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The French Lieutenant's Woman:The Strong Chains of Victorian Society

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GÜLRAH MORAMOLLU
KOCAELI UNIVERSITY , TURKEY
ABSTRACT:
The French Lieutenant’s Woman: The strong chains of Victorian society .

The French Lieutenant’s Woman is the third published book of John Fowles.Fowles
has always been concerned with the general issue of human freedom,by which he means the
freedom of indivuals from the constraints of society and its institutions. “His novels show
the beauty and the pain of the process in which a sensitive mind moves from ignorance of
self to knowledge of self. ”(Fawkner,1984:121) In fact ,what happens in the novel can be
described as a quest and Charles’s quest lies in his loss of Sarah. Fowles says “ the genesis
of all art lies in the pursuit of the irrecoverable,what the object- relations analyst now calls
symbolic repair.” ( Relf,1998:375) And in his fiction “men develop towards women not vice
versa” ( Loveday,1985:5) In that sense French Lieutenant’s Woman can be seen as a
bildungsroman very much like Great Expectations: the education of the central character,his
search for identity and breaking the illusions created by himself and the society and ultimately
reaching the reality:the real worth comes from inside.In this context Charles Smithson learns
through his relationship with two very different women:Ernestina Freeman and Sarah
Woodruff. Charles in his pursuit of Sarah realizes that he searches for his own identity as
well.And this process of ‘emancipation’ does not involve a single choice ,a single moment
of indecision and pain ,but a lifetime of struggle and discomfort. And in Charles Smithson’s
case we see how difficult it is to overcome the precepts of this patriarchal society or to stay
immune to those precepts.

KEYWORDS:Human freedom, Victorian World ,Existentialist Search, Bildungsroman

Gülrah Moramollu
The French Lieutenant’s Woman: The strong chains of Victorian society .

The French Lieutenant’s Woman is the third published book of John Fowles.Fowles
has always been concerned with the general issue of human freedom,by which he means the
freedom of indivuals from the constraints of society and its institutions. “His novels show
the beauty and the pain of the process in which a sensitive mind moves from ignorance of
self to knowledge of self. ”(Fawkner,1984:121) In fact ,what happens in the novel can be
described as a quest and Charles’s quest lies in his loss of Sarah. Fowles says “ the genesis
of all art lies in the pursuit of the irrecoverable,what the object- relations analyst now calls
symbolic repair.” ( Relf,1998:375) And in his fiction “men develop towards women not vice
versa” ( Loveday,1985:5) In that sense French Lieutenant’s Woman can be seen as a
bildungsroman very much like Great Expectations: the education of the central character,his
search for identity and breaking the illusions created by himself and the society and ultimately
reaching the reality:the real worth comes from inside.In this context Charles Smithson learns
through his relationship with two very different women:Ernestina Freeman and Sarah
Woodruff.

This novel can be seen as a historical novel as well,but he does not write historical
novels per se.Rather than that it is a novel set during an earlier period of history ,in 1867 more
than a century ago (to the written period a century) which must be understood in terms of its
relationship to the present which makes it contemporary rather than historical.(Relf,
1998:381) It is at the same time written in the style of Victorian novel,in accordance with
which Charles has epiphanies,but more than ever we have the constant intrusion of John
Fowles ,the narrator in the narrative.In short we can say that Fowles exploited Victorian novel
tradition ,Romance tradition,and bildungsroman style for his own purposes,but not in the
usual way. Since Fowles has been called a protean novelist,he always breaks molds and tries
something new.(Mc Hale,2004:197) In Postmodernist Fiction it says:
“After twelve chapters of flirting with real-world historical fact,the narrator of Fowles’s
French Lieutenant’s Woman abruptly confronts us with an irrefutable fact of a different
kind.He says “This story I am telling is all imagination.These characters I create never
existed outside my own mind ” with this gesture,the illusory reality of the fictional world
is destroyed ,and in its place we are offered,if not the real world ,at least a real
world….by breaking the frame around his world the author foregrounds his own
superiority.The metafictional gesture of frame-breaking is ,in other words a form of
superrealism….. (after the introduction of the idea of the writer as dead by the
modernists),the postmodernist fiction has brought the author back to the surface.Free once
again,as in French Lieutenant’s Woman ,to break in upon the fictional world,as in Chapter
13 the postmodern author is even free to confront the reader with the image of himself at
the end of the novel into the compartment where Charles is situated…..So writing is no
longer an expression emanating from a unified source or origin,but rather a multi-
dimensional space in which a variety of writings,more of them original,blend and clash ,
a “tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centers of culture” ” ( McHale,2004:
197)

