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@fantineweek 2018 - day three: family | friendship.

this is gonna be one part angsty canon meta, and one part angsty headcanon. because, uhhh, because i have a lot of feelings about this.

(extra long post too, whoops.)

friendship first.

okay. as much as i really, really do want fantine to have a whole bunch of friends who love and support her, and as much as i would love for favourite / dahlia / zéphine to belong to that category --

she really doesn’t have any friends at all. especially not the rest of the paris quartet.

believe me, i want favourite to be fantine’s best friend. i want dahlia to be the one who taught her which particular type of maroon made her blonde hair glow best. i want zéphine to have sat up with fantine during those restless nights when cosette was an infant and helped her with all the small important things involved with caring for a child of that age.

but while canon gives us not very much interaction between these ladies at all, it does give us just enough to say “uh-uh. the only reason these people spend any time together at all is because their boyfriends are best friends.”

from “tholomyes [sic] is so merry that he sings a spanish ditty” :

all received, to some extent, the kisses of all, with the exception of Fantine, who was hedged about with that vague resistance of hers composed of dreaminess and wildness, and who was in love. “You always have a queer look about you,” said Favourite to her.

okay, but just because hapgood has this translation, that doesn’t necessarily mean that’s what hugo originally wrote. (i parsed a little of this with the quartet last year here on my fantine blog.)

“tholomyès est si joyeux qu’il chante une chanson espagnole” :

toute recevaient un peu çà et là les baisers de tous, excepté Fantine, en fermée dans sa vague résistance rêveuse et farouche, et qui aimait. -- Toi, lui disait Favourite, tu as toujours l’air chose.

“avoir l’air chose” can be read as “you’re always daydreaming” or “there’s something peculiar about you” -- or any other number of ways to tell someone that they’re the odd one out.

fantine is the only one vouvoied by the entire party, except for tholomyès who of course tutoies her. we see why in this section -- because even though this is only one afternoon, and only one of the three ladies talking to her, we can reasonably extrapolate that this is how the dynamic has been between all of them for at least the past two years.

fantine is the only one who doesn’t want to play their game of exchanging kisses indiscriminately. the only one she’s in love with is tholomyès, so the only person she wants to be kissing her is tholomyès. meanwhile, the other ladies aren’t actually in love with their gentlemen: they see them as hobbies to drop when one or both parties get bored: of course they don’t care who kisses who.

the oldest, favourite, is twenty-three; the youngest, fantine, is twenty-one. that’s the same age gap between me and my sister. hugo treats this like an insurmountable distance. but it isn’t the age gap which isolates fantine from the other three ladies. it’s simply that she sees the world so differently than they do.

how could such different people be real friends?

in fact, the only person who extends a hand of friendship -- and i mean that in the sense of providing warmth and kindness in her life, out of no sense of obligation (*cough* valjean *cough*) -- is marguerite, her elderly neighbor.

from “madame victurnien’s success” :

She began to make coarse shirts for soldiers of the garrison, and earned twelve sous a day. Her daughter cost her ten. It was at this point that she began to pay the Thenardiers [sic] irregularly.

However, the old woman who lighted her candle for her when she returned at night, taught her the art of living in misery. Back of living on little, there is the living on nothing. These are the two chambers; the first is dark, the second is black.

Fantine learned how to live without fire entirely in the winter; how to give up a bird which eats a half a farthing's worth of millet every two days; how to make a coverlet of one's petticoat, and a petticoat of one's coverlet; how to save one's candle, by taking one's meals by the light of the opposite window. No one knows all that certain feeble creatures, who have grown old in privation and honesty, can get out of a sou. It ends by being a talent.

[...]

