Cosette Fauchelevent serves three major functions in Les Misérables—her strengths and weaknesses should be analyzed according to these three functions. Cosette's first role in the novel is that of personifying the physical and spiritual of children talked of in the preface to the book. Second, she represents the love of women idealized. And third, she is a symbolic figure—she symbolizes life, hope, and the future.

As a child, Cosette is beaten, belittled, and deprived terribly of basic physical, emotional, and spiritual needs. She is not fed enough to keep a bird alive; but she is nevertheless expected to accomplish the workload of an adult. There is no figure to love her or support her, and the Thénardiers can in no way provide nourishment for her spirit. She is entirely alone and must be her own inventor of happiness. She creates a doll of a small sword; she makes friends with the Thénardiers' dog (the dog dies); and she talks to herself and to God to ease the fearfulness of life. Once pretty and happy while in the care of her mother, she becomes ugly, sullen, and cold-hearted in the hands of the Thénardiers.

But always hopeful. On Christmas Eve, she naively places her dirty shoe before the fire place in expectation of receiving something from Father Christmas—despite the fact that Father Christmas has formerly always ignored her. In her adulthood, she retains this unconquerable hope, along with the other attributes she acquires while with the Thénardiers: reserve, melancholy, submissiveness, and the ability to control her emotions. She suppresses emotions that make herself and those she loves unhappy. She buries them deep inside, and moves on quickly, ignoring or overcoming anything that would hold her back. Cosette is strong in this first role of hers; she is adept at fighting misery.

The relationship between Cosette and Jean Valjean is based upon the relationship between Victor Hugo and his favorite daughter, Leopoldine. Leopoldine died when she was still quite young. Her death sent Hugo into a deep depression. The distress experienced by Hugo at the loss of Leopoldine was likely the basis for the feelings felt by Valjean when he lost Cosette to Marius. The deep emotional attachment between the Valjean and Cosette in the novel is almost celestial—each is always striving to make the other happy, even if that means suppressing feelings of betrayal, resentment, and loneliness.

Cosette hides from Valjean her sadness in her desire to please him. She is always trying to be loving and hopeful towards her father. It is this attitude of hers that is his staff of life.

Cosette deals with deprivation in what some would term a weak way, but in what is rather a passively strong way (if that term is not oxymoronic). When the presence of Marius is taken away from Cosette by Valjean, she bears it patiently and strives to be cheerful for the sake of her father. She still loves Marius deeply, but she soon recovers her cheerfulness. Although she has not forgotten Marius, her love must have an outlet. She devotes herself to her garden, to Valjean, she even flirts with the officer Theodule Gillenormand. This is not weak or fickle of her, for she still cherishes the memory of Marius—she has only put away from her present mind that which makes her unhappy. To avoid sulkiness and depression is not to be weak.

Ironically, in a reversal of roles, when the presence of Valjean is taken away from Cosette by Marius, she acts in the same way. She suppresses the sadness and clasps on to the happiness around her. She does not forget the loved one, she buries him in the recesses of her heart, to be brought out again when circumstances are more favorable. "Thus is youth constituted;" Hugo tells us, "it quickly wipes its eyes; it believes sorrow useless and does not accept it. Youth is the smile of the future before an unknown being which is itself. It is natural for it to be happy. It seems as though it breathed hope."¹

Cosette is also submissive. She was not brought up to be assertive. She was brought up to be passive by the Thénardiers, and loving by Valjean. Cosette loves and pleases he who it is possible for her to please, but she will cross no one (out of unconscious fear of being beaten as she was by the Thénardiers, perhaps). She can only find the power to resist when her very spirit is in danger—such as when she is forced into the night to fetch water, or when she is faced with prospect of losing Marius forever. Otherwise, she is submissive. Cosette's submissiveness is not only a result of life with the Thénardiers, but also a deliberate plot ploy of Hugo in further enhancing Cosette's symbolic nature. I will explain that point later on.

Cosette symbolizes life, hope, and the future. Hugo says that, "She gave to him who saw her a sensation of April and of dawn. There was dew in her eyes. Cosette was a condensation of auroral light in womanly form."² The references to "April," and "dawn," clearly point to rebirth and new life, and talk of her being "auroral light in womanly form," tells us that Cosette is not to be taken literally—Hugo was not attempting to create an extremely realistic girl. He was writing what he imagined light would be like in the form of a woman. Cosette displays many qualities of many types of light, most notably the light of love and redemption.

