Adversity Is More Easily Resisted Than Prosperity
The Man Who Laughs“Adversity Is More Easily Resisted Than Prosperity” is the narrator’s warning that sudden good fortune can test character more severely than hardship. In Gwynplaine’s case, the discovery of a parchment in a drifted bottle abruptly opens the prospect of rank and wealth; the change exposes ambitions that misfortune had held in check and threatens to turn elevation into moral decline.
The Maxim and Gwynplaine’s Reversal
The narrator applies the maxim directly to Gwynplaine’s transformation. He had been a hero, perhaps still was, but the prospect of material splendour begins to displace his moral greatness. Ambition, instinctive desire, passion, and covetousness—impulses the restraints of misfortune had kept at a distance—now take possession of his heart. The reversal is not caused by a long struggle for advancement: it begins with the chance discovery of a parchment in a waif carried by the sea, showing how quickly a change in fortune can become an assault on conscience.
The suddenness matters. Only a few hours have passed, yet yesterday’s life already seems remote, and Gwynplaine can begin to regard lordship as natural. The narrator describes him as caught in the ambush of the Better, which is the enemy of the Good: improvement in worldly condition appears to promise a higher life, but may instead erode the virtues formed under adversity. The expression therefore describes more than a contrast between poverty and wealth; it marks the danger that an apparent ascent can reverse a person’s moral direction.
Adversity, Prosperity, and the Images of Danger
The narrator gives the maxim a series of images of unequal trials. Poverty has its Charybdis and riches its Scylla: neither condition is harmless, but prosperity presents a different peril from the one a person has learned to endure. Those who remain upright beneath a thunderbolt, the passage observes, may be brought down by its flash. Likewise, a person standing firm at a precipice may be carried upward by mists and dreams. Elevation itself can diminish the one it raises, and an apotheosis may possess a sinister power of degradation.
These images unsettle the ordinary reading of success as unqualified good fortune. The narrator warns that what people call luck can deceive: chance wears a disguise, and fortune’s appearance does not establish whether it is Providence or Fatality. Even brightness may be deceptive. A gleam may seem to offer light, yet set its recipient on fire. In Gwynplaine’s sudden rise, the language of height and splendour thus carries a warning: the new prospect is alluring precisely where it may prove dangerous.
Significance
The expression serves as the passage’s interpretive principle for Gwynplaine’s changed circumstances. His former deprivation was painful, but it also imposed restraints; the prospect of wealth and rank loosens them and exposes desires that hardship had suppressed. The maxim does not claim that adversity is good or that prosperity must corrupt everyone. It identifies prosperity as a moral trial that can be harder to recognize and resist, because its dangers arrive dressed as success. Gwynplaine’s apparent ascent consequently becomes a test of whether material elevation will preserve or diminish the moral stature he had shown in adversity.
