14 John Fowles : The French Lieutenant’s Woman

Dr. Sushil Kumar

John Fowles: An Introduction

Born in Leigh-on-Sea, Essex, a suburb of London (see Image No: 1), on 31 March 1926 as the son of Gladys May Richards and Robert John Fowles, John Robert Fowles (see Image 2) is a writer who enjoys popularity with readers and critics, as he combines in his fiction both tradition and experiment. Fowles is simultaneously a postmodern and a traditional novelist.

Although many a times he finds that postmodern art upsets tradition, he venerates the unconventional and the breakers of rules. His fiction combines traditional narrative with postmodern experiment. It was at the time Fowles attended Oxford that he became influenced by the writings of the French existentialists, Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre and began to seriously consider a career as a writer. He has both poetry and novels to his credit. His major works include The Collector (1963) (Image 3), The Aristos (1964) (Image 4), The Magus (1965) (Image 5), The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969), Poems (1973), The Ebony Tower (1974) (Image 6), Daniel Martin (1977), Mantissa (1982), A Maggot (1985) (Image 7). He has also to his credit some translations from the French, including the novella Ourika and adaptations of Cinderella.  He  has  also  written  the  text  for  several  photographic  compilations,  including Shipwreck (1975) (Image 8), Islands (1978) (Image 9) and The Tree (1979) (Image 10). In May 1998, Wormholes (Image 11); a book of essays; was published. The first volume of his journals appeared in 2003 followed by volume two in 2006. The first comprehensive biography on Fowles, John Fowles- A Life in Two Worlds, appeared in 2004.

The French Lieutenant’s Woman: An Introduction

Ever since its publication in 1969, the novel The French Lieutenant’s Woman (Image 12) has attracted an immensity of critical attention and has generated an abundance of commentary, not always in agreement about the issues involved. Some critics find its treatment of the Victorian age superficial while some argue for the contrary, some view it as a feminist novel while some others think that it falls short of being one. The critics are also divided on the issue of languages. In the year 1981 it was adapted into a film with a screenplay by Harold Pinter, directed by Karel Reisz and starring Meryl Streep and Jeremy Irons. The novel was also adapted into a British play in 2006.

In 2005, TIME magazine chose the novel as one of the 100 best English-language novels published between 1923 and 2005 (<http://entertainment.time.com/2005/10/16/alltime-100- novels/>). The novel’s reputation is partly due to its expression of postmodern literary features through its focus on metafiction, historiography, marxist criticism, feminism and intertextuality. Stylistically and thematically, Linda Hutcheon describes the novel as a prototype of a particular postmodern genre: “historiographic metafiction”.

Background

Fowles had already become a literary luminary with two novels to his credit The  Collector and The Magus prior to the publication of The French Lieutenant’s Woman. Fowles was inspired by a persistent image of a ‘Victorian Woman,’ who later developed into Sarah Woodruff, the main character of the novel.

In a 1969 essay titled “Notes on an Unfinished Novel,” Fowles reflects on his writing process. He said he had an image during the autumn of 1966 of “A woman [who] stands at the end of a deserted quay and stares out to sea” (136). He determined that she belonged to a “Victorian Age” and had “mysterious” and “vaguely romantic” qualities (136). He made a note at the time about the function of the novel, saying You are not trying to write something one of the Victorian novelists forgot to write; but perhaps something one of them failed to write. And: Remember the etymology of the word. A novel is something new. It must have relevance to the writer’s now – so don’t ever pretend you live in 1867; or make sure the reader knows it’s a pretense.

Fowles describes various factors important to the development of the novel throughout the essay, including his debt to other authors. Later Fowles described another influence; as pointed out by Eileen Warburton; noting that the characters and story of The French Lieutenant’s Woman related to Claire de Duras’s 1823 novel Ourika, which features a tragic affair between an African woman and French military man (165-186).

Summary

The novel is set in the mid-nineteenth century. It opens in the coastal town of Lyme Regis (the small harbor town in which Fowles had been living since the year 1968) in 1867. Sarah Woodruff is the protagonist of the novel as identified by the self-conscious narrative voice.

She is the woman referred to in the title. She is also known as “Tragedy” and “The French Lieutenant’s Whore”.

