Where it was universally maintained that women do not have orgasms: and yet every prostitute was taught to simulate them. Where there was an enormous progress and liberation in every other field of human activity; and nothing but tyranny in the most personal and fundamental. (FW 212)
Fowles's third published novel, The French Lieutenant's Woman, addresses a number of concerns that are introduced in his earlier works. In this work, the concern with the feminine voice is addressed more fully than in The Collector where the only female voice, Miranda, has her diary embedded in Clegg's narrative. The protagonist of the novel, Sarah Woodruff, acts as surrogate author, affording her the power of narration within the confines of the text proper. She "writes for herself a freedom 'beyond the pale'"(Hagen 446). The French Lieutenant's Woman also addresses the influence, the presence, of history in our society. George Steiner posits that it is "not the literal past that rules us," but it is "images of the past. These are often as highly structured and selective as myths"(13). In this novel, Fowles examines the Victorian Age in terms of his own society, commenting on the social illness that he sees in it. The book's epigraph from Marx indicates the political drive of the novel: "Every emancipation is a restoration of the human world and of human relationships to man himself." Another, less quoted epigraph helps to focus this concern:
Now, what if I am a prostitute, what business has society to abuse me? Have I received any favours at the hands of society? If I am a hideous cancer in society, are not the causes of the disease to be sought in the rottenness of the carcass? Am I not its legitimate child; no bastard, Sir? (FW 235)
Relating the plight of individuals, especially women, in society to social ideology makes The French Lieutenant's Woman's primary focus a feminist one.
Examining the politics of feminism in the novel, this chapter addresses the constructed male-dominated ideology that Fowles criticizes. Postmodernist theory is used to investigate the nature of power within the narrative and how it reflects the thematic concerns of the novel, "how the meanings and values of that world have been constructed and how, therefore, they can be challenged or changed"(Waugh 34). Frederick Holmes suggests that "Fowles sensitizes the reader to the fictionality of his work in order to emphasize his view that all of life is a web of fictions"(191). The second aspect of this chapter addresses the nature of "historiographic metafiction." By setting the novel in 1867, Fowles is able to show the existence of the nemo in both Victorian times as well as his own. Foucault's idea of "historical ontology" is discussed in relation to Fowles's employment of nineteenth-century history in the novel. Finally, the relationship between Sarah and Charles is viewed in terms of author and character/reader. The quest for freedom for both of these characters rests on the metafictional concept of the relationship between fiction and reality.
Fowles posits that the genesis of the novel was "an obsessive image [he had] of a woman with her back turned, looking out to sea"(CL 464) who "represented a reproach on the Victorian Age"(HM 88). The choice to set the novel in Victorian times was not a conscious one. Not knowing the Victorian age "in the historian's sense very well, [he does] know the by-ways, the psychological side"(ML 190-1). However, Fowles does realize why he would "unconsciously" choose this age, claiming: "[He] also had to come to terms with [his] own hatred of it"(ML 191). Fowles admits to the social conditioning that he and "every English child of [his] generation . . . grew up with"(ML 191).
Once the writing was started, however, it became "an exercise in technique . . . a complex bit of literary gymnastics" (LM 36). As well as borrowing literary pieces from writers of the age, Fowles also structures his novel using some conventions of the Victorian novel. The interruption of sequences of events and of the change of location from chapter to chapter is similar to the serialized novels of the nineteenth century. For example, Chapter 8 ends with Charles preparing to return from Undercliff, leading the reader to expect Charles's reunion with Ernestina in the following chapter. However, Chapter 9 begins with a description of Mrs. Poulteney.
Also borrowed from the Victorian writers is the practice of using an intrusive and omniscient narrator. Having a "cinematic eye," the narrator freely moves from one character to another, describing events that are happening simultaneously. Fowles realizes that "of course the novelist is a god"(NR 35). That the narrator of The French Lieutenant's Woman claims that he is only writing in a "convention universally accepted at the time of [his] story"(FW 80) demonstrates that the novel is "the ultimate con"(NR 35) game. Fowles has created "a 'Victorian' novel that is a contemporary novel 'about' the Victorian novel"(Eddins 48). The playfulness Fowles displays concerning narrative indicates his interest in the construction of discourse, as well as his response to current literary theory concerning the role of the author.
