Gwynplaine's rescue and care of Dea

Gwynplaine's rescue and care of Dea is the childhood act that turns two abandoned children into one another’s refuge. Recounted to Dea by Ursus, the episode shows Gwynplaine responding to another child’s helplessness with practical care, even when he had almost nothing to give. It also establishes the contrast between the face the world laughs at and the kindness Dea learns to see in him.

Circumstances of the Rescue

Gwynplaine was himself a child cast off by the gang that had taken him, and he had endured a difficult journey from Portland to Weymouth. Dea learned from Ursus that, while still an infant, she had been left beside her dead mother. Gwynplaine heard her cry and went to her, though he had no secure place or shelter of his own. In a landscape of abandonment, the encounter placed another child’s immediate need before his own precarious survival.

The rescue was not a single gesture detached from what followed. Gwynplaine accepted responsibility for Dea and carried her through hardship. Ursus’s account made clear to her that the boy had taken on a second life to protect while he was already exhausted and alone.

Care Through Hardship

Gwynplaine shared his scant clothing with Dea when she was cold. Though he was hungry himself, he thought of finding food and drink for her. His care persisted through the hardships of winter and snow, solitude, fear, cold, hunger, thirst, and storm. The account presents these not as obstacles overcome by strength alone, but as circumstances in which he repeatedly chose to protect a more vulnerable child.

That care continued beyond the original rescue. As an adult, Gwynplaine became a source of strength for Dea’s weakness, comfort amid poverty, help in sickness, and a form of sight for her blindness. His childhood act therefore began a lasting relationship of practical dependence and devotion: the child who had saved her remained the person on whom she relied.

Dea’s Understanding of Gwynplaine

Dea could not judge Gwynplaine by sight. She learned what he had done through Ursus’s account, and from that history formed her understanding of him: she recognized his courage, self-denial, and devotion. To her, his goodness was not an abstraction but a constant support, someone sympathetic and helpful whom she trusted not to abandon her. The story of the rescue turned her anxiety into certainty and gratitude.

This understanding sharply contrasts with the crowd’s response to Gwynplaine. His face provoked laughter and then repulsion; onlookers saw a grotesque performer and judged him by his appearance. Dea, by contrast, knew the history of his actions. Her blindness does not prevent her from recognizing his character; in the account, it is the crowd’s reliance on outward appearance that limits its understanding.

Significance

The rescue establishes the moral meaning of Gwynplaine’s permanent laugh. His face makes strangers laugh whether or not he feels joy, and even his distress intensifies its fixed expression. Dea’s knowledge of his childhood care exposes the distance between that outward appearance and the person beneath it: the figure others regard as a spectacle had, as a child, made himself a refuge for someone even more helpless.

Later, Gwynplaine interprets the forced laugh as an expression of suffering imposed by power, and presents his own altered face as a symbol of a mutilated people. The rescue gives that public claim an intimate foundation. Before he speaks for the abandoned and oppressed, he has already answered abandonment through adoption, meeting Dea’s need with care when he himself had little to spare.