Girl With A Pearl Earring And Les Miserables Literary Analysis

In Girl With A Pearl Earring and Les Miserables, Griet and Cosette are mistreated by the higher class. Cosette is Fantine’s daughter who is given to the Thenardiers, a family of innkeepers, because Fantine knows she cannot take care of Cosette. While at the Thenardiers’s inn, Cosette is abused and forced to do extortionate tasks she is barely able to do, like fetch water in the dark with a bucket larger than her. She is given no mercy, because of the “fierce mistress and venomous master” she is being ordered by (Hugo, p. 649). Because Cosette is the daughter of a poor working class woman, the Thenardiers, a relatively rich family, treat her horribly. Cosette has to bow to their demands because being from a lower class, there is nothing she
can do about her situation. Just like Cosette, Griet is mistreated by those of a class higher than her. Even from the beginning of her life as a maid, Griet was mistreated by the people she worked for. After the death of Griet’s sister, Agnes, Cornelia taunts Griet by giving her an old doll to give to Agnes. Although Cornelia knows Agnes had passed away, she acts on Griet’s misfortune to sadden her even more. Cornelia knows she is a higher class than Griet, and abuses that power against her. Cosette’s situation is fully controlled by the Thenardiers. She cannot change the fact that she is a lower class, so she is told to do extreme tasks around the inn, displaying the limits lower classes have when put up with a member of a higher class. Cornelia believes that she has power over Griet because of her high class, and plays with Griet’s feelings because she knows that Griet cannot go against her without extreme consequences. Both characters are trapped by the fact that they must answer to a higher class and must deal with the mistreatment that comes with having someone have power over them.