VILNIUS PEDAGOGICAL UNIVERSITY

FOREIGN LANGUAGE DEPARTMENT

MARGARITA DIDŽIULYTĖ

IMITATION AND PARODY

OF THE VICTORIAN NOVEL
IN JOHN FOWLES’S
“THE FRENCH LIEUTENANT’S WOMAN”

MASTER PAPER

Supervisor: Doc. R.Rudaitytė

VILNIUS, 2006
 CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

1. THEORETICAL PART:

1. 1. Postmodernism

1. 2. Intertextuality

2. THE NARRATIVE TECHNIQUE USED IN THE NOVEL “THE FRENCH

LIEUTENANT’S WOMAN” BY J. FOWLES

2. 1. Paratextual Level

2. 2. Duality of Presentation

2. 3. Multiple Endings in the Novel and their Function

CONCLUSIONS

SUMMARY

REFERENCES

2
 INTRODUCTION

John Robert Fowles (1926-2005) is rightly considered to be one of the most significant of
English writers. His novels won the popular and critical acclaim. He was born on March 31, 1926
in Leigh-on-Sea, a small town located about 40 miles from London in the county of Essex,
England. He loathed his suburban background and recalled it as oppressively conformist and his
family life as intensely conventional. Fowles was the son of a prosperous cigar-merchant, Robert
J. Fowles, and a school-teacher, Gladys Richards.

Fowles attended Bedford School, a large boarding school designed to prepare boys for
university from ages 13 to 18. After briefly attending the University at Edinburgh, the future
writer began compulsory military service and within two years was promoted to lieutenant.
However, World War II ended before he saw combat. Then Fowles spent four years at Oxford
where he was much influenced by the writings of the French existentialists. In particular he
admired Albert Camu and Jean Paul Sartre whose writings corresponded to his own ideas about
conformity and the will of individual. He received a degree in French in 1950 and began to
consider a career as a writer.

Several teaching jobs followed: a year lecturing English literature at the of Poiters,
France; two years teaching English at Anargyrios College on the Greek island of Spetsai; and
finally, between 1654 and 1663, teaching English at St. Godric’s College in London, where he
ultimately served as the department head. The time spent in Greece was of great importance to
Fowles. There he began to write poetry and between 1952 and 1960 he wrote several novels but
offered none to a publisher, considering them all incomplete in some way and too lengthy.
Although he started writing novels from the age of 26 he was in no hurry to publish them and his
first novel “The Collector” appeared when he was 37.

The book was published in the spring 1963 and was an immediate best-seller. The critical
acclaim and commercial success of “The Collector” allowed Fowles to devote all his time to
writing. So, Fowles stopped teaching and started a literary career. The narrator of the novel,
Freddie Clegg, is in his middle twenties, an orphaned child and a collector of butterflies. After
winning a national football lottery he uses his winnings to purchase a secluded Tudor mansion
with a fotresslike cellar. He kidnaps and imprisons a young woman, Miranda Grey, a lively art
student. The strong-willed Miranda keeps a diary, records their conversations and plans her
escape, while Clegg wants to win her “respect”. She gains small victories but never her freedom
and dies of pneumonia. At the end the collector plays with the idea of repeating his performance.

The “Aristos”, a collection of philosophical thoughts and musings on art, human nature
and other subjects, appeared the following year. It was a book about the writer’s personal
philosophies. Fowles’s second novel “The Magus” (1966, revised in 1977) followed. This novel
has become something of a cult novel, particularly in the USA. In the novel Fowles uses elements
from William Shakespeare’s play “The Tempest” (1623). The book was inspired by the writer’s
brief time on the Greek island of Spetsai. “The Magus” is a story about the Englishman, Nicholas
Urfe, who escapes his latest love affair on the Greek island of Phracos. There he meets the
3
demonic millionaire Maurice Conchis, the Prospero of the tale, and falls in love with Lily,
Conchis’s dead fiancee or an actress portraying her. Conchis is the master of magic and
hallucinations in the “Godgame”, which lead Urfe to deeper self-knowledge and re-birth. Fowles
interweaves in the story Greek myths, psychoanalysis, Nazis and stuffing explanations of the
mysterious events. Finally, Urfe breaks free from Conchis’s power. However, when Fowles
published the revised version of the novel twelve years later, this point was left more ambiguous.

In 1966 Fowles moved to Dorset. He lived first at Unerhill farm and then settled in a cliff-
top house by the sea on the southern coast of England in the small town called Lyme Regis. For a
period the writer was a curator of a local museum. Fowles even published several non-fiction
books about Lyme-Regis. He also used Lyme-Regis as the setting for the novel “The French
Lieutenant’s Woman”, one of his best novels which is still spoken of for many years after as the
most important event of the period. In the 1970s Fowles worked on a variety of literary projects –
including a series of essays on nature – and in 1973 he published a collection of poetry “Poems”.
He also worked on translations from French literature, including adaptations of “Cinderella” and
the novella “Ourika”. His translation of Marie de France’s 12th story “Eliduc” served as an
inspiration for the book “The Ebony Tower” (1974), consisting of a novella and four short
stories. The novel “Daniel Martin” (1977) was about an English screenwriter’s search for himself
in his past. The work is also full of observations on aesthetics, philosophy, cultural history, the
difference between Britain and the United States, archeology and myth. Daniel is engaged to Nell
but he realizes that he loves her sister Jane.

In the murder mystery “Maggot” (1985), which combines science fiction and history,
Fowles returned to the layered structure of “The Magus”. A group of five people travels in Devon
in 1736. After a night’s lodging they continue their journey – and disappear. An investigation
starts, three members of the group are found, but their testimonies lead to a miracle and
disturbing vision of a contact with travellers from the future. The novel is a beautiful recreation
of the eighteenth century mind. The novel “Mantissa”, a fable about a novelist’s struggle with his
muse, was published in 1982. It tells the story of a writer who awakes in hospital suffering from
amnesia. He has several apparently imaginary dialogues with Erato, his muse, who assumes
various forms throughout the novel.

Fowles also wrote short fiction, essays and poems and did translations. A range of his
non-fictional texts are to be found in introductions to other writer’s books, periodicals and
academic journals. “Wormholes: Essays and Occasional Writings” was published in 1998. This
anthology of writing includes journal entries, literary essays and musings on Englishness,
religion, the environment and many other topics written during four decades. “The Tree” (2000)
also offers us his reflections on his life, art and a variety of personal concerns. It contains
recollection of Fowles’s childhood and explores the impact of nature on his life and work.

In 1999 the writer was nominated for the Nobel Prize for literature. His every novel is a
big event in the literary world. All his fictional work sells out very quickly and the paperback
versions have sold millions of copies. In addition to the commercial success Fowles remains an
important figure in contemporary literature, both as a contributor to current discussions and an

4
influence on readers and other novelists. Critical studies about him continue to be published and
his work remains at the forefront of academic and popular debate on contemporary literature.

