Ah, it’s That Chapter in Brickclub! I always find this post to be enormously helpful in understanding thecultural context for Mme. T’s novels here. I actually wish it wasn’t all behind a cut, it’s just so much useful context!–Especially the bit about how a lot of the novels Hugo’s citing were by men “legitimizing” fictional forms women created by …writing the same thing but being men, and by how the specific narrative through-line of them ties in with Mme T’s expectations for herself and her girls.
I write bullet-point meta now? Bullet-point meta is cool.
If you think Eponine was a terrible person I will fucking fight you
If you think Eponine was a pure virtuous saint I will fucking fight you
If you think the most tragic thing about Eponine was that Marius didn’t love her back, look, I’m sorry, you are just plain wrong
Eponine’s parents are awful people trying to raise her into an awful person and her entire adolescence has been a morally-degrading hell and SHE IS TRYING TO ESCAPE
She doesn’t even make any claim to being a good person, she just wants OUT of the criminal underworld and begging and fraud and extortion and prostitution and robbery and assault
She p. much considers herself a devil who’s trying to defect to the side of angels
Marius is what sets all this off
She puts him up on a pedestal of Virtuous Poverty b/c holy shit, an alternative to being Le Mauvais Pauvre
No seriously Marius is what makes her realize how fucked-up her life is and how fucked-up she is as a result of her upbringing, and that she doesn’t have to just mutely accept it
There is a hefty dose of sexual shame in why she considers herself Irrevocably Fucked-Up, she’s a 19th-century girl in a 19th-century world, but it’s so not the only thing going on there, and the ways Eponine is being sexually exploited and how they affect her fucked-upness is a subject that deserves a long-ass meta post all to itself
And yeah, she hatches a wild plan to lure Marius to the barricades so they can die together
This is not a relapse into her family’s Wicked Ways or a random act of capricious madness, it is a full-on goddamn Javert Derailed breakdown
bc when you pin EVERYTHING on someone, not just your heart but your hope and your backbone and your moral compass, then yeah you can totally suffer in noble silence while watching him be in love with someone else, but the prospect of him DISAPPEARING AND BEING GONE FOREVER?
does not compute
critical error
initiate self-destruct sequence and lock down Marius unit in closest possible proximity
Yes this is pointless and selfish, in the general sense that Eponine is fucking drowning and clinging to Marius’ ankle to stay afloat and tries to pull him down with her rather than let him get out of the water
And holy shit she manages to transcend that moment of total breakdown panic and fix the damage she’s done and let Marius go? A teenager with no guidance and a shitty amoral abusive upbringing and basically nothing except a dogged determination not to be the person her parents made her?
Come back and tell me to my face that Eponine was a terrible person, ya little punk
She is ambiguous and conflicted and trying so, so hard to do the right thing
i think it’s time for a little lesson in appreciating eponine thenardier as a character.
get ready for a truth bomb comin’ at you: eponine is fundamentally selfish, her feelings for marius were not genuine sustainable romantic love, and they would have been a complete disaster if they had ever been something resembling a couple. you are doing it wrong.
i’m sorry. she’s not some fallen disney princess, and i get SO FREAKING MAD when people romanticize her character. it’s not totally the audience’s fault, and the people running the musical have over the years tended to cast actresses who could easily play both roles, type-wise, and that would have been UNTHINKABLE in the original cast. because eponine is an unwashed, possibly mentally unstable street urchin who follows marius around and sneaks into his apartment and eats his leftovers while humming to herself. lea salonga’s casting was maybe the worst thing that ever happened to the character, and i love lea salonga. but if there’s a fallen disney princess, IT’S FANTINE JESUS FUCKING CHRIST.
let’s get one thing straight: the poor little eponine bullshit is getting old.
she shouldn’t see herself as some tragic poor soul whom the world has broken. the best actresses have not played her this way. she is not self-pitying. have you even LISTENED to on my own? that shit is not bemoaning. she is not blaming marius. she gets mad and does the little you know little you care shit, but on my own, her big song, is not a fucking pity party. she is realizing that she loves him and that THEY WILL NEVER WORK OUT. it’s not “why doesn’t he love me.” she knows she is not even remotely in his field of romantic prospects and yeah, it hurts, but she’s not blaming anybody, especially not cosette or marius. don’t fucking simplify her to that level. she has her selfish indulgent moments but she has balls and strength and grit. she stands up to the father who most likely doubles as her pimp and who rules her life and whom she has until now been aiding in criminal activities IN ORDER TO PROTECT MARIUS AND COSETTE.
