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Literary Devices
Definition of Allusion
In literature, an allusion is an unexplained reference to someone or something outside of the text. Writers commonly allude to other literary works, famous individuals, historical events, or philosophical ideas... read full definition
In literature, an allusion is an unexplained reference to someone or something outside of the text. Writers commonly allude to other literary works, famous individuals... read full definition
In literature, an allusion is an unexplained reference to someone or something outside of the text. Writers commonly allude to... read full definition
Chapter 6 – The Deputy Crown Prosecutor
Explanation and Analysis—Villefort's Betrothal:
In Chapter 6, Dumas traces the scene at the betrothal dinner for Villefort. The "cream of Marseille's society" is in attendance, and Dumas' account of the guests and their conversation becomes a meditation on contemporary French politics:
There were former magistrates who had resigned their appointments under the usurper, veteran officers who had left our army to serve under Condé, and young men brought up by families which were still uncertain about their security, despite the four or five substitutes that had been hired for them, out of hatred for the man whom five years of exile were to make a martyr, and fifteen years of Restoration, a god.
As is fitting for such a historically-minded novel, The Count of Monte Cristo is full of allusions to the actual historical events that take place in the time in which the tale is set. In this instance, Dumas reminds the reader that the historical context for the novel is the exile of Napoleon, who is "made a martyr" by his exile and ultimately promoted to an almost divine status in the eyes of the French people. In emphasizing the unintended consequences of Napoleon's exile, which fed directly into this "resurrection" as a divinely-ordained ruler, Dumas draws a parallel between Napoleon's experience and the Count's own imprisonment and return—which Dumas treats in similarly divine terms throughout the novel. In this way, the scene subtly foreshadows the forthcoming "restoration" of Dantès as the Count of Monte Cristo, who will return from his prison to wreak havoc on those who did him wrong.
Chapter 15 – Number 34 and Number 17
Explanation and Analysis—A Failure of Imagination:
In Chapter 15, Dumas relates the extent of Dantès's predicament as he sits in prison in terms of that which Dantès does not know: uneducated as he is, Dantès has no means to entertain himself with knowledge of literature or memory of historical anecdotes. Dumas articulates this plight with a series of literary devices, including visual imagery, metaphor, and an allusion to the vividness of oil painting:
Dantès was a simple, uneducated man; to him, the past was covered by a murky veil that can be raised only by knowledge. In the solitude of his dungeon and the desert of his thoughts, he could not reconstruct ages past, revive extinct races or rebuild those antique cities that imagination augments and poeticizes so that they pass before one’s eyes, gigantic and lit by fiery skies, as in Martin’s Babylonian scenes. All he had were: his own past, which was so short; his present – so sombre; and his future – so uncertain: nineteen years of light to contemplate, in what might be eternal darkness!
Dumas uses metaphor to compare the act of remembering the past and anticipating the future to attempting to look through a haze or a veil—the object of sight is obscured through the opacity of time. He also invokes the English artist John Martin, a Romantic painter who would have been a contemporary of Dumas, to demonstrate the power of a well-educated imagination: had Dantès known more, he might be able to conjure scenes in his head like those of Martin's massive paintings of biblical events.
By demonstrating Dantès's lack of education and refinement, Dumas foreshadows the forthcoming crash-course in cultural and military knowledge and aristocratic behavior that he will receive from the Abbe—the very education that will enable him to transform into the Count of Monte Cristo. Dantès will leave the prison capable not only of imagining a wild future for himself but also with the power to make that future into reality.
Related Themes:
Chapter 48 – Ideology
Explanation and Analysis—A Fate Worse than Death:
In Chapter 48, Villefort and the Count engage in a philosophical discussion about the nature of justice. As Villefort explains that there are things worse than death—such as apoplexy, resulting from a stroke, "that lightning bolt which strikes you down without destroying you"—he makes an allusion to Shakespeare's Tempest:
You are still yourself, but you are no longer yourself: from a near-angel like Ariel you have become a dull mass which, like Caliban, is close to the beasts. As I said, in human language, this is quite simply called an apoplexy or stroke. Count, I beg you to come finish this conversation at my house one day when you feel like meeting an opponent able to understand you, and eager to refute what you say, and I shall show you my father, Monsieur Noirtier de Villefort...