Fowles is described as a postmodern writer by such critics as G. Baužytė, M. Bradbury, L.

Hutcheon and many others. He is to a high degree original and he is always striking new paths in
literature. Malcolm Bradbury considers Fowles to be “one of our great writers, both because of
his in many ways traditional virtuosity and his willingness to see there is a new encounter to be
made between the conditions and options of modern existence and the form of art” (Bradbury,
1995, p. 293). He is a complex, celebrated writer, interested in manipulating the novel as a genre.
Fowles’s place in literature as a precursor of postmodernism in the English novel is singular and
durable. He gave a new direction to the English novel and is rightly considered to be the father of
the English postmodernism. The writer shows a preoccupation with a fictionality of his texts. His
novels are self-consciously reflexive, questioning the nature of the text. He experiments with the
variety of writing to explore the meaning of human behaviour. For the most of his narratives the
writer uses the salient motif of quest for self-knowledge, for freedom, for love.

Fowles remains distinguished by his attention to ideas: in particular, existentialism, the

relationship of man to nature and the role of the artist. G.Baužytė points out that Fowles’s main
themes are the aim of art and the artist’s responsibility (Baužytė, 1995, p. 49). Fowles believes
that the writer of serious fiction commits himself to altering the society in which he lives. He
feels that he may have helped a little in altering people’s view of life. Fowles’s main social
concerns are with the conditions of man whom he sees trapped in a role that denies his individual
freedom, thereby denying self-knowledge. Thus, his central philosophical preoccupation is the
conflict between the doctrines of free will and determinism.

Fowles’s writing career spanned more than 40 years, but his most famous work remains
“The French Lieutenant’s Woman” (1969) which was made into an Oscar-winning film starring
Jeremy Irons and Meril Streep in the title role. The novel finally established the writer’s
reputation so much that he was awarded with the Silver Pen Award the following year. It is also
the most commercially successful of Fowles’s novels. “The French Lieutenant’s Woman” is the
book that today’s casual readers seem to associate with Fowles. The novel grew out of a dream
the author had of a woman standing at the edge of a quay and looking out to the sea.

When the novel “The French Lieutenant’s Woman” was published in 1969 it was at once
recognized as a brilliantly innovative and complex book. The appearance of the novel was a
bombshell because it had an incredible double ending. It was the first example of postmodern
playfulness anyone had seen. The book was an immediate bestseller and has still remained the
most commercially successful novel because the surface story, that of a passionate love affair,
could be readily enjoyed without having to engage deeply with the philosophical ideas underlying
it, but those postmodern ideas and techniques that the writer uses to convey them make the novel
so remarkable.

“The French Lieutenant’s Woman”, being a complex, innovative novel of an outstanding

English author, certainly, allows different interpretations. As M. Bradbury rightly puts it:
5
 “We might regard it as a brilliant novel of recuperation, displaying the availability of the
Victorian tradition for the modern writer… It is a story of emancipation through history,
where Victorian hypocrisy, prudishness, ignorance and sentimentality give way to modern
truth and authenticity, good faith and freedom, and Sarah is set free from the
imprisonment that as a woman and a social alien constrains her. Alternatively, we might
take it as a very modern novel, about two characters, and above all Sarah, discovering
their modern emancipation in a world that it is framed, by a learned and well-read author
with a great gift for a pastiche and imitation, with the dress of Victorian experience and
the background of Victorian society. Or more obliquely, we might take it as a postmodern
meta-text, a commentary on writing itself, a work where the consciousness of the fictional
nature of all fictions is made clear, and attempt to seek their freedom from it” (Bradbury,
1995, p. 281-282).

Another postmodernist critic, Linda Hutcheon, cites “The French Lieutenant’s Woman”
as an example of postmodern historiographic metafiction, that it is an “example of doubled
narrative” (Hutcheon, 1995, p. 84). She writes about the novel”
“…the specificity of Victorian social and literary theory is evoked (in tandem with both
the fictional narrative and the metafictional commentary). Through footnotes which
explain details of Victorian sexual habits, vocabulary, politics, or social practices.
Sometimes a note is used to offer a translation for modern readers, who just might not be
able to translate Latin quite as easily as their Victorian forebears could. This is in clear
(and ironic) contrast to Laurence Sterne’s assumptions in Tristram Shandy that readers
and commentators shared a certain educational background. Obviously, part of the
function of these postmodern notes is extra-textual, referring us to a world outside the
novel, but there is something else going on too: most of the notes refer explicitly to other
texts, other representations first, and to the external world only indirectly through them”
(Hutcheon, 1993, p. 84).
Hutcheon also speaks about another role of footnotes: they function “as self-reflexive signals to
assure the reader as to the historical credibility of the particular witness or authority cited, while
at the same time they also disrupt our reading – that is, our creating – of a coherent, totalizing
fictive narrative” (Hutcheon, 1993, p. 85).

Fowles’s novel “The French Lieutenant’s Woman” shows how thoroughly this form of
postmodern fiction, a historiographic metafiction, depends upon intertextual practice. Being
double-coded, it exploits the tension between fact and fiction, between the constructed and the
real. There are a lot of textual references in the novel, for example, references to modern
theoretical ideas, including those of Barthes, or the notes explaining aspects of Victorian society
in comparison to the twentieth century. These references disrupt historical realism.

“The French Lieutenant’s Woman” is a retrospective twentieth century examination of the

Victorian novel of the nineteenth century. The writer presents us with the realistic picture of the
nineteenth century compared with the twentieth century. In the novel Fowles uses postmodern
techniques and strategies to produce the parody of historical fiction. As M. Bradbury puts it, “The
French Lieutenant’s Woman” is “both a formal imitation of the Victorian novel and an elegant
endeavor at assessing the historical and mental difference between such a story and a modern
reader – involving the construction of the consciousness of the world of a hundred years ago and
6
the consciousness underlying the whole society and producing a kind of cultural unity between
the inner and the outer world” (Bradbury, 1995 p. 284).

The novel “The French Lieutenant’s Woman” is considered to be an excellent imitation

and parody of the Victorian novel (Baužytė, 1995, p. 49). The aim of this paper is to prove this by
analyzing the novel. In my paper I will use Genette’s theory of narrative discourse. Gerard
Genette (born in 1930) is a French literary theorist, associated with poststructuralist movement.
He has written several critical books about the practice of reading literature and about the
relationship between literature and critique. His most important work is a four-part “Figures” but
he has continued teaching and writing up to this day. “Narrative Discourse: An essay on Method”
(1972), a section of “Figures”, is both a classic text of French structuralism and the central
reference for all the studies in literary domain of narratology.