Incorporating these conventions into the text, Fowles then challenges them. Claiming that "the Victorian age . . . was highly existentialist in many of its personal dilemmas"(HM 90), he propagates his quasi-existential philosophy of freedom by having his characters contest both the socialization of the age and their limited freedom as fictional personas. The mixture of history and fiction is characteristic of the postmodern novel. Linda Hutcheon argues that both history and fiction "derive their force more from verisimilitude than from any objective truth; they are both identified as linguistic constructs"(105). The interrelation of these two types of discourses allows Fowles the means to criticize modern society in an historic novel.
Mahmoud Salami posits that the real strength of The French Lieutenant's Woman "resides in its metafictional self-consciousness [] and in the way it addresses the reader and connects him/her with the world outside the text"(107). Fowles is able to do this by employing a number of narrative techniques that force the reader to question his own role in the novel. First, by challenging the concept of the author as a godlike figure, Fowles lays bare the power position of the reader as constructor of the text. Brian McHale calls this "laying bare the processes by which the readers, in collaboration with texts, construct fictional worlds and objects"(100). Second, Fowles is able to transcend time, ignoring boundaries, allowing the "narrator [to] represent[] the hindsight made possible by history, and in this way facilitate[] the illumination of the past in the optic of the present"(Cooper 105). Finally, Fowles creates a Chinese-box structure giving Sarah the role of author within the text. All three processes help develop the novel's concerns with politics as well as forcing the reader to become an active participant.
After twelve chapters of straightforward third-person narration, the "author" invades his text in Chapter Thirteen. Ending the twelfth chapter with the questions "Who is Sarah? Out of what shadows does she come?"(FW 80), the author shocks the reader by claiming, "I do not know"(FW 80). Immediately the characters, and the reader, are given a kind of autonomy. However, the author does claim some accountability for what is allowed in the text, for "possibility is not permissibility"(FW 81). The author also refers to the reader as "you," indicating the "presence of a communicative circuit linking addressor and addressee"(McHale 223). Thus, the reader is brought into the text as a character much as the author physically enters the text later on the train.
Claiming that the only good definition of God is "the freedom that allows other freedoms to exist"(FW 82), the author, as "god", although not dispossessed of his power, understands his limitations. In Foucault's terms, the author is "reduced to nothing more than the singularity of his absence"(1984 102). Self-referential, the novel is constructed "less according to its signified content than according to the very nature of the signifier"(1984 102-03). Arguing that a text consists of multiple writings, Roland Barthes states that "there is a site where this multiplicity is collected, and this site is not the author . . . but the reader" (59). Using intertexts--various discourses from Victorian literature, history and philosophy--Fowles is able to foreground the reader. The most common form of intertext in the novel is the use of epigraphs to show that "the novel's narrative is representational but not referential"(Salami 109). These borrowed discourses foreground the work as artifice, an attempt to reconstruct possible history.
Brian McHale says, when the postmodernist author "appears to know that s/he is only a function, s/he chooses to behave . . . like a subject"(201). In The French Lieutenant's Woman the author claims not to be a subject but to be a function, the most important perhaps bridging one hundred years of history. The story of Sarah and Charles is set in 1867, yet the author lives "in the age of Alain Robbe-Grillet and Roland Barthes"(FW 80). Linda Hutcheon posits that the postmodern novel "suggests that to re-write or to re-present the past in fiction and in history is, in both cases, to open it up to the present"(110). In the novel Fowles not only "opens up" history to the present, but blurs the boundaries between past and present. Apart from the authorial intrusion into the text on behalf of the author, we also note the physical appearance of the author of 1967 in the actions of 1867. We see the bearded creator enter the action as an observer twice in the novel: first on the train to London and again at the home of the Rossettis. The author claims that he has "pretended to slip back into the year 1867; but of course that year is a century past"(FW 317-18).
