#but is so caught up in their own trauma and misery that they make rash decisions and push people away

[brjeauregard]

Some of you want your favorite characters to have a happy ending, I want my favorite characters to make questionable choices and face the consequences of their actions. We are not the same

[meta-squash]

Brick Club 1.5.10 “Outcome Of The Success”

It’s long, I’m sorry. There’s just so much in this chapter!

The chapter’s first paragraph is a description of the misery of winter weather, bookended by sentences about Fantine. It’s been nearly a year since she was fired. The bit about winter is a description of Fantine’s descent as well as the weather. Winter brings short days which means less work; Fantine’s position in society means she’s finding less work as well because she is essentially freelancing rather than working for an employer with steady jobs. “No heat, no light, no noon, evening touches morning” is such a good description of the way everything is miserable and just blurs together when you’re trying to just stay alive. All the awful stuff is sharp and dull at the same time. “Winter changes into stone the water of heaven and the heart of man.” Fantine is starting to harden here; we see her become more shameless, tougher.

Fantine wears a cap after cutting her hair “so she was still pretty.” And this disappears so rapidly in this chapter. Her beauty is so important. Fantine is the only character aside from Enjolras who is repeatedly described as beautiful in a way that seems to really matter. (Cosette is also beautiful, but that description is almost entirely through Marius’ POV, rather than from a more general POV with Fantine.) The slow destruction of Fantines beauty--the discarding of her pretty clothes for peasant ones, her frequent tears, the loss of her hair and teeth, the torn and threadbare clothing--mirrors her social destruction. She desperately clings to her beauty by wearing a cap, but she obviously gives up pretty soon.

What fascinates me here is that Hugo mentions that Fantine admired Madeleine, like everyone else, but he also implies that she didn’t hate him straight away for her dismissal. In the previous chapters, her reaction is to accept the dismissal as a “just” decision. She works up her hatred by repeatedly telling herself it was his fault. It seems as though she lands on the right conclusion in the wrong way. She blames herself first, and only through gradually convincing herself does she start to blame Madeleine. He and his crap system are the ones to blame, but she comes to that conclusion in a roundabout way that feels like she still blames herself but is trying not to. Fantine has been a scapegoat for everyone up until now; Madeleine has become her scapegoat to avoid (incorrectly) blaming herself.

“If she passed the factory when the workers were at the door, she would force herself to laugh and sing.” She’s trying so hard to make them think they haven’t gotten to her, but it just makes it so much more obvious. The laughter and singing is the “wrong” reaction, and it makes everyone notice her even more, and judge her even harder. It’s just so sad because I can understand that behavior of trying so hard to act the opposite way of how you think people will expect you to, only it backfires and makes your true feelings all the more apparent, which gives even more fuel to the cruel people.

Fantine takes a lover out of spite, “a man she did not love.” There are a few things here that contrast with the grisettes of 1.3. This lover is someone Fantine does not love, her first relationship since losing Tholomyes, who she was in love with. The man is also a street musician, which reminds me of Favourite’s actor/choir boy. The difference being that Favourite’s boy had at least some connections through his father, and Fantine’s lover is only a street musician. Fantine takes this lover in for the same reason that she sings and laughs outside the factory: to try and show that she’s unaffected, which really only serves to do the opposite. She has this affair “with rage in her heart,” which seems to be the only emotion left for her for anyone besides Cosette (and maybe Marguerite).

“She worshiped Cosette.” My only comment here is that this is something that Valjean will later echo. Both worship and adore Cosette as a point of light, something to cling to and love and care for.

Okay maybe I’m missing something here, but Fantine can read but she can’t write? This is probably my “been good at reading/writing my whole life” privilege talking, but wouldn’t she be able to write if she could read? I suppose maybe it’s like how I can look at numbers and understand the numbers but I can’t do math for shit? I don’t know. That just caught my eye.