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 1. THEORETICAL PART

In critical works “The French Lieutenant’s Woman” is rightly considered to be an

outstanding parody and imitation of the Victorian novel. It is a good example of the writer’s
extraordinary gift as an imitator and a literary stylist. Fowles uses works of earlier artists as
material for his own novel; he takes up subjects from history of English literature. This reflects
the postmodern thinking in which art is seen to mirror other arts (texts), not life or “reality”.
Fowles breaks away from the realist convention by foregrounding intertextual position of his
novel. “The French Lieutenant’s Woman” is also one of the best-known examples of
postmodernist metafiction (Baužytė, 1995, p. 36). This kind of writing deliberately breaks fictive
illusion and comments directly upon its own fictive nature or process of composition.

Because of the inevitability of textuality of our knowledge of the world and history,
imitation is no longer seen in negative terms because it is considered to be the essence of true
literature. The idea of the past partly forms the present. However, all these ideas are newly
formed and new significance is given to them.

Before finally moving to the actual discussion, it is necessary to comment on two central
concepts of this paper: (1) “postmodernism” and (2) “intertextuality”. These notions are used
differently by different theorists, and consequently are not without some conceptual ambiguities.
Hence their brief elaboration is presented.

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 1. 1. Postmodernism

Postmodernism is a complicated term which is highly debated among postmodernists

themselves. Most theorists have their own working definition. Whatever the conclusion - one
thing is certain - “postmodernism” is not easily definable. Many philosophers and theorists have
added something to the discussion, but no one has come with a satisfactory definition.

It was first used in reference to architecture in 1974 to describe a movement that rejected
a modernist passion for the new and wanted to return to the reassuring classical forms of the past.
Literary critics began to use the term in the 1960s to describe the experimental fiction of the post-
World War II period which reacted against the perceived norms of the classical modernism.
Other critics see postmodernism as the continuation and development of modernist ideas since it
extended many of its fundamental techniques and assumptions, while still others view past
literature and culture retrospectively through postmodern eyes and claim that certain much earlier
works are postmodern.

There are many similarities between modernism and postmodernism. Postmodernism

ignores the distinction between high and low forms of art. Postmodernism also favors reflexivity
and self-consciousness, fragmentation and discontinuity, ambiguity, simultaneity and an
emphasis on the fragmented, dehumanized subject. Both modern and postmodern literatures
represent a break from the nineteenth century realism in which a story was told from an objective
or omniscient point of view. They also explore subjectivism, turning from external reality to
examine inner states of consciousness, in many cases drawing on modernist examples in the
stream of consciousness styles of Virginia Wolf and James Joyce.

However, there are crucial differences between modernism and postmodernism in the
attitude to tradition. Postmodernism, many argue, emphasizes pastiche and parody of earlier
forms and styles. Postmodern art rejects notions of originality and modernism’s desire to “Make
it New”. Unlike modernist writers, who created works out of pure imagination, postmodernist
artists work with cultural givens trying to manipulate them in various ways. They very often use
parody and pastiche for this purpose.

Postmodernism involves not only a continuation of the modernist experiments, but also
attempts to break away from modernist forms as well as to overthrow its “high art” by recourse to
the models of “mass culture” in film, television, newspaper cartoons and popular music. An
undertaking in some postmodernist writings is to subvert the foundations of our accepted modes
of thought and experience so as to reveal the “meaninglessness” of existence and the underlying
“nothingness”.

Postmodernism has sought to explain many uncertainties, ironies, contradictions and

multiple points of view that animate the world. Postmodern literature is often self-consciously
reflexive, questioning the nature of the text, the authority and existence of the author. It uses
techniques like pastiche, metanarrative, nonlinear constructions, absurdity and irony.
9
 1. 2. Intertextuality

The term intertextuality is crucial in an attempt to understand the notion of

postmodernism in this sense. It is one of the most commonly used terms in contemporary critical
vocabulary, but it is not a transparent term. In postmodern epoch, theorists often claim, it is not
possible any longer to speak of originality or the uniqueness of the artistic object, since texts are
always built from existing cultural codes and norms and traditions established by previous works
of art. The text can be called the intertext, and thus the term intertextuality foregrounds notions of
relativity, interconnectedness and interdependence in modern literature and culture.

The term intertextuality emerges from the complex history of modern literary theory. It is
associated with the names of M. Bakhtin, J. Kristeva and R. Barthes. Intertextuality has its origin
in the twentieth-century linguistics, particularly, in the seminal work of the Swiss linguist
Ferdinand de Saussure. His emphasis on the systematic feature of language establishes the
relational nature of meaning and thus of texts.

However, intertextuality also emerges from other theories which are more concerned with
the social context within which words are exchanged. The work of the Russian theorist Mikhail
Bakhtin (1895-1975) is crucial here. Bakhtin thought Saussurean system was devoid of social
context, and he argued that a speaker’s utterances were always directed at others, who in turn,
would produce countering utterances, as in dialogue, hence in dialogism.

His ideas helped others articulate theories of intertextuality. For Bakhtin the relational
nature of the word stems from the word existence within specific social sites, specific social
registers, specific moments of utterance and reception. Julia Kristeva’s attempt to combine
Saussurean and Bakhtinian insights and major theories produced the first articulation of
intertextual theory in the late 1960s. In her work intertextuality suggests the interdependence of
texts, the continual deferment of meaning through and between texts.

It is possible to assume that a literary work is not simply the product of a single author,
but of its relationship to other texts and to the structures of language itself. So, intertextuality
subverts the concept of the text as self-sufficient totality. Thus, writing is always a re-writing
which foregrounds the trace of various other texts. Postmodernism recognizes the value of
tradition. It understands present culture as the product of previous representation and it exploits
and comments on the past using irony and parody.

Bakhtin traced the polyphonic character of the novel back to its historical roots in popular
carnival practices. He characterized the formal features of carnivalized literature which is
heterogeneous, mixed with different styles and registers. Where the official genres are typically
unitary, carnivalized literature interrupts the text with a multiplicity of inserted genres – letters,
essays, theatrical dialogues, and novels-within-the-novel, and so on. Carnivalized literature, in
other words, is characterized by stylistic heteroglosia and recursive structure – features which
postmodern literature also has.
10
 In the polyphonic novel, according to Bakhtin, there is no objective narratorial voice to
guide us through the vast array of voices, interpretations, world-views, opinions and responses.
The critic does not seek to announce the death of the author, but the author does not enter the
novel as a guiding authoritative voice and much of his speech exists as reiteration of existing
speech – genres, utterances, class and other distinct and cultural positions.

The polyphonic novel presents us with the world which does not support only one official
point of view, one ideological position, but with the world which is literally dialogic. It is
important to note that dialogism does not simply concern the clash between different characters –
central discourses; dialogism is also a central feature of each character’s own individual
discourse. This is what Bakhtin means by double-voiced discourse and with this notion we began
to come to a major theory of intertextuality, that is all utterances depend on or call to other
utterances; no utterance itself is singular; the word is always permeated with traces of other
words, other uses. This can be called intertextuality.

