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Quasimodo
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Quasimodo is a central character from French author Victor Hugo's 1831 novel Notre Dame de Paris. Against Hugo's wishes, most English translations of the work have renamed it The Hunchback of Notre Dame, making Quasimodo the title character.
Quasimodo is a tragic protagonist in the story and is a type of noble savage.
Quasimodo was born with extreme physical deformities, which Hugo describes as a huge wart that covers his right eye and a severely hunched back. He is found abandoned on the doorsteps of Notre Dame on a Quasimodo Sunday, the first Sunday after Easter, by the archdeacon Claude Frollo, who adopts the baby and brings him up to be the bell-ringer of the cathedral. Due to the loud ringing of the bells, Quasimodo also becomes deaf.
Looked upon by the general populace of Paris as a monster, Quasimodo later falls in love with the beautiful Gypsy girl Esmeralda and rescues her when she is entangled in a murder. Quasimodo does not earn love or compassion by the end, the main theme of the book being the cruelty of social justice. Quasimodo also murders his former benefactor, Frollo, who has sealed Esmeralda's doom in hopes of quelling his lust for her, by pushing him off the cathedral. He later goes to the mass grave where the bodies of the condemned are dumped and dies clutching Esmeralda's body; years later, their skeletons are found intertwined.
Quasimodo's name can be considered a pun. Frollo finds him on the cathedral's doorsteps on Quasimodo Sunday and names him after the holiday; the Latin quasimodo means "almost like" — possibly Hugo intended to play on a visceral reaction from some readers that the hunchback was only almost like a human being.
In the novel, he symbolically shows Esmeralda the difference between himself and the handsome, yet superficial Captain Phoebus with whom the girl is infatuated. He places two vases in her room: one is a beautiful crystal vase, yet filled with dry, withered flowers; the other a humble pot, yet filled with beautiful, fragrant flowers. Esmeralda takes the withered flowers from the crystal vase and presses them passionately on her heart.[1]
Many film adaptations of The Hunchback of Notre Dame have been made, which take various degrees of liberty with the novel. In the 1996 Disney animation, for example, Quasimodo is neither one-eyed nor deaf, and is capable of fluent speech. Among the actors who have played him over the years are:
- Lon Chaney, Sr., in the 1923 silent film The Hunchback of Notre Dame.
- Charles Laughton, in the 1939 film The Hunchback of Notre Dame.
- Anthony Quinn, in the 1956 film The Hunchback of Notre Dame.
- Anthony Hopkins, in the 1982 film The Hunchback of Notre Dame.
- Tom Hulce, voice actor for Quasimodo in the 1996 Disney animation The Hunchback of Notre Dame and its sequel.
- Garou, played the part of Quasimodo on-stage French version of Notre Dame de Paris in the late 1990s.
