ABSTRACT
In Les Misérables, the alternative to this archetypal femininity appears to be its dissolution. Seemingly countless are the characters symbolically or rhetorically deprived of womanhood by age, suffering, or corruption: Mlle Baptistine’s thinness in old age leaves her “barely enough of a body for it to have a sex” [“à peine assez de corps pour qu’il y eût là un sexe”; LMPl I, 1, i, 5];1 Éponine’s difficult life, which she ends disguised as a boy, gives her the “voice of a drunk galley slave” [“voix de galérien ivre”; III, 8, iv, 751]; Madame Thénardier’s corruption is figured by hideous masculinization.2 Whether a “woman victim” or a “woman
myth” [“femme victime” or “femme mythe”; Lassegue 41], women in Hugo represent a double discourse on womanhood, “one clearly feminist, … that is, when his female characters are social types … ; the other idealist, … which rejects any realistic referent to project the character in the absolute” [“l’un nettement féministe, … c’est-à-dire quand ses personnages féminins sont des types sociaux … ; l’autre idéaliste, … qui rejette tout référent réaliste pour projeter le personnage dans l’absolu”; Savy, “Cosette,” 184]. A female character may be a model of a feminine ideal that is by definition a passive, objectified non-subject, or a creature so profoundly denatured as to no longer be feminine.