Fantine is starting to lose her inhibitions as she begins to lose control of everything in her life. She’s laughing and singing and running and jumping around outside in public, she’s acting loud and brash and odd. Her reactions to her misfortune and the terrible things that keep happening express the “wrong” emotion. It’s an attempt to cope, and a courageous one, but it’s drastically different from the quiet Fantine who barely spoke that we were introduced to.

“Two Napoleons!” grumbled a toothless old hag who stood by. “She’s the lucky one!”

This line really struck me. We’ve been tunnel-visioned on Fantine’s misery this whole time. Suddenly the focus pulls back a little bit and we get a little bit of perspective. Fantine is not at rock bottom yet. She could still go so much lower. To this toothless old woman, she’s lucky because she’s pretty and because her teeth have worth. Fantine is poor, and cold, and worried about her kid, and most of the town laugh at or scorn her, and yet this old woman still thinks she’s the lucky one of the two of them. It’s a much more subtle commentary on the levels of poverty and abjectness that exist. Once you’ve fallen through the cracks in society to the level of homelessness, to the level of selling your teeth and hair and body, to complete aloneness, anyone who has even a scrap more than you seems “lucky.” And Fantine’s not too far from that existence.

The conversation between Marguerite and Fantine about military fever is so weird. Is Marguerite just saying stuff? This dialogue sounds like a conversation between two people who have no idea what they’re talking about. It’s like those scenes in comedies where one person pretends to be super confident about something to impress the other even though both of them are completely wrong. Oh okay wait! I just did some googling and I’ve realized that neither of them know what they’re talking about because Thenardier did his bad spelling thing! “Miliary fever” is an old medical term for an infection that causes fevers and bumpy skin rashes. (Mozart’s death is attributed to it; it seems to have fallen out of use as it became easier to pinpoint certain illnesses.) I think this isn’t just Marguerite not knowing what she’s talking about. This is a misunderstanding due to Thenardier’s misspelling (whether deliberate or not, I don’t know) and neither Marguerite nor Fantine know enough to realize it.

ETA: Okay wow I’m keeping that whole “miliary fever” thought journey in just to record my thought process but I’ve just double-checked against the Hapgood translation and the original French, and the mistake isn’t with the Thenardiers at all! It’s entirely the fault of the translators. The original French says “miliare” and Hapgood has translated it as “miliary”; Fahnestock and MacAfee clearly did not notice that the French was “miliare” and not “militaire,” and neither did their editors.

“During the night Fantine had grown ten years older.” Off the top of my head, I can only think of three instances of not-old people being blatantly described as looking old. This description here, Valjean when he returns from Arras, and Eponine. There are probably more I’m missing, but the connecting factor between these three is severe, prolonged trauma. Trauma and a difficult life can prematurely age people (I always think of that Dorothea Lange photo of the migrant mother who was only 32 but looks 50) and Hugo uses this fact to bolster his descriptions of what they go through. But Fantine and Valjean both age almost suddenly; Eponine is already old-looking the first time we meet her as a character with dialogue. Fantine’s sudden aging is another level of departure from her old life. In Paris, she was the youngest of the group, and now she looks far older than she is.

“Actually, the Thenardiers had lied to get her to get the money. Cosette was not sick at all.” As readers, we know this. We’ve seen the Thenardiers lie over and over and we see Fantine sacrifice with no idea. But this one hits harder than the others. Partly, I think, because Hugo puts it so bluntly in a sentence that has its own paragraph. But also because this is the first sacrifice that is truly unalterable. Fantine’s hair can grow back. There may have eventually been some slim chance of a job opportunity or something coming up somehow, or an influx of things needing mending or something. But she cannot regain her teeth. This is also the first sacrifice that physically disfigures her in a visible way. She can hide her lack of hair under a cap, she can hide her lack of money by using and reusing things. She cannot hide her missing teeth.

