“The French Lieutenant’s Woman” by John Fowles is a Victorian novel that portrays the emerged effects of society on the individual’s awareness of his own and thus the triggered behavior when confronting the reality, “the truth”. The characters in the novel are designed due to the requests of Victorian Age on the nature of men and women. Thus, The French Lieutenant’s Woman of the title is the mysterious woman of the typical Victorian romantic novel, “poor Tragedy (…) and others that cannot be properly spoken” (Fowles, p. 12 in Doherty, p.54). Sarah Woodruff, embodies The French Lieutenant’s Woman is “an element which disrupts the proper functioning of Lyme Regis society” (Doherty, p.53) as she separates the engaged couple since she attracts Charles Smithson much more than Ernestina Freeman, his fiancée does.
Victorianism and gendered selfhood: norms, deviations, and consequences
Ernestina, an aristocratic young woman acts as a conventional ”future wife”, since she never questions Victorian society “There were so many things she must never understand: the richness of male life, the enormous difficulty of being one to whom the world was rather more than dress and home and children. All would be well when she was truly his; in his bed and in his bank … and of course in his heart, too” (Fowles p114) while Sarah Woodruff, aiming to leave behind her past and assuming the role of a “mistress” on account to the “relation” with Varguennes, the French Lieutenant, lives now without any social constraints “You were not born a woman with a natural respect, a love of intelligence, beauty, learning (…) I don’t know how to say it, I have no right to desire these things, but my heart craves them and I cannot believe it is all vanity” (Fowles, p.148)
Thereby, the Victorian individuals stand in opposition when relating themselves to the society requirements.
In addition, both Charles and Ernestina reveal their allegiance to the past, which is a Victorian particularity (Chapter 2). Charles refers to the relics of past ages when discussing, while Ernestina wishes that he would act more like the romantic gentlemen of fifty years earlier. Their engagement does not prevail over the dark lady, who keeps them apart.
The guises of authorial self-insertion as a postmodern artifice: roles and narrative effects
According to Campbell, the story is a “third person” account. (Campbell in Nelles, p.207) While agreeing that Fowles is using “Victorian conventions, whereby the dramatist interrupts his work to dispel illusion” (Nelles, p.207), Lehmann Haupt perceives the entry of the narrator as a natural function of “the familiar voice of the omniscient narrator” and points out that “the seemingly experimental device of multiple endings was not unknown to Victorian novelists” (Lehmann-Haupt in Nelles, p.207) “I do not know. This story I am telling is all imagination. These characters I create never existed outside my own mind” (Fowles, 95)
Whereas deeming the narrator’s involvement in the plot who “actually joins his characters.” (Huffaker in Nelles, p.209) , Adam states that Fowles “often uses the convention to blur rather than reinforce the distinction between the fictive and real, most emphatically perhaps in those passages where the novelist takes on the attributes of a character, or the character those of a novelist. An outrageous time-traveller on a Victorian train, Fowles stares at the sleeping Charles in Chapter 55, while in Chapter 12 we are told that Charles, with a will of his own, has taken the path to the dairy against the wishes of his author. Related to this is his habit of referring to the characters’lives outside the novel , and the novelist’s familiarity with them: we are told , for example of his purchase of Sarah’s Toby jug or of Ernestine’s death on the day Hitler invades Poland. Fowles obviously delights in the paradoxes he raises, and while one cannot discuss here their implications at length, they would seem to highlight the need for reconsideration of such terms as “author”, “character”, “persona” or “illusion” (Brantlinger in Nelles, p.209)
The opening words of the novel “An easterly is the most disagreeable wind in Lyme Bay” (Fowles, p.3) illustrate that the narrator is familiar with the area “No house lay visibly then, or beyond a brief misery of beach huts, lies today in that direction” (Fowles, p.4). Subsequent references bear out the reinforced thesis that the narrator lives in Lyme Regis: “Scientific agriculture in the form of myxomatosis, has only very recently lost us the Green forever” (Fowles,p77), “perhaps I now live in one of the houses I have brought into the fiction” (Fowles, p.80), “a fashionable young London architect now has the place and comes (not “goes”) there for weekends” (Fowles, p.129)
Fowle’s involvement in the text aims to “overlap” the places, the temporal references and the subjects so as to testify his strength and his ability of governing over “the world imagined” fact that assigns authentic direction to the novel. “I am a novelist, I can follow her where I like” (Fowles, p.96)
Writing and open-endedness: explorations of textual finality
The alternative endings are prefigured in Charles’s projection of Sarah as fluctuating site of desire, “luring-receding, subtle-simple, proud-begging, defending-accusing” (Fowles, 296). The splitting from reality reaches its climax in the seduction-recognition scene where the discrepancies between the chronological time (ninety seconds), and the experienced time (eternity), the actual space (ten feet) and the imagined space (ten miles) of the encounter, are emphasized (Doherty, p.60). In this context Charles gets “increasingly unsure of the frontier between the real Sarah and the Sarah he had created in so many such dreams”, between the one who personifies “all mystery and love and profundity and its subversive antithesis, “a half-scheming half-crazed governess from the obscure seaside town “ (Fowles, 366-7 in Doherty, p.61), incapable of dividing truth from illusion.