After the death of Fantine, and Valjean's reentrance into prison, he was in danger of falling into the grasp of evil once again. What stopped him? The love of Cosette. Cosette saved him. She was his second redemption. It was Fantine's love for Cosette that finally redeemed her from her sins. It is Marius's love for Cosette that became his life source. She is the rebirth of all three of these characters. And yet Cosette is not independently angelic. The redemption that Cosette offers must be reciprocal for her to have the power to redeem. Under the care of the Thénardiers, Hugo tells us that Cosette was on the verge of becoming either "an idiot or a demon."³ The attitude of the person who has care of her very much affects her own attitude. Her influence is limited to the receiver's willingness to be changed. She needs love and strength to be able to give love and strength. Of Cosette's "tranquil confidence," Hugo says that it only belonged to natures of "extreme strength or extreme weakness."4 He does not specify. What Cosette essentially is depends up who and how a person interprets her. Jean Valjean saw her as an angel, Madame Thénardier saw her as the devil.

Cosette's submissiveness, or ability to be molded, is obvious in many scenes in the book. She bends almost entirely to the will of her father. Symbolically, this is because she is his life, and he makes what he likes of his life. When her soul "becomes" Marius's soul, she conforms to his wants and needs because she is symbolically now his life. Cosette becomes that which she senses her loved ones wish her to be. She is passive for the Thénardiers (for they want her to be nothing, and she does not love them), obedient and loving for Valjean, and inspiring and passionate for Marius. Cosette encompasses all qualities and no qualities. She is everything and nothing (thus the reason some view her as empty-headed :)). Cosette is such a broad and, at the same time, such a marginal character that she is easily misinterpreted. The mistake comes in viewing Cosette as human. Hugo never intended her to be realistic or human in the way Marius is. He intended her to be glowing, wild, and distant. He rarely takes us inside her mind, and when he does, it is only vaguely. He does not mean for us to come to know Cosette as a representation of a young girl. He intends for us to see her as a representation of the ideal—of rebirthof hope—of light.

Near the end of the book, Jean Valjean represents the past, Marius the present, and Cosette the future. It is Marius's time to take "control" of the future, and it is Jean Valjean's time to fade. He has lived his life and is no longer part of the present. He is the past. It has come time for Cosette to move away from him to another life. Hugo says:

"Nature devides living beings into the coming and the going. The going are turned towards the shadow, the coimng towards the light. Hence a separation, which, on the part of the old, is a fatality, and on the part of the young, involuntary. . . . Youth goes where joy is, to festivals, to brilliant lights, to loves. Old age goes to its end. They do not lose sight of each other, but the ties are loosened. The affection of the young is chilled by life; that of the old by the grave."5

Cosette owes all that she has become to the Valjean and she will remember him for that But she will also not dwell upon him. According to the symbolic theme of Cosette, she must conform by nature to those around her. Her enduring, firm qualities are those of loving and hoping and "being inclined in a single direction."6 She is incapable of seeking to please the wills of both Marius and Valjean at the same time; their wills are contradictory, how can she please them both? Her nature is in singleness, and she chooses to follow her husband. This is not wrong of her. After marriage, her greater duty is to her spouse, not to her father. Cosette conforms to Marius's ideas and intentions not because of an inability to think for herself, but rather on account of an ability to intuitively discern the needs of others. Her role in the book is to love and to hope and to bring those around her to love and hope as deeply as she does. The future cannot be upheld unless there is someone alive to dream for it and love it. Jean Valjean relinquishes the role, and Marius takes it up. Responsibility for actions of Marius and Valjean are not to be placed on her shoulders. Her role is not to oppose, mope, or intercede—she instead loves and inspires. She does not fight with Marius about her father because it would be contrary to her nature. She also does not push away her father, for that would too be contradictory to her nature. Seeing that Marius wishes her to be separated from Valjean, Cosette buries her father's memory deep in her heart where her husband cannot see that it thrives; and she continues to love and hope for the present.

The strength or weakness of Cosette is essentially up to the reader. They can view her passivity and submission as weak, or they can see the motivation behind her passivity---her deep love and hope---and view her as strong. Hugo never directly informs whether she is strong or weak---he is constantly vague in an attempt to reiterate his theme of the future. The future is not strong nor is it weak---it is only what one makes of it. It is not essentially constant in its outlook, but it is continually full of potential and hope. Everything that belongs to the future, and so symbolically, to Cosette also, is either "extreme strength or extreme weakness." There is nothing inbetween. But which is Cosette? Ultimately, it's up to you.

*This rather melodramatic, biased, and confusing essay is loosely based on a paper I wrote for school last year while we were studying Les Misérables. My teacher despised Cosette.

¹Les Misérables, Jean Valjean, Book I, Chapter X

²Les Misérables, Saint Denis, Book VIII, Chapter I

³Les Misérables, Cosette, Book III, Chapter VIII

4Les Misérables, Cosette, Book IV, Chatper II

5Les Misérables, Jean Valjean, Book IX, Chapter I

6 Ibid.

(C) 2001 & 2002