Grantaire and women
I was gonna answer this question over at lesmisquestions, but it got so long I thought I’d make it into its own post…
Um yes, so, the question of whether Grantaire’s attracted to women or not. Here’s the bit regarding women from his introduction, before we get to the bit about Enjolras (bolding mine, it’ll be important in a sec):
He was inordinately homely: the prettiest boot-stitcher of that day, Irma Boissy, enraged with his homeliness, pronounced sentence on him as follows: “Grantaire is impossible”; but Grantaire’s fatuity was not to be disconcerted. He stared tenderly and fixedly at all women, with the air of saying to them all: “If I only chose!” and of trying to make his comrades believe that he was in general demand. (x)
Then there’s this:
“Go and sleep somewhere else,” cried Enjolras.
But Grantaire, still keeping his tender and troubled eyes fixed on him, replied:—
“Let me sleep here,—until I die.” (x)
So however he looks at women, he looks at Enjolras in the same way.
When he actually interacts with women, he’s mostly just grabbing them in order to drunkenly rant at them about whatever’s on his mind. Then when he’s at the point of quite epic drunkenness he grabs Matelote the waitress, calls her ugly (you’re one to talk, R), asks her for ‘an embrace’ and talks about her ‘cheeks which invite the kiss of a sister, and lips which claim the kiss of a lover’ in a general sort of way before people start yelling at him for being an arsehole. (No note of what Matelote made of any of that: I don’t imagine she was pleased…)
Then there’s his ramble about the woman he knew who apparently sold out by marrying a banker:
And then, I met a pretty girl of my acquaintance, who is as beautiful as the spring, worthy to be called Floreal, and who is delighted, enraptured, as happy as the angels, because a wretch yesterday, a frightful banker all spotted with small-pox, deigned to take a fancy to her[…] Now here she is a bankeress. This transformation took place last night. I met the victim this morning in high spirits. The hideous point about it is, that the jade is as pretty to-day as she was yesterday. (x)
So he notices that girl’s beauty, whoever she is. (Maybe she’s the aforementioned Irma Boissy.) But he’s mad at her for marrying a banker rather than for rejecting him, so he doesn’t appear to have had any romantic interest in her.
And then of course (going back round full circle…) there’s this bit from Grantaire’s introduction:
There are men who seem to be born to be the reverse, the obverse, the wrong side. They are Pollux, Patrocles, Nisus, Eudamidas, Ephestion, Pechmeja. They only exist on condition that they are backed up with another man; their name is a sequel, and is only written preceded by the conjunction and; and their existence is not their own; it is the other side of an existence which is not theirs. Grantaire was one of these men. He was the obverse of Enjolras.
Where Grantaire’s compared to a lot of guys who were in relationships with other men, and labeled as Enjolras’s ‘obverse’. Which all seems like Hugo saying that whoever else Grantaire is interested in, he’s interested in Enjolras first and foremost. Whether that extends to other men, though…I dunno.
In conclusion, R’s either a) pretending to be interested in women when he isn’t, b) bisexual or, c) Enjolrasexual. (If that isn’t someone’s URL yet it needs to be.) But I don’t know which. I suspect all are valid really…anyone got anything else?