Influenced by Bakhtin’s ideas, Roland Barthes (1915-1980), one of the most famous
exponents of poststructuralist theory, also states that the origin of the text is not a unified
authorial consciousness, but a plurality of other voices, other words, other utterances and other
texts. According to him, there are no emotions before the textual description of emotions, no
thoughts before the textual representation of those thoughts; no significant actions which do not
signify outside of already textualized and encoded actions. The modern writer arranges and
compiles the always already written or spoken.

In his famous polemical 1968 essay “The Death of the Author” Barthes employs
intertetextual theory to make a strong argument of the figure of the author in the production of
meaning and the very nature of literary meaning itself. This essay is widely known for its
displacing the author from the centre of critical art. The essay provides a short and useful
introduction to some of the significant themes developed in postructuralism. For him, literary
meaning can never be fully stabilized by the reader, since literary work’s intertextual nature
always leads the readers on to new textual relations. Authors, therefore, cannot be responsible for
the multiple meanings readers can discover within literary texts. Barthes views such a situation as
liberation for readers from the traditional power and authority of the “author” who is now “dead”.
This idea, which is expressed in a much quoted phrase “the death of the author is the birth of the
reader”, is one of the most widely known features of intertextual theory ” (Barthes, Modern
Literary Theory, 1996, p.122).

We should accept that the author’s control over the text is limited, that the text is available
for more plural interpretation and the readers are free to read more meanings according to their
own predilections, ideologies and political convictions. The phrase “Death of the Author” is used
to convey the idea that texts have meaning and an independent existence outside that intended by
the author, depend on the context and reader. The theory of the death of the author states that the
intentions of the author are meaningless to the interpretation of the text. According to this theory,
any given text consists not of one authorial voice but of multiple genres, outside influences,
subconscious drives and preexisting texts that constantly shape and inform communication.

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 There has, however, been another approach to the relationship between readers and
literary texts they read which uses intertextuality to argue for critical positions at times
diametrically opposed to those of Bakhtin and Barthes. The French literary critic Gerard Genette
employs intertextual theory to argue for critical certainty, or at least for the possibility of saying
definite, stable and incontrovertible things about literary texts. Literary works, for him, are not
original, unique, unitary wholes, but particular articulations of an enclosed system and the
function of criticism is to rearrange the work back into its relation to the closed literary system.

In his studies, Genette tries to redescribe the entire field of poetics from a perspective of
transtextuality, which is his version of intertextuality. Transtextuality for him is the textual
transcendence of the text which can be defined as all that is set in the text in the relationship with
other texts. It includes issues of imitation, transformation and so on. According to Genette,
transtextuality covers all the aspects of a particular text. In order to illustrate this point and clear
it up somewhat, Genette proceeds to present four subcategories of transtextuality as he defines
them.

The first kind of transtextuality is termed intertextuality which he defines as the presence
of a text within another text. The French critic reduces intertextuality to issues of quotation,
plagiarism and allusion. The second type of transtextuality is paratextuality which will be
discussed in the paper later. The third type is styled metatextuality: that is, when a text takes up a
relation of commentary to another text. The fourth kind is hypertextuality. What Genette calls the
hypotext is a text that can be definitely located as a major source of signification for a text for
instance, Homer’s “Odyssey” is a hypotext for Joyce’s “Ulysses”. The last type, architextuality,
includes generic, modal, thematic and figurative expectations about texts.

Linda Hutcheon, one of famous contemporary critics, has promoted a greater

understanding of postmodern literature. Being a major theorist of the relationship between
postmodernism and intertextual theory, she argues that postmodernism is contradictory and
double-coded, since it “paradoxically manages to legitimize culture (high and mass) even as it
subverts it” (Hutcheon, 1993, p. 15). In her approach, modernism can never be simply opposed
to postmodernism since the latter movement continually relies on and exploits the former styles,
codes and approaches, just as it relies on and exploits those of other historical periods. The
postmodernism’s employment of the codes and forms of the past are viewed in terms of the
concept of parody, which is the key term in Linda Hutcheon’s theory of postmodernism. She
writes:
“Parody – often called ironic quotation, pastiche, appropriation, or intertextuality - is
usually considered central to postmodernism… But this parodic reprise of the past of art
is not nostalgic; it is always critical. It is also not ahistorical or de-historicizing; it does
not wrest past art from its original historical context and reassemble it into some sort of
presentist spectacle. Instead, through a double process of installing and ironizing, parody
signals how present representations come from past ones and what ideological
consequences derive from both continuity and difference” (Hutcheon, 1993, p. 93).
This citation shows that Hutcheon even considers that parody is closely related to intertextuality.

By using frequent quotations and parody, postmodernist authors often indicate that every
text is embedded in other texts and the emergence of the term “intertextuality” in contemporary
12
literary criticism is used to emphasize this. Linda Hutcheon also states: “Postmodern parody is a
kind of contesting revision or rereading of the past that both confirms and subverts the power of
the representations of history” (Hutcheon, 1993, p. 95). In other words, parody allows writers, on
the one hand, to subvert the dominant literary tradition, but, on the other hand, to negotiate their
own place in literature. So, parody is unavoidable in postmodernism.

Obviously, parody is not a literary strategy which is restricted to contemporary literature.

Take for instance, Cervantes’s “Don Quixote”, which parodies the chivalric romance, and Henry
Fielding’s “An Apology for the Life Mrs. Shamela Andrews” or “Shamela (1741)” which attacks
the middle class morality of Samuel Richardson’s “Pamela or Virtue Rewarded”. “Shamela” is
written as a shocking revelation of the true events which took place in the life of Pamela (whose
true name turns out to be Shamela) is in fact a wicked and lascivious creature, scheming to entrap
her master, Squire Booby, into marriage. Another novel by Fielding parodying “Pamela” is “The
History of the Adventures of Joseph Andrews and his friend, Mr. Abrahams Adams” (1972),
more commonly known as “Joseph Andrews”.

Postmodern novels dealing with historical subjects, which Hutcheon calls “postmodern
historiographic metafiction”, show that no historical narrative of events records or represents
those events. Historical events themselves only come to the historian through what Hutcheon,
following Genette, calls “paratexts”. History is only available to the contemporary historian
through a network of prior texts. History exists as a vast web of subjective texts, the new
historical account being one more author’s struggle to negotiate a way through an intertextual
network of previous forms and representations.

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 2. THE NARRATIVE TECHNIQUE
USED IN THE NOVEL
“THE FRENCH LIUTENANT’S WOMAN”
BY J.FOWLES

The plot of the novel “The French Lieutenant’s Woman” by J. Fowles focuses on the love
affair between a Victorian gentleman and a poor governess. A wealthy amateur paleontologist
Charles Smithson falls in love with Sarah Woodruff. Charles is a noble young man who expects
to inherit his uncle’s fortune. Sarah is a passionate and imaginative governess who claims to have
lost her heart and good name to a French lieutenant whose wounds she took care of while he was
a guest of the family that formerly employed her. It has scandalized the “polite society” of Lyme
Regis and has ostracized her from this society. She is generally held to be the French Lieutenant’s
Woman. Fowles depicts Sarah as a nonconformist who struggles to keep her individuality. In
doing so, Sarah captures the attention of Charles and in turn brings about change in him.

