Same-sex desire and intimacy in Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables and Its adaptations: a creative and critical study

Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables has a profound relationship with its queer fans. Fans testify to the novel’s importance in their lives and, through substantial self-reflexive creative and critical online fanwork, shape the novel’s existence today by exploring homoerotic possibilities between characters Valjean and Javert, and Enjolras and Grantaire. However, the novel and its adaptations have not been studied from a queer perspective, and the remarkable and enduring phenomenon that is the Les Misérables fandom has not been researched at all to date. Addressing these gaps, this thesis uses a critical approach that develops the concept of a ‘queer sensibility’ and Hugo’s notion of the ‘lecteur pensif’; it argues the novel depicts desire and intimacy in ways that both conform to and extend how same-sex desire and intimacy were depicted—overtly and though coding—in established queer literature of the period. The thesis demonstrates how, in professional adaptations of Les Misérables, desire and intimacy appear but are also negated in relation to Valjean, Javert, Enjolras, and Grantaire, due to the muting of the revolutionary politics of the source novel. Contextualised by documented fandoms and informed by the author’s immersion in fandom for over a decade, this thesis further uses a qualitative survey to show how queer fans’ work with Les Misérables enables them to negotiate their identities, politics, and experiences.

The critical part of the thesis is followed by an experimental creative writing section blending fanfiction with academic research. This creative work further draws out the transfiguring potential of queer love in Les Misérables by reimagining Enjolras and Grantaire’s relationship as an openly queer romance in present-day Paris. This thesis as a whole thereby opens up how we read nineteenth-century French literature and contributes to our understanding of contemporary queer connections to same-sex desire and intimacy in historical source texts.