Critically analysing John Fowles' ‘The French Lieutenant's Woman’ as a Postmodern Fiction

THE FRENCH LIEUTENANT'S WOMAN

By John Fowles

Critically analysing ‘The French Lieutenant's Woman’ as a Postmodern Fiction

-Venus Anand

‘The French Lieutenant's Woman’ by English writer John Fowles was published in 1969. The novel is set in the nineteenth century romantic literary genre with the plot of 1867 seen through a twentieth century perspective. It deals with the love story of Sarah Woodruff and Charles Smithson, a palaeontologist and follower of Darwin. [I intend to show that] ‘The French Lieutenant’s Woman’ is a postmodern fiction. The postmodern themes analysed in ‘The French Lieutenant’s Woman’ are History, Author and Authority, and Ontological worlds; on the borderline between postmodern themes and strategies the issue of Intertextuality is discussed; and the strategy discussed is Metafiction.

This work concentrates on the depiction of these particular themes and strategies because they are the most significant and distinctive postmodern elements deployed within the novel, which, on the one hand, disconnect ‘The French Lieutenant’s Woman’ from the Victorian tradition, yet, on the other hand, show how the tradition is continued in the new context of postmodernism.

Let’s understand the term ‘postmodern’. But before outlining the conception of ‘postmodern’ used in the present discussion, some terminological definitions are in order. When looking at the use of the words 'postmodernity', 'postmodernism', 'postmodernist' or 'postmodern', it is striking that the meaning of these words seems to change according to what book you are reading. This is not only due to the sometimes exaggerated caprice of some authors, but is closely linked to the respective contexts in which they occur.

On a literary level, ‘postmodern’ is employed as a literature characterised by reliance on narrative techniques such as fragmentation, paradox, and the unreliable narrator defined as a style or a trend which emerged in the post–World War II era. Postmodern works are seen as a response against dogmatic following of Enlightenment thinking and Modernist approaches to literature.

History is one of the main themes explored in The French Lieutenant's Woman. The novel is set in Victorian England of 1867 and full of historical detail and information about the Victorian time. Readers are given a thorough and insightful look into the nineteenth-century society and thinking.

They learn about Victorian attitudes to duty, love, sex and religion; about the view of life and prevailing fear of death; about the permeating evolutionary ideas and their impact on old beliefs.

They also learn about the twists in class relationships and the differences between those who are gentlemen by birth and those who become gentlemen through wealth; about the social role and position of women - ranging from miserable prostitutes to the daughters of well-to-do upper-class families.

However, ‘The French Lieutenant's Woman’ is not a classic realist fiction, which would remain and operate only within the past Victorian times. It is a historiographic- metafiction, which breaks traditional patterns of historical novels, and thus considerably changes the expectations readers might have.

‘The French Lieutenant’s Woman’ undermines the authority of the narrator. We tend to be suspicious toward any ultimate authority imposed on a text. This is the reason why so many contemporary novelists choose to write in the voice of a subjective first-person rather than in the objective and omniscient third-person. In fact, ‘The French Lieutenant’s Woman’, as a crossover novel between the traditional and the experimental tendencies, shifts between the use of “I” and “he” in its narration. Nevertheless, the ironical “I” is the major narrative form undermining the narrative authority and affecting the overall treatment of the issues of power, freedom, creation and control, and inevitably also the role of readers and the status of characters.

The whole novel is permeated with narrative intrusions through which the narrator comments on plot developments and the behaviour of characters, explains and provides further information on certain situations. However, these intrusions are in its essence often rather tentative. The narrator assumes rather than asserts. He openly acknowledges that the information he has and transmits is often incomplete and that he sometimes only guesses and expresses his subjective feelings and opinions. Therefore, the lack of knowledge on the part of the narrator is reflected.

For example, when the narrator describes a night scene at Mrs. Poulteney’s house, with Sarah and Millie lying in one bed. Millie is referred to as a girl of “nineteen or so”, which suggests that the narrator has a limited knowledge of her age.

Another example, the narrator discusses the issue of lesbianism. In respect to the lady of the Marlborough House, he says: “I doubt if Mrs. Poulteney had ever heard of the word ‘lesbian’; and if she had...”. The hesitant expression “I doubt” makes it explicit that the narrator only assumes a certain fact.

As a work of historiographic-metafiction, ‘The French Lieutenant’s Woman’ operates within contradictory yet overlapping worlds. One of the major postmodern paradoxes of the novel is breaking the boundaries between reality and fiction, making the two worlds merge and, as a corollary, rendering the separation of the real and the fictitious narratives undesirable, and even impossible.

The novel oscillates between two contradictory, metafictional tendencies: Establishing the illusion of reality and exposing its fictionality. On the one hand, The French Lieutenant’s Woman’ draws attention to its artifice and to the processes involved in the act of creation; on the other hand, it is anchored in the real, historical world through the deployment of or allusions to real-world figures, events or works of art.

The discourse of the characters (considering Charles, Sarah, and Ernestina) of ‘The French Lieutenant’s Woman’ is often permeated by allusions to literature and literary characters of that time. The deployment of such allusions serves to authenticate the characters and to raise the credibility of the story. Fictitious characters of the novel identify themselves with the ontological world of the historical, real-world authors even though they have, in fact, the same fictional status as the literary characters they allude to, like Emma Bovary or Uriah Heep. In compliance with postmodern philosophy, the status of reality and fiction is questioned and the two worlds merge.

The postmodern themes and strategies ‘The French Lieutenant’s Woman’ displays in such abundance categorises this novel among the genre of historiographic-metafiction which crosses the boundaries between the worlds traditional historical fiction kept isolated. Just like the worlds of the present and the past; the fiction and the reality; the elitist and the popular; the mockery and the reverence and the continuity and the change blend in the novel, so do blend the postmodern themes and strategies. They are all interconnected, one necessarily evoking the other.

The novel is considered a landmark between the old tradition and the new experimental attempts, a bridge between the Victorian and the modern world, and one of the most exemplary and influential novels of the 1960s British fiction, which reflects the changes stimulated by postmodern philosophy and view of the world.

The paradoxical and contradictory tendency is inherent to postmodern art and makes ‘The French Lieutenant’s Woman’ a remarkable example of historiographic-metafiction, which showed another level of the possibilities of a novel, and influenced successive authors in their rendering of history and reality.