Anne Hathaway In Les Miserables 3

The castration that Fantine wants is the castration of the aristocratic, military state from the world of Christian Humanism and the Catholic Church.

Fantine's femininity, in this context, becomes a product of one contradictory tendency. She is, on the one hand, very much an ideal Victorian woman, sublimated and spiritualized, longing for a world of gentlemen and ladies. On the other hand, she is a violent and vengenful woman, longing for a revenge against men, men of all time and all nations, for the sin that men commit all the time, THAT MEN LONG TO POSSESS A WOMAN LIKE A THING. The tension between these two versions of women creates the Fantine character, but the musical implies that if she were in the right context, she would simply be an angelic, heaven-longing woman.

It's not unlikely that these aspects of a woman are not contradictory. They may, just as well, be a part of the same tendency. The Victorian woman may be a vengeful woman who desires to kill the animal part of man. What's striking about Anne's Fantine is that she possesses both of these characteristics with such intensity and longing. It's as if the character of Fantine were stretched to her very limits like a bow stretched to its maximum tension. She is interesting to watch because the viewer is left to wonder when she will become insane almost.