Another woman in Charles’s life is Ernestina Freeman, who is ten years younger than he.
She is a superficial, spoiled child and her conformity contrasts to Sarah’s rebelliousness. These
two characters make the dark-light opposition. Ernestina represents the light, predictable and
respectable, whereas Sarah appears the dark and mysterious. It is possible to assume that the main
characters of the novel, Sarah, Charles and Ernestina, present the reader with different attitudes
towards life. They each illuminate one of the basic facets of the human personality: the
individual, the compromiser and the conformer.

The novel seems initially a story of Charles’s difficult choice between Ernestina and the
outcast Sarah. Sarah becomes the outright heroine and refuses, in turn, to remain in her Victorian
fictional place, transgressing the novel frame and carrying with her the intimation of a past
history, so that she can be read as an early twentieth century new woman or a feminist persecutor.
It is possible to say that Sarah is an existentialist before her time and persuades Charles to
become one. He must understand what she already knows about the trapped world in which they
live and the necessity to seek freedom. To be free, he must break out of the conventional society
where he is well-placed, break the engagement with Ernestina and suffer the consequences of
freedom of choice. Charles develops a sense of independence through realizing that his love for
Sarah is worth more than his shallow attachment to Ernestina. Thus, the two main characters,
especially Sarah, think and act in a twentieth century way and Fowles explores the evolutionary
progress of man’s thinking from the religious authoritarianism of the Victorian era to the
frightening existential freedom of the twentieth century.

Postmodern culture, in general, is often characterized by a compulsion to return to past

texts and artifacts through allusions and quotations, the re-writing and re-viewing of past texts. In
the case of Fowles’s novel “The French Lieutenant’s Woman” this return is dominantly ironical
and subversive. It should be noted that in the 1960s in the British literature there was a strong
tendency to experiment with new forms of writing. Contemporary writers were greatly indebted
to this movement, either by opposing it or by subverting the heritage of the past. Fowles’s novel
“appeared at an interesting time, when many British writers were rethinking their relationship to
their tradition” (Bradbury, 1995, p. 282). The writers constantly questioned their own texts and
14
used parody and intertextuality as new techniques. “The French Lieutenant’s Woman” is an
example of postmodern historical metafiction, because it widely employs intertextual references
and allusions. The novel is also a highly unconventional postmodern narrative in which Fowles
widely experiments with writing techniques, such as self-conscious authorial intrusions, duality
of presentation, dislocations of time and multiple endings.

Fowles skillfully uses the historical background of the period. His choice of time is very
deliberate because the Victorian Age in Great Britain is considered to be the height of British
industrial revolution and the full effects of industrialization made themselves felt. This is
reflected in the words that are used by Fowles as an epigraph to the third chapter of the novel.
Here the writer takes as an epigraph the phrase from “Portrait of an Age” by G. M. Young: “Of
all decades in our history, a wise man would choose the eighteen-fifties to be young in”(Fowles,
1969, p. 11).

It was also a significant period of social reform, when the second reform Bill was passed,
when the new ideas were bubbling to the surface from Karl Marx, Charles Darwin and others.
These new scientific theories – particularly Darwin’s theory of evolution - raised religious and
philosophical doubts. The tendency to look with critical eyes on man, society and God was
becoming the dominant mode of thought. This period is often regarded as a time of many
contradictions. There was a clash between the widespread cultivation of outward dignity and
restraint and the widespread presence of many deplorable phenomena, such as prostitution, child
labor and having an economy based largely on exploitation of colonies.

All these events undermined the celebrated Victorian optimism, confidence and even
complacency of the early days of Victoria’s reign which were caused by scientific and economic
progress made in the nineteenth century. It should be noted that the term “Victorian” is very often
used to denote a strict set of moral standards, usually applied hypocritically. The term shows
negative qualities of smug narrow mindedness, conformity, morality and an overwhelming need
to be respectable. Thus, the novel reflects the crisis of Victorian faith, the twists and turns of
belief of the period.

Literary activity in Victorian England was intense and prolific and much of the writing
concerned with social problems. It was the great age of the English novel. Charles Dickens,
William M. Thackeray, George Eliot, George Meredith, Charlotte Bronte, Anthony Trollope,
Thomas Hardy and many other famous writers and poets were working at that time. Victorian
literature pretended to mirror reality in a sincere way and to educate the audience with plain
truths; the moral message was that as long as the hero stuck to the right principles, even in harsh
circumstances, God or Divine Providence would recompense him and punish the wicked. Fowles
knew Victorian literature thoroughly. He studied in detail its plots and characters and he skillfully
used this knowledge to write a Victorian type of novel using the conventions of the period but
from a twentieth century view-point.

15
 2. 1. Paratextual Level

The study of paratextuality acknowledges that the artifice that surrounds the text can be as
important as the text itself. Paratextuality plays a significant role in narrative production a text
and helps to direct the reader’s reception of a text. Genette has made important contributions to
analysis of paratext. According to him, paratext consists of those elements which lie on the
threshold of a text. Genette further divides it into two smaller units: a peritext and an epitext.
Peritext is relatively closely associated with the text itself. Examples of the epitext are titles,
chapter titles, genre indications, prefaces, notes, epigraphs, footnotes, colophons, dedications,
typefaces and type of paper. The epitext, on the other hand, consists of statements about the book
beyond the boundaries of outside the text. The epitext includes interviews, publicity
announcements, reviews by and addresses to critics, private letters and other authorial and
editorial discussions.

Paratextuality is extremely important in “The French Lieutenant’s Woman” as Fowles,

like many other postmodernist writers, blurs the lines between text and extra-text. In the paper I
will analyze only mottoes and epigraphs that Fowles uses before each chapter of the novel. The
writer moves freely between past and present, adds footnotes, quotations from Darwin, Marx and
the great Victorian authors and comments on Victorian politics and customs. Linda Hutcheon
tells us that “epigraphs in historiographic metafiction move in two directions at once: to remind
us of the narrativity (and fictionality) of the primary texts and to assert its factuality and
historicity” (Hutcheon, 1993, p. 85).

In Victorian tradition, each chapter of the novel has at least one epigraph, taken mainly
from Victorian literature. Many of them are from works of Thomas Hardy, Alfred Lord
Tennyson, A. H. Clough, Matthew Arnold, Charles Darwin, George Eliot, William Makepeace
Thackeray, Jane Austen and some others. Fowles’s knowledge of Victorian writers is amazing.
He also quotes papers of the time. The way the writer chooses his quotations shows sharp
sensibility and a remarkable intelligence which throws very clear light upon the author referred
to. However, Fowles does not blindly follow the Victorian authors who widely use epigraphs and
mottoes. The purpose of them is to set the tone for the chapter which follows and to comment on
the events of the chapter, for example, on the situation and character. The epigraphs also serve as
foregrounding.