It’s interesting that we do not hear about Mme Victurnien here. Rather than the last chapter, this would be the one where Victurnien would be “winning.” The consequences of Victurnien’s actions have now permanently affected Fantine’s life. Except I think the reason we don’t see her here is that she wouldn’t face it. She can look out her window at Fantine walking down the street in distress with her beauty intact and feel satisfaction, but if she saw Fantine walking down the street, toothless and hairless, I don’t think she would feel satisfaction, because she wouldn’t be able to connect her actions to this Fantine. Feeling satisfaction towards this level of misery would require acknowledging her participation in causing it. It’s one thing for the townspeople to laugh at or gawk at her, but I think claiming responsibility for her condition is something else altogether that I’m not sure Mme Victurnien would do.

Fantine throwing her mirror out the window is a strange sort of contrast compared to Eponine’s reaction to a mirror. Fantine cannot face her descent. Eponine is already there, and her excitement at Marius’ mirror is a weird sort of distracted examination of herself. Fantine cannot bear to examine herself because unlike Eponine, she can remember what it was like before this. Tossing away the mirror is tossing away the thoughts of her past life and her past self; she can’t ever go back to that.

“The poor cannot go to the far end of their rooms or to the far end of their lives, except by continually bending more and more.”

God I don’t really even know what to say about this line except ouch. It’s just so poignant and intense. The older you get the harder it is to survive, to get up with each new stumble. And we can also take into account things like the cholera epidemic that will occur a few years later in the book, which mostly affected the poor. There’s so little access to any sort of help or assistance. And clearly Valjean’s few little systems of aid aren’t good enough. He may have set up a worker’s infirmary and a place for children or old workmen, but there doesn’t seem to be assistance for single, unsupported women, or the homeless and unemployed. They’re left to bend more and more under the weight of life.

“Her little rose bush dried up in the corner, forgotten.” I can’t help but read this as a parallel to the Thenardier’s treatment of Cosette. As Fantine falls apart and falls behind on her payments, Cosette is growing up which means the abuse from the Thenardiers has probably increased. It also feels like a weird sort of throwback to the spring/summertime imagery of beauty and chasteness and modesty from back in 1.3, which has now completely disappeared and dried up as Fantine loses her beauty, her modesty, and her coquetry.

I love the little detail about Fantine’s butter bell full of water and the frozen ice marks. It’s such a small detail but so evocative. It also feels like a metaphor for each of Fantine’s new hardships. Every time the butter pot freezes over, it leaves a ring of ice for a long time; each time Fantine encounters a new trauma, she hardens and becomes tougher. She keeps her dried up, long gone modesty and youth in one corner and the suffering that has hardened her in the other. On a side note, I’m wondering if there is actually butter in her butter bell or if she’s now using it only for water? I would imagine water only; butter seems like something that might be expensive. Also, would the building she’s living in have had indoor plumbing, or would she have gotten water from a well or a pump somewhere? My plumbing history knowledge is lacking.

Hugo describes Fantine’s torn and badly mended clothes. At this point she’s working as a seamstress, which means she’s at least proficient in the skills needed to sew and/or mend clothes in such a way that they stay together. This means that the repairs done for herself are likely careless and messy. I think this is partly an indication of how little time she has for herself--if she’s sewing for work for 17 hours a day, she has very little time to mend her own stuff, and definitely can’t afford better quality material--and partly an indication of the ways in which she is falling apart. She doesn’t bother mending her things properly, she goes out in dirty clothes. She doesn’t mend her stockings, she just stuffs them further down in her shoes. It seems she has only one or perhaps no good petticoats, which means she’s probably walking around in just a shift and a dress. Not only is her stuff threadbare and falling apart, she’s also probably freezing due to the lack of layers.

“A constant pain in her shoulder near the top of her left shoulder blade.” This makes me wonder if Fantine’s left-handed. If she’s sewing by hand, by candlelight, in a shitty rush chair, for seventeen hours a day, that is absolute murder on the back/shoulders/neck. Whenever I do hand-sewing I’m usually sat on the floor or my bed, and my back and upper shoulders tend to get sore if I get in the zone and I’m bent over the work for a long time. I don’t know about French dressmakers, but I know around that time the English were really big on very small, neat, almost invisible stitches. Which would hurt to do for seventeen hours a day by candlelight.