In The Tempest, Ariel is a noble spirit and Caliban a half-human/half-monster. Villefort means to juxtapose these two characters to emphasize why apoplexy is a fate in some cases worse than death itself—a challenge to the Count's own stance, as he has just stated that only death will be able to stop his mission. Dumas uses this chapter to further illustrate the differences between the characters of the Count and Villefort, much like Shakespeare himself would have done with Ariel and Caliban, and this passage displays once again Villefort's haughty tone and ability to weave together elite references to make his point. In The Count of Monte Cristo, allusions are often reflections on the characters who make them.
Related Themes:
Chapter 62 – Ghosts
Explanation and Analysis—The Ghost of Murders Past:
In Chapter 62, the Count leads his dinner guests toward disaster as he begins to manipulate the deceit of his former acquaintances against them. In a moment of particular dramatic irony, Bertuccio comes face to face with Villefort—whom Bertuccio thought he had murdered.
Without replying, Bertuccio pointed to Villefort, with a gesture like Macbeth pointing to Banquo. ‘Oh! … Oh!’ he murmured at length. ‘Do you see him?’
‘Whom? What?’
‘Him.’
‘Him! The crown prosecutor, Monsieur de Villefort? Of course I can see him.’
‘You mean, I didn’t kill him?’
‘Come, come! I think you are losing your wits, my good Bertuccio,’ said the count.
At first, Bertuccio thinks Villefort must be a ghost—and Dumas takes this opportunity to allude to Macbeth's shock at seeing the ghost of Banquo in Shakespeare's Macbeth. The Count, of course, plays dumb regarding the whole thing and feigns bemusement that Bertuccio would think Villefort was dead. The Count begins to set his plot in motion: by bringing a group of conspirators with conflicting ambitions and deadly intentions together, the Count can stoke the tensions and intrigues of the group for his own benefit.
Chapter 68 – A Summer Ball
Explanation and Analysis—Queen Mab or Titania:
In Chapter 68, Albert discusses his mother, Mercédès, with the Count. As Albert gushes about his fondness for his mother, he makes an allusion to Shakespeare's plays:
You know how I feel about my mother, Count: she is an angel, still beautiful, still witty, finer than ever. I have just come back from Le Tréport. Now, for any other son, just imagine: travelling with his mother would be an act of kindness or an unavoidable burden. Yet I have just spent four days with mine in Le Tréport and I can tell you they were more satisfying, more relaxing and more poetical than if I had been with Queen Mab or Titania.
In Romeo and Juliet, Mercutio describes Queen Mab in passing as a prankster fairy who visits people in their sleep. In Midsummer Night's Dream, meanwhile, Titania is the queen of the fairies who Puck curses to fall in love with a donkey-headed man named Nick Bottom. While Dumas makes frequent allusions to Shakespeare and other works of literature in The Count of Monte Cristo as a means to grant greater weight to his own narrative and invite a reader's greater engagement with his story, the invocations of these fairy characters has potentially greater significance: in the Count's absence, Mercédès has married Mondego despite remaining in love with Dantès—an inversion of Titania's story, in which she falls in love with Nick Bottom despite being married to Oberon. Albert's comparisons of his mother and these two fairy queens invokes the lengthy literary tradition of romantic conflict of which The Count of Monte Cristo is a part.
Related Themes:
Chapter 69 – Information
Explanation and Analysis—Hotel Decoration 101:
In Chapter 69, Villefort waits to interview Lord Wilmore to get more information on the mysterious Count of Monte Cristo. As he waits for Wilmore to arrive, Dumas treats the reader to a vivid description of Wilmore's residence aided by visual imagery and allusions to literature:
The visitor waited in the drawing-room; there was nothing remarkable about this room, which was like any other in furnished lodgings: a mantelpiece with two modern Sèvres vases, a clock with Cupid drawing his bow and a mirror, in two sections; engravings on each side of the mirror, one showing Homer carrying his guide, the other Belisarius begging alms; wallpaper, grey on grey; a sofa upholstered in red, and printed in black—this was Lord Wilmore’s drawing-room. It was lit by two lamps with shades of frosted glass that gave only a feeble light, as if deliberately designed not to strain the tired eyes of the prefect’s emissary.
Color and light imagery suffuses this passage, as the reader imagines for themselves the decor arranged before Villefort. To make his description even more specific, Dumas has included specific allusions to literature-influenced artworks: an engraving of Homer carrying his guide, presumably after the painting of the same name by 19th century French painter William-Adolphe Bouguereau, and Belisarius—a Byzantine General—begging for alms, after the painting by 18th century French painter Jacques-Louis David.
