Fiction:
The French Lieutenant’s Woman Non Fiction:
“Notes on an Unfinished Novel”
“The Filming of The French Lieutenant’s Woman”
Fowles most publicized work, The French Lieutenant’s Woman, the composition of which began in 1967, when he was already the author of two best-sellers, exemplifies his hybridization of the novel form. The techniques, describing fragile behaviourial patterns, reveal sets of layers for the interpretation of the characters. Their ways of thinking show the possibilities of meta-historic images, strongly intuitive, and pro-existentialist. Fowles uses sexual autonomy to celebrate the freedom of the self, from existential restraints.
Unlike the dislocated hero Nicholas, the protagonist here is a matured gentleman, a baronet‟s nephew with a lot of inheritance. Connor, who situates Fowles‟s The French Lieutenant’s Woman as a seminal novel, comments that it displays “ironic capability, between past and present view points and languages” (Connor 142).
Haunted by a recurring image of a mysterious woman standing on the end of a dockside, looking out to the sea, Fowles‟s previously planned writings took the backseat, and the seed of The French Lieutenant’s Woman germinated. Commenting, “I am trying to show an existentialist awareness”(WH 18) he evolved the image into Sarah Woodruff, an impoverished Victorian ex-governess. The novel situates itself and Fowles as a part of
“…the nostalgia pervasive in British high brow culture for the Victorian past, with its ambiguous social hierarchy, its reassuringly solid and densely cluttered interiors, its seeming confidence, stability, and unclouded sense of purpose”( Holmes 49).
This chapter focusses on the temperaments of the two protagonists, Charles Smithson and and Sarah Woodruff. Since the characters are the emblems of social tendencies, societal insinuations will be given significance in the analysis. The narrative configuration in The
French Lieutenant’s Woman, is an important device used by Fowles in determining the valorization of the self of the protagonists. The arrangement encompasses the epigraphs, literary parallels, allusions, and the natural landscapes. Two of the non-fictional essays,
“Notes on an Unfinished Novel,” and “The Filming of The French Lieutenant’s Woman,”
which have thematic bearing to the novel, will be covered in the chapter.
The theme of The French Lieutenant’s Woman is multifarious than The Magus. It is set in 1867, exactly eight years after the publication of Darwin‟s Origin of The Species, and six months before Karl Marx published the first volume of Das Kapital. What interested Fowles was how the Victorian world could be evolved into a modern one, and how his characters react to the fresh currents in the ambiance. But Fowles, goes beyond this, and views the self in critical perspectives in this novel, making the reader inclined to an uncanny feeling of nostalgia. To Huyssen: “…history in a certain canonical form may be delegitimized as far as its core pedagogical and philosophical mission is concerned, but the seduction of the archive and its trove of stories of human achievement and suffering has never been stronger”(Huyssen 5). The shifting patterns in the novel explain Fowles‟s concern with its historical transitions. It retracts the clothes, social mannerisms and chronological background of 1867. At times it fails to adhere to the mental picture of the Victorians, but Fowles comments that this kind of “ cheating ” (Acheson 17) is an intrinsic part of creative works.
The French Lieutenant’s Woman begins with Sarah, its female protagonist, standing on the harbour breakwater at Lyme Regis, Dorset, looking out to the sea exactly a century
before the novel was composed. Charles, a Victorian gentleman, an amateur scientist, comes to the coastal town of Lyme, to study fossils. Betrothed to Ernestina Freeman, the sole offspring of an affluent industrialist, Charles and his fiancée, are out for a stroll along the Cobb in Lyme Bay. They encounter a woman, whom Ernestina recognizes as Sarah Woodruff, scorned and doubted as faintly insane by the local community after her affair with a French seaman. A fascination develops between Charles and Sarah, which culminates into matured love. She guides Charles in a tantalizing game of seduction, and he is seen battling against the Victorian norms, which ends with the breaking off his commitment to Ernestina. Charles and Sarah discover fulfillment of their love in their encounter in Exeter. But she vanishes mysteriously after this occurrence, leaving Charles in the crossroads. The novel ends, with multiple endings, enveloped in ambiguity, allowing a freedom of choice to the readers.