The old woman who had given her lessons in what may be called the life of indigence, was a sainted spinster named Marguerite, who was pious with a true piety, poor and charitable towards the poor, and even towards the rich, knowing how to write just sufficiently to sign herself Marguerite, and believing in God, which is science.

this is where the angsty headcanon about family comes in.

hugo does nothing by accident. except for his math, which he does badly on purpose, because he hates math.

in one of the earlier drafts of les misérables, he gives fantine the name of marguerite louet. he scratched this out later, of course; he gave her a diminutive instead of a proper name, to show better how much of a street urchin she was.

but he kept the name marguerite, and he gave it to the elderly spinster neighbor who helped fantine.

marguerite is a type of daisy. it is also the french version of the name margaret, which ultimately derives from the greek word margaron, meaning pearl.

y’all know where i’m heading with this.

it would be too much of a stretch to headcanon that marguerite is fantine’s mother. marguerite is probably too old to be her mother -- and she takes a grandmotherly sort of role, anyway.

more likely that marguerite is the older aunt to a niece she did not even know existed.

maybe fantine is the spit and image of marguerite’s youngest sister. maybe fantine has the same nose that their dad had, the same high forehead as her brother, the same smile as the one she sees in the mirror (the same pearls).

or maybe it’s cosette who embodies those things, and if marguerite saw that little girl, she would be struck with a living image of the past.

@fantineweek 2018 - day two: gold.

once more we are going off the hapgood translation available here.

i guess i could technically put this under the “sacrifice” prompt, but ... i honestly think that her hair alone is its own category.

two things related to fantine’s hair which account for a lot of symbolism in her story: the fact that it is gold, and the fact that she sells it.

so starting off with the fact that it is gold --

i haven’t seen many of the movie adaptations -- in fact i am avoiding the liam neeson & uma thurman one like the plague, for probably obvious reasons -- but in lm 2012, and the 25th anniversary cast, we basically see that cosette’s hair color and fantine’s hair color is switched. the same thing will be true of the bbc miniseries. it’s basically only staged productions that i’ve seen that stay true to the book.

this bothered me for a while, and at first i thought the only reason it bothered me was because i am a stickler for details. marius ought to have dark hair, grantaire ought to be ugly, the barricade is on rue de la chanvrerie not rue de villette, musical, i don’t care if it doesn’t rhyme.

except ... well, hugo writes these things, even the smallest of details, for a reason. marius has dark hair because he is a Romantic, which is associated with melancholy, and you can’t very well have a byronic brooding sort of fellow with golden hair. and you can see the same care for details with his physical descriptions of grantaire, enjolras, éponine, et cetera. there’s an element of symbolism involved.

he writes the fallen woman, fantine, with long golden hair.

this being western society, and all the issues that it entails, blond hair is associated with not only beauty but purity. we give princesses like rapunzel and cinderella blonde hair; we give prince charming blond hair; we give stained glass angels blond hair. 

in the picture of dorian gray, oscar wilde gives dorian blond hair to emphasize the fact that he hides under an image of purity to conduct his evil deeds. he uses the trope of blond hair = purity to turn our character expectations upside down.

hugo gives fantine blonde hair, and tells us she is innocent; tells us she works hard; tells us she is good. then he shows us how society devours her, starting with her blonde hair. he uses the trope, and the expectations that follow that trope, to show the reader (who at that time would have been a bourgeois not unlike tholomyès or bamatabois) that despite her abasement, fantine never deserves what happens to her.

hugo is intent on hammering it into our heads that she never actually did anything wrong, and he uses her hair as a symbol for her purity and innocence.

she sells that pure golden hair herself.

-- which brings me to my second point.

in the musical, it is the wigmaker who approaches fantine. it is the wigmaker who tells her what pretty hair she has, and how much money she can make by selling it. fantine is reluctant -- she stubbornly digs in her heels at first, she is horrified by the prospect (and rightly so!). it is only the thought of cosette which forces her to accept the wigmaker’s offer.

i can’t find a picture of it, so let me describe what i saw at the us tour:

fantine, wrapped in a shawl, on the left. the wigmaker, stage center, a crone, hunched over -- and at the words “ten francs may save my poor cosette,” she raises her right hand in a slow arc towards the ceiling, holding her shears aloft -- the shears are open, the moment is predatory triumph, and as soon as the note ends she practically leaps upon her victim to drag her offstage.

this scene gives us the hungry jaws of society which devour fantine. it’s horrible. but the book gives us something even more horrifying, for all that it’s brief.

from “result of the success” :

One day they wrote to her that her little Cosette was entirely naked in that cold weather, that she needed a woollen skirt, and that her mother must send at least ten francs for this. She received the letter, and crushed it in her hands all day long. That evening she went into a barber’s shop at the corner of the street, and pulled out her comb. Her admirable golden hair fell to her knees.