Thus the writer does not originate his discourse but mixes already extant discourses as it is
already pointed out.
It is the general pattern of Fowles’s novels to have “female characters to have an edge on
the men in terms of awareness and knowledge of themselves” (Campbell and
Fowles,1976,<http://www.jstor.org/stable/1207620>) [22.10.2010].In an interview he
describes this belief in some sort of female principle as such: “ I feel that the universe is
female in some deep way.I think one of the things that is lacking in our society is equality of
male and female ways of looking at life.I have always disliked the dominant theme of
machismo as in Hemingway and the whole of American society.This sort of deep thing in
one’s writing really does not come out in one’s conscious mind:it comes out in how one
was born,the culture one was brought up in.Which is what I was trying to say in The
Collector [ and in The French Lieutenant’s Woman respectively] .” (ibid:465)And in Charles
Smithson’s case we see how difficult it is to overcome the precepts of this patriarchal society
or to stay immune to those precepts.

Charles Smithson,a respectable member of Victorian class-conscious society “starts the

novel as a ‘gentleman’ but we are immediately reminded he is also a “ Darwinist ” as well
.And this is his dilemma to start with.”( Fawkner,1984:79) Ultimately The French
Lieutenant’s Woman is not so much the story of a man torn between the conventions of his
time and the sexual attractions of an unusual “remarkable” woman embodying social and
human emancipation. “It is rather the story of a man who can choose ,indeed who has to
choose between two ways of relating himself to time.” (ibid:79) The Darwinian theory of
survival dictates “the necessity to blend with the unquestioned assumptions of one’s age ”
(ibid:79) if one desires social survival –which then necessitates Charles to marry
Ernestina,who is the rich heiress of Freeman stores,and work in Mr.Freeman’s trade,in a way
blending his “fossilized ” nobility or squirerarchy with the richness of upper middle-
classes: an option which disgusted Charles ,or to stand in favour of the concepts of
individual choice and free will as requirements of human emancipation which necessitates
the painful and suffering role of the outcast in the society: that of the way of Sarah Woodruff
termed as “poor tragedy ” or “the French Lieutenant’s woman ” by society,outside the laws
or rules of society.Ironically it is not Charles ,who is the believer of science and a Darwinist
who can reconcile the changed conception of evolution with his own personal interests and
social outlook but Mr.Freeman who is in fact terribly against the idea that our forefathers are
apes that can do it.

Charles is knowingly determined not to adapt himself,but he knows his class is

determined to die ,he already feels himself like a “fossil ” which he is found of collecting .
“He belongs to a group of social species , ‘a dying class ’ that is about to be superseded by
its competing and more vital enemies.In the crowded London streets he feels threatened by
the working classes as well. ” (Fawkner,1984:81) In the flow of biological evolution and
social ‘progress’ ,he is inferior to both the powerful bourgeois with all its vulgarity , to
Mr.Freeman a draper’s son and to the rising plebian (like the new people in The Collector )
with all its impertinence-the best example is illustrated in Sam Farrow ,his servant.( ibid:81)
From this point of view ,Charles’s passiveness becomes a noble ‘refusal’ as he chooses
not to adapt. “And in a metaphysical transition within the novel from a Darwinian to a social
and existentialist level of understanding this biological refusal to adapt becomes a social
refusal to conform ,the existentialist act:an act of passive resistance to time itself. ”
(ibid:81) So he has decided to be one of the “few ” questioning elite,not part of the “many” .
(from Aristos qtd in.Loveday,1985:4-5)

