Figure Profile— Fantine

Hello! In the past few weeks, I’ve finished my article on the two main characters, and today I’m going to profile the first female character, Fantine, who is a factory worker under Jean Valjean’s charge. Though she dies young and thus accounts for little proportion of the story, she is fairly pivotal to the development of the plot; her dismal fate together with her interaction with Jean Valjean both motivate his afterwards epic life story.

Fantine is born in poverty and brought up under harsh circumstances. In her youth she has fallen in love deeply with a student; tragically, the student abandons her while her pregnancy as he attribute their love to youth ignorance and regards it as sort of fun. Though utterly mournful and heartbroken, Fantine strives to provide her illegitimate child, Cosette, who is lodged at the Thénardiers, a selfish and greedy innkeeper couple.

However, Fantine’s beloved child is labored and tortured by the cruel couple without her knowledge. Moreover, the couple is so grasping that they demands more and more money under the excuse of needs for living and medical care; unfortunately, meanwhile, Fantine’s scandal is held up to view ruthlessly by her coworkers, and hence she is driven out the factory.

Her sole financial source being cut off, Fantine gets bogged down into endless despair, and resorts to prostitute to pay her debts. After then, Jean Valjean knows this poor woman by chance, and feels guilty about what he has done. To make up for his fault, Jean Valjean takes care of sick Fantine and commits himself to the union of the family. However, Javert intercepts Valjean in order to bring him to justice; Fantine eventually dies in sorrow.

Though Fantine might not be so important as the previous two I’ve mentioned, when it comes to this figure, we are sure to think up I Dreamed A Dream, a representative song of Les Mis. This song conveys her greatest despair about the plight she is trapped in, and the mourning for her elapsed youth; there’re lyrics go like this, ‘I had a dream my life would be/ So different from this hell I'm living/ So different now, from what it seemed/ Now life has killed the dream I dreamed.’ I think it not only illustrates Fantine’s grief, but also reflects the suffering of all man in the ages of chaos and turbulence; I think the lyrics fit well to the title as well as the main idea of this book, Les Misérables, and stimulate us to weep for their pain and sympathize with the wretched. I think that’s the reason why this song can attain universal praise.