#some people? read elaborate Romantic drowning imagery? to cope???

[secretmellowblog]

Hugo’s descriptions of the sea in Les Miserables— especially in the chapter “Billows and Shadows,” which compares Jean Valjean’s oppression to the suffering a sailor who falls overboard in the middle of the ocean — are so capital r Romanticism. It’s fascinating to see the similarities between Hugo’s Romantic literature and the work of Romantic seascape painters...like it's amazing that Hugo managed to write in the way those paintings Look.

The most significant comparison here is Gericault’s “Raft of the Medusa,” which is Thee iconic Romantic painting of a shipwreck— depicting the historical moment when the stranded sailors of the Medusa desperately tried to signal a distant ship that did not notice them. (This painting is also massive.)

And, Hugo’s use of a dramatic Sublime ocean imagery to symbolize greater inner turmoil is also very “Wanderer above the Sea of Fog,” although this painting does not depict a literal ocean.

Finally, I love to compare Hugo descriptions of the sea to the work of the Romantic Painter Ivan Aivazovsky, who primarily painted seascapes:

The wind blows in gusts; all the foam overwhelms him. He raises his eyes and beholds only the lividness of the clouds.

He witnesses, amid his death-pangs, the immense madness of the sea.

He is tortured by this madness; he hears noises strange to man, which seem to come from beyond the limits of the earth, and from one knows not what frightful region beyond.

There are birds in the clouds, just as there are angels above human distresses; but what can they do for him? They sing and fly and float, and he, he rattles in the death agony.

He feels himself buried in those two infinities, the ocean and the sky, at one and the same time: the one is a tomb; the other is a shroud.