Dumas knows the familiar references to which his audience will be able to relate, and he fills the narrative of The Count of Monte Cristo with them. Here, the invocation of two famous paintings in the middle of a highly descriptive sequence helps the reader better visualize Wilmore's residence.
Chapter 72 – Madame de Saint-Meran
Explanation and Analysis—The Danish Prince:
Throughout The Count of Monte Cristo are a number of allusions to Shakespeare's Hamlet. Dumas uses references to the tragedy to set up a parallel between Prince Hamlet's legendary quest for revenge and Dantès's own quest throughout the novel.
In Chapter 72, when Villefort reviews his lists of enemies, he frets that one of them may have emerged from his past to seek revenge:
When he had gone through all the names in his memory, re-read them, studied them and commented on each list, he shook his head. ‘No,’ he muttered. ‘None of those enemies would have waited and toiled patiently until now to come and crush me with this secret. Foul deeds will rise, as Hamlet says, and sometimes fly through the air like a will-o’-the-wisp, but these are flames that light us a moment to deceive.
In quoting Hamlet, Villefort sets up a moment of situational irony—he seeks solace in Hamlet's simile that foul deeds can deceptively reappear, despite the fact that the Count presents a very real threat. The irony is doubled in that Hamlet's character correlates to the Count in The Count of Monte Cristo, and Villefort therefore seeks comfort in the words of his mortal enemy.
Later, in Chapter 76, the Count himself quotes Hamlet to Baroness Danglars as they reflect on the sudden deaths of a number of Villefort family members:
‘But you know very well: after losing Monsieur de Saint-Méran three or four days after his departure, they have just lost the marchioness three or four days after her arrival.’
‘So they have. I did hear that. But, as Claudius says to Hamlet, such is the law of nature: they lost their fathers, and mourned them; they will die before their sons, who will mourn them in turn.’
‘But that’s not all.’
‘How do you mean, it’s not all?’
At the Count's invocation, this allusion feels downright sinister: death is a matter of course, as the murderous Claudius says to Hamlet after killing his father—a "law of nature." Although the Count is perhaps most similar to Hamlet, given their shared desire for revenge, this sequence sees him citing the main antagonist of the play as a justification for his designs that have led to the deaths of a number of characters. Although the Count is undoubtedly the hero of the novel, exchanges like this reveal the darker side of his adventure and complicate the reader's perception of his supposedly noble thirst for revenge.
Although The Count of Monte Cristo would go on to become a classic in its own right, Hamlet is one of the most iconic revenge narratives in the history of literature. By connecting the Count's story to Hamlet's, Dumas taps into his readers' likely familiarity with Shakespeare in order to strengthen the legitimacy and intensity of his own take on a revenge story.
Related Themes:
Chapter 76 – The Progress of the Younger Cavalcanti
Explanation and Analysis—The Danish Prince:
Throughout The Count of Monte Cristo are a number of allusions to Shakespeare's Hamlet. Dumas uses references to the tragedy to set up a parallel between Prince Hamlet's legendary quest for revenge and Dantès's own quest throughout the novel.
In Chapter 72, when Villefort reviews his lists of enemies, he frets that one of them may have emerged from his past to seek revenge:
When he had gone through all the names in his memory, re-read them, studied them and commented on each list, he shook his head. ‘No,’ he muttered. ‘None of those enemies would have waited and toiled patiently until now to come and crush me with this secret. Foul deeds will rise, as Hamlet says, and sometimes fly through the air like a will-o’-the-wisp, but these are flames that light us a moment to deceive.
In quoting Hamlet, Villefort sets up a moment of situational irony—he seeks solace in Hamlet's simile that foul deeds can deceptively reappear, despite the fact that the Count presents a very real threat. The irony is doubled in that Hamlet's character correlates to the Count in The Count of Monte Cristo, and Villefort therefore seeks comfort in the words of his mortal enemy.
Later, in Chapter 76, the Count himself quotes Hamlet to Baroness Danglars as they reflect on the sudden deaths of a number of Villefort family members:
‘But you know very well: after losing Monsieur de Saint-Méran three or four days after his departure, they have just lost the marchioness three or four days after her arrival.’
‘So they have. I did hear that. But, as Claudius says to Hamlet, such is the law of nature: they lost their fathers, and mourned them; they will die before their sons, who will mourn them in turn.’
‘But that’s not all.’
‘How do you mean, it’s not all?’