Fowles gives the text a Victorian ambiance, but retains a typically twentieth-century pre- occupation, with issues such as feminism and self-realization. Fascinated in the genre of the nineteenth century romantic and gothic novel, he wrote The French Lieutenant’s Woman, through the perspective of a twentieth century writer. This can be analyzed from the authorial intrusions and opening quotations in the text, drawn from the works of Victorian writers. In this way, he attempts to evaluate in the structure, “those values that the Victorians most heralded”(Face 10). The nineteenth-century conventionality in the theme of The French Lieutenant’s Woman, is shattered by the fact that the author-narrator is aware of the twentieth-century events. He is torn between the aspiration to write a Victorian novel, and the yearning to expose its pretences, constrained him to the sardonic
intelligence of his own age. The novel thus attracts readers, seeking a re-creation of Victorian fiction, and also those looking for an engagement with existing concerns. A narrative strand is maintained throughout the novel, that allows the reader unconcerned with history or philosophy, but simply deduce the plot.
As a part of his narrative device, Fowles uses epigraphs prefacing the sixty-one chapters of The French Lieutenant’s Woman. As a narrator he is able to “reconstruct, represent and „colonize‟ the cultural milieu of the Victorian age by the representation of aspects of its literary world” (Salami 107), through the poetry of Mathew Arnold, Tennyson, Hardy and Clough. The economic, social and political ideologies, with questions relating to sexuality of the Victorian times are expressed in the prose writings of Darwin, Marx, E.
Rouston, Pike, Lewis Carroll and Jane Austen. Their accounts on social changes, are quoted as epigraphs. Fowles arranges the epigraphs accordingly to elucidate the context of each chapter, in which the characters are projected as trying to re-construct their own selves. By reading the epigraphs, history and literature are reachable to us in a textualized and narrativised form. The linking of the historical and literary epigraphs strengthen what Linda Hutcheon calls the “histriographic meta-fiction” (Hutcheon 5). Fowles goes into historical settings in The French Lieutenant’s Woman, which becomes complicated at times to reconstruct life as actually experienced by people in the past. To Henry James,
“To project yourself into a consciousness of a person essentially your opposite, requires the audacity of a great genius; and even men of genius are cautious in approaching the problem” (qt: Lodge 50).
The epigraphs on Marx‟s comments in the Das Capital, aptly upholds the mood of the time. Marx pointed out that the rock-hard structures of the Victorians were built on false impressions. It was the era where John Stuart Mill give his orations of “silent domestic revolution taking place whereby women and men are, for the first time in history, really each other‟s companions”(Harrison 97-8). The ideology of modernization became dominant, and complexity was felt by the subaltern classes. Ironically at the same time, efficient male power warmed up its strength to restrain this rising ideology, against the possible challenges. Tennyson‟s poems as epigraphs to some of the chapters highlight Sarah‟s enigmatic projection as comparable to the verses taken from Maud and In Memoriam. The profound anguish of Tennyson is also seen in the poems, which runs in harmony with Charles‟s desolation on Sarah‟s behavior. The powerful narrative thus includes, “question of freedom of the characters, the search for self-knowledge and mystery, and the importance of history and mythology”(Salami 134).
The French Lieutenant’s Woman opens with Hardy‟s poem The Riddle, giving a premonition of the impending mystery in the narration:
Over the sea, Wind foul or fair,
Always stood she……. Seemed charm to be (FLW 9).
In this opening chapter, Charles and Ernestina “dressed in the heights of fashion”(Ibid 10), are walking near the Cobb, which faces the sea in Lyme Regis. The omniscient narrator is thorough in illustrating their ensemble: “…a magenta skirt of an almost daring
coat and above the black boots…the netted chiffon…”(FLW 10). Charles‟s wardrobe is described as, “…impeccably in a light grey, with his top hat held in his free hand…which the arbiters of the best English male fashion”(Ibid 11). Ernestina‟s innocent bantering is stalled by Charles‟s attention drawn to a figure of a woman “standing motionless, staring out to sea”(Ibid 11). Attempting to draw Charles away from the figure, Ernestina tells Charles, that the woman is nicknamed in Lyme as the “French Lieutenant‟s Woman”(Ibid 14), abandoned by a mysterious French seaman. Her grit to lead Charles away draws a blank, as he ventures close to the figure. Requesting the lady to be careful of an oncoming squall, Charles‟s sentence is cut short, when she rotates and gives him a look which was like a “lance”(Ibid 16), starting the catastrophe of his respectable engagement to Ernestina:
Again and again, afterwards, Charles thought of that look as a lance; and to think so is of course not merely to describe an object but the effect it has. He felt himself in that brief instant an unjust enemy; both pierced and deservedly diminished. (FLW 14-15)
To Neary, the description of this gaze is saturated in negativity so much that “it is almost impossible not to connect it with the „look‟ described by Sartre”(Neary 169). With a mixture of Freudian and Sartrean combination, this initial look of Sarah to Charles, seems to deconstruct the maxims of Victorian culture, cutting and annihilating him. It lures him like a siren, and as the novel progresses, destructively linking him with her sexuality.