She leads her life in Lyme Regis as a disgraced woman, a pariah. She is believed to be jilted by a French sailor, named Varguennes and is supposed to be waiting for his return. Sarah is now working as a servant in the Malborough House of Mrs. Poulteney. Mrs. Poulteney and the housekeeper, Mrs. Fairley, attempt to curb her freedom in order to make her repent for her sins. She spends her limited free time staring out at the sea on The Cobb, a stone jetty, and walking on Ware Commons, a large wood. When the novel opens, Charles Smithson and Ernestina Freeman are walking beside the bay (see video 2; from the film to watch the opening scene). They see Sarah,  about  whom  Charles  becomes  fascinated  after  hearing  about  Sarah’s  situation  from Ernestina. Ernestina is Charles’ fiancée and the daughter of a wealthy tradesman, while Charles is a baronet, an orphan dependent on his uncle and an amateur paleontologist.

Charles’ curiosity about Sarah soon ripens into a passionate relationship. Although Charles is engaged to Ernestina (Image 13), he clandestinely meets Sarah many times during his exploration to collect fossils. During these meetings, Sarah reveals to him much of her history, and requests him to help and support her. In the meantime Sam, Charles’s servant, falls in love with Mary, the maid of Ernestina’s aunt. During this period, Charles’ elderly uncle Sir Robert; on whom he is dependent; gets engaged to a widow, Mrs. Tomkins, a woman young enough to bear him a child. This means that Charles may be losing his place as heir to his uncle’s wealth. Ernestina is very upset about the resulting loss of social prospects.

Meanwhile Charles falls deeply in love with Sarah and advises her to leave Lyme for Exeter, where she can have more freedom. Sarah is soon dismissed by Mrs. Poulteney and she leaves. Charles feels deeply worried about her. Soon he finds a note left to him by Sarah. Sam also sees this and he figures out what is going on between his master and Sarah. He even thinks of blackmailing Charles to extract money from him in order to make his life secure with Mary. Meanwhile in Winsyatt, the house of Sir Robert, things are not going well. Mrs. Tomkins becomes pregnant by the butler. Charles’ uncle confesses his mistake in marrying her and promises Charles that he “will not go unprovided for”.

Charles is not able to forget Sarah. Charles broods over his condition; he realizes and admits that he is marrying Ernestina not out of love but for her wealth. Then he sets out to warn Ernestina’s father about his uncertain inheritance in the pretext of ending the relationship. On his return journey, Charles stops in Exeter to visit Sarah.

From there, the self-conscious narrator, who intervenes throughout the novel and later becomes a character in it, offers three different conclusions to the novel.

In the first fake ending, Charles does not visit Sarah, but immediately returns to reaffirm his love for Ernestina. Charles confesses to Ernestina about his affair with a woman but he holds back the details. They marry and beget children, though their relationship is not a happy one. Charles enters into business under Ernestina’s father, Mr. Freeman. Charles is not at all worried about Sarah’s fate and the narrator repeatedly points out this lack of knowledge about Sarah. The narrator rejects this ending as a daydream by Charles. Critic Michelle Phillips Buchberger describes this first ending as “a semblance of verisimilitude in the traditional ‘happy ending’” found in actual Victorian novels.

The narrator appears as a character sharing a railway compartment with Charles before the portrayal of the second and third endings.

In the second ending, Charles and Sarah enter into a physical relationship and Charles came to know that Sarah is a virgin and the French sailor episode is a false story. Ruminating on his emotions during his encounter with Sarah, Charles breaks his engagement with Ernestina, and proposes to Sarah through a letter which he entrusts with Sam to deliver. But Sam deliberately fails to deliver the letter. Ernestina’s father disgraces Charles for breaking off the engagement. To escape the disgrace, Charles goes abroad to Europe and America. Meanwhile, Sarah ignorant of Charles’ proposal flees to London. She has not left any forwarding address to Charles. Charles’ men search for Sarah while he is abroad. Sam and Mary are happily married.

Two years later Charles gets anonymous information that Sarah has been found. He hurries back to England and finds out that she has been living in the house of the painter poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti, where she enjoys an artistic life. Sarah shows Charles their child, leaving him in hope that the three may be reunited one day.