“There is then in The French Lieutenant’s Woman from this aspect a strong
deterministic vein ” (ibid:81) The inevitable shadow of Thomas Hardy who was the first
author in the Victorian period to question the bigotry of the age.He is also the one who
applies Darwin’s theory of evolution to a social context.Besides his heroine Tess in the novel
Tess of D’Urbervilles epitomizes the perfect frankness and directness of Sarah Woodruff,
another outcast in Victorian society who refuses to be labelled.Tess’s close relation with
nature is another aspect of Hardy and Fowles.Fowles says “if the human condition should be
regarded as imbedded in the conditions of nature ,one of his pronouncements takes on a new
meaning: “the key to my fiction ,for what it is worth ,lies in my relationship with nature ”
(Relf,1998: 379 ) And both of them describe a pagan nature,the Undercliff in the Ware
Commons is primeval like Hardy’s Wessex.The similarities between the heroines is worth to
notice as well.Tess cannot escape her fate and crucified by the male society,luckily for Sarah
there is another alternative .She finds a friendly environment in the proponents of Pre-
Raphaelite movement in London.At least in this new environment she feels harmonious
and happy not as an artist but at least connected with art.Pre-Raphaelites are revolutionaries
who tried to break the stifling strait-jacketed puritanical aspect of the Victorian age,they tried
to make the society admit nature and sexuality. “Their movement is a complete rebellion to
Victorians who have an Egyptian quality in their enveloping ,mummifying clothes,their
narrow-mindedness,their fear of the open ,of the naked.” ( Fowles,2004:173) So they are
hopelessly trying to hide realities ,repress natural instincts.Naturally it is a very hypocritical
age full of contradictions.Fowles notices this duplicity and says : “Never was the record so
completely confused,never a public façade so successfully passed off as the truth on a gullible
posterity ;and this ,I think,makes the best guidebook to the age very possibly DrJekyl and
MrHyde.Behind its latterday Gothik lies a very profound and epoch-revealing truth.Every
Victorian had two minds:and Charles had at least that. ”(ibid:355)

Charles,believing he is searching for the woman of his life like a romance hero ,is
really undertaking the quest for something more elusive.The writer warns the reader as:
“With Sam in the morning,with Ernestina across a gay lunch,and here in the role of Alarmed
Propriety… he was almost three different men;and there will be others of him before we are
finished .”(ibid:143) H.W Fawkner says “transcending the toying with literary myth-that of
the romance –which is diffused through the whole novel,it is the comprehension of an
individual fate that is at once universal and timeless ”(1984:82) Charles bravely faces a
particular social situation existing in time:the Victorian world itself,observing it he feels
“nausea for his own time”.But still he cannot escape the viewpoint of patriarchal Victorian
period which degrades women to the status of sexual objects.He starts the novel very
superficially thinking he is an intellectual and liberal,but he is on the surface of things.It is
obvious in his treatment of both Ernestina and Sarah.He sees Ernestina who has the “perfect
face” of the time as a toy or as a “child”,with Sarah his attitude is not different.What attracts
him first to Sarah is her helplessness,loneliness,poverty and smallness.His attitude to Sarah is
obvious in the following two extracts from the novel:
“The girl lay in the complete abandonment of deep sleep,on her back.Her coat had
fallen open over her indigo dress,unrelieved in its calico severity except by a small
white collar at the throat.The sleeper’s face was turned away from him,her right
arm thrown back,bent in a childlike way…There was something intensely tender
and yet sexual in the way she lay :it awakened a dim echo in Charles of a moment
from his time in Paris.” (Fowles,2004:74)

And there is another scene full of sexual innuendos:

“They stood thus for several seconds,locked in a mutual incomprehension.She seemed so
small to him,standing there below him,hidden from the waist down,clutching her collar,as if
should he take a step towards her,she would turn and fling herself out of his sight.”(ibid:75)
He has obviously a “suppressed sexuality” which is another driving force for Victorian
male.But Sarah is not only that which will be recognized by Charles,that she is also a
“remarkable woman ”.Sarah has two distinct features which the writer says are the “ two
curses of her”: “the instinctual profundity of insight was the first curse of her life” and the
second is “her education” which makes her unfit for the position of a farmer’s
daughter.Instead of “looking down” on herself as the other students did at school “she looks
up through them” ,as “she read far more fiction and far more poetry,those two sanctuaries of
the lonely,than most of her kind…..without realizing it she judged people as much by the
standards of Walter Scott and Jane Austen,seeing those around her as fictional
characters,and making poetic judgements on them.”(ibid:58) So as the author said she had
become “the perfect victim of a caste society”. (ibid:58) And as it is noticed by Charles “ her
face was well-modelled,and completely feminine ,and the suppressed intensity of her eyes
was matched by the suppressed sensuality of her mouth” .(ibid:119) In Charles’s mind her
eyes and the expression of them brings to his mind his earlier experiences of foreign women
and he had realized she was more intelligent and independent than she seemed. The author
and the reader know Sarah is more than that ,she is not only intelligent but the writer of her
own text.She reminds him of the French deterministic novel’s heroine Emma Bovary:another
passionate woman ,with the instinct of an artist imprisoned in a petty bourgeois society.There
are other similarities between these two women,both have masochistic drives.For example
Sarah has chosen to work in Marlborough house of Mrs.Poulteney to torture herself .The
reason why she has not revealed the reality of her relation with the French Lieutenant
Varguennes is the same,because the illusion and unreality she has created for herself makes
her different-and it is what she feels:that she is different from this petty society of Lyme.She
is the untamed nymph from the forest,she has potential to be different.

As it is pointed out earlier she is more intelligent than Charles can guess.The fact that
Sarah “generates her own story-first about herself and Varguennes,and then about herself and
Charles” it is obvious that she is “the writer of her own texts” (Cooper,1991:112) Mahmoud
Salami argues someting similar ,he says we can see Sarah“ as a creator of texts,of stories and
parables that teach”( qtd in Foster,1994:81) but “it is perhaps more accurate to understand
Sarah herself as a text to be read .” (ibid:81) In Understanding John Fowles Thomas C.
Foster says “ not only her narratives but her sheer presence require active reading by
Charles,as well as by the others in the novel.Such a view of the novel can be quite
fruitful,since it gives readers a means of understanding the different Sarahs presented to
different audiences.” (1994:81) As it is argued before“ the general public of Lyme Regis is
presented with a very simple text:Sarah as fallen woman,ruined by a wicked foreign
seaman,sensual and unrepentant.To Dr.Grogan she is another text,a case study of an
unbalanced woman.To Charles ,however Sarah presents another,very different text:constantly
shifting ,sometimes contradictory,unpredictable,unfinished.Each time they meet she produces
some new bit of information,some new slant on her personality.She is occasionally the
wanton,more commonly the damsel in distress . ” (ibid.:1994:81-82) She is an expert
narrator,writing her own story “extending and developing her text through Charles and
plotting her own seduction with the care of an author marshalling facts,she arranges her
dismissal from Mrs.Poulteney’s employ and lures Charles first to Carslake’s Barn by means
of a note (in French!),and then to Exeter by means of an address.”(Cooper,1991:112) In the
hands of Sarah ,a female author Charles seems to be a puppet drawn to his destiny ,unable to
make a meaning out of this text.Sarah,he can never be sure if she is a destructive woman ,a
Siren prepares his downfall and hence his end or a saviour who saves Charles from the great
danger of being merely another pillar to the petty Victorian establishment.

When Charles finally goes to Endicott’s family hotel where Sarah has prepared the
scene delicately “ with a non-existent sprained ankle to support her ruse and a richly
coloured shawl to provide personal decor ” ( ibid.:112 ).It is where the consummation of their
love and the climax of the story coincide.Charles finds to his shock that she is a virgin ,that
she has never made love to the French lieutenant. “His reading of her moves from victim of
romantic impulses to victim of a narrow-minded society to manipulative,selfish marriage
wrecker.The last image settles more firmly when,having broken his engagement and returned
to Exeter,he discovers that she has vanished.” (Foster,1994:82) And as Pamela Cooper rightly
analyses “Fowles has reversed those premises supporting his model of creativity and gender
by showing us male sexuality (Charles’s) colonized by a female artist (Sarah) for inclusion in
a text of her own devising….By the time Sarah,apparently in full posession of an
independence guaranteed by creative triumph,tells Charles that he cannot marry her.”
(Cooper,1991:112-113) And the traditional roles of man and woman changed after this event
as it will be argued later.

