#mme victurnien is actually fascinating and i am always weirdly intrigued by her

[kingedmundsroyalmurder]

Brickclub: 1.5.8

Fantine has never had a single ally in her entire life.

I’m starting with this, because it’s so crucial to understanding her and how she frames the world. Fantine has never had a single person she can trust or rely on. The closest she’s ever had to that was Tholomyes, and we all saw how that turned out. As a child, she had no family and had to fend for herself. We don’t know what her life was like on the farm, but it doesn’t seem like the family remembers her, so she was probably pretty solitary. In Paris, her only social connections seemed to be the grisettes, who tolerated her at best and mocked her at worst. Here in M-sur-M, the other women immediately take a dislike to her and work to bring her down.

I’m saying this, not to cruelly reinforce how tragic Fantine’s life has been (although, on that note, Jesus Fantine’s life is tragic) but to say that this is where she comes from when people tell her to appeal to the Mayor. Not only has she just been fired on his explicit orders (or so she was told), but literally nothing in her life has ever suggested that going to someone for help will result in anything other than apathy at best, active disdain or malice at worst. Of course she’s not going to ask the mayor for help. She’s going to do what she can on her own, just like she always has, because it’s the only thing she knows how to do.

Anyway, moving backwards, this is where Hugo’s carefully set up gossip theme starts really coming into play. We’ve seen that every newcomer gets gossiped about and judged. The Bishop gets it, Madeleine gets it, Valjean got it, and now so does Fantine. But here’s the thing: the less social power you have, the more power that gossip can have, and thus the more destructive it is.

The Bishop arrived in a position of power. Regardless of his weirdness and his poverty and how much he offends his colleagues, the Bishop has power in his society. And this matters, because it means the only impact the gossip really has is a)temporary and b)on how he is perceived. No matter how corrupt or wicked he was, he would still be received in society and still have power. For the Bishop, the gossip is mostly harmless and amusing.

Madeleine arrives in M-sur-M as a neutral outsider, who proves his character with a heroic feet and rapidly makes his fortune. Unlike Myriel, the gossip surrounding him has the potential to have more social impact, not that he cares about his reputation, but like Myriel he’s got the social power and status to, again, mostly just ignore it.

Meanwhile, Jean Valjean and Fantine, two people without power, as a convict and a poor, unwed mother, have their lives ruined by town gossip. Jean Valjean is run out of town and probably would have gone straight back to prison had the Bishop not happened to him. Fantine, meanwhile, doesn’t have a Bishop yet, and the gossip around her lost her her job and, eventually, will lead to her death.

And this ties back to his main point, his overarching theme, the entire reason this book exists, which is that society is most harmful and toxic to its most vulnerable members. The rich and powerful, i.e. the ones with the resources to survive society’s attacks, are mostly insulated from them. The poor and vulnerable are not only poor, they are then attacked and ostracized for that very poverty. A social phenomenon that probably at most provides the Bishop with a few laughs over dinner with his sister sends Fantine to her death.

(That said, I do have some side-eye about him going out of his way to personify this one, female gossip, in particular. Not that she doesn’t deserve to be judged, because wow does she ever, but Hugo is Bad At Women and choosing this particular woman as the mouthpiece for his virulent social commentary is... not great. But that’s for a different post.)