she even says it! it’s the title of the song! “i love him, but only on my own.” ON MY OWN. she does not expect him to love her back! she wishes she did. it hurts that she doesn’t. but she is on some level aware that she is idealizing him into this vision of what her life could have been like, and what she wishes her life could be like.
for all that sympathetic portrayal i’ve just given you, i’m gonna drop another truth bomb: she continues to interact with him in an unhealthy possessive manner, and in the book she wants so badly to be with him that she tricks him into going to the barricades, hoping he will get shot. obviously, this doesn’t occur in the musical. she also jumps in front of a bullet heading for marius in the books, so i mean on a cosmic level i guess it evens out. but her death in the musical? she’s not risking her life to save him. she’s not even intentionally risking her life. she’s caught by a stray bullet trying to climb back to him to tell him she did what he asked, in a move that is clearly meant to endear her to him further. she didn’t do it for him. she did it for herself, because she wants him. despite having recognized and accepted that they will never happen.
and the cosette thing? the girl-hate perpetuated by this fandom’s segment of eponine lovers is positively disgusting, and the term mary-sue comes up a whole fuckton of a lot. if you think about it for like three seconds, a mary-sue is a female character who is too perfect, and most often it goes way beyond criticizing bad writing and into hating female characters. i’m sorry, since when are we criticizing people for being awesome? if it were a dude in the same position, you’d never say he was a gary stu. in the book, cosette is a fully developed character who is more sympathetic and interesting than eponine, and in addition to several years of staring at each other from across parks, cosette and marius have been meeting in secret for weeks. i understand that she was simplified and fucking shafted by boubil and schonberg into someone without much personality at all. that doesn’t make her some kind of horrible harpy bitch who is stealing marius from poor righteous devoted eponine. she had the audacity to fall in love with him and to have him fall in love with her.
but besides all that, you don’t get to ~get the guy by completing a series of tasks or being more devoted or loving him better. the HOW DARE HE CHOOSE COSETTE OVER EPONINE WHO LOVED HIM SO MUCH!!! argument is getting really fucking stale, and it’s been that way since, like, the nineties. you’re late to that party, the ship has sailed, leave your internalized misogyny and immature notions of how relationships and affection work at the door. she isn’t entitled to marius, and her entitlement sure as hell shouldn’t be interpreted as in comparison to cosette. it should never BE cosette OR eponine. they’re not on the same level.
for all that, i still really like eponine. i like the eponine that you should be liking. i like the eponine who stands up to her father, who refuses to stop dreaming despite horrifying circumstances, who is selfish and immature and spoiled and maybe a little unstable. i like the eponine with character, with layers—not the 2d teenybopper taylor swift bullshit misogynist self-indulgent brat you identify with because she gets spurned romantically. stop blaming the guy. stop blaming the other girl. marius did nothing to hurt eponine on purpose. cosette sure as hell didn’t, and there’s no evidence that eponine hates her, so why the fuck do you? she’s desperate and grasping and selfish, but she doesn’t hate either one of them.
in the end, dying in marius’s arms is her happy ending. she knows it. she honestly accepts that this is the best she’s gonna get. that’s her tragedy. not that she didn’t get the guy and died for love. no. stop that bullshit before you even think it. and she is honestly happy to be there! she is legitimately thrilled to get that much. she’s got fight. she’s got practicality. she’s got strength and flaws and qualities and this interpretation of her absolutely KILLS them all as well as the characterizations of cosette and marius (admittedly not fucking helped by the casting trends as a whole).
you want a good eponine, check out frances ruffele. her voice is squeaky, but the character sure as fuck isn’t who you’re thinking she is. try to get a hold of footage of celia keenan-bolger, because she’s the closest to book!ponine and maybe the best-developed eponine i have ever seen. she doesn’t turn on my own into her BIG SHOWSTOPPING ALL-ABOUT-ME number—it’s a number among many others that gives us insight into her character and she sure as fuck doesn’t stop to have a pity party. the fandom and the franchise have absolutely gutted a great character, and she didn’t deserve that shit. don’t try to sell it to me.
another rant for another day is the fact that THIS LOVE TRIANGLE IS NOT THE FUCKING POINT OF THIS MUSICAL. it’s a slice of so many characters and lives intersecting at these few moments and it’s meant to criticize what was happening in society at the time of its publication. it is an epic. it is way bigger than your fucking romantic intrigues, so stop simplifying it to that. you will never get me to cry more over eponine’s death than the barricade scenes.
tl;dr: this macro is a steaming pile of horse shit, and so is the interpretation eponine it represents.
¯_( ಠ_ಠ)_/¯ 