Yet Charles ,still unsatisfied with his interpretation of Sarah, “ like a reader who finds a
novel missing its last most critical chapter.He waits for two years while his agents search for
her,partly out of love and partly out of an anxiety of uncertainty:he wants to know why she
has done what she has done.Unlike ordinary readers,Charles gets his chance to question this
extraordinary author.If the text of Sarah is radically unstable,it is sufficiently provoking to
spur him to action.” (Foster,1994:82 )Like the novel itself ,Sarah becomes an enigma, a
“Syphinx ” (Fowles,2004:420) figure both for the reader and Charles.And may be it is the
reason why Charles seems closer to them ,trying to make a meaning of Sarah like the reader
trying to work out the meaning of this challenging postmodernist novel with a double ending.
“The search for her authentic text is complicated by Charles’s construction of a fantasy
text,as Salami notes,is a “masculine narrative” in which Sarah is “a mystery,a dangerous
Eve,a contradictory subject”( Salami qtd in.Foster,1994:83).Charles “can never understand,
or “read” Sarah until he learns to accept her feminine narrative without bending it to the will
of his masculine desires and prejudices”( ibid:83)

In all the chapters we refer to in the previous paragraphs Sarah emerges as a kind of
female Heathcliff character ( Thomas Forster qtd.in Lynch,2010:52) , “ill-placed ” in
society.She asks to Charles “Where am I not ill-placed?” ( Fowles,2004:241)It is not a
coincidence that Charles and Sarah find themselves in the Undercliff,far away from the
constrictions of society conversing more freely than they can in Lyme.And the way Fowles
gives nature is almost primodial,a Pagan setting not tamed by the society.It is her role of
outcast finally she will hand to Charles and in a way “after recreating herself in his form ”
(Lynch,2002|< http:// www.jstor.org/stable/3175978. >) [22.10.2010] ,then she will find a
place in the society.And in that way the romance hero Charles’s quest of an object of love
turns into a quest of true self.And “The French Lieutenant’s Woman shows the way in which
a narrative can modulate from a sexual to a personal quest without loss of continuity”
(Loveday,1985 :8) Related with this idea in his essay “Hardy and the Hag” “Fowles refers to
Gilbert Rose’s psychoanalytical theory in which he posits that the love interest in most novels
that is the male character’s pursuit of an idealized young female masks the novelist’s sense of
separation from and loss of the original mother-child bond,perhaps Oedipal in the Freudian
sense” which is an important point to emphasize .(Relf,1998:370)

The education of Charles starts with his loss of Winsyatt.When Sir Robert,his uncle,the
Squire of that estate changes his idea of bachelorhood and decides to get married,Charles is
disinherited and that old tradition of feudalism,the owning of land and the fates of people on
it: this role that has been created for him ,that of a male patriarch,his illusion of himself is
shattered.And for once he becomes liberated .At the same time considering the prospects of
his fiancee Ernestina ,he is degraded to the position of a “bought” husband which really
disgusts him especially after Freeman’s offer of being trade-partners.Charles feels himself
humiliated exactly the way he has humiliated and tried to own Ernestina and Sarah
respectively.His own estimate of himself is shattered as a “lion” or a “male patriarch”,he still
wants to play the ‘knight errant’ who saves ‘the damsel in distress’.So he turns to Sarah who
according to him represents (in fact plays)this in her self well. She is little,crying,sleeping
outcast of the society and because of these very attractive for the male ego:a possible
possession.

“Contained within Fowles’s treatment of the masculine mentality is a topic which

almost merits discussion on its own is namely the question of
categorizing,classifying,and above all collecting.Dreadful warnings about the dangers
of collecting run through in both novels Collector and The French Lieutenant’s Woman
,and in each case we find the vice exclusively associated with men.Charles,until he falls in
love with the unclassifiable Sarah,enjoys collecting and classifying fossils…..Science
for Fowles ,is an extension of the same device:by classifying things under headings we
possess them ,yet we miss what is most valuable in them,their individual esence.This
feeds back into the fiction in the form of a recurrent masculine tendency to reduce women
to the status of objects.”
(Loveday,1985:5)
The classic treatment of this is to be found in Fowles’s first published novel,appropriately
titled The Collector.

