maybe not the absolute best thing about les miserables the novel (it’s a long book) but the one that stood out the most to me and has remained with me most strongly is that when the book is explaining to us the plight of fantine, who basically like finds herself poor and knocked up bc iirc she hooked up with some fuckboy who was never gonna stick around, victor hugo really takes pains to be clear that fantine did a lot of really dumb shit. she made stupid ass choices. she was naive and impulsive and unwise and myopic. it’s not a story where a tragic heroine did everything right and still got screwed. but the moral argument put forth by, i mean, to some degree the entire novel but particularly (to my recollection) by this section is essentially like, isn’t it so fucked up that we live in a society where someone can be functionally condemned to a life of suffering for the crime of being a fallible human being in their youth? isn’t being young and stupid and getting to move on from that a human right that we are denying people? shouldn’t you be allowed to be kind of an idiot without ruining your entire life? it’s such a clearly and expansively empathetic view and it’s an idea that people obviously continue to struggle with based on Any Time Anything Happens Ever and also one that i feel like continues to be rare in narrative art or media, at least expressed this fully or strongly.
