broke vs poor in “les mis”

Overly Devoted Archivist Uncategorized eponine thenardier, les miserables, marius pontmercy 0 Comments

barricadeur:

so last week, i was having a conversation with a good friend of mine, and one of the topics that we got onto was the difference between being broke and being poor.

both of these phenomena have similar hallmarks: living paycheck to paycheck, lacking the money to save or splurge, feeling constantly stressed. but there’s a real fundamental difference between brokeness and poverty that remains important. the nation had an article that illustrated this distinction:

Post-recession, we often blur the distinction between the downwardly mobile and the permanent underclass—especially when wringing our hands over what will become of millennials, many of whom entered the job market just as it was weakest. Here’s an easy way to tell them apart: both are struggling, but the former has a safety net. One has the luxury of moving back home or tapping their college networks for a break; the other faces diminished earning power, a dramatically more precarious job market, and sometimes homelessness—often without any help from parents.

i think this is also a really useful distinction in the world of les mis — specifically, in comparing a character like marius to éponine.
marius is definitely broke. we see him without any money, doing the nineteenth-century equivalent of couch-surfing. he’s a penniless student for a long time, and even when he does get a job, it’s clear that he’s barely making ends meet. after all, he ends up living next door to the thénardiers. clearly, he’s down on his luck.

but marius also has resources that prevent him from ever really falling into true poverty: he has his health and an education that leaves him well suited to gainful employment, as well as his family connections. he chooses not to take money from his grandfather — which is a morally upstanding decision that makes total sense, given his family history, but is still a choice. indeed, there’s even a certain luxury in his brokeness: he doesn’t need to work to support anyone or worry about anyone else’s well-being (think of fantine).

in contrast, éponine lacks all of the invisible safeguards that marius possesses. she’s caught in a multi-generational trap of poverty that is very different from marius’s temporary situation, and we see that in everything from her ill health to her family. there’s no grandfather waiting in the wings to take éponine away from her misery, and even though she can read, there’s no chance that she could ever become a lawyer or translator like marius and rise above her station. her options in life are extremely limited, and remain so.

even though hugo himself calls marius both “indigent” and “poor” in the chapter titles, then, i think it’s important that we distinguish between marius’s problems — which again, are real and difficult and worthy of our empathy — and those of someone like éponine. today, i would say that marius is broke and éponine is poor. in a contemporary context, understanding the difference between class-bassed poverty and misfortune due to temporary circumstances is a key precondition to solving them. it doesn’t help to make college more affordable for people who are never going to be in a position to graduate high school. conversely, talking about new jobs the economy has created doesn’t help people who are too overqualified to be considered for those jobs.

so yeah….in the context of the novel, marius may be broke. but éponine (and others like her) is truly miserable. so last week, i was having a conversation with a good friend of mine, and one of the topics that we got onto was the difference between being broke and being poor.