“She hated Father Madeleine profoundly, and she never complained.” The Hapgood translation of this line is better, I think. Still, I think it’s important that it’s pointed out that she never voices her opinions or her complaints. It’s only when Madeleine is in front of her that she announces them at all (despite not speaking directly to him then, either). She hates Valjean, she blames him, and yet obviously some part of her still thinks that she deserves it, or that her dismissal was right.

“She sewed seventeen hours a day, but a contractor who was using prison labor suddenly cut the price, and this reduced the day’s wages of free-laborers to nine sous.” Reading this book is always a lot because aside from the still-relevant general overarching commentary about society and poverty and mutual aid and goodness and all that, there are so many smaller details that are so painfully, strangely relevant to the present day. Even today there’s fear that employers will come up with a new policy or a new labor shortcut that means less income. Employers who pay their employees less because the workers get tipped, or outsourcing that causes layoffs. Prison labor, too (and behind that, the fact that prison labor doesn’t guarantee a job in a similar field after release if desired).

In the next two chapters, we jump ahead somewhere between a few weeks to a couple months. What happened to Marguerite in the interim? Hugo describes her as a “pious woman [...] of genuine devotion,” but I have this sad thought that maybe when Fantine made the decision to become a sex worker, Marguerite may have turned her back on her as well. As we’ve seen with Valjean, being poor but modest is Good, and being poor and desperate enough to do something improper and “immoral” is Bad. Despite Marguerite’s canonical generosity towards the poor, I wouldn’t be surprised if Fantine’s decision overstepped some moral boundaries of hers.

“But where is there a way to earn a hundred sous a day?” I’m a little stuck on this. Would she make this much money? I’m basing the following information off of Luc Sante’s The Other Paris, so the monetary info might be slightly different a for non-Parisian area. According to Sante, someone like Fantine, a poor woman working without a pimp or madame and not in a legal brothel, would basically be working for pocket change. 100 sous would equal about 5 francs. If her earnings are basically pocket change, I don’t think she’d make 5 francs a day. Just considering the fact that a loaf of bread might cost about 15 sous, which seems like pocket change, or even slightly more than pocket change. Fantine probably becomes a sex worker and finds herself in the exact same position that she was in before, not making any more money than she would have if she had continued to be a seamstress.

[the-sanatorium-i-have-built]

Sometimes you make rash judgements or statements while inebriated that you later regret or just know you didn't think through properly. In those times, I find my wanting clarity, to hit undo and try that moment in time over.

This is that do over I don't know if I will have the courage to send...

So 100% sober me at the moment and in being so, I need to say this.

I never really have been much on friendships. I have associates, people who become part of your circle for whatever reason and then seep into other parts of your life and linger but do not grow with you. My husband calls us people collectors, we accept people in, we try and influence them in a postive way, we give them our time, we just exist with them. The outcome varies, sometimes they become better people or just tire of us and move on, sometimes our influence is so much so they can't move past it and linger until we are forced to quell the situation, and some influence us enough back that we want them as an ongoing fixture (ie, a friend).

I've collected a lot of people over the many lifetimes I have managed to cram into this body. But few people ever find a place with me as actual friends, people i want to give my time to continually, people i want to know everything about and equally in return everything about me, people i want to know who i really am and who they really are. The most precious gift one can give is themselves, and to my friends and family i give that freely and in abundance.

Not many people are invited into the chaos, and fewer still choose to remain long enough to find the beauty in chaos that is me. The good, the neutral, the evil, all the pieces that encapsulate the person i am, was and try to be. Just as importantly in given them the opportunity to explore the chaos, to learn of me and themselves, hopefully find their own beauty in chaos and help leave them the same or better than when I entered their life.

Although my husband, he is my best friend. I have a few various people that i have met over the decades through work who have become friends to a degree. People I have know the majority of my life and share common trauma or solace with, but the circle has always remained mostly associates by choice. Friendship is a level I just can't reach with most for various reasons.

