THEMES IN THE FRENCH LIEUTENANT’S WOMAN

INTRODUCTION

The French Lieutenant's Woman is a postmodern historical fiction novel written in 1969 by
John Fowles. It revolves around the relationship of three characters- Charles Smithson,
Ernestina Freeman and Sarah Woodruff. Despite being engaged to the pretty wealthy heiress
Ernestina, Charles finds himself obsessed with the irresistible and enigmatic Sarah who is an
outcast in the eyes of Victorian society. The novel explores the existential crisis that Charles
is faced with when he realises his own freedom of choice. Being a postmodern novel, it deals
with themes of Metafiction, Parody, Freewill and Intertextuality.

THEMES

METAFICTION

Metafiction means writing about writing and it tries to make the fictional aspects of the
fiction apparent. By projecting out the artificiality of the art, the idea of ‘wilful suspension of
disbelief’ can be done away with. Metafiction aims at telling its readers that fiction is just
fiction and that it is not an illusion of reality. They feel that writing is a fabricating process
and thus any written text automatically becomes tainted by the backgrounds and cultures of
the author himself. Hence, metafiction writers aim at subverting the existing linear traditional
and realistic representation of fiction. Metafictional works are paradoxical in nature where
they seek to draw the attention of the readers to the artifice of the work while anchoring its
world to the “real” world through allusions to actual historical events and personages at the
same time. Metafiction also questions the presence of a single objective truth to reality as the
“the observer always changes the observed” (Waugh, 3). Another paradoxical element in self-
reflexive novels is to directly address the reading audience and involve them actively in of
creation. This way they are forced to participate in the novel while at the same time they feel
distanced by textual self-consciousness of the novels. Metafiction also invites the author or
narrator into the fictional world which further destroys the sense of reality. This metafictional
intrusion turns the concept of "the death of the author" paradoxical. As Waugh argues, “the
more the author appears, the less he or she exists. The more the author flaunts himself in the
fictional world the more noticeable is his absence outside it.” (Waugh, 134)

The story moves naturally in a Victorian style for the first twelve chapters and then the author
jolts the readers when he gives his own opinion about modern writers and their authority,
principles and capacity. A sense of independence of the characters is revealed through the
lines "Though Charles liked to think of himself as a scientific young man.." and "I ordered
him to walk straight back to Lyme Regis. But he gratuitously turned and went down to the
Dairy” (Fowles, 81). Both these lines make it seem that the choice of the character is what

1
makes the story progress instead of the traditional author’s plan. Later in the novel, we find
Charles boarding a train in search of Sarah where we encounter the narrator in his shared
compartment. The author at that time did not know what to do with Charles, and he asked:
"what the devil am I going to do with you?" (Fowles, 17) This way the narrator becomes a
character in the very fiction he is creating. The double ending with which the narrator leaves
us further breaks the illusion of reality as the two endings directly contradict each other. An
added element of supernatural comes up wherein he rewinds his watch to make the second
ending possible.

BURLESQUE OR PARODY

Burlesque or parody is a manner of writing in which the original is imitated in order to poke
fun at it. The French Lieutenant’s Woman is a burlesque of the traditional Victorian realistic
narrative method. The author freely chooses the elements which he desires to present and
thus he shifts between the ongoing story and his rational comments, between the previous
century and the modern time, between a third-person narrator and a character involved in the
novel.

The novel begins just as another Victorian realistic one. His language, dialogue, style and
detail description, such as historical events, attire, decor, and furniture, convince us that the
novel must be written by a Victorian writer. Fowles employs the conventions of brief
authorial comments, footnotes, essay materials and epigraphs and thus manages to connect
the past with the present. This comparison of the Victorian with the Modern Period reveals
the hypocrisy as well as the lack that is evident in the former. Fowles also makes the narrator
follow traditional realistic narrative to deepen the parody of the same. He also presents two
female characters who are a striking opposition to each other as they embody the difference
in the age itself.

The Victorian society presented in the novel is one in which the moral, religious, aristocratic
traditions seem to decline. The British Empire was losing its power which it had been
wielding for a long time. While the bourgeoisie was ascending, the aristocracy was
descending. To maintain their position, the aristocrats were forced to form an alliance with
the bourgeois preferably through marriage like the union of Charles and Ernestina in the
novel. The Victorian people were hypocritical when it came to religious views. They resort to
God only when they feel like they have sinned. Mrs Poultney is one such character who
despite being a rich widow donates only a small sum. She also hopes that God wouldn’t
judge her on this and wishes a ticket to paradise after death. She is extremely bossy and treats
her servants cruelly. She adopts Sarah not out of kindness and sympathy but for the sake of
redeeming herself from the sin and crime that she has committed to the poor. “…the sanctity
of marriage (and chastity before marriage) was proclaimed from every pulpit, in every
newspaper editorial and public utterance; and where never—or hardly ever—have so many
great public figures, from the future king down, led scandalous private loves… Where the
female body had never been so hidden from view; and where every sculptor was judged by

2
his ability to carve naked women… and where the output of pornography has never been
exceeded… Where it was universally maintained that women so not have orgasms; yet every
prostitute was taught to simulate them…” (Fowles, 211) Fowles through this line brings out
the dual life that the Victorian people seem to lead where they pretend to be a gentleman or a
lady whilst having a private life that they themselves regarded as vulgar and obscene.

