pilferingapples:

honestly the slow horror of Fantine’s Descent is so overwhelming every time I read it 

Valjean Falls in a single moment of reckless desperation; he makes one bad call and is cast out of society before he can blink, and that’s one kind of horror; the awful fractured feeling of a life changed irrevocably before there’s time to even protest.

But Fantine has to choose, over and over and over and over, to carve herself up bit by bit. She gets  the choice, she has to make the conscious effort to sacrifice first every piece of her happiness and comfort– and comfort  sounds so superfluous but god it’s so essential, people need  fire in the winter and warm clothes and clean living space and enough food and sleep  to be comfortable and she gives it all up– and then literally cutting herself up, piece by piece– 

and she could stop. She could always stop, right up until her arrest. She could live, herself , on what she gets for shirts, never mind the relatively larger income she gets from prostitution.  Every time, even after she’s sold her teeth and hair and become a prostitute–she could just stop sending Thenardier money, and start climbing back out of debt. She has to choose, every single day, every minute, to keep destroying herself, for a daughter she doesn’t even know is still alive– all she has to go on is Thenardier’s word, and even Fantine realizes, in time, that he’s not at all to be trusted. It wouldn’t even be unfeeling for her to give, it would be a totally logical sort of despair if she came to believe Cosette had died, that Thenardier was just extorting her (he would. We all know he would. Even Fantine surely knows he would.).

But she walks clear-eyed into hell, for years,  because the one thing she really can’t survive without is her hope for Cosette.  And every day the escape hatch is right there, and every day she chooses to ignore it. She’s got more conviction than all Napoleon’s doomed army at Waterloo, because she has to step into that abyss on purpose  and with no hope of glory, believing it makes her worth less. 

And she does it anyway.