At the Count's invocation, this allusion feels downright sinister: death is a matter of course, as the murderous Claudius says to Hamlet after killing his father—a "law of nature." Although the Count is perhaps most similar to Hamlet, given their shared desire for revenge, this sequence sees him citing the main antagonist of the play as a justification for his designs that have led to the deaths of a number of characters. Although the Count is undoubtedly the hero of the novel, exchanges like this reveal the darker side of his adventure and complicate the reader's perception of his supposedly noble thirst for revenge.
Although The Count of Monte Cristo would go on to become a classic in its own right, Hamlet is one of the most iconic revenge narratives in the history of literature. By connecting the Count's story to Hamlet's, Dumas taps into his readers' likely familiarity with Shakespeare in order to strengthen the legitimacy and intensity of his own take on a revenge story.
Related Themes:
Chapter 85 – The Journey
Explanation and Analysis—The Christ in C(h)risto:
In Chapter 85, Albert agrees to travel with the Count to Normandy. As he lays eyes on the Count's ship, which bears the Count's supposed coat of arms, Dumas makes an explicit allusion to the Passion of Jesus:
A little corvette was bobbing in a fairly large cove; it had a narrow hull and tall mast with a flag flying from the lateen yard and bearing Monte Cristo’s coat of arms: a mountain on a field azure with a cross gules at the chief, which could also have been an allusion to his name (evoking Calvary, which Our Saviour’s passion has made a mountain more precious than gold, and the infamous cross which his divine blood made holy) as much as to any personal memory of suffering and regeneration buried in the mysterious night of the man’s past.
Dumas compares the titular hill—monte—of Monte Cristo to the biblical hill upon which the Romans crucified Jesus in the passion narratives of the New Testament. By drawing a parallel between the "source" of the Count's assumed aristocratic status with the site of Jesus's sacrifice, Dumas makes an explicit comparison between the Count and Jesus himself. There are more than a few such comparisons in The Count of Monte Cristo, as Dantès's exile, imprisonment, and subsequent ascension to power and fortune under the identity of the Count echo Jesus's death and resurrection. The Count himself would no doubt appreciate this comparison, as he perceives his path to revenge as biblical in scale and effectively predetermined: the Count sees himself, at least at first, as someone destined to deliver a divine retribution to those who have wronged him.
Related Themes:
Chapter 94 – A Confession
Explanation and Analysis—Family of Atreides:
In Chapter 94, the Count tries to navigate how to continue destroying the Villefort family without simultaneously harming Maximilien and Valentine. As he tries to explain to Maximilien the fate that awaits the Villeforts—a family Maximilien would join if he were to marry Valentine—he resorts to an allusion to the Atreides family:
‘So?’ said the count, astonished at this insistence, which he could not understand, and looking closely at Maximilien. ‘Let it start again. It’s a family of Atreides. God has condemned them and they will suffer their fate. They will disappear like the houses of cards that children set up, which fall one by one when their builders blow on them—and would do so even if there were two hundred of them. Three months ago it was Monsieur de Saint-Méran; two months ago, Madame de Saint-Méran; the other day it was Barrois, and today it will be old Noirtier or young Valentine.’
The Atreides, or the descendants of the Greek king Atreus, are a spectacularly unfortunate family in Greek myth and literature—and in particular within the work of Homer and Sophocles—with an infamous amount of tragedy and death through their generations. Dumas uses an allusion to this myth to show how the Count thinks about fate and the possibility of predestination: the Atreides were not doomed from the individual actions of the family members themselves so much as they were doomed by the wrath of the Greek gods. Seeking justification for his attempts to destroy the Villeforts, the Count dismisses their fate as out of his hands—he sees himself as merely ushering them to their pre-determined demise.
Related Themes:
Chapter 111 – Expiation
Explanation and Analysis—The History of Grief:
In Chapter 111, Villefort arrives home to find a horrifying scene—his wife has killed their son and herself. Rising to the dramatic grandeur of the moment, Dumas caches his description of this scene in a network of allusion and hyperbole in order to make it as affecting as possible:
A moment before, he had been sustained by fury, that huge resource for a strong man; and by despair, the supreme virtue of grief, which drove the Titans to climb the heavens and Ajax to brandish his fist at the gods.
Villefort bent his head under the weight of sorrows, rose up on his knees, shook his hair, which was damp with sweat and standing on end with horror, and this man, who had never had pity on anyone, went to seek out the old man, his father, just so that in his weakness he might have someone to whom to tell his misfortune and someone with whom to weep.