Sarah‟s look, Sartre would have termed as annihilating. In Being and Nothingness, Sartre argues that looks that steal the self of another, encloses it in nothingness, and also endows the self a consciousness of his own being:
With the appearance of the Other‟s look, I experience the revelation of my being- as-object; that is, my transcended…In particular feel myself touched by the Other in my factual existence…Thus the encounter with the Other does not only touch me in my transcendence: in and through the transcendence with the Other surpasses, the facticity which my transcendence nihilates and transcends exists for the Other. (Sartre 351)
Nature is described prolifically in the opening chapter, with the sea as the metaphor of mystery. The sea is presented as a mystery, which unfolded in the novel‟s chapters: “An easterly is the most disagreeable wind in Lyme Bay… and the real Lymers will never see much more to it than a long claw of old grey wall that flexes itself against the sea”(FLW 9). Emblems of social tendencies, like Charles's engagement to Ernestina, symbolize the union of the bourgeoisie and the nobility that cemented the Victorian class hierarchy by accommodating the new money, made in manufacturing and trade, and to the affluence vested in land and designation. Charles's decision to end his engagement anticipates the eventual breakdown of this consensus and the twentieth-century destruction of the Victorian social strata. The virtuous courtship between Charles and Ernestina is paralleled by the more open sexual relationship between their servants Sam and Mary, showing the relative freedom given to Victorian working-class lovers, as opposed to their bourgeois counterparts. The character of Sam Farrow, Charles‟s manservant in the French Lieutenant‟s Woman, is a caricature of Dickens‟s Sam Weller of The Pickwick Papers.
In the first part of the novel, Charles is projected as a Darwinist rebel against the Victorian orthodoxy. Losing his mother at childbirth, and his father in 1856, he becomes the sole beneficiary of his father‟s fortune and also of his childless uncle‟s. Not preoccupied with the conventions of his era, he has a dislike for hunting and the hunters:
“Charles adamantly refused to hunt the fox. He did not care that the prey was uneatable, but he abhorred the unspeakability of the hunters”(FLW 19). Walking was his hobby, having a “sinister fondness for spending the afternoons at Winsyatt, in the library”(Ibid 20). A born naturalist, he found “what little God he managed to derive from existence, he found in Nature not the Bible” (Ibid 20). Fowles‟s atheistic concepts are reflected here:
“Existence is ultimately or potentially knowable; God is infinitely unknowable” (The Aristos 12).
On Charles‟s disposition, Fowles dwells on his slips, without much prudence, in retrospect. After his completion of studies at Cambridge, he had drifted into appalling company, and the eventual was that he ended up “one foggy night in London, in carnal possession …” (FLW 20). Horrified, his father dispatched him to Paris. In the years to come, he became interested in paleontology, spending his time wandering on the seashore, assembling fossils. Frequenting the Geological Society, his interest shifted from the Winsyatt library. His uncle was pleased as it moved him from “the damned books in the damned library”(Ibid 21). A victim of lethargy, he had in short all “the Byronic ennui”(Ibid 22). Secretly admiring Gladstone, he also had his own political leanings. As a prey of the trappings of the Victorian society, his engagement to Ernestina was a part of an ensnaring of the Victorian society‟s call to duty.
