Madame Thénardier

Madame Thénardier represents the corruption of feminine sensibility through circumstance and moral choice. In her youth, she was drawn to the romantic novels popular in her era, novels which formed her imagination and created in her a vision of herself as a romantic heroine. Yet circumstance and marriage to a man of dubious character led her away from any possibility of realizing those imagined ideals. Rather than transcending the gap between romantic aspiration and brutal reality, she allowed the brutal reality to obliterate the romantic aspiration entirely.

By the time she receives Cosette, Madame Thénardier has become a woman entirely devoid of sentiment or tenderness. She participates with her husband in the systematic exploitation of the child, regarding her not as a human being worthy of care but as an economic asset to be extracted. She is distinguished by her capacity for cruelty and her utter indifference to the suffering she causes. Where her husband's evil is motivated by greed and opportunism, hers appears more thorough—a complete corruption of human feeling. She embodies the novel's warning about how poverty, disappointment, and vice can consume the human capacity for compassion.