What such movement from the author suggests, apart from his power over the text, is the likeness of the two ages. David Gross says that the "historical past, by being inserted directly or indirectly into a novel at certain crucial points in the narrative, can provide a striking commentary on the present by the simple power of contrast"(19). In The French Lieutenant's Woman this is the case. Using the Victorian age as foil for his own, Fowles comments on modern society in the novel. However, the opposite is also true. By inserting an author into the historical text, Fowles is positioning the present within the past. Blurring the boundaries of time, Fowles allows himself much more freedom to comment on the modern world: "time was the great fallacy; existence was without history, was always now, was always this being caught in the same fiendish machine"(FW 165). Fowles is not suffering from what Russell Jacoby calls "social amnesia" or "society's repression of remembrance--society's own past"(5), but realizes that much of the past exists in the present. Foucault says that in criticizing the past "we must,
on the one hand, open up a realm of historical inquiry and, on the other, put itself to the test of reality. . . . This means the historical ontology of ourselves must turn away from all projects that claim to be global or radical." (1984 46)
For Fowles, "time is a function of matter; and matter therefore is the clock that makes infinity real"(A 25). The "matter" of the past, and of the present, is what Fowles is concerned with in the novel.
Foucault begins his work, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, by stating that, "for a long time, the story goes, we supported a Victorian regime, and we continue to be dominated by it even today"(1978 3). In The French Lieutenant's Woman, Fowles shows how we are dominated by Queen Victoria, the "monstrous dwarf" of the age. Using the Victorian period as a mirror for post-World War Two society, Fowles examines the calibanity of both periods and the influence of it on the individual, particularly women. He considers the Victorian age to be a time of contradictions, an "age where woman was sacred; and where you could buy a thirteen-year-old girl for a few pounds"(FW 211). It was a time of "duty" and "responsibility," a time where convention was more important than authenticity. Here the nemo becomes an intricate part of the characters in the novel. The expectations society has of the individual caused a malaise in these individuals. The author tells us of Charles: "His statement to himself should have been, 'I possess this now, therefore I am happy,' instead of what it so Victorianly was: 'I cannot possess this forever, and therefore am sad'"(FW 60). What is at issue in this novel is "the relationship between a psychological and historical dimension"(Jacoby 98). It appears that Fowles is allowing the nemo into social psychology. The conventions of the time, "duty," and the fear of God (as with Mrs. Poulteney) dictated to many individuals their roles in society.
The French Lieutenant's Woman is the nearest Fowles comes to writing an explicitly political novel. Charles Mosley posits that the political novel "tends to feature ministerial and parliamentary life"(46). In his novel, Fowles is able to suggest these themes by using epigraphs, particularly those of Marx and Darwin, reminding the reader of the political climates and movements of the time. Moreover, in the background of the novel is a reminder of the 1832 Reform Bill and the inclusion of the Pre-Raphaelite movement, key events in "working out that awful straight-jacketed, puritanical aspect of the Victorian age"(CL 464). Victorian society, to Fowles, was controlled by the nemo. Complying with convention was the only means of being accepted by society. Gentlemen of the time had a "profound humorlessness (called by the Victorians earnestness, moral rectitude, probity, and a thousand other misleading names)"(FW 20). In terms of sexuality, copulation was seen as an act of "Duty": "[Ernestina] sometimes wondered why God had permitted such a bestial version of Duty to spoil such an innocent longing"(FW 29). The protocol expected from both men and women was considered to be the only way to keep society "civilized," safe from "caliban." However, as can be discovered from the novel, the opposite occurs. Charles is said to lack both passion and imagination: "This dismissive double equation was Charles's greatest defect--and here he stands truly for his age"(FW 153).
The character of Mrs. Poulteney also exposes some of the conventions of Victorian England. Claiming that there "would have been a place in the Gestapo for the lady"(FW 23), the narrator describes her as a woman with two obsessions: "One was Dirt...and the other was Immorality"(FW 22). Being a God-fearing woman, Mrs. Poulteney believed in hell. Due to this position, she had to allow the "French Lieutenant's Whore" into her home because "there was God to be accounted to"(FW 33). Positive actions brought about by the wrong reasons seem to be Mrs. Poulteney's, and perhaps the Victorians', motives for acting. What occurs in The French Lieutenant's Woman is the challenge of such conventions. Most prominent is the character of Sarah. Being named after her, the novel is obviously concerned with her development. While she and Charles both figure in the thematic concerns of the novel, Sarah is much more involved in the narrative structure of the work. In Sarah, Fowles "creates a positive role model . . . a woman of imagination, intelligence, daring, and moral integrity"(Byrd 306). The story of the novel hinges on her being the "French Lieutenant's Whore," the surrogate author. She is in fact the "magus" of the novel's world, creating a reality, her encounter with the French Lieutenant, and allowing others to "act" within that reality.
