hearing the bell. Here's a great comic related to that experiment.

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