In the third ending the narrator re-appears outside the house of Mr. Dante Gabriel Rossetti and turns back his pocket watch by fifteen minutes. Incidents are similar to that of the second-ending version until Charles meets Sarah. Their reunion is not so happy, in fact it is sour. In the new ending the parentage of the child is not made clear. Sarah is also a changed person and she expresses no interest in reviving the relationship with Charles. Charles leaves the house rejecting Sarah.

This version is unconventional, yet more realistic, an ending more apt for a twentieth century postmodern novel as its author refuses to constrain the freedom of his characters or to

fiction and consciously using it to serve his own purpose, meticulously informing the reader exactly what he is doing. Each chapter is endowed with at least one epigraph, taken mainly from Victorian literature, both fiction and non-fiction. The epigraph sets the tone for each chapter. His style deftly combines a nineteenth-century Victorian prose style with an anachronistic twentieth- century modernist perspective.

At first, John Fowles is the omniscient narrative voice, who analyses both the form in which he writes and himself writing in this form. Secondly, John Fowles becomes a character in the novel, who enters Charles’s first-class railway compartment and has the look of an omnipotent god. Charles Smithson who is regarded as the ‘surrogate’ of the novelist can be interpreted as the third variant of John Fowles in the novel. Throughout the novel, the authorial intrusion can be seen and Fowles uses this technique in order to show the reader how he manipulates reality through his art. The narrator often includes discussions of scientific theories of Charles Darwin, the political theories of Karl Marx, poetical and fictional works of Arnold, Tennyson, Hardy, A. H. Clough, Jane Austen etc. Through these metahistorical and metafictional voices, the postmodern narrator questions the role of the historian and the author in their reclaiming of the past. In her article discussing the use of paratext, or the contextualizing text printed in the book such as the footnotes and epigraphs, Deborah Bowen argues that the novel’s paratext forces the reader, like in other postmodern works, to rethink the importance of such peripheral material that in other contexts will get overlooked in light of preference for the main text (67-69). Instead of nicely complementing the main plot and adding meaning, these paratextual elements do not always contribute to the effectiveness of the novel and often act to unseat the authority of the narrative voice.

1.5.2 Intertextuality

An important element of postmodernism is its acknowledgment of previous literary works. Apart from the intrusion of the author, highlighting particular interpretations of the text, the book relies on intertextual references to provide additional commentary. The epigraphs for each chapter refer to a number of important Victorian texts and ideas. References to other texts act in “ironic play” (Hutcheon 45), parodied by how the novel follows other Victorian conventions throughout the text. The works and ideas of William Thackeray, Jane Austen, George Eliot, Charles Dickens, Froude, Thomas Hardy and Karl Marx are direct inspirations for this parody. The Victorian dilemma between science and religion is seen in the debates between Charles and Mr. Freeman about Darwin and his Origin of the Species, Charles in favour and Freeman in contrary. In his discussion of science and religion in the novel, John Glendening notes  that  both  character  commentary  on  Darwin’s  publications  along  with  the  epigraphs mentioning those works act as direct contributors to the novels emphasis on science superseding religion (118-25). Similarly, according to Landrum, by quoting Marx with the first epigraph, along with multiple subsequent epigraphs, thematically the novel directs attention towards the socio-economic situations created within the novel (103-04). Deborah Bowen notes the trend in literary critics’ struggle to find reading of the epigraphs that help understand the themes of the novel, and argues that the poor synchronicity of epigraphs with text “disperses the authority of the narrative voice, thus destroying his power to speak as a moralist”.

1.5.3 Historiography and Metafiction

Linda Hucheon describes this novel as belonging to “historiographic metafiction” (5). She defines this postmodern genre as “well-known and popular novels which are both intensely self-reflexive yet paradoxically also lay claim to historical events and personages” (5). This postmodern genre combines production of narratives with history and literature, the various ways in which knowledge is produced within a culture. Important to her discussion of the genre’s post- modern  style,  The  French  Lieutenant’s  Woman‘s  self-reflexive  narration  bridges  different discourses that usually remain separated, such as academic history, literary criticism, philosophy and literature.

When the novel opens, as Charles and Ernestina are enjoying a walk at the Cobb, Fowles has her say: ‘“These are the very steps that Jane Austen made Louisa Musgrove fall down in Persuasion”’ (FLW; 13). For a reader unfamiliar with Austen, the allusion however has the effect of heightening the novel’s realist pretensions. It is quite feasible that, if the characters in the past, projects a contemporary hetero-normative sexuality on the history of Victorian England (31). For Fletcher, Fowles’ paradoxical treatment of Sarah as both a Victorian character and as a desirable “modern woman,” through feminist gestures and sexual tension between Charles and Sarah, confines the historical set characters and their experience to stereotypical heterosexual romance.