First of all, Fowles uses epigraphs from Thomas Hardy (1840-1928), who speaks about
love. For instance, the epigraph for the first chapter of the novel is taken from T. Hardy’s poem
‘The Riddle”. This epigraph and the title of the poem itself emphasize the enigmatic figure of
Sarah Woodruff who is presented as a riddle not only to Charles but for the narrator as well.
Stretching eyes west
Over the sea,
Wind foul or fair,
Always stood she
Prospect–impressed;
Solely out there
Did her gaze rest,
16
 Never elsewhere
Seemed charmed to be.
THOMAS HARDY, “The Riddle”
(Fowles, 1969, p. 3)
It should be noted that Sarah in the chapter is described in similar terms and she remains such a
mysterious figure throughout the novel. The reader learns about Sarah’s actions, her position in
society and what other characters think of her. But her own thoughts are never presented in the
novel and Fowles does not give explanations for her behaviour, as he does, describing other
characters of the novel, for instance, Charles.

Or let’s take the epigraphs to chapter 58 where the results of Charles’s search for Sarah
are described. They show what is going on in Charles’s mind, his spiritual growth and the tragic
fate of the two main characters of the novel:
I sought and sought. But O her soul
Has not since thrown
Upon my own
One beam! Yes, she is gone, is gone.
HARDY, “At a Seaside Town in1869”
(Fowles, 1969, p. 425)
The epigraph highlights Charles’s mood. In fact, he is desperate because he has failed to find
Sarah. He has checked agencies for governesses, advertised – all without success. Charles has
also visited the United States of America and advertised there.

The penultimate chapter, containing a happy ending, has the epigraph with the name of
the main characters’ child Lalage:
Lalage’s come; aye
Come is she now, O!
HARDY, “Timing Her”
(Fowles, 1969, p. 438)
The chapter describes Charles’s and Sarah’s passion reunion and their daughter Lalage serves as
the healer of breach. The child seems to be the main reason for characters to be together.

The second much cited in “The French Lieutenant’s Woman” poet is Alfred Tennyson
(1809-1892). Fowles refers to his poems “In Memoriam” (1850) and “Maud” (1855). The first
poem “Memoriam” was devoted to the poet’s best friend, Arthur Henry Hollam, who had died in
Vienna in 1833 aged 22. The different moods, thoughts, beliefs, recognition and overall terrible
sense of loss reflect both the individual suffering and some of the main concerns of the period as
well. “Maud” is a morbid story, because its theme is that shedding blood is a cure for
disappointed love. Like Charles, the narrator goes abroad but becomes mad.

The epigraph to chapter 6, where Sarah’s history is presented, emphasizes again that she
is strange and mysterious and she is difficult to be explained:
“Ah, Maud, you milk-white fawn, you are all unmeet for a wife.
TENNYSON, Maud (1855)
(Fowles, 1969, p. 31)
17
This chapter contains Sarah’s history which the vicar tells to Mrs. Poultney, her future employer.
The vicar told that Sarah’s conduct led to scandal because she had behaved without propriety in
leaving her job and running after a Frenchman, Mr. Varguenness. In Victorian time a lady could
not do something like that and remain a lady. The reader learns Sarah’s history but Fowles does
not give us explanations for her behaviour.

The second encounter between Charles and Sarah in chapter 10 is also highlighted by the
epigraph from this poem:
And once, but once, she lifted her eyes,
And suddenly, sweetly, strangely blush’d
To find they were met my own…
TENNYSON, Maud (1855)
(Fowles, 1969, p. 66)
Here Charles discovers Sarah sleeping and must apologize when she awakes and sees him,
observing her. The reader can guess that something significant will happen between them.

The epigraph to chapter 12, taken from Tennyson’s poem “In Memoriam”, makes us think
more deeply about the relations between Charles and his fiancee Ernestina described there. On
the surface there is a strong attraction between them. However, Charles does not mention his
meeting with Sarah to Ernestina and the epigraph also shows that their relations have a break off:
And was the day of my delight
As pure and perfect as I say?
TENNYSON, In memoriam (1850)
(Fowles, 1969, p. 84)
Chapter 13, where Fowles speculates about the artist’s role in a modern society, has somewhat a
vague epigraph, reflecting the tone of this chapter, also taken from Tennyson’s poem “Maud”:
“For the drift of the Maker is dark, an Isis hid by the veil…” (Fowles, 95)

Let’s take one of the two epigraphs to chapter 20 where Sarah tells her story to Charles.
They show that we mustn’t blame Sarah for her position in society. The epigraph, taken from
Tennyson’s poem “In Memoriam”, makes her innocent in the reader’s eyes:
Are God and Nature then at strife,
That Nature lends such evil dreams?
So careful of the type she seems,
So careless of the single life…
TENNYSON, In memoriam (1850)
(Fowles, 1969, p. 163)
Sarah asks Charles to meet once again, when she has more time, so that she can tell him the truth
about her situation and obtains his advice. In their meeting, described in this chapter, Sarah
revealed to Charles that she indeed became infatuated with the French lieutenant when he was
recovering from an injury in the house, where she was a governess. She followed him when he
left for France. Charles is surprised to find out that she seems to be proud of her status as an
outcast, for it differentiates her from the society she considers unjust.

18
 In chapter 25 Charles receives a note from Sarah and decides to go to her; however, the
epigraph states that Charles will not be with her and they will part:
O young lord-lover, what sights are those,
For one that never be thine?
TENNYSON, Maud (1855)
(Fowles, 1969, p. 205)

The epigraph to chapter 45 is also taken from Tennyson’s poem “Maud”. In this chapter
Fowles rejects his first traditional ending, explaining that it is just one possibility, a hypothetical
future for his characters. Charles recognizes his freedom of choice and decides to put up at Exeter
for the night. Then he visits Sarah at the hotel. The epigraph clearly shows Charles’s ability to act
in another way:
And ah for a man arise in me,
That the man I am may to be!
TENNYSON, Maud (1855)
(Fowles, 1969, p. 339)

The third much cited in the novel poet is A.H. Clough (1819-1861). His poetry is often
experimental in form, expressive in love, doubt, duty. That is why the mottoes from him in some
ways reflect the doubts and uncertainties of Charles. For example, let’s take the epigraph to
chapter 44 which speaks about duty. It highlights the first fake ending. It is the conventional
Victorian ending in which virtue triumphs. In it Charles arrives in Exeter, goes to Lyme and
confesses to Ernestina. They are reunited. The narrator recounts that they go on to marry, have
seven children and live well into the twentieth century. However, this ending should not be the
right one because, according to the epigraph, duty is not always the best way out:
Duty – that’s to say complying
With what’er’s expected here…
With the form confirming duly,
Senseless what it meaneth truly…
‘Tis the stern and prompt suppressing,
As an obvious deadly sin,
All the questioning and the guessing
Of the soul’s own soul within:
“Tis the coward acquiescence
In a destiny’s behest…
A.H.CLOUGH, “Duty” (1841)
(Fowles, 1969, p. 334)

The epigraph to chapter 54, taken again from Clough’s poetry, has the mood of despair
that somehow predicts the future relations between Charles and Sarah:
My wind is turned to bitter north
That was so soft a south before…
A.H.CLOUGH, Poem (1841)
(Fowles, 1969, p. 399)

19
In this chapter Charles finds out that Sarah has gone without trace after their passion encounter at
the hotel. He writes a letter to Sarah, telling her how much she means to him and promises her
marriage. Unfortunately, Charles never learns that his servant Sam has not delivered his letter.