“What splendid hair!” exclaimed the barber.

“How much will you give me for it?” said she.

“Ten francs.”

“Cut it off.”

within twelve hours of receiving the letter, she has willingly given up her hair for the sake of her child.

her hair: the symbol of her purity.

okay, pretend we’re talking about an actual human being and not a character for two seconds.

she is known, earlier in the book, as fantine la blonde. part of her identity is taken up by the fact that she has this glossy beautiful hair.

this hair falls down to her knees. her knees.

this? (source)

is a LOT OF HAIR.

and it STILL doesn’t even come down to the knees. this is maybe just over HALF as long as fantine’s hair is.

my hair used to go down to the middle of my back before i had it cut off in a pixie in 2016. so without realizing it i sort of did a mini fantine ... you know, sans the rest of the trauma that goes along with her entire situation.

my hair only went to the middle of my back. call that 2.5, 3 feet of hair total. it was long enough that if it was loose, it would get caught in my armpits if i wasn’t paying attention. (super glamorous, right?) i can only imagine what having hair like that ^ would be like, let alone hair that goes down to the knees. long enough to sit on, for God’s sake!

hair that long has to be maintained daily. combing it, washing it, drying it, making sure it doesn’t tangle, making sure it doesn’t get caught in things and snap off, getting rid of split ends. braiding it, learning different hairstyles, all the little accessories like pins and combs and brushes. it’s practically its own hobby -- and when we consider that this is the only pleasure left in fantine’s life, that she spends the entire rest of her day sewing piecework ...

i had my hair cut to a pixie and everyone in my life who knew me before the pixie cut went crazy over it. part of a woman’s identity is in her hair, and there are other writers more articulate than i am who will happily talk at length about how different hair lengths make society perceive you in different ways. feminine, masculine, whatever. i’m not here to talk about that part. i’m talking about how her hair, her long hair which was a part of her identity simply because of its length, is also a part of her body.

man, i got my hair cut to a pixie on purpose, because i wanted to and because i thought it would be a cute low-maintenance haircut. there was no emotional turmoil involved in that decision. i made it willingly, and i had been looking forward to it for a few months. yet even then -- even now, two years later when my hair’s grown down past my shoulders again -- i still miss having hair down to the middle of my back.

fantine has no time to contemplate that decision. she does not want to make that decision. she is poor, she lives off practically nothing, and combing her hair is the one thing left in her life that affords her some happiness. her hair is the only beautiful thing left in her life.

one thing the lm 2012 movie did right is it showed fantine’s face during the haircut, and anne hathaway looks like she’s a split second away from bursting into tears. there is an element of trauma here. i can only imagine that fantine spends a fair few nights crying over that loss, and she would be justified in doing so.

it’s after the loss of her hair that she falls into anger and bitterness. this was the last bit of joy in her life, and she has sold it away willingly.

nobody makes the decision for her that her hair is worth selling. nobody gives her a choice to make that she can decline or accept. she comes up with the idea on her own.

to take an image from little shop of horrors, she chooses to step into the monster’s mouth.

this is a literal way that fantine sells herself, months before she becomes a woman of the town. the way she becomes a prostitute is exactly the same: no pimp approaches her, no women in the chorus tell her she’ll make easy money. she comes to the conclusion herself, and she takes that final step.

from “christus nos liberavit” :

Misery offers; society accepts.

@fantineweek 2018 - day one: youth | childhood.

going off the hapgood translation available online here.