So if Charles chooses the human emancipation that Sarah embodies,his social

banishment will prove as severe as her own.But at first he did not realize it is not a simple
choice of a wife,it is a choice to freedom,or a higher order of reality(transcendence) in which
“Notion of possession as the purpose of life,whether it be of a woman’s body,or of high profit
at all costs,or of the right to dictate the speed of progress” (Fowles qtd in.Vipond,1999:68)
should be rejected.Since for Fowles freedom is the measure of social evolution,what Charles
has to undergo consists of two elements: “ on the one hand he must learn that the girl he is in
love with is a real human being,with all that that implies of respect for her rights and
identity.On the other hand he must smiltaneously learn that his love is not only for another
person ,but also for an aspect of himself-an intangible that can never be owned,nor shut up in
a cellar as if it were in a flesh-and –blood sense real.”( Loveday,1985:6-7) From that aspect
“Fowles’s fictional treatment of women is revealed or can be confirmed by the Jungian
assumptions on which Fowles bases his treatment of sexuality.It is to do with anima,that
feminine side or Eve-man which Jung saw as buried in every masculine personality.” (ibid:6)

Since “ Fowles’s female characters reign over the private sphere,the world of intuitive
knowledge,sensibility,the emotions…conversely men exercise dominance in the public
sphere,the world of science and systematic classification of action,violence and war.It follows
from this that Fowles associates men with orthodoxy,conformity,and repression ;he remarks
in the Aristos that in the Genesis myth ‘ Adam is stasis,or conservatism,Eve is kinesis,or
progress’(Aristos,157 qtd in.Loveday,1985:5) and he is harshly critical of ‘the selfish
tyranny of the male.” (ibid:5)

Charles in his pursuit of Sarah realizes that he searches for his own identity as well.And
this process of ‘emancipation’ does not involve a single choice ,a single moment of
indecision and pain ,but a lifetime of struggle and discomfort which was already implied to
him by Dr.Grogan who said the life Charles chooses and leads should be worth of his
sacrifices and it should not lead him to be more selfish but rather to the contrary,he should
be a good person.

Charles thinks by choosing to offer marriage to Sarah,he will be “uncrucified”,but he still

thinks in the set patterns of patriarchal society.He imagines that he is going to “dress”
Sarah,take her round the world,and teach her:a superior male teaching an inferior female,and
then in return she will be grateful to him for giving up everything for her sake which reminds
us of the Byronic Rochester trying to deck Jane Eyre with jewellery,trying to own her.Unlike
Ernestina’s protestations that Charles is not romantic at all,he turns out to be a very Byronic
character ready to pursue this romantic quest at all costs.

All the same Charles’s incompatibility with Sarah is obvious even at the end.As the
dilemma still continues ,he cannot get rid off “his stiff language” and state of mind-as he
asks Sarah : “But you cannot reject the purpose for which woman was brought into creation.”
(Fowles,2004:431) And the reason of their failure to communicate becomes more obvious
when Sarah said “[she ] found her identity in her solitude” and because of that she values her
“solitary state” now in a different way as it defines who she is.” (ibid: 430) And because of
that she says she cannot marry and be a wife to Charles or any men,as all this suggests her to
enter into the little box called “wife” and deny herself.It is the first time she fits in a group as
herself,so she is happy in finding ultimately that role of the artist’s ,Dante Gabriel Rosetti’s
assisstant.And she does not seem to repent in any way for manipulating him or being
absolutely selfish as well as compelling .She “generates an indecipherable text which
transforms Charles’s life while thwarting his powers of rational comprehension… and
exploiting him to the last. ” (Cooper,1991:433)

In his helplessness of trying to give a meaning to her motivations ,Charles as Mahmoud

Salami argues builds a “masculine narrative” of Sarah.(ibid:432) So at the point we think
Charles at last achieved a kind of self-awareness and an awareness of his society ,still there is
the intrusion of old forms,to stay immune to those forms seems to be not in his
hands.Charles also has recognized that socially and temporally they are incompatible with
Sarah,belonging to different classes and different centuries:
“He had a re-awoken sense of that strange assumption of intellectual equality in her.He
saw , too,what had always been dissonant between them:the formality of his language-
seen at its worst in the love-letter she had never received –and the directness of hers.Two
languages,betraying on the one side a hollowness ,a foolish constraint-but she had just
said it,an artificiality of conception-and on the other a substance and purity of thought
and judgement;the difference between a simple colophon,say,and some page decorated
by Noel Humhreys,all scrollwork,elaboration,rococo horror of void.That was the true
inconsistency between them……”(Fowles,2004:428- 429)

Because Sarah is at once an expression of time and timelessnes .For Charles and for
the reader she belongs to time insofar as she represents a new feminine consciousness
founded in the historical beginnings of female emancipation.Like her counterparts in America
Sarah is always direct and “naked” so to speak,whereas Charles is imprisoned in his stiff
language .Since language is a direct extension of the male patriarchy.

