Editors Reads Verdict
Hugo's strangest and most politically direct novel imagines a man whose permanent laugh exposes the cruelty of English aristocracy and the performance demanded of those the powerful find entertaining — a Gothic melodrama with a social argument at its core.
What We Loved
- Gwynplaine's compulsory grin is one of the most powerful symbols in all of Hugo's work — a face that cannot express its inner life
- The contrast between the carnival world and the House of Lords is among Hugo's most effective structural ironies
- Dea, the blind girl who loves Gwynplaine, is rendered with genuine tenderness and depth
Minor Drawbacks
- The melodrama is at its most extreme here — coincidences pile up to a degree that strains credulity even by Hugo's standards
- The English aristocratic world Hugo depicts is more satirical caricature than realistic social observation
- At 688 pages, the novel overstays its narrative welcome in the final third
Key Takeaways
- → The face is not the self — a man can be forced to wear an expression that inverts everything he feels
- → The aristocracy's laughter at Gwynplaine in the House of Lords is the novel's most devastating image: the powerful entertained by the mutilated
- → Blindness, in Dea, is figured as a form of vision — she sees Gwynplaine truly because she cannot see his enforced smile
- → The Comprachicos represent all systems that deform children to produce a product the powerful will find useful or amusing
| Author | Victor Hugo |
|---|---|
| Publisher | Dover |
| Pages | 688 |
| Published | January 1, 1869 |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Classic Fiction, French Literature, Gothic Fiction |
The Man Who Laughs Review
Victor Hugo published L’Homme qui rit in 1869, two years before the fall of the Second Empire that had kept him in exile for nearly two decades. He was sixty-seven years old, and the anger driving the novel is the anger of a man who has spent a very long time watching the powerful abuse the powerless with confident indifference. It is his most openly political novel — which is saying something — and its central image is one of the most disturbing in nineteenth-century fiction.
Gwynplaine was abandoned as a child in the snow by the Comprachicos, a gang that specialised in purchasing children and surgically deforming them for the amusement market — producing dwarves, contortionists, and in Gwynplaine’s case, a man whose mouth has been carved into a permanent, rictus grin. He cannot frown, cannot express grief or rage or pain, cannot communicate his inner state through his face. He laughs whether he wants to or not. He is discovered near-frozen in a snowdrift by a wandering mountebank named Ursus, who takes him in along with Dea, a blind infant girl he finds at the same time. The three grow up together as a carnival troupe, Gwynplaine performing his grin for audiences who find it hilarious, Dea loving him without seeing what he looks like.
The discovery, in the novel’s second half, that Gwynplaine is the disinherited son of an English lord sets in motion the machinery of melodrama that Hugo manages with absolute confidence even as it strains credulity. The scene in the House of Lords — where Gwynplaine attempts to make a passionate speech about poverty and injustice while the assembled peers laugh helplessly at his grin — is the novel’s political centrepiece and one of the finest things Hugo ever wrote. The laugh they cannot suppress is the same as his: both involuntary, both expressive of something entirely different from what the face shows.
Hugo’s title character is the ancestor of a long line of figures whose enforced performance conceals their humanity — the clown, the jester, the entertainer who must produce joy regardless of his circumstances. The Joker, the most famous of Gwynplaine’s descendants in popular culture, was directly inspired by this novel. Hugo’s contribution to the tradition of the man whose face has been turned against him is to insist that the mask is a political condition, not merely a personal one: someone made Gwynplaine this way, and that someone had reasons that served their interests.
Our rating: 4.1/5 — Hugo’s most extreme novel, and the one whose central image has proved most durable in the century and a half since he created it.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is "The Man Who Laughs" about?
Gwynplaine, whose mouth was surgically carved into a permanent grin as a child by a gang called the Comprachicos, grows up as a carnival performer and discovers he is an English peer. Hugo's most melodramatic novel is also his most direct examination of disfigurement, spectacle, and the face made into a mask by forces outside the self.
What are the key takeaways from "The Man Who Laughs"?
The face is not the self — a man can be forced to wear an expression that inverts everything he feels The aristocracy's laughter at Gwynplaine in the House of Lords is the novel's most devastating image: the powerful entertained by the mutilated Blindness, in Dea, is figured as a form of vision — she sees Gwynplaine truly because she cannot see his enforced smile The Comprachicos represent all systems that deform children to produce a product the powerful will find useful or amusing
Is "The Man Who Laughs" worth reading?
Hugo's strangest and most politically direct novel imagines a man whose permanent laugh exposes the cruelty of English aristocracy and the performance demanded of those the powerful find entertaining — a Gothic melodrama with a social argument at its core.
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