As I read for this week, I couldn’t help but picture the “Feast of Fools” as it appears in the Disney version of The Hunchback of Notre Dame. The premise is that Quasimodo, a young man misshapen and naïve, an outsider, leaves his invisibility behind for a day and experiences the “Feast of Fools” in the center of Paris. His guardian, Frollo, is a man of means and wickedly pious and presides over the events of the Feast. His control over Quasimodo is thinly veiled in the guise of keeping this bell-ringer safe within the walls of the church.
The Feast of Fools, as Disney portrays it, is supplemented in explanation with a musical number referring to the event as “Topsy-Turvy Day.” A jester extends an invitation to “all” to participate and observe the splendor and inverse of taboo and norms. While Quasimodo walks the crowd in comfort early in the day, he finds himself in a competition for the most ugly or gruesome costume. When Esmerelda goes to pull of his mask, she tugs at his face and realizes that it is no mask, that he is presenting himself in his real form, that he is an outsider who does not perform the inversion as the folks in the crowd. Rather, he embodies inversion, he is inversion. Once the folk discover that he is not deliberately performing this act of topsy-turviness, they turn on him and set him apart on a wheel where they tie him down, throwing debris in his direction.
The crowd, celebrating inversion in festival, rejects the constant embodiment of other, inverse, and carnival thereby denigrating a young man whose physical form visibly disturbs their sense of normalcy in a fair for the celebration of disruption. During a time when the purpose of gathering is meant to capitalize on the reification of otherness and the liberation of the physical from cultural norms, mores, and expectations, one who cannot shift their appearance from normal to abnormal suffers and finds themselves as defined visually by a hunchback that can neither be shrugged off nor ignored when they are “outed.” Their appearance then defines them and sets them apart.
Quasimodo returns to the bell tower for sanctuary. In the church, his visibility is still limited. He does not come into contact with the public but instead lives caring for the bells in the company of gargoyles who, with Disney’s assistance, talk and chatter all day long. These grotesques in the film are horned, winged statues whose presence is of course another inversion, the world undone and topsy turvy. The animation of these stone sculptures in their conversation, flight, movement, etc. all add to the atmosphere of liberation. Their inversion is controlled though as they move within the walls of the church alone and are tied to one physical location. Petrified as they are, they retain their sense of mischief and their influence over Quasimodo. The church, however, holds sway over those who reside within its walls, human and inanimate alike, and ultimately exercises power in the city and over its people.
According to our Babcock reading, “Religions…are very often built in antithesis to other persuasions” (18). The church in the film is the foil against which the festival is set. At the end, as Quasimodo along with the gypsy folk of Paris act in solidarity against the guards and forces on Frollo’s side, the church becomes a hellscape as its gargoyles perform outside of their petrified norm, fire pours from its gutters and through its columns, Esmerelda is nearly murdered at Frollo’s hands, and in turn Frollo is sent over the edge to his death in flame and stone. Quasimodo in the midst of all this cries out, “Sanctuary! Sanctuary! Sanctuary!”
Are we meant to observe this as the church offering safety and freedom from Frollo and his upper-class ilk? Are we meant to denote the topsy-turvy nature of the lower class overcoming the powerful Frollo and his cronies? Is that topsy-turvy? Is the church’s role in this film as a place of safety and also distress topsy-turvy? Here the church and the priest within it declare more often what it is rather than what it is not. It is a space for reflection and safety or sanctuary. Frollo, however, declares it as a space of regulation, defining the strictures around Quasimodo’s life including with whom he may be in contact, his role in society (as bell ringer alone), and the necessity for his hidden, undisclosed existence.
The outcast in this film is the underdog and the liberated in the end of the film. The assumption, as Disney-fication leads us to expect, is that they all lived happily ever after. Quasimodo is greeted warmly and accepted into the new social fold and life returns to normal. This new normal includes Quasimodo and his physical, visual deformity while the inner deformity and destructive nature of Frollo is rejected by society and he dies in the process. If Quasimodo’s inverse nature is accepted then is the social fabric of Paris in this film enacting inversion constantly in this new world where the Other is accepted rather than rejected?
Word Witch 