The same inconsistency is evident after his physical possession of Sarah.After it takes
place ,strangely the roles of woman and man change.Sarah mastering herself well,since she
has achieved her aim, says she gives Charles the most important thing she values –which is
his freedom.He has no obligations whatsoever,though tradition dictates Charles to get married
to her.But what Sarah speaks about is rather on a different scale:
“You have given me the consolation of believing that in another world,another age,another
life,I might have been your wife.You have given me the strength to go on living…in the here
and now.”( ibid:342)

So in giving Charles his freedom,Charles becomes closer to “the few elect” which he
wants to be.Since for Fowles and apparently his character Sarah “freedom is ultimately the
measure of social evolution” and necessitates the denial of “possession as the ultimate aim in
life”.”And in this intoxicating process of gaining a higher order of reality Charles finds
himself in a situation that forces him to remove a barrier between himself and reality.”
(Fawkner,1984:118-119) And he finds himself in utter loneliness as a result.

On the other hand Sarah seems to sense that she belongs to another age,that of
future.Charles sees women who are very much like her frankly speaking and open in
America,in contrast to Ernestina who has exactly “the right face for her age” in which “the
favoured feminine look was the demure,the obedient,the shy”.She is completely unlike Sarah
who is the woman of the twentieth century and because of that entirely disconcerting.More
clearly than Charles without the benefit of Darwinian theory Sarah sees their century as a
“temporal prison” that chance has placed them.

Sarah to a higher degree than Charles is aware of her own situation,conscious of her own
struggle,of its purpose and meaning.In contrast to Charles she is able to live up to Arnold’s
idea of “it’s a piety acting what one knows”(Fowles,2004:440) Charles knows ,but his
position in Victorian society is so firm that each act is the outcome of a painful struggle.The
fact that he is continually stuck in dilemma,although he lacks the magnetism of the
mysterious heroine makes him a more complex and ,interesting figure. As it is earlier pointed
out in this paper his endeavour to try to make sense of Sarah like the reader who tries to
achieve the same goal, brings him closer to the reader. Unlike the reader,as a creation of
author he lacks the help of the narrator.

Not only that he is incapable of acting in accordance with the knowledge he possesses as
an intelligent Darwinist and sensitive lover but his knowledge is partial. “To a certain extent
he is aware of male chauvinism and the more obvious forms of the suppression of women in
his time.Yet his attitude to Sarah frequently reveals a complete ignorance of how he is
himself part of (the vast apparatus) that masculine aggression and
dominance.”(Fawkner,1984:87-88) Here Fowles very deliberately emphasizes the historical
situation.He says elsewhere in an interview that both Charles and Sarah are historically
determined . (Campbell and John Fowles,1976 <http:// www.jstor.org/stable/1207620 > )
[22.10.2010 ] From that aspect “time here is not only an age-the typically masculine age of
Victorian England with its factories,imperialism,and aggressive expansion.Time is also a
more particular historical moment- the birth of feminism: ”( Fawkner,1984:87-88)

