We will confine ourselves to saying that the love of Fantine was a first love, a sole love, a faithful love."(Hugo, 145) in the endeavor to survive and sustain her child she is forced to become a prostitute, thus enduring extreme humiliation. For Hugo thus, she represents another 'miserable' being, part of the dregs of society who is nevertheless pure and luminous because of her inner goodness, the divine essence that cannot be corrupted by the extraneous influence of man: "Fantine was one of those beings who blossom, so to speak, from the dregs of the people. Though she had emerged from the most unfathomable depths of social shadow, she bore on her brow the sign of the anonymous and the unknown."(Hugo, 145) Fantine thus represents the poor and ignorant woman who is forced to practice prostitution as the ultimate resource for survival, but who nevertheless remains pure and uncorrupted inside. Finnally, Fantine's daughter, Cosette, is the character that Hugo drafts as a prototype for the young girl who is orphan and helpless in the world. The author thus dwells on the details of Cosette's upbringing as a motherless child. Despite the fact that her destiny is ultimately fortunate as she has Valjean as her loving ward and then Marius as a loving husband, Cosette has a very difficult childhood. Having a multitude of surrogate parents, she grows up quite ignorant of the realities that surround her. As a servant girl for the Thenardiers, Cosette grows up in an incredibly humiliating and grimly oppressive atmosphere: "Her childhood produced upon her the effect of a time when there had been nothing around her but millepeds, spiders, and serpents."(Hugo, 942) Then, when she is finally rescued by Valjean, she has a comparably much happier life in a convent. However, Hugo insists on the essential lack of a...
All the nuns in the world are not worth as much as one mother in the formation of a young girl's soul. Cosette had had no mother. She had only had many mothers, in the plural."(Hugo, 940) the implication is that the social forces had again separated the mother and the child, through the mother's struggle and her untimely death. With unwonted psychological mastery, Hugo observes the innocence but tremendous ignorance of the young girl who confuses Valjean with a mother figure: "When he was seated, she leaned her cheek against his white hair, and dropped a silent tear, saying to herself: 'Perhaps this man is my mother.'"(Hugo, 943) Thus, Cosette embodies the young girl who has to suffer because of her orphanage in a world which offers little defense for the helpless individual.
After the publication of the book, France underwent further upheaval, and Hugo returned to France only at the proclamation of the Third Republic (Kirjasto). Hugo continued his work with the poor, the oppressed and the revolutionaries in that he fought and provided shelter where he could. His work was rewarded with his election as senator of Paris in 1876. Given his life of service to those in need, it is
Victor Hugo Romantic Writings of Victor Hugo The romantic period was partly in reaction to the impact that the industrial revolution had on the psyches of artists of all stripes. The move toward an industrial culture had moved many people from the pastoral scenes of the country into the grungy hearts of the cities. Many of the people worked in the factories six days a week for many hours a day, or
Because of its strong ethical overtones and themes, Victor Hugo naturally gravitates towards imagery of light and darkness in Les Miserables. Light and darkness symbolize their respective moral poles, the binaries of good and evil, beneficence and maleficence, right and wrong. Drawing attention to ethical polarities helps the reader to better understand and appreciate moral ambiguity. The protagonist Jean Valjean epitomizes moral ambiguity, as the reader follows his journey from
Emotions of Love and Lust in the Works of Victor Hugo Victor Hugo is easily one of the major figures of world literature. Hugo has been responsible for painting some of the most compelling portraits of the struggle of the human condition and how certain emotional conditions continue to subsist among untold levels of depravity and suffering. One can examine The Hunchback of Notre Dame and Les Miserables as portraits of
religious themes of the three works mentioned, those being Les Miserables, Notes on Nursing and the Calling of Katie Makanya, are all fairly easy to see. A major fact about Les Miserables is that Jean Valjean spends a lot of time in jail for doing something relatively minor, stealing food to feed a starving family, and then this gets compounded three to four times over when Valjean tries to
Virtue Ethics Virtue-based vs. duty-based ethics: arguments and examples from Victor Hugo, Aristotle, Bernard Mayo, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and William Frankena In the study of ethics and morality, there have been theoretical foundations in which it was argued that morality comes with being rather than doing, or that a true moral life is one that is a product of doing instead of being. Or, oftentimes, theoreticians and philosophers contend that morality must bear
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