Patricia Hagen states that, "by re-writing herself as a 'fallen woman,' Sarah rejects the roles constructed for her by Victorian convention and writes for herself a freedom"(446). Establishing Sarah as the surrogate author of the text plays an important role in considering the political nature of the novel. It has been suggested that "Fowles wants to represent the development of such a feminist consciousness and yet he does not give Sarah a voice"(Michael 233). However, considering the important role Sarah plays, essentially dictating the text to the other characters, one must realize that Sarah does indeed have a voice. While Fowles believes there is an essential difference between men and women in terms of emotions, logic, and sensibility, Sarah's "voice" can not be transmitted in a conventional manner. Her thoughts and feelings are not offered to the reader unless she wishes it so. Philip Cohen suggests that, by "placing a veil between Sarah's thoughts and the reader, the narrator may be respecting her autonomy, but someone is keeping the book's structure intact"(158). Yet, Sarah's "autonomy" serves a second purpose: not only does it structure the novel, it also shows Fowles's concern with the emancipation of women.
As with Miranda in The Collector, Sarah is an artist. She has consciously created a world in which she can freely choose her destiny. Two such choices are especially important in the text: her choice to lie about the French lieutenant and her decision at the end of the novel to live without a relationship with a man. The former allows her freedom from the conventions of Victorian society. She is a social outcast; yet she becomes "authentic," existentially speaking, due to the freedom she creates for herself. In terms of a political concern, Sarah becomes the "new" woman, the woman who escapes the "Adam-consciousness" that defines society. Magali Michael posits that the novel "wants to assert the theme of feminism and yet fails as a feminist novel"(225). Although the novel does not construct a discourse "in which words acquire new meanings which validate and celebrate a new, positive version of women"(Weedon 9) it does assert feminist themes. By making herself the surrogate author, Sarah has challenged male power. The two male characters who are closest to Sarah are Charles and Dr. Grogan. Grogan claims that Sarah suffers from "[m]elancholia as plain as measles"(FW 126) and that she "wants to be a sacrificial victim"(FW 127). Ironically Grogan is fairly accurate in his diagnosis. However, Sarah is not "melancholy" because of the French lieutenant, as Grogan believes. Her despair comes from being "allowed to live in paradise, but forbidden to enjoy it"(FW 138). To achieve freedom in "paradise" Sarah creates the story of the French lieutenant,
so that [she] should never be the same again. [She] did it so that people should point at [her], should say, there walks the French Lieutenant's Whore. . . . So that they should know [she has] suffered, and suffer[s], as others suffer in every town and village in this land." (FW 142)
Such a statement shows concern with the social position of women and the domination masculine society has over women. Identified with women in other towns, Sarah becomes Fowles's voice for female emancipation.
In the first of the two endings Sarah suggests her role as artist. When confronted by Charles she claims that she has "seen artists destroy work that might to the amateur seem perfectly good . . . [she] was told that if an artist is not his own sternest judge he is not fit to be an artist"(FW 351). She justifies destroying any possible relationship with Charles because it contained a "falsehood in it"(FW 351). What is important is that Sarah, given the opportunity to wed Charles, declines. Unlike Ernestina, who was prepared to become the dutiful wife, Sarah is not. "I have found new affections," she says, "[b]ut they are not of the kind you suggest"(FW 350). Sarah continues: "I do not wish to marry. . . . I do not want to share my life. I wish to be what I am"(FW 352-3). Brunilda Lemos suggests that "only the last [ending] fulfills our expectations of Sarah"(87). In this ending, Charles hurries out into the streets, leaving Sarah and his child. By not marrying, Sarah has defeated the Victorian convention that has tried to define her.
Unlike both Clegg and Nicholas, Charles is a wealthy, educated man. However, these characters are similar in that all lost their parents at a fairly young age. Charles's mother dies when he is only a year old, leaving him alone with his father. Considering that the story of the novel occurs in 1867, it is likely that Charles was still in his late teens or early twenties when his father died in 1856. However, what appears to be more important in shaping Charles's character is the Victorian Age itself. Being raised to be a gentleman, Charles was largely unmotivated. The narrator says:
Laziness was, I am afraid, Charles's distinguishing trait. Like many of his contemporaries he sensed that the earlier self-responsibility of the century was turning into self-importance: that what drove the new Britain was increasingly a desire to seem respectable, in the place of the desire to do good for good's sake. (FW 19)
What Charles was facing was the nemo, his desire to be a "somebody." In short, he had "all the Byronic ennui with neither of the Byronic outlets"(FW 19).