“But remember the date of this evening:April 6th,1867.At Westminster only one week
before John Stuart Mill had seized an opportunity in one of the early debates on the
Reform Bill to argue that now was the time to give women equal rights at the ballot-
box.His brave attempt…was greeted with smiles from the average man….None the less
,March 30th,1867,is the point from which we can date the beginning of feminine
emancipation in England…” ( Fowles,2004:115)
All the same Sarah is not a feminist,nor Charles is a socialist.Nor is either of them an
existentialist.And yet Fowles gives their private conflicts a wider human significance which
allows us to see their struggles in terms of feminism,socialism and existentialism.Also we
have to notice a parallelism in Fowles’s use of postmodernist narrative style which eludes a
clear-cut ending with its twin endings and mysterious Sarah who denies conventional
interpretations or any interpretations at all for the motivation of her actions.She says to
Charles: “ Do not ask me to explain what I have done.I cannot explain it.It is not to be
explained.”(ibid:342) In that way both the novel and heroine are mysterious,undecipherable.
“Fowles,starting with Chapter 13 repeatedly notes too much has changed in our worldview,in
our understanding of literature….to continue with narrative in the manners of James or
Hardy.The “interruptions” then are the novel,or,rather the interplay between the narrative and
its interruptions constitute the business of the novel….he wants to bring the reader’s
involvement with the story of Charles and Sarah to a satisfying resolution as well….” (Foster,
1994:85-86)

Consequently Sarah ,the ill-fated one has found an alternative symbolic universe,a social
frame within which she is able to choose an identity,but Charles has not.He has been forced to
resign his identity as a Victorian “gentleman” but what he will replace it with is not at all
clear at the end of the novel.Since the novel is a kind of bildungsroman,it is appropriate to see
Charles as “starting over”.So in the second ending,the narrator tells us : “it was as if he found
himself reborn,though with all his adult faculties and memories.But with the baby’s
helplessness-all to be recommenced,all to be learnt again!” an outcast almost facing “the
unplumbed,salt,estranging sea”.(Fowles,2004:444-445)” At the end of the bildungsroman,the
protagonist is almost always on the road to some undefined destination,with an old identity
left behind and a new one still in the process of forming.” (Lynch,2002
<http://www.jstor.org/stable/3175978 >) [22.10.2010]

So Fowles’s novel French Lieutenant’s Woman can be seen as “a desperately needed

attempt to bring more civilization which in this context means more female intelligence into a
brutal society” (Fawkner,1984:88) Furthermore Fowles explains in his Notes to an
Unfinished Novel :
“ “My female characters tend to dominate the male.I see man as a kind of
artifice,and woman as a kind of reality.The one is cold idea,the other is warm fact.” “In
bringing these two polarities together he shows that the female characters can have a
positive effect on the latter,the male characters,but he does not despite the fact that he
brings them to a point of mutual recognition, resolve the inevitable conflict and tension
that exists between them.” (Vipond,1999:59-60)

Like Sarah denies to be defined and explained through a kind of

categorizing,the author denies to bring a clear-cut definition or solution to this
dilemma which leaves the ending open.And in this way makes them both
authentic in an existentialist term.It should also be noticed that “what attracts men to women
in Fowles’s fiction is mystery,the fact that they cannot and must not be understood;as Jung
puts it “All objective ,non-intuitive understanding…has the diabolical element in it,and
kills.”” (qtd in. Loveday,1985:7)
 Works Cited:

Acheson,James.Modern Novelists:John Fowles. New York:St.Martin’s Press,1998.

Aubrey,James R. John Fowles:A Reference Companion.New York,Connecticut,London:

Greenwood Press,1991.

Campbell,James and John Fowles. “An Interview with John Fowles ”.jstor.

22.10.2010 < http://www.jstor.org/ stable/1207620 >.

Cooper,Pamela.The Fictions of John Fowles .Ottowa,Paris:University of Ottowa Press,1991.

Fawkner,H.W .The Timescapes of John Fowles.London,Toronto:Farleigh Dickinson

University Press,1984.

Foster,Thomas C.Understanding John Fowles.Columbia,South Carolina: University of

South Carolina Press,1994.

Fowles ,John .The French Lieutenant’s Woman .London:Vintage,2004.

Loveday,Simon. The Romances of John Fowles.Houndmills,Basingstoke,Hampshire:

Macmillan Press,1985.

Lynch,Richard P . “Freedoms in the French Lieutenant’s Woman”.jstor.

22.10.2010 < http: //www.jstor.org/ stable/3175978 >.

McHale,Brian. Postmodernist Fiction.New York,London:Methuen,2004.

Relf ,Jan. Editor.Wormholes:Essays and Occasional Writings .New York:Henry Holt and

Company,1998.

Vipond,Dianne L.Editor.Conversations with John Fowles.Jackson:University Press of

Mississipi,1999.

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