Another cited poet is Matthew Arnold (1822-1888), epigraphs from whom also have a
connection with the situation of Charles and Sarah. Thus, chapter 9 gives some information on
Sarah. The reader learns more about her character. Sarah can see through people, including her
employer, Mrs. Poultney. She influences the Poultney’s house despite Mrs. Poultney’s obvious
malevolence. Sarah is popular with the servants, except Mrs. Fairley. The following epigraph
taken from Arnold’s poem “A Farewell” emphasizes Sarah’s originality, her ability not to be an
ordinary woman:
…this heart, I know,
To be long lov’d was never fram’d;
But something in its depths doth glow
Too strange, too restless, too untamed.
MATTHEW ARNOLD, “A Farewell” (1853)
(Fowles, 1969, p. 51)
The epigraph to chapter 21 from Arnold’s poem “Parting” makes the reader foresee the tragic fate
of Charles and Sarah’s relations:
Forgive me! forgive me!
Ah, Marguerite, fain
Would these arms reach to clasp thee: –
But see! ‘tis in vain.

In my void air towards thee

My strain’d arms are cast.
But a sea rolls between us –
Our different past.
MATTHEW ARNOLD, “Parting” (1853)
(Fowles, 1969, p. 178)
The sad tone of the poem and its name “Parting” somehow predict that the main characters of the
novel, Charles and Sarah, will part forever and their efforts to be happy together will be vain.

The epigraph to the next chapter reflects Charles’s struggle with himself, his wish to be
indifferent to Sarah:
I too have felt the load I bore
In a too strong emotion’s sway;
I too have wished, no woman more,
This starting, feverish heart, away,

I too have longed for trenchant force

And will like a dividing spear;
Have praised the keen, unscrupulous course,
Which knows no doubt, which feels no fear.

But in the world I learnt, what there

Thou too will surely one day prove,
20
 That will, that energy, though rare,
Are yet far, far less rare than love.
MATTHEW ARNOLD, “A Farewell” (1853)
(Fowles, 1969, p. 188)

There are epigraphs from other sources which also reflect the Victorian climate. All the
epigraphs make our understanding of the novel deeper. Here are some more examples. For
instance, chapter 3, which describes Charles’s background, has two epigraphs foreshadowing this
story. It should be noted that Charles in the novel is described more openly than Sarah. The
reader learns not only facts from his biography, but his thoughts and motives of his behaviour.
Explanations of Charles’s actions are also presented while there are no explanations of Sarah’s
behaviour and only facts are presented. The first epigraph to this chapter is taken from Charles
Darwin’s work “The Origins of Species” (1859) which somehow makes the reader think about
the main character’s origin:
“But a still more important consideration is that the chief part of the organization of every
living creature is due to inheritance; and consequently, though each being assuredly is
well fitted for its place in nature, many structures have now no very close and direct
relations to present habits of life” (Fowles, 1969, p. 11).

The second epigraph to this chapter is taken from G.M. Young “Portrait of an Age”. It
states that the time of the Queen Victoria is the best time to be young in (Fowles, 1969, p. 11).
This epigraph, already mentioned in the paper, is used deliberately to show Charles as a lucky
young man who has all grounds to be happy because of his privileged position in the society, of
his future marriage with Ernestina, a daughter of a rich man. The epigraphs help the writer to
describe Charles as a conventional nineteenth-century gentleman whose outlook and attitudes are
typical of the age in 1867. He is presented as an intelligent idler, but he is not stereotyped beyond
hope of that age.

The ironical tone of chapter 8 concerned with the description of Charles on the fossil hunt
is emphasized by the epigraph from Leslie Stephen “Sketches from Cambridge” (1865):
“But if you wish at once to do nothing and be respectable nowadays, the best pretext – is
to be at work on some profound study…” (Fowles, 1969, p. 44)
The given epigraph highlights the writer’s satirical tone of an observer, describing the Victorian
amateur collector.

Chapter 4 presents Mrs. Poultney, Sarah’s employer. She is depicted as a black villain,
representing only evil and hypocrisy. Mrs. Poultney is a caricature of Victorian responsibility, her
Christianity is only surface. In this chapter Fowles skillfully imitates the style of Charles
Dickens. Two epigraphs to this chapter add more details to the description of the character of
Mrs. Poultney, the atmosphere in which Sarah has to live. The first epigraph is taken from a
famous Victorian poem written by Mrs. Norton:
What’s DONE, is what remains! Ah, blessed they
Who leave completed tasks of love to stay
And answer mutely for them, being dead,
Life was not purposeless, though Life be fled.
21
 MRS. NORTON, The Lady of La Caraye (1863):
(Fowles, 1969, p. 18)
The second epigraph is from E. Boyston Pike “Human Documents of the Victorian Golden Age”:
“Most British families of the middle and upper classes lived above their own cesspool…”
(Fowles, 1969, p. 12) These epigraphs, without doubt, make us to think more thoroughly about
the things described in this chapter.

Chapter 14, which describes Charles’s visit to Mrs. Poultney, is marked by the epigraph
taken from Jane Austen’s novel “Persuasion”:
“My idea of good company, Mr. Elliot, is the company
of clever, well-informed people, who have a great deal of
conversation; that is what I call good company.”
“You are mistaken,” said he, gently, “that is not good
company – that is the best. Good company requires only
birth, education, and manners, and with regard to edu-
cation is not very nice.”
(Fowles, 1969, p. 100)
In this chapter Fowles truthfully depicts the social pretence and bigotry of the Victorian time. The
epigraph helps us understand the type of the society where Charles has to make visits. Having
read it the reader looks at the society of Lyme Regis with a critical eye, tries to make his or her
own decision according to the given epigraph.