The young and naive Ernestina Freeman, was on vacation at her Aunt Tranter‟s. She was blissfully in love, with happy dreams of wedlock. Enjoying being adulated and fussed over, she never realized that Charles was attracted to her only because of his social commitments. But to a man like Charles “she proved irresistible”(FLW 31). Pampered extremely by her parents and her aunt, they moved mountains to dote on her. Aunt Tranter was an individual of a noble essence, whom nobody could dislike, “even to contemplate being angry with that innocently smiling and talking”(Ibid 32), was unthinkable. Gullible and sympathetic, with profound optimism and self-dependence, she doted on Ernestina as a nurse. Trying to make the best of things for herself, she ended up making the best things of the world also. Having a stringent respect for the Victorian conventions, Ernestina fervently wanted to marry Charles and have children. But she hated physical relationship among beings: “It was not only her profound ignorance of the reality of copulation that frightened her; it was the aura of pain and brutality that the act seemed to require”(FLW 34). Fowles describes her coyness as the upbringing of an ethical Victorian young woman. The narration informs that she was born in 1846, and expired on the day when “Hitler invaded Poland”(Ibid 33).
The title of the novel is focused on Sarah Woodruff, a patriarchal elucidation of an outcast and a fallen woman, who was allegedly in love with a French lieutenant, Vargueness. This alleged liason of Sarah and the Frenchman are presented in the novel as a flashback. Here, Fowles clears his intention that, “practically everyone‟s assumed the central character is about the heroine Sarah. But for me the book was always equally
about Charles”(Bragg 33). As the novel unfurls, Sarah is portrayed by the narrator, to have previously lead a secured life as a governess in the Talbot family in Lyme. In due course, she leaves her employment and follows Vargueness to Exeter. Her misjudgment in gauging the lieutenant to be a man of standards, is an inauthentic trait in her, though Fowles ventures to depict her skill in analyzing characters, in due course of the narrative:
“She had some sort of psychological equivalent of the experienced… the ability to know almost at the very first glance… she was born with a computer in her heart” (FLW 57).
As she confides in Charles, it was only in Exeter that made her see what Vargueness was.
Later in the novel, she confides that the lieutenant was insincere and a liar, “I tried to see worth in him, respectability, honour. And then I was filled with a kind of rage at being deceived”(FLW 151). Vargueness allegedly makes her rise from the ashes of the phoenix.
Her initial misfortune ascends her to an assured level of authenticity. She returns to Lyme Regis, and by turning her back to the Victorian conventions, positions herself at a distance as the French Lieutenant‟s mistress. She spurns the society, which she “cannot understand”(Ibid 153). Arnold‟s lines from A Farewell quoted as an epigraph in Chapter 9, shows this psychical state of Sarah: “…this heart, I know…Too strange, too restless, too untamed” (Ibid 56).
In due course, coming across Sarah in the Undercliff, Charles is jolted by her sudden appearance, “He stood unable to do anything but stare down, tranced by this unexpected encounter”(FLW 74). Tennyson‟s lines from Maud, quoted as an epigraph in Chapter 10, is reflected in this connection to Sarah‟s strangeness:
And once, but once, she lifted her eyes…
To find they were met by my own. (FLW 70)
While taking a saunter in the wildernesses of the Undercliff in Lyme, Charles encounters Sarah again in isolation, sleeping in a precarious position in, “a broad, sloping ledge of grass some five feet beneath the level of the plateau” (FLW 73).
Not recognizing, Charles edges closer, moving around the curve of the plateau, when Sarah wakes up, “They stood for several seconds, locked in mutual incomprehension”(Ibid 75). Apologizing sincerely to her, Charles withdrew from the cliff and unknowingly, he took a steeper path towards the village. Fowles symbolically gives the premonition of the tragedy that was to befall him: “in that luminous evening … the whole Victorian Age was lost” (Ibid75).
Nature again plays on important role in determining the self in The French Lieutanant’s Woman. The Undercliff in the Dorset coast, Lyme Regis, where Charles and Sarah start their steady romance, is a world which Fowles endorses:
It roars, pounds hisses, mumbles on the reefs below our fields all day long, and then all night gives a sort of voice to all those powers of nature that are exterminated almost everywhere else in England…green men could survive in those impenetrable thickets. (Warburton 280)
The cliff symbolizes nature and life against the dead world of Lyme Regis, and their lifeless conventions. It is nature that gives and provides the soothing balm to them. The encounter in the Undercliff, a kind of sensual Garden of Eden, is romantic and inexplicable. This unfathomable salve in nature, is elaborated in Fowles‟s non- fictional work, The Tree: “In summer it is the nearest this country can offer to a tropical