1.5.4 Multiple endings

The multiple endings of the novel have received so much critical attention. Each ending offers a likely ending for Charles’s search for Sarah: in the first ending Charles gets married to Ernestina, in the second ending Charles successfully reestablishes a relationship with Sarah and in the third Charles is flung back into the world without a wife or a partner. Michelle Phillips Buchberger discusses these endings as a demonstration of “Fowles’s rejection of a narrow mimesis” of reality; rather Fowles presents this multiplicity of endings to highlight the role of the author in plot choices (147). About the multiple endings, Fowles himself wrote in his article “Hardy and the Hag”:

I wrote and printed two endings to The French Lieutenant’s Woman entirely because from early in the first draft I was torn intolerably between wishing to reward the male protagonist (my surrogate) with the woman he loved and wishing to deprive him of her — that is, I wanted to pander to both the adult and the child in myself. I had experienced a very similar predicament in my two previous novels. Yet I am now very clear that I am happier, where I gave two, with the unhappy ending, and not in any way for objective critical reasons, but simply because it has seemed more fertile and onward to my whole being as a writer.

 Themes

Existentialism

It is the philosophical idea that we exist and are entirely responsible for our own actions in lives. The idea was put forward by Jean Paul Sartre (Image 15). When things go wrong, God is not to be blamed. We exist in a world which has its own rules, ethics and conventions and we cannot detach ourselves from it. We are never free of the necessity of making choices – of which we are not able to foresee the consequences. It is rather anachronistic to include an existentialist theme in the novel, for the theory was not in vogue in the Victorian age. Fowles sets Charles and Sarah in an existentialist image, they are constantly placed in circumstances in which they have to make certain choices and their lives have their uncertainties too.

But above all it seemed to set Charles a choice; and while one part of him hated having to choose, we come near the secret of his state on that journey west when we know that another part of him felt intolerably excited by the proximity of the moment of choice. He had not the benefit of existentialist terminology; but what he felt was really a very clear case of the anxiety of freedom – that is, the realization that one is free and the realization that being free is a situation of terror.

1.6.2 Feminism

There  is  undoubtedly  a  feminist  inclination  to  the  novel.  Sarah  the  protagonist  is portrayed as a more liberated and independent willed woman as compared to the other female characters, such as Ernestina and her aunt. In a 1985 interview by Jan Relf, Fowles declared himself a “feminist” (qtd in Buchberger, 145). Some critics are against the feminist reading of the text. Michelle Phillips Buchberger argues that The French Lieutenant’s Woman, along with Fowles’ two earlier novels The Collector (1963) and The Magus (1965), proclaimed a “pseudo- feminism” while advocating some feminist ideas; but, she says, they are permeated by a “fetishism [of women that] perpetuates the idea of woman as ‘other’” (133). Alice Ferrebe also notes that, despite Fowles’ attempts to critique masculine values, his novels remain male fantasies demonstrative of the “compromises and contradictions” created by the gendered situation in which he was writing.

 Sexual Repression and Gender

The novel is a decisive study of the sexual repression characteristic of the Victorian age. There is a strong sensual element in the story and the characters react in the way they do mainly because of the sexual behaviours of the time. Women of the middle and upper classes were ignorant of sex before marriage. A female is not supposed to take initiative in inviting sexual activity either before or after marriage. Ernestina, who is a typical Victorian woman, will not even permit herself to look at her own nudity, or permit Charles to touch her. She idealises her love for Charles by reciting romantic poetry and passionate entries in her journal. A female from a respectable Victorian family will not be sanctioned acquaintance with a man even after the engagement. In the novel, Aunt Tranter is always present whenever Charles calls upon Ernestina. Women who act in contrary to the Victorian values are looked down upon. Sarah is ostracized by the society for having gone after a man. The lower classes were much more fortunate than the middle and the upper classes. Mary and Sam, the servants are sexually active. Obeying the rules and taboos is only a concern of the more refined species of society. It is important to note the ambivalent attitude of the Victorian society towards its male and female members. Men were expected to be experienced in sex. Prostitution was prevalent at the time the novel is set. Clubs like the Terpsichore existed indeed, where the so-called gentlemen could indulge in their sexual instincts. Charles has much sexual experience which makes his relationship with Ernestina a troubled one. Sarah is abused and abandoned by a French sailor who is already married.

