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
Marianne is brilliant as always. One day I will write full-on Eponine meta, but in the meantime:
The main message Hugo was using Eponine to get across was a message about poverty and agency, not a message about love. (I like musical!Eponine, but Valar in Aman does her characterisation miss the mark by a margin the size of the Pacific ocean.) Les Mis is a novel about the inherent injustice and oppression of 19th century society; the majority of its characters are from the miserables class because Hugo is illustrating, in his indomitable Hugolian style, exactly what kind of people such an unjust and oppressive system creates. The Thernardiers are products of the system, and they are also perpetrators of it: having embraced criminality as the only way to get ahead, they do their damnest to ensure Eponine embraces it as well. Eponine, when we meet her, has had a lifetime of both overt abuse and soul-destroying poverty; I invite you to look around at our modern world and note exactly what that tends to produce even in the 21st century.
But if Hugo is writing against the injustice of the system, he is also writing in favour of those who have the strength of character to rise above their circumstances. (Valjean, of course, is the epitome of this.) This creates a degree of tension in the writing, as Hugo is trying to both show that the system is horrible because it produces horrible people and also say that some people are strong enough to not be horrible people despite the system, without negating his first point about the horribleness of the system. Eponine, in many ways, encapsulates that tension: she tries so hard to rise above her circumstances and Do the Right Thing, and she both fails and succeeds. Having fixated on Marius because he is the only adult in her life who has ever treated her like an actual person (and there’s a whole meta post in that alone), she sees him as a Way Out and is trying, desperately, to scramble away from her family and their entire way of life. Her actions w/r/t Marius are arguably the first time in her life that she makes decisions for herself instead of doing what she’s told; Hugo writes this as a good thing (Hugo likes agency), and thus she is given brief moments of heroism such as talking the Patron-Minette away from Valjean’s house on the Rue Plumet. That her agency later results in her luring Marius to the barricade on a suicide mission is specifically because of the hand she has been dealt: her situation is so desperate and all-encompassing that she requires Marius, at least emotionally, to escape it. If that is a failure of strength of character, she ultimately rises above it by telling Marius the truth, and dies in peace.
Eponine is, as with all of Hugo’s characters, a part of his message on the importance of breaking the cycle. Eponine specifically is a treatise on how fucking difficult it is to break the cycle when you’ve been dealt the shittiest hand in the deck — and thus, the importance of changing the deck so that people don’t get dealt those shitty hands any more. To read her as a terrible person because of her actions w/r/t the Marius subterfuge is to read her as a bit player in the Marius&Cosette story, which is to completely miss the point of her own story. It’s an important point; I’d encourage paying attention to it.