FHIS 501

Toine: Staying on Top

Sometimes it is difficult to determine what is good and/or what is bad. The difficulty lies, perhaps, in the subjective experience or learned values of he or she who gazes at a situation to be contemplated. Determining then whether something is good or bad may be irrelevant because of the varying opinions the situation or object in question may generate. There is however something that remains from anyone who gazes. It is precisely the gaze that remains. Then, if the gaze was not altered with the subjective values or the use of polarizing language to describe or explain, the gaze is an objective text that can be read and effectively argued. Guy de Maupassant offers an “objective” gaze of a place and of a people in the short story Toine.

Toine is the man that gives his name to the story and therefore much attention, focus, is vested onto his character. In this story he is the character that would be impossible to say that he is anything but a good man. That however does not seem to be the stories objective to show that he is good or to show that he is bad. In this objective gaze, let’s remember that that is realisms objective, we easily see what ‘seems to be’, Toine is a Jolly good fellow who gets fat, has a nagging wife, and then has health problems, but it is also easy to miss, perhaps because of this happy, pleasant fellow, the connections that can be made with the material which makes up this gaze, the words, the language. In his town, in his land, Toine is a man of power, and as such must maintain that power, stay on top, by any means, even in the sneakiest of ways, sneaky because he doesn’t resort to violence but rather other undetected methods that allow things to go on as they should, as he wants them to be.

It would be difficult to make a full analysis in a short blog post but the argument, an observation in the text, has been made. A few examples can be given in support of this, although without deep explanation. First there is the opening of the text. It is the start of the gaze into Toine’s life but also into the dynamic of the town area where the story takes place. It describes Toine and his importance in the land. He is talked about and recognized as a focal point, perhaps he is even liked. Then the story presents him personally. He is a man that ‘gives back to the people’, even if just a drink or one meal, a man that uses language, humor, to maintain those important around him. The use of this language can be said to create subjects for Toine; people whom he has persuaded. After this, there is an underlying fact that is also symbolically connected to his growing body, this is his growing wealth. He takes and he grows without giving anything substantial back. The contrast to him is his wife, nagging wife who hates him, and has been described as a “peasant woman”.  This is the only person whom he has a problem with, and the only person who hates him for his bodily and wealth growth while she herself must do peasant work.

At the end we have a particular situation. Toine seems to be emotionally changed by the birth of the chicks, which “he has birthed”.  But in a matter of moments he turns to having no care for life in order to give a gift, perhaps a gift of persuasion, perhaps a gift of pleasure. At work in the text are politics such as politics of life, social division, and wealth distribution shown in conjunction with, or underneath, the image of a pleasant man and the land of which he is lord.