Victorian England wanted women to be coy, frail, and subordinate. To fit the ideal role of
wife and mother, these women suppressed their sexual desires and refused to talk about it
publicly. While privately, they indulged in their own fantasies and had clandestine affairs
with their lovers. In the novel, we find Ernestina secretly admiring her nude in her bedroom
mirror. The contrasting ideas that Victorian rural England and urban England believed in is
revealed through the line “’tasting before you buy’ (premarital intercourse, in our current
jargon) was the rule, not the exception.”(Fowles, 214) A gentleman, on the other hand,
should be chivalric and be able to protect ladies and to control their temper and emotions. But
the reality is that gentlemen are bored and annoyed by the shallow, pretentious ladies and
thus are forced to seek the prostitutes as a way of an outlet. Fowles through the following
lines gives us the state of the society-"…An age where woman was sacred; and where you
could buy a thirteen-year-old girl for a few pounds—a few shillings if you wanted her for
only an hour or two. Where more churches were built than in the whole previous history of
the country; and where one in sixty houses in London was a brothel (the modern ratio would
be nearer one in six thousand)”. (Fowles, 211)

DETERMINISM AND FREEDOM

Victorian Period was pervaded by Darwin’s Theory of Evolution which when interpreted
philosophically seems to be deterministic in nature and thus implied a lack of freedom. In the
novel, Charles refused to believe that he is merely acting out a series of actions that he was
evolved to do. His deep fear is that he is the human equivalent of "an ammonite stranded in a
drought": stuck in time, helpless in the face of fate and forces beyond his control” (Fowles,
167) Sometimes he manages to convince himself that he has free will and can act freely.
When he’s faced with the choice of returning to Ernestina or visiting Sarah, we find him in an
anxiety of freedom where he realises he’s free and this sense of freedom brings him,
existential terror.

Fowles writes in Chapter 13 that "there is only one good definition of God: the freedom that
allows other freedoms to exist" (Fowles, 82). Fowles diverts from the usual manner in which
the narrator is presented as an omniscient figure and discusses the limits to his own freedom.
Of Ernestina's spirit and strong will, he writes: "she leaves me no alternative but to conclude
that she must, in the end, win Charles back from his infidelity" (Fowles, 202). In Chapter 61,
he says that he "did not want to introduce" himself as a character in the novel, suggesting that
he doesn't have full control over what even his own character does (Fowles, 361). We also
see him struggling to understand what’s on Sarah’s mind through the lines, “But what the
protagonist wants is not so clear, and I am not at all sure where she is at the moment"

3
(Fowles, 317). This lack of freedom that the novelist has over his characters mirrors with the
limit of freedom we have in our own lives. Ernestina symbolises the Victorian woman devoid
of freedom while Charles is presented as a sceptic when it comes to free-will. Sarah is an
independent modern woman with heightened intuition. For her, every minute is precious;
every decision is her own choice; every step she takes is for her own happiness.

INTERTEXTUALITY

Postmodernism disregards unity, totality and closeness and instead celebrates openness,
diversity and pluralism. The text is always considered as a part of a larger context explicitly
displaying links and connections to other texts. When text is taken from its original context
and gets incorporated into another text, new meanings inevitably arise and this makes the text
open-ended. Readers are free to interpret the text in multiple ways on the basis of the context
and discourse in which the text is read.

Although written by John Fowles, the novel shares its authorship with many other writers
whose works inspired him and became an integral part of his twentieth-century rendering of
the Victorian novel. Throughout the novel we find him employing epigraphs, footnotes and
paratextual devices as is seen in the case of any other historical metafiction. Each chapter
opens with an epigraph that seems to run parallel to the themes and situations that is explored
in the chapter. The first chapter wherein we meet Sarah for the first time begins with a poem
by Hardy's called "The Riddle". Both Hardy and Fowles seem to describe the melancholic
woman looking over the sea as a ‘Riddle' that is enigmatic in every way. The footnotes
employed disrupts the linear reading but it remains as a portal for the past to the present.

CONCLUSION

The postmodern themes and strategies The French Lieutenant’s Woman displays make it a
stunning example of historiographic metafiction. The novel is a blend of past and present,
fiction and reality, elitist and popular, parody and reverence and of continuity and change.
This blending of contrasting ideas is well achieved by John Fowles through the use of
postmodern themes and strategies, all of which are essential and interconnected. The novel
allows an open reading of the text and thus it will undoubtedly capture the hearts of
generations to come.

4
 BIBLIOGRAPHY

Fowles, John. The French Lieutenant's Woman. Little Brown and Company, 1969.

Ji, Qiming, and Ming Li. “Freedom in ‘The French Lieutenant’s Woman.’” Theory and
Practice in Language Studies, vol. 3, no. 11, 2013, doi:10.4304/tpls.3.11.2052-2060.

Leader, Anna. Suduiko, Aaron ed. "The French Lieutenant’s Woman Themes". GradeSaver.
17 November 2015. 22 July 2018. https://www.gradesaver.com/the-french-lieutenants-
woman/study-guide/themes

Lehmann-Haupt, Christopher. "On the Third Try, John Fowles Connects." The New York
Times. 10 November 1969. 22 July 2018.
<https://www.nytimes.com/books/98/05/31/specials/fowles-french.html>.

Waugh, Patricia. Metafiction: The Theory and Practice of Self-conscious. Routledge. 1984.