Miracle of the Rose (Cyclopedia of Literary Characters)
At a glance:
- Author: Jean Genet
- First Published: 1946
- Type of Work: Novel
- Type of Plot: Psychological
- Time of Work: Approximately the first thirty years of the narrator’s life
- Setting: A boys’ reformatory at Mettray and the Fontevrault Prison
- Genres: Long fiction, Psychological fiction, Autobiographical fiction
- Subjects: Prisoners, Prisons, France or French people, Gay men, Homosexuality or homosexuals, Love or romance, Sex or sexuality, Murder or homicide, Twentieth century, Capital punishment, Rape, Fratricide, parricide, or filicide, Reformatories
- Locales: France
Characters Discussed
Jean Genet (zhah[n] zheh-NAY), a defensive, thirty-year-old Fontevrault “lifer” with repeated burglary convictions who sees himself as a character in a dream, a living skeleton, and a dead man irrevocably locked within the restrictions of prison life. In his inverted moral order, he covets infamous acts of brutality so that he can attain the spiritual heights of Harcamone, a rapist-murderer, and thus achieve his own death by decapitation as the epitome of beauty. The thin, lightly muscled, slow-moving narrator masks his fears by assuming an offensive,...
[The entire page is 1000 words long]
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