Cosette's story often has such a fairy-tale feel, and it starts with this section (what should I be calling these chunks of text? the X.X sections as a whole, not the X.X.X ones? Volumes?) .
And yet I'm not at all sure why I get that feeling quite so strongly, in terms of narrative technique. The initial namelessness of the cast, with Two Mothers echoing the way people in fairy tales are Mothers and Millers and Eldest Daughters? But if Fantine is presented as if she was s stranger to us again, it's not different than what happens with JVJ, and his story never feels this way. The Three Sisters made by Cosette, Eponine , and Azelma maybe? That's a very fairy-tale motif indeed. Something about the way the inn itself is described..?
Augh, I absolutely cannot put my finger on it. Still, something about this passage feels as ominous and certain and doomed as if the inn was a gingerbread cottage and Fantine was vowing to keep silent for seven years while making shirts out of nettles.
Notes on Various Things under the cut:
- love that the inn sign is really badly made. I've seen several attempts at it in various adaptations and they're always a disaster and it's excellent, I want a collection.
- the cart is covered with "the same ugly yellow mud sometimes used to decorate cathedrals". The cart that is A Metaphor for outdated social institutions. I see you, Hugo.
- I will FIGHT Hugo about peasant/working class women's clothing in this era, this outfit would be super charming! But it's definitely more about utility and practical wear than Fantine's old outfits. There are roughly a billion dissertations to be written about the way that things working class people do and use are , through history, treated as inherently ugly/undesirable, regardless of how much art and beauty might actually have gone into it; I feel like the classism kinda speaks for itself on that. And then,since Hugo's already drawn a huge Romantic Aesthetic defining line between the Useful and the Beautiful in this book, I think I can fairly just quote Gautier's explanation of the issue -- "Nothing is really beautiful but that which cannot be made use of; everything that is useful is ugly, for it is the expression of some need, and the needs of man are vile and disgusting, like his poor, weak nature" -- and leave this for now. I suspect it will come up again.
- Fantine has been "marked by irony" --that is, scarred by her time with Tholomyes. I do like the way this new line on her face sounds almost like a dueling scar. Fantine's a fighter in her own way!
- ...Tholomyes is gonna make it to at least 1828, meaning he'll outlive everyone we love in this story except Cosette and Marius. And he'll do it while being "always a man of pleasure"--I feel like there's an implicit suggestion that Cosette has a lot of half-siblings in the world, all of them with a story as important as hers, if only people would take them seriously.
- ...as a Somewhat Taller Than Average woman myself, I am rather delighted by Hugo's obvious terror of women who are Not Tiny. ( And I realize I'm probably Reaching to think that Mme T might have been much happier and more well-adjusted if she weren't trying to cram her giant self into a tiny box of Ideal Femininity? Maybe she'd have been much more ok if she'd been able to go into showbiz and get famous as a weightlifter or something. )
But I do think there's a real sort of sadness to her introductory chapters. She had an ideal dream for her own life , and it wasn't even a particularly ambitious one--just a love story, really-- and it's fallen through as much as anyone else's hoped-for Ideal in the novel. She's still trying to hang onto it at this point, but we're already given a glimpse of the future when she'll not only have given up on that ideal, but come to despise herself for it. This is no way absolves her of her cruelty towards others, but I think she's a more complex villain (and she is a villain) than she's sometimes treated as.
- Fantine does try to lie about having been married, here! ...but she also comes right out and tells people she's making a financial Deal with exactly how much money she has, and how much she's able to give over, before it's all settled. It's painful how ill-prepared she is to deal with this kind of economic manipulation (and I think "prepared" is really relevant; she's had no one more naturally skilled or experienced to teach her how to handle these things, and business negotiations, which this is, are incredibly complicated) .
Seeing how much money Mme T gets for Cosette's fine clothes makes me strongly suspect that Fantine was severely underpaid for pawning her own fancy things--unless, and I guess this is possible, her "putting all her finery" on Cosette is meant to be literal, and Cosette's current clothes are directly made of Fantine's old fancy outfits.
- Fantine tries to lie about having been married , and the neighbors *see* her crying as she leaves Cosette, and Cosette must have been well dressed and all for that first months or so...but still, everyone believes the Thenardiers when they start telling the town that Cosette is an abandoned, illegitimate child. They believe it because Cosette looks the part, and Cosette looks the part because the Thenardiers force her into it. In so many ways, Fantine is never in control of the narrative about her child, and What People Say about them does indeed matter more than anything she does--no amount of effort, no show of love, can save her and Cosette when everyone else has decided they're socially damned.
...but on the less thematic and more practical side,how on earth are the Thenardiers learning about her marital status? Seriously, was this freely avaialable info? This issue is something that comes up several times in the novel and I really have no idea what access to people's family records was like?
- we get our first negative association with a cat , hm
- ...workers have "generous impulses", huh? (also I am not at all sure if the corresponding Bourgeois Respectability is meant to be entirely a good thing, but I'm not sure it's NOT , like I would be with Some Writers? Agh)
Google Translate agrees with Rose, but I wonder if this isn't one of those words that was colloquially used to mean a general category of creatures in its day --Things Like a Crayfish/lobster/crab-- and has come to mean something very specific now?
- ..y'know, what really kills me about Cosette in this every time is how everyone , *everyone* in this town really either believes she deserves her abuse, or thinks it's BETTER than she deserves. This is not happening in secret, behind closed doors, in a private house; it's at the public inn and very blatant. Everyone knows she's out in the cold , first up every morning, starving and beaten, in a home where the other kids somehow have more than enough (because their parents steal it from Cosette, directly). And not one person in this discount Omelas even thinks it's bad , much less intervenes. It's a point in the Thenardiers' favor, socially. This isn't just the gamins of Paris being brushed aside,this is a whole town actively citing horrible child abuse as the Moral and Good Option that elevates the people doing it.
And in this, I suppose, Cosette shares a history with Valjean-- they're both put through absolutely horrific abuse , which is not just societally ignored, or accepted with jaded apathy , but openly lauded as morally correct. I hate Montfermeil so much-- but Montfermeil is not really different from Arras, or Digne, or any other place where people think that abuse of the "deserving" is a Good Thing.
To give the Volume 1 polls time to run through fully before starting on the next volume, I’ll be cataloging the winning translations/translators as well as some of my favorite observations on the posts!
I.iv
Sorry folks, unfortunately this one only ran for a day instead of a week-- vote in the re-run now. The first winners were Denny and FMA with "To Trust is Sometimes to Surrender".
I.iv.1
"One Mother Meets Another", agreed upon by Wilbour, Walton, FMA, Rose, and Donougher, was also agreed upon by the votes, with a 77.4%.
I.iv.2
Donougher's "First Sketch of Two Shady Characters" is the winner this time, with an even 40%.
no tally this time, sorry, because 1. very few chapters up for polling and 2. the first has to be rerun.
