Of Dolls and Girls in Nineteenth-Century France Valérie C. Lastinger (bio) Most French children become acquainted with the nineteenth-century poet Victor Hugo through excerpts from his novel Les Misérables, a book filled with lively and memorable children. The three main female children characters—Cosette, Ponine, and Zelma—are introduced after the following passage: A doll is one of the most imperious needs, and at the same time one of the most charming instincts, of female childhood. . . . To care for, to clothe, to adorn, to dress, to undress, to dress over, to teach, to scold a little, to rock, to cuddle, to put to sleep, to imagine that something is somebody—all the future of woman is there. . . . The first baby takes the place of the last doll. A little girl without a doll is almost as unfortunate and quite as impossible as a woman without children. [343] Reading this passage, Laura Kreyder comments that "these famous pages . . . continue to represent the model of the play-relation of the 'child-woman' in yesterday and today's textbooks" (90).1 Certainly, Victor Hugo remains a dominant patriarchal authority figure in France; within the narrow limits of these few lines, feminists can recognize a deterministic summary of maternity as the only possible female destiny. Hugo's responsibility is great; his impress on French literature and politics and his influence in the domain of French children's literature are undeniable. French children today commonly read abridged versions of Les Misérables (1862) and Notre-Dame de Paris (1831). Excerpts from Les Misérabks, as Kreyder notes, are usually part of grade school curricula, and the favorite passages—those that deal with Cosette as a child—are the passages I consider here. It is tempting for feminists to portray Hugo as perpetuating a conditioning of female childhood into the maternal role. At the center of this conditioning rests the doll, this reified child—usually, this reified female child. But Hugo deserves a fair hearing; an analysis [End Page 20] of gender role models should not rest on a few lines. These few lines, moreover, should be read with great care, for they are rich and controversial. Indeed, Hugo's text contains a number of "windows" through which readers may glimpse a world not quite so rigid as the one first readily perceived. Typically Hugolian, typically romantic, the rhetoric of the passage is based on a series of binary oppositions or equivalences: imperious/charming; something/ somebody; doll-less girl/childless woman; first baby/last doll. These rhetorical pairs, so familiar to Hugo's landscape and so forcibly penetrating the reader's mind, prove here, however, to be just as many sophisms for the contemporary reader.2 Where, we may ask, is the rational impossibility in the sentence "as impossible as a woman without children"? The word impossible works on at least two levels, implying both biological impossibility and an incompatibility of characters (that is, a woman without children is impossible to live with). Of course, infertility is hardly rare and barren women are not necessarily high-strung and inflexible. Thus taken apart, Hugo's deceptive aphorism implies another: "a little girl without a doll is as possible as a woman without children." Take another of Hugo's assertions: "to imagine that something is somebody, all the future of woman is there." The cleanness of such a phrasing at first seduces, but again one is tempted to reverse the sentence to make sense of it. Under patriarchy, a woman's future is not to imagine that something is somebody but rather to understand that she, somebody, is something. The temptation to reverse the axiom is all the stronger since historians have shown that by the late seventeenth century, contrary to earlier practice, babies were certainly considered as somebody rather than something(Aries 53-73).3 With such examples of the slyness of apparently clear-cut sentences, one suspects that when it comes to the portrayal of gender, Hugo may also distort stereotypes. In this context, a stereotype is defined as an idea that on a superficial level can pass as being expected, predictable, unimaginative. In the opening passage, for...