Fantine - Character Role

Character Role

Fantine has been interpreted as a holy prostitute figure, who becomes a "quintessential mother" by sacrificing her own body and dignity for the purpose of securing the life of her child. She is an example of what has been called the "the cliché of the saved and saintly prostitute that pervades nineteenth-century fiction", which is also found in the writings of Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy and Dickens. Oscar Wilde presented her as a figure whose suffering makes her lovable, writing of the scene after she has her teeth removed, that "We run to kiss the bleeding mouth of Fantine". Kathryn M. Grossman says she moves into a form of "maternal sainthood" and that "When Madeleine affirms that she has remained virtuous and holy before God, Fantine can finally release her hatred and love others again. Or rather, it is because he perceives the reality beyond her appearance that she finds the mayor worthy of renewed devotion. For Valjean, the bedraggled prostitute verges on 'sanctity' through 'martyrdom' (640; sainteté . . . martyr)."

John Andrew Frey argues that the character has a political significance. Fantine is "an example of how women of the proletariat were brutalized in nineteenth-century France...Fantine represents Hugo's deep compassion for human suffering, especially for women born into low estate." Mario Vargas Llosa takes a less positive view, arguing that Hugo in effect punishes Fantine for her sexual transgression by making her suffer so horribly. "What disasters follow from a sin of the flesh! On the matter of sex, the morality of Les Misérables melds perfectly with the most intolerant and puritanical interpretation of Catholic morality."

Fantine's image as a saint-like symbol of female victimhood appears in the writings of the union leader Eugene V. Debs, founder of the Industrial Workers of the World. In 1916 he wrote the essay Fantine in our Day, in which he compared the sufferings of Fantine to abandoned women of his own day:

The very name of Fantine, the gay, guileless, trusting girl, the innocent, betrayed, self-immolating young mother, the despoiled, bedraggled, hunted and holy martyr to motherhood, to the infinite love of her child, touches to tears and haunts the memory like a melancholy dream....Fantine — child of poverty and starvation — the ruined girl, the abandoned mother, the hounded prostitute, remained to the very hour of her tragic death chaste as a virgin, spotless as a saint in the holy sanctuary of her own pure and undefiled soul. The brief, bitter, blasted life of Fantine epitomizes the ghastly story of the persecuted, perishing Fantines of modern society in every land in Christendom.