Eponine depicts the pains and wounds that I, and perhaps millions other women around the world, shared together. Many women have their own untold, unspoken love or admiration to someone who falls in love with other woman whose beauty they cannot compete with. Just like her story, she, who falls for Marius, but Marius seems to see her as an equal friend, a comrade, and instead fall in love at the first sight with the pretty Cossete, and tells her everything about the other woman delightfully, while she holds her sorrows inside.
She is the realization of women's platonic love, hidden feelings (though the love is not worth to die for, as she does in the play). Platonic or non-platonic, this kind of story shared the same quality or message: the unrequited love.
Eponine, perhaps, is more a victim rather than a bad person herself. She's a victim of a bad upbringing, bad parents, which reminds me of the quotes from Sissy, a fragile female character in Michael Fassbender's movie, 'Shame'. She says something in the last scene of the movie: "We are not bad people, we just come from a bad place".
Eponine also somehow, characterizes my heroines in the old days kungfu movies when I was a kid: who possessed high level of kungfu skills, smart, but are not the ones selected by the main male characters of the movie because, well, they're not as delicate and as beautiful as the beautiful, small toed, unskilled (not having kungfu skills) ladies. In-short: they are not not angelic, not fragile, strong, a bit tomboy, not having a real lady's or princess' qualities, not someone that the male characters can exercise their protective, masculine, dominating attributes.
Meanwhile in the real life, many of my female friends are often blamed by their family for being 'too selective' in looking for prospective partner because they are not married yet until their late 20's, or 30's or even 40's, -most parents and society are frustrated indeed, looking down and pitied at them as the leftovers, the losers of the 'wedding market' competition. I keep on wondering myself: are they really the ones to be blamed?
pic from: http://godsofart.com/les-miserables-portraits
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On My Own
On my own
Pretending he's beside me
All alone
I walk with him till morning
Without him
I feel his arms around me
And when I lose my way I close my eyes
And he has found me
In the rain the pavement shines like silver
All the lights are misty in the river
In the darkness, the trees are full of starlight
And all I see is him and me forever and forever
And I know it's only in my mind
That I'm talking to myself and not to him
And although I know that he is blind
Still I say, there's a way for us
I love him
But when the night is over
He is gone
The river's just a river
Without him
The world around me changes
The trees are bare and everywhere
The streets are full of strangers
I love him
But every day I'm learning
All my life
I've only been pretending
Without me
His world will go on turning
A world that's full of happiness
That I have never known
I love him
I love him
I love him
But only on my own
[- From: http://www.elyrics.net -]
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