But as events occur to remind you that life is just that life, experiencing the world and people and making moments, we found ourselves looking for more. Content in our co-dependecy yes, knowing we are an eternal unit and despite what ebbs and flows roll in we will roll right through with them together, knowing our love is mutual and infinite. But still knowing that more could be had to experience, both as a unit and as individuals, we decided to once again,as we have done before, try to expand our circle. So we started trying to invite more people into the chaos, we got out of our comfort zones and reentered the dark sides of the chaos ourselves, we choose to live.

We began looking for people who aren't afraid of the unknown but welcome it. Those who if they don't share our views of the world can at least communicate and understand and feel comfortable letting us give them a glimpse of the insanity that is our lives. We want to meet people, form bonds, experience every opportunity life gives us, and to share those opportunities with the people we meet along the way as well.

I wanted friends, i wanted to be more, and reach more, and know more. I wanted to just let life happen, to go into the new or unknown and open myself fully to people to become associates, friends, lovers, a part of our unit, whatever role, just to exist and experience with me/us. I wanted that from the beginning of this lifetime I am living now, unfortunately i spent too many years being caught up on myself and my own insecurities to see that my husband had felt the same way the whole time.

As a lucky side effect of the 2 month long ass raping the universe has given me, the Hulk finally won and came to the surface. As has been since we met, my Betty Ross, my husband saved me and brought the real me back. The discussion and subsequent realization that our mutual misery was starting to break into the shell of comfort and love we had settled into led us to the journey of now. Expand our selves, live like the true us, like we did when we first met, remember and embrace our love and friendship and try to find people to share that want for life with us. This was the experiment, this was the new journey and it brought us both back from the mundane selfless trap of adulting we were struggling to free ourselves and each other from. Just the prospect of the venture was enough to bring the light back into our darkness, and so we traveled on.

We both entered the world of online dating, we made profiles and we started to meet people. Not necessarily looking for anything physical but rather just learning to talk and interact with people again outside of our jobs and if some form of relationship developed then so it was. Just vibe, just live and that was the idea and still is really. We started meeting people, having conversations. The results have been mixed, mostly just more associates to expand the circle, some strange obsessive people as can be expected, and a few randoms that are showing potential as more but that still has to be determined. Overall a good journey so far. My husband has found a new friend and more importantly his escape, at least in short term, and i have been able to influence some people who needed someone in their life at the moment i entered.

I was content in the random short bursts of interaction spread out over a few to sometimes many people. I was meeting people and chit chatting but i wasn't feeling like friendship or more was an option with anyone. Then you sent me a message and i followed suit. We began the same banter that i had with everyone else. We exchanged pleasantries, we joked, we flirted aimlessly, we just existed sharing each others time. You taught me about things to which I was/am ignorant, you laughed at my hyper randomness and made be feel better about myself in doing so. Primarily, I like to think we entertained each other through our individual misery at least a little. I found an escape from the stresses of my life when talking with you. I found myself interested, enough to invite you further into the chaos, and you accepted. I told my husband about you, he was happy for me and glad i had someone to share my time when he could not. I wanted more and still do. I wanted to be more than associates in the passing of time. I wanted to know you because I feel you are capable of knowing me.

I really just want the opportunity to have a friend and I want that to be you. Nothing nefarious, nothing hidden, just a place in my life under a few conditions in order to be open and honest with all involved. I still think you could be that and honestly I do miss the escape and in a way the normalcy your presence was providing. I guess I miss the chance for more, I know I wanted more. I haven't been interested in really knowing another person in a long time but you intrigue me because we are different, yet possibly the same, and that question wasn't answered for me.

I like to think there is still an opportunity, if you are willing to just give the ignition another try. You said you guessed that the bus stops here, but why? If nothing else, us west virginian hillbillies are known for our hospitality and always giving a hand. So I say why not hook up the jumper cables and we see where this road leads, if nothing else but for the pleasure of the drive together.