Pamela Cooper suggests that "it is in relation to Charles, therefore, that Sarah (at least within the framework of the book) assumes her full narrational function--a function that defines him by association as a reader"(123). Like Nicholas in The Magus, Charles becomes both a reader and character in Sarah's text. Woodcock posits that Sarah is "the mystery woman who is both a male fantasy and the catalyst for male redemption"(92). However, considering Sarah had already positioned herself as the "fallen" woman before Charles's arrival in Lyme Regis, one cannot claim that Charles made Sarah anything. Unknowingly, though, it is Sarah who creates a world for Charles. That Charles should become interested in Sarah, and eventually break his engagement with Ernestina, suggests that he is not content with his present situation. Even if Charles's character is not the most likable of Fowles's male protagonists, at least he does realize that he is becoming too willing to remain within the conventions of society. This perhaps explains Charles's fascination with Sarah. She is a woman who has defied convention, or so he believes.
Sarah does become the catalyst for Charles's potential redemption in the novel. Yet, it is he who initiates this process. Being intrigued by Sarah's position, Charles sets out to live up to "his original chivalrous intention: to show the poor woman that not everybody in her world was a barbarian"(FW 74). As the novel is postmodernist, it is fitting that Charles becomes the "reader." As well, the reader of the novel and Charles discover Sarah's fabrication simultaneously during the climax of the novel. Up to this point, "Charles . . . views Sarah less as author than as text; reading Sarah as one reads a novel . . . he continually constructs and revises his hypotheses about her"(Hagen 445). Like Nicholas, Charles believes that he is in control of his situation, that his choices are made of free will. Both of these protagonists leave their lovers for other women who are "fictionalized." However, Charles does not have the knowledge that there is a "godgame" occurring.
Charles's freedom occurs in a rather atypical manner. His uncle having decided to marry, Charles loses the much expected money he would have received from the will. Ernestina's father offers a proposal to Charles that consists of becoming a partner in the family business. More than just pride overtakes Charles in refusing the offer; the nemo again confronts him:
Charles did indeed by this time feel like a badly stitched sample napkin, in all ways a victim of evolution. Those old doubts about the futility of his existence were only too easily reawakened. He guessed now what Mr. Freeman really thought of him: he was an idler. And what he proposed him: that he should earn his wife's dowry. . . . It was to Charles as if he had travelled all his life among pleasant hills; and now came to a vast plain of tedium--and unlike the more famous pilgrim, he saw only Duty and Humiliation down there below--most certainly not Happiness or Progress. (FW 228)
There are two ways to confront and destroy the nemo: "[He] can conform or [he] can conflict"(A 50). Charles's final decision is to rebel. He breaks off his engagement with Ernestina, leaving his potential father-in-law's money, and attempts to begin a relationship with Sarah. As has been suggested, it was not Sarah who willingly deceived Charles, but it was Charles himself who realized that he needed to break with the conventions that were being dictated to him. However, Charles remains confused about this sudden turn of events. He says: "If you only knew the mess my life was in . . . the waste of it . . . the uselessness of it. I have no moral purpose, no real sense of duty to anything"(FW 180). Sarah's final rejection of his proposal seems the best possible solution for Charles. After leaving the Rossetti's, he
now begins to pace, a man behind the invisible gun carriage on which rests his own corpse. He walks towards an imminent, self-given death? [The narrator] think[s] not; for [Charles] has at last found an atom of faith in himself, a true uniqueness. (FW 366)
He has started to challenge the nemo and endure life.
Having been criticized by Bruce Woodcock for being a
"camouflage for the voyeur in [Fowles]"(81), The French Lieutenant's Woman,
like The Magus, investigates the need for change within the male ideology
of society. Even though Charles may have seen Sarah as "the enigma of his
Oedipal quest"(Woodcock 99) early in the novel, the final ending suggests
not the oppression of Sarah, but her emancipation. How Charles views Sarah
is a comment on his character, on male character, not a comment on her.
Sarah has gained her autonomy from Victorian convention and from the reader.
She has collapsed "all the incrustations, however formed, that hide what
[she] really feel[s] and what [she] really think[s]"(A 176).