Dumas begins with an invocation of two stories from classical mythology. The first reference is to the legendary ascent of the Titans, Ancient Greek gods who ascended into the heavens themselves in order to overthrow Uranus and rule the universe. The second reference is to the infamous rebuke of the gods made by Ajax the Lesser, who "brandished his fist" at the gods rather than appeal to them for help after a shipwreck and was killed for this transgression by Poseidon.
Dumas's appeal to ancient divine conflict is a means to hyperbolically convey Villefort's grief—his despair is extreme to the point of rivaling those of the gods and heroes of old. So extreme, in fact, as to have a physical impact on Villefort—the "weight of sorrows" bends his head down as he rises to leave the scene.
Dumas frequently alludes to classical literature and myth in The Count of Monte Cristo, and such references serve to intensify the spectacle of his narrative and appeal to the reader's awareness of the thousands of years of art and literature that have depicted these stories again and again. At the very least, for a culturally aware contemporary reader, these allusions would invoke the vivid scenes of classical conflict and horror painted by artists in the 19th century contemporary to Dumas himself—and thereby provide a visual accompaniment to his narrative.
Chapter 112 – Departure
Explanation and Analysis—The Count's Holy Vocation:
In the closing chapters of The Count of Monte Cristo, the Count attempts to wrap up the many, many loose ends he has accumulated over his decades-long quest for revenge. There's no question that the Count thinks quite highly of his grand plan against those who wronged him in his previous life as Dantès, all those years ago. In Chapter 112, as he reveals the depth of his ambitions to Mercédès, he uses a dramatic simile to convey this sense of grandeur:
From then on, that fortune seemed to me a holy vocation; from then on, there was not one further thought in me for that life, the sweetness of which you, poor woman, have sometimes partaken. Not an hour of calm, not a single hour. I felt myself driven like a cloud of flame through the sky to destroy the cities of the plain.
The Count feels himself to have been, at the height of his quest for justice, like a violent fireball descending toward the cities of the plain. Besides showing the self-destructive nature of the Count's quest that he only begins to appreciate by the end of the novel, this is a likely allusion to the themes of fire and vengeance that pervade the story of the Trojan war as told in Homer's Iliad—in particular recalling Book 21 of the poem, when Hephaestus scorches the legendary plain of the Trojan battlefield with his divine fire and aids the Greek war effort to destroy the city of Troy.
Throughout The Count of Monte Cristo, Dumas makes a concerted effort to raise the gravitas of his plot through dramatic literary devices and frequent invocations of the narratives of classical epic and European literature alike. The Count's subtle allusion to Homer's poetry and comparison of himself to an embodiment of violent, divine wrath vividly associates the drama of Dumas's historical world with the fantastical imagery of Greek myth and reminds the reader—at the very same moment as the Count is coming to this realization himself—that he's too caught up in his own story for his own good.
Related Themes:
Chapter 115 – Luigi Vampa’s Bill of Fare
Explanation and Analysis—Prison Cuisine:
In Chapter 115, as Danglars sits imprisoned by Vampa and his crew, he watches them eat a miserable meal that becomes more and more appetizing as he realizes his own hunger. Dumas conveys Danglars's thoughts on the food through the use of vivid visual and taste imagery:
...it may be that the crudest of victuals can address a tangible invitation in quite eloquent terms to a hungry stomach. Suddenly Danglars felt that at this moment his was a bottomless pit: the man seemed less ugly, the bread less black and the cheese less rancid. Finally, those raw onions, the repulsive foodstuff of savages, began to evoke certain sauces Robert, certain dishes of boiled beef and onions which his cook had adapted to more refined palates when Danglars would tell him: ‘Monsieur Deniseau, give us a spot of plain home cooking today.’
Even though the food seems relatively awful—black bread, rancid cheese, and raw onions are hardly a hearty meal—Danglars nonetheless comes around on eating it due to his fast-growing appetite. In his mind, he transforms the raw onions into a palatable version of actual, fine cuisine as he might have requested from his own chef. No matter how high the station of a character in The Count of Monte Cristo, they are not safe from a fall from grace. Danglars's ability to justify eating the rotting food is a visceral reminder of just how far he has fallen.
Dumas himself wrote a cookbook of sorts and he alludes to this work—and his evidently extensive knowledge of cooking practices—in this scene. In the cookbook, which Dumas called his Dictionary of Cuisine, he even writes about the sauces Robert! Throughout The Count of Monte Cristo, Dumas makes an effort to connect his story to his own life and the world at large. Allusions like this could build his connection with his reader and create a more engaging and relatable reading experience.
Related Themes:
