129 pages • 4 hours read
Alexandre DumasThe Count of Monte Cristo
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1844A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Symbols & Motifs
Death and Resurrection
Edmond undergoes more than one symbolic death before he reinvents himself as Monte Cristo. He experiences a kind of social death when he is imprisoned in the Chateau d’If and nearly dies when he takes Faria’s place and is thrown into the sea, experiencing another near-drowning before the Genoese smugglers rescue him. Faria also appears to die once before his actual death when he experiences the seizure he treats with his red liquid.
As a “man who [has] come back from the next world” (178), Monte Cristo is depicted sometimes as a frightening revenant and sometimes as a Christ-like figure. To the objects of his vengeance, he is a kind of ghost, and more than one character notes the extreme coldness of his hands. Others, such as the members of the Morrel family, see him as a savior and protector.
Other characters who undergo death-like experiences and then return to life include the newborn Benedetto, dug up by Bertuccio after being buried alive; Villefort, whom Bertuccio believes he has killed and who narrowly survives; Noirtier, whose stroke has given him the appearance of a “frozen corpse” while he retains his intelligence and will; Valentine, for whom a funeral is actually held after Monte Cristo drugs her in order to rescue her from her stepmother; and Maximilien, who swallows what he believes to be a fatal poison before being reunited with Valentine. These repeated images of apparent death and rebirth reflect both the theme of Rebirth and Reinvention and the theme of The Byronic Hero, testing the limits of good and evil.
Money
Money plays a key role in the novel, especially in the stories of the Morrel family and Danglars, and financial need or greed is a motivating factor in many characters’ lives. Banks and bankers, the stock market, and the availability of credit all help shape people’s destinies. In addition, characters apply the language of debt and repayment to other situations, speaking of what they owe people or how they can repay them.
For example, Maximilien undertakes to repay his family’s debt to their unknown benefactor by saving a life on the anniversary of his intervention, while his sister keeps on display the actual purse containing the paid invoice representing their financial salvation and the diamond for her dowry, blurring the lines between literal and figurative debt (the purse is the same one in which M. Morrel left money for the dying M. Dantès). Attitudes toward the repayment of literal debts also serve as an index of moral fiber. M. Morrel is ready to kill himself over the failure to pay his creditors, while Danglars thinks nothing of running away to Rome when he has no means to pay his.
Drugs and Poisons
Drugs that can bring either healing or death play a central role in the novel. The most notable example is the red liquid formulated by Faria, which he and Monte Cristo use to revive people but which Mme. Villefort apparently uses to kill them. Noirtier takes the same drug to treat his paralysis and uses small doses of it to build up Valentine’s resistance to the poison administered by her stepmother. Monte Cristo uses drugs to control his own need for sleep, and to induce sleep in both Valentine and Maximilien. Drugs give those who use them power over life and death; whether this power is used for good or evil is up to the individual.
Politics
The turmoil of French politics in the Napoleonic period results in dramatic reversals of fortune for several characters early in the book, most notably when Edmond is arrested after Danglars and Fernand denounce him for carrying a letter from Elba just before Napoleon’s dramatic return to France. The shifting fortunes of Villefort and his father, Noirtier, are also closely linked to the rise and fall of Napoleon. Villefort’s anti-Bonapartist politics help to instigate Bertuccio’s vendetta against him when he refuses to prosecute the death of Bertuccio’s brother. On the whole, the more sympathetic characters in the book are aligned in some way with Bonaparte and the revolution, while the less sympathetic characters tend to be aligned with Royalists (Franz appears to be an exception).
Political movements and wars in Italy, Spain, and Greece help to shape the careers of Faria and Morcerf. When Monte Cristo wants to manipulate Debray and Mme. Danglars into unwise speculations, he sends a fake telegram declaring that a pretender to the Spanish throne has just returned to Catalonia in the manner of Napoleon.
Orientalism
Though of French origin, the novel often depicts Monte Cristo as “Oriental,” an identity he both performs and that other characters infer about him. The most notable instance is his unseen, fictional alias as Sinbad the Sailor, a reference to a tale from One Thousand and One Nights, a series of Middle Eastern folk narratives first introduced to Europe in the 18th century with Antoine Galland’s French translation: Les Mille et Une Nuits (1704-1717).
In Dumas’s era, many French readers would have a working knowledge of the Nights and the “Orientalist” system of representation (or misrepresentation) that made up the 18th-19th-century European, colonialist understanding of non-Western places (the Middle East, North Africa, South-West Asia, etc.). Within “Orientalist” thought, these areas and their occupants were seen as dangerous, irrational, and “erotic” compared to the West. This creates a problematic binary and system of “Othering,” that Monte Cristo utilizes to his own advantage. 20th-century scholar Edward Said, in his work Orientalism, highlights the constructed nature of the “Orient” as a hegemonic, European invention rather than a reality and accurate depiction of non-Western places and people, who, under colonialism, often lacked self-representation.
Dumas uses many of these “Orientalist” tropes throughout the novel, notably with the characters of Haydée and Ali, both of whom are non-Western characters who seemingly lack agency and voice, especially in the case of Ali, who physically has no tongue, effectively silencing the non-Western characters in the novel, mimicking colonialism’s hegemony. While these stereotypes reflect the biases of Dumas’s time and the problematic system of Othering that “Oriental” thought invokes, Orientalism’s constructed nature adds to the novel’s layers of fabrication, connecting to the theme of Rebirth and Reinvention, in which identity is explored, in part, as performative; this is also highlighted by the fictional nature of Monte Cristo’s Sinbad the Sailor alias from One Thousand and One Nights, which is itself a compilation of stories about performance and storytelling.
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By Alexandre Dumas