The Great Victorian Dilemma

The narrator often reflects on Smithson’s fascination with science – be it defending Darwin and his theories or while referring to the fossils found in Lyme Regis. The Victorian dilemma between science and religion (Image 16) often occurs in both historical studies of the Victorian age and also in Victorian fiction. In his chapter on The French Lieutenant’s Woman in his book, Evolution and the Uncrucified Jesus, John Glendening argues that Fowles’ novel is one of the first neo-Victorian novels to handle the dynamic created between science and religion in Victorian identity (113). Glendening says that Fowles uses commentary on Darwinism “to comment on characters and their experience and to forward a view of natural and human reality opposed to Christian doctrine, and, within limits amenable to existentialist philosophy” (119). In general ideas of science and religion are central to the personal and social identities that develop within the novel.

1.7 Conclusion

The French Lieutenant’s Woman is both an experimental novel and a historical novel, focusing on England in the 1860s. Its double role has allowed its reviewers to praise it on one level while criticizing it on the other, though there are things to praise and to blame about both its shapes. As an experimental work, it paradoxically assumes the form of a Victorian novel. Fowles goes crab-backwards to join the avant-garde, imitating George Eliot as a way to emulate Alain Robbe-Grillet and Roland Barthes. At the same time, as a historical novel, The French Lieutenant’s Woman presents us with allusions and even footnotes to everything from evangelicalism to evolution, from imperialism to Marxism. Fowles’ narrator is so crammed with Victoriana that he verges on pedantry. Whether we view it from one perspective or the other, and whether we choose to think it an artistic success or an aberration, Fowles’ story presents us with ideas and questions that appeal both to literary critics and to historians; and while it has stirred up no tempest of controversy, it has aroused much interest in itself.

Reference

• Bowen, Deborah. “The Riddler Riddled: Reading the Epigraphs in John Fowles’s “The French Lieutenant’s Woman.”” The Journal of Narrative Technique 25 (1): 67–90. JSTOR 30225424.
• Buchberger, Michelle Phillips (2012). “John Fowles’s Novels of the 1950s and 1960s”. The Yearbook of English Studies (Modern Humanities Research Association) 42: 132 150. JSTOR 10.5699/yearenglstud.42.2012.0132).
• Ferrebe, Alice (2004). “The Gaze of the Magus: Sexual/Scopic Politics in the Novels of John Fowles”. Journal of Narrative Theory 34 (2): 207–226. doi:10.1353/jnt.2004.0010. Retrieved 23 October 2013.
• Fletcher, Lisa (2003). “Historical Romance, Gender and Heterosexuality: John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman and A.S. Byatt’s Possession”. Journal of Interdisciplinary Gender Studies 7 (1 & 2): 26–42.
• Fowles, “Notes on an Unfinished Novel”, The Novel Today: Contemporary Writers on Modern Fiction edited by Malcolm Bradbury 136
• Fowles, John. The French Lieutenant’s Woman. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1969.
• John Fowles,” Hardy and the Hag,” in L. S. Butler, ed., Thomas Hardy After Fifty Years (Rowman & Littlefield, 1977, pp. 35)
• Glendening, John (2013). “Evolution and the Uncrucified Jesus: The French Lieutenant’s Woman”. Science, Religion, and the Neo-Victorian Novel: Eye of the Ichthyosaur. Routledge. pp. 109–135. ISBN 978-1-134-08827-0.
• Landrum, David W. (Spring 1996). “Rewriting Marx: Emancipation and Restoration in The French Lieutenant’s Woman”. Twentieth Century Literature 42 (1 (John Fowles Issue)): 103–113. JSTOR 441678.
• Stephenson, William. Fowles’ The French Lieutenant’s Woman. London: Bloomsbury, 2007. Print.
• Warburton, Eileen (Spring 1996). “Ashes, Ashes, We All Fall down: Ourika, Cinderella, and The French Lieutenant’s Woman”. Twentieth Century Literature 42 (1): 165–186. JSTOR 441682.