We will confine ourselves to saying that the love of Fantine was a first love, a sole love, a faithful love."(Hugo, 145) in the endeavor to survive and sustain her child she is forced to become a prostitute, thus enduring extreme humiliation. For Hugo thus, she represents another 'miserable' being, part of the dregs of society who is nevertheless pure and luminous because of her inner goodness, the divine essence that cannot be corrupted by the extraneous influence of man: "Fantine was one of those beings who blossom, so to speak, from the dregs of the people. Though she had emerged from the most unfathomable depths of social shadow, she bore on her brow the sign of the anonymous and the unknown."(Hugo, 145) Fantine thus represents the poor and ignorant woman who is forced to practice prostitution as the ultimate resource for survival, but who nevertheless remains pure and uncorrupted inside. Finnally, Fantine's daughter, Cosette, is the character that Hugo drafts as a prototype for the young girl who is orphan and helpless in the world. The author thus dwells on the details of Cosette's upbringing as a motherless child. Despite the fact that her destiny is ultimately fortunate as she has Valjean as her loving ward and then Marius as a loving husband, Cosette has a very difficult childhood. Having a multitude of surrogate parents, she grows up quite ignorant of the realities that surround her. As a servant girl for the Thenardiers, Cosette grows up in an incredibly humiliating and grimly oppressive atmosphere: "Her childhood produced upon her the effect of a time when there had been nothing around her but millepeds, spiders, and serpents."(Hugo, 942) Then, when she is finally rescued by Valjean, she has a comparably much happier life in a convent. However, Hugo insists on the essential lack of a...

All the nuns in the world are not worth as much as one mother in the formation of a young girl's soul. Cosette had had no mother. She had only had many mothers, in the plural."(Hugo, 940) the implication is that the social forces had again separated the mother and the child, through the mother's struggle and her untimely death. With unwonted psychological mastery, Hugo observes the innocence but tremendous ignorance of the young girl who confuses Valjean with a mother figure: "When he was seated, she leaned her cheek against his white hair, and dropped a silent tear, saying to herself: 'Perhaps this man is my mother.'"(Hugo, 943) Thus, Cosette embodies the young girl who has to suffer because of her orphanage in a world which offers little defense for the helpless individual.
The situation is certainly common in modern society, as in Germany for instance, where, as research shows, single mothers and orphan children are still a poignant reality. While civilization seems to have evolved towards a more stable system, there are still excruciating problems related to orphanages from different causes. The situations described by Hugo's novels are thus still authentic in many respects and applicable to other societies as well.

Works Cited

Brosman, Catherine Savage. "Victor Hugo," in Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 119: Nineteenth-Century French Fiction Writers: Romanticism and Realism, 1800-1860

Grossman, Kathryn M. Figuring Transcendence in 'Les Miserables': Hugo's Romantic Sublime.

Hugo, Victor. Les Miserables. New York: Penguin, 1971.

Lynd, Robert. "Jean Valjean," in Books and Writers, J.M. Dent & Sons, 1952