The first alternative ending turns on Sarah’s refusal to renounce to her “inscrutable role as a seductive” (Doherty, p.61) woman in relation to Charles. Sarah is found residing in London under the name of Mrs. Roughwood where she works as an artist’s model for Mr. Rossetti. (Chapter 60)
“She insists on retaining her status, rejecting the denominative limitations which the univocal name, Mrs Charles Smithson, would impose upon her” (Doherty, p.61) ”But I am not to be understood” (Fowles p.386 in Doherty, p.61). Charles accepts Sarah’s equivocal status: “You may reserve to yourself all the mystery you want” and her incomprehensible discourse: “Shall I ever understand your parables?” (Fowles, p.387 in Doherty p.61) He is surprised to find that she does not need someone to rescue her from immorality as her new life seems rather uncomfortably bohemian, however he admires her strength and freedom.
The child that appears in this scene belongs to Charles and it seems to unify the couple.
The second ending (Chapter 61) turns on an ironic reversal of terms because Charles gets into the “hidden cancer (…) in all its loathsome reality”(Fowles, p.395-399). The action takes place in Rossetti’s house. As Sarah does not admit to still love Charles, he falls into an utterly disgusted with himself and with the woman whom he is in love with. He observes the child in the arms of a young woman as he exits. Thus they both have to face the world alone, as someday their child has also to do.
However, in discovering that Charles could love Sarah rejecting conventional attitudes and social consequences, he is now aware of holding the strength in himself that he has not have before.
As Fowles worked within the constraints throughout the novel, he concluded that they lived separate lives. Although the author designs two „endings,” they both move the reader towards the final decision. The two endings are not to impress the audience but to create a world of “multiple choice”, fact which is common for Victorian literature.
Bibliography
John Fowles, “The French Lieutenant’s Woman”, London: Vintage Books, 2004
William Nelles “Problems for Narrative Theory: The French Lieutenant’s Woman”, Style, Vol 18, No 2, Recent Literary Theory (Spring 1984), pp.207-217 (11 pages)
James Campbell “An interview with John Fowles”, Contemporary Literature, 17 (1976), 463 in William Nelles “Problems for Narrative Theory: The French Lieutenant’s Woman”, Style, Vol 18, No 2, Recent Literary Theory (Spring 1984), pp.207-217 (11 pages), p. 207
Robert Huffaker, “John Fowles (Boston:Twayne, 1980), p.96 in William Nelles “Problems for Narrative Theory: The French Lieutenant’s Woman”, Style, Vol 18, No 2, Recent Literary Theory (Spring 1984), pp.207-217 (11 pages), p. 209
Patrick Brantlinger, Ian Adam and Sheldon Rothblatt, “The French Lieutenant’s Woman: A Discussion”, Victorian Studies, 25 (1972), 344 in William Nelles “Problems for Narrative Theory: The French Lieutenant’s Woman”, Style, Vol 18, No 2, Recent Literary Theory (Spring 1984), pp.207-217 (11 pages), p. 209
Fred Kaplan, “Victorian Modernists: Fowles and Nabokov”, Journal of Narrative Technique, 3:2 (1973), pp.113, 114 in William Nelles “Problems for Narrative Theory: The French Lieutenant’s Woman”, Style, Vol 18, No 2, Recent Literary Theory (Spring 1984), pp.207-217 (11 pages), p. 212
Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, “On the Third Try, John Fowles Connects”, New York Times, 10 Nov. 1969, p.45 in William Nelles “Problems for Narrative Theory: The French Lieutenant’s Woman”, Style, Vol 18, No 2, Recent Literary Theory (Spring 1984), pp.207-217 (11 pages), p. 208
Gerald Doherty, “The secret plot of metaphor: rhetorical designs in John Fowles’s The French Lietenant’s Woman”, Paragraph, Vol 9, (March 1987), pp.49-68 (20 pages)