She was born at M. sur M. Of what parents? Who can say? She had never known father or mother. She was called Fantine. Why Fantine? She had never borne any other name. At the epoch of her birth the Directory still existed. She had no family name; she had no family; no baptismal name; the Church no longer existed. She bore the name which pleased the first random passer-by, who had encountered her, when a very small child, running bare-legged in the street. She received the name as she received the water from the clouds upon her brow when it rained. She was called little Fantine. No one knew more than that. This human creature had entered life in just this way. At the age of ten, Fantine quitted the town and went to service with some farmers in the neighborhood. At fifteen she came to Paris “to seek her fortune.”

this is the only paragraph we have that describes anything of her youth. as far as hugo is concerned, her story begins in 1817, when she is 21 years old and two years a mother.

fantine, as in (en)fantine - childlike. the obvious connotation there is innocence.

it is pretty much implied that fantine grows up on the street much the same way that gavroche and the mômes did. and yet hugo spends so much time after this telling us how much she is naively in love with tholomyès; how young she is, how sweet this first love is, even if tholomyès does not requite it.

that naïveté might be solely attached to her romantic inclinations, though, i think.

fantine survives a childhood in the gutter. yet hugo only devotes two sentences (two! out of this enormous book, only two!) to her rise from gamine to grisette.

she is clever enough to realize that she will not be able to get anywhere in life if she stays where she is. hugo says she quits montreuil-sur-mer at the age of ten. ten years old. what on earth was i doing at the age of ten? pretending to be a gargoyle at recess? reading books about talking owls? fantine volunteered to work at a farm; she worked there for five years; and when she wanted more out of life, at the age of fifteen (only two years younger than cosette in 1832!) she walks to paris.

four years later she becomes a mother.

when we first see fantine in “double quartette” and “four and four”, she is young; she is quiet, prone to melancholy daydreaming; she is in love with tholomyès.

(side note: digging through “four and four” for quotes, i found this:

Listolier and Fameuil, who were engaged in discussing their professors, explained to Fantine the difference that existed between M. Delvincourt and M. Blondeau.

blondeau, that old rat! eleven years from now we’ll be hearing your funeral oration courtesy of bossuet! it’s little nuggets like these that keep me in love with this book, dammit.)

fantine wears fashionable if modest clothes, and hugo takes great care to describe not only the curve of her throat and the dimple between her shoulder (uh ... thanks, buddy) but the type of fabric that she wears, the particular color of the muslin, et cetera. fantine is a pieceworker at this point -- she clearly knows what she is doing, even if she is less coquettish about it than the other girls in the quartet. this gives us an inkling of what she spent her time doing from the age of fifteen onward. though, really, this is only a different venue for what she had been doing ever since she was ten.

she spent her time climbing up the ladder. she found a new skill, and she learned it, and she made herself useful. i don’t call that particularly naive.

she got out of the gutter, and the horrors that this entails. she made herself a comfortable life away from the constraints of what she was born into.

contrast this with the stories of valjean and javert:

valjean did not start in the gutter. he was forced into prison, and he was forced into the abyss that is being an ex-convict. only the grace of m. myriel allowed him to climb out of that pit -- not just his kindness, but his silver. ( “i have bought your soul for God.” )

javert started in the gutter, but unlike fantine -- let’s be honest here -- given the social and historical context in which hugo was writing, the terms with which he describes javert can easily be interpreted as javert being part romani -- javert does not have the same options to rise from his horrible circumstances. he has no miraculous donor to give him money. and he is not a blonde white girl.

so fantine and valjean get out. there is a catch; of course there is.

it is valjean’s history which is the pitfall waiting for him. as long as someone knows who he is, and will take advantage of it, he will always have the specter of the bagne lurking over him.

and fantine’s fate? well, by the time we meet her, as young as she still is (21! by God, she’s only twenty-one years old!), the trap has already been baited and set for her, and she’s already been caught in it. tholomyès has made her the mother of his child, but he has refused to make her his wife.

i don’t believe that fantine is so innocent she cannot comprehend it is only tholomyès’ whim which keeps her, an unmarried mother, out of the yawning abyss. i can’t believe it. she must have seen enough of life, both in paris and in m-sur-m before that, to know how society devours unmarried mothers.

i can, however, believe that it is her innocent love which blinds her to the fact that he is willing to condemn her to such despair.