15 this reason from the theories provided, the writer employs only two of the
theories: the Marxist Theory and the Postcolonial Theory.
2.1.2 Poverty Effects towards Child’s Behavior
Based on certain theorists, there are specific theories about what affects someone‘s personality. Hurlock 1976 who states that there are eight factors
which influence someone‘s personality p. 137-354. In this study, the writer only employs two determinants, which are social determinants and family
determinants. Those two determinants are related to the events that happened in the novel. The social and family conditions in the novel are poor. It is because in
social conditions, the people‘s point of view toward Fantine who already had a daughter but her husband left her makes people think that she is a prostitute. In
family conditions, Cosette, the young daughter who only had a mother and an absent father that abandoned them makes Fantine struggle to earn a living. The
challenge happens because extreme poverty has come to the people in that era and that is why people must struggle to earn a living and do whatever they can to get
food or money. Those conditions affected little Cosette who has to work in a motel where she and her mother live because they cannot afford to have a house to
live.
2.1.3 Theory of Poverty
The theory of poverty is taken from a journal written by Islam 2005. Islam 2005 states that poverty is divided into four types, that is: social darwinian
16 theory of poverty, culture of poverty, situational theory of poverty, and structural
theory of poverty.
2.1.3.1 Social Darwinian Theory of Poverty
Islam 2005 states that the poor were poor because they did not work hard. They squandered money on gambling, drinking and unnecessary luxuries,
and they had disorder of family life. They had no ambition, no inner call for work, were fatalistic, and suffered from ―an intractable ineducability.‖According to
Social Darwinists, the poor are poor because they have low IQ and low mental capacity and biologically destined to be poor. The welfare system that underwrites
this human substratum of deviance is a sheer wastage of resources and should be dismantled p. 2.
2.1.3.2 Culture of Poverty
The second theory is the theory of the culture of poverty developed by the anthropologist, Lewis 1959. The culture of poverty is a specific syndrome that
develops in specific situations. According to Islam 2005, it requires an economic setting of cash economy, a high rate of unemployment and under employment,
low wages and people with low skills. In the absence of voluntary or state support and stable family, the low-income population tends to develop the culture of
poverty against the dominant ideology of accumulation of the middle class. The poor realize that they have a marginal position within a highly stratified and
individualistic capitalistic society, which does not offer them any prospect for upward mobility. In order to survive, the poor have to develop their own