It should be also noted that Fowles not only skillfully uses epigraphs but he takes a lot of
care to interest the reader in them. For example, first the reader is introduced to the poem of Mrs.
Norton “The Lady of La Caraye” in the epigraph and, later, in another chapter the reader is
reminded of the poem. Here Ernestina reads the poem to Charles who, however, falls asleep
during the reading. The reader learns the writer’s attitude to the poem. Fowles says that “The
Lady of La Caraye” is a typical poem of that time:
“It is a best seller of the 1860s: the Honorable Mrs. Caroline Norton’s The Lady of La
Caraye, of which The Edinburgh Review, no less, has pronounced: “The poem is a pure,
tender, touching tale of pain, sorrow, love, duty, piety and death”- surely as pretty a string
of key mid-Victorian adjectives and nouns as one could ever hope to light on (and much
too good for me to invent, let me add)” (Fowles, 1969, p. 114).
Once again we feel that the novel is written by our contemporary. Then Fowles describes the
biography of the author of the poem, the content of it and gives interesting facts about that time.
The narrator again cites some passages from “The Lady of La Caraye” in the novel. They not
only explain why Charles has fallen asleep but show the atmosphere of the Victorian evening at
home.

Or let’s take another example where the writer openly discusses his epigraphs of the
novel. Thus, in the last chapter, which represents the last existential ending, Fowles directly
confesses to the reader that he uses epigraphs to reflect the air of that time. In the last ending
Charles leaves Sarah without realizing that the child he notices on the way out is his. The narrator
ends the novel by noting that Charles has at least begun to have some faith in himself. There are
two serious epigraphs to this chapter which help us understand Charles and Sarah’s interior

22
motives and thoughts, to think more deeply about the essence of human relations in general. The
first epigraph is taken from “The Ambidextrous Universe” by Martin Gardner:
“Evolution is simply the process by which chance (the random mutations in the nucleic
acid helix caused by natural radiation) cooperates with natural law to create living forms
better and better adapted to survive” (Fowles, 1969, p. 461).
The second epigraph is taken from “Notebooks” by Matthew Arnold: “True piety is acting what
one knows” (Fowles, 1969, p. 461).
At the end of this chapter Fowles calls the reader’s attention to these epigraphs:
“For I have returned, albeit deviously, to my original principle: that there is no
intervening god beyond whatever can be seen, in that way, in the first epigraph to this
chapter; thus only life as we have, within our hazard-given abilities, made it ourselves,
life as Marx defined it – the actions of men (and of women) in pursuit of their ends. The
fundamental principle that should guide these actions, that I believe myself always guided
Sarah’s, I have set as the second epigraph. A modern existentialist would no doubt
substitute “humanity” or “authenticity” for “piety”; but he would recognize Arnold’s
intent” (Fowles, 1969, p.466-467).
In this passage of the novel Fowles not only deliberately reminds the reader that he or she is
reading fiction but hemakes us think about serious life problems, about the existential idea that
we are entirely responsible for our own lives. There is no God to be blamed when things go
wrong and at the same time we exist in a world which has its own laws, morals and traditions and
we cannot separate ourselves from it. Therefore every decision we make has to be remade or
reassessed and we constantly have to change our lives because we are never free of the necessity
of making choices – of which we are unable to predict the outcome. Nor can we share or pass on
the choice we must make, for we alone bear the responsibility for shaping our own lives and
futures.

In conclusion, it should be mentioned that mottoes and epigraphs, being one of the kinds
of paratextuality, are very important in “The French Lieutenant’s Woman”. In Victorian tradition,
Fowles gives one or even two epigraphs to each chapter of the novel. However, the writer does
not blindly follow the tradition of the Victorian novel in using epigraphs to each chapter. The
epigraphs, taken from different Victorian sources, are used to set the tone for the chapter, to
comment on its contents, and to serve as foregrounding. In addition to their function of reflecting
the air of the Victorian Age, the epigraphs also break the fictive illusion and remind the reader
that he or she is reading fiction, that i. the novel which describes the people, events that have
never existed in reality.

23
 2. 2. Duality of Presentation

The novel is set in Lyme Regis in the1860s but with a contemporary narrator who lives in
the twentieth century; in other words, the plot of 1867 is seen through the interpretations and
perspectives of a hundred years later and our twentieth century perspectives are reinforced by the
duality of presentation. Fowles’s method of dealing with narration is something new in the book.
The novel is characterized by different modes of narration. In the form of his narration and his
choice of narrators the writer was obeying his own verdict, written as a memorandum to himself
where he warned himself against pretending that he lived in 1867 and insisted on making sure the
reader knew it was pretence. This is why the reader is constantly, almost in every chapter,
reminded of the time the novel is set. There are also a lot of authorial intrusions where Fowles
directly discusses with his reader the modern issues of the twentieth century or compares the two
ages.

The novel gives a brief but right description of the Victorian epoch. In the novel Victorian
customs and traditions are depicted from the twentieth century perspective. So, there are two
perspectives, the one from the Victorian point of view and the other from the modernist twentieth
century novel. The writer allows the reader to experience Victorian England through the eyes of a
stereotypical young lady, Ernestina, an educated young refined gentleman, Charles, and an
outcast woman, the mysterious Sarah. The novel is concerned with the spiritual growth of
Charles under the influence of Sarah.

Fowles’s novel is characterized by its frequent use of deliberate anachronisms, that is

chronological errors that place a person, event or object from the nineteenth to the twentieth
century. They help to show associations and differences between the two distinctive periods.
Fowles spends much energy juxtaposing “the then” - the Victorian age and “the now” - the
twentieth century. In critical literature anachronisms are used as a prominent element of
postmodernism.

Fowles’s narrator attributes to Sarah the attitudes and psychology of a modern, that is
late-twentieth-century woman. The projection of a 1960s mentality back into 1860s is
realistically motivated: Sarah, we are told, represents the first glimmerings of modern sensibility
in Victorian culture, the historical opening wedge of modernity. Charles, on the other hand, is
described as a man who has “always asked too many questions” (Fowles, 1969, p. 11). In another
place of the novel Fowles asks the reader to see Charles for what he is: “a man struggling to
overcome history. And even though he does not realize it” (Fowles, 1969, p. 295).

The book gives a good impression of the Victorian romance and the world of Thomas
Hardy. Fowles comments on Victorian customs, the theories of Charles Darwin and the poetry of
the Victorian authors. The writer emphasizes that he does not write in the Victorian era but he
writes in the twentieth century. He uses the conventions and stylistic concerns of the Victorian
era but he also uses those of the twentieth century.

24
 Fowles admires the works of those writers he imitates but he sometimes adds his own
thoughts and ideas. All great Victorian novelists (Charles Dickens, William Makepeace
Thackeray, Elizabeth Gaskell, George Eliot, Anthony Trollope, Thomas Hardy and others) use
their own voices so much that they often succeed in becoming a character in their own novel. The
same can be said about Fowles’s twentieth century narrator who briefly turns into a character in
chapter 55. The narrator appears as the overdressed impresario who enters a train carriage with
Charles and turns back the watch and thus narrative time. His description resembles the writer’s
appearance: “a massively bearded face… a man of forty or so” (Fowles, 403). The narrator sits in
his protagonist’s first-class apartment on his railway journey to London and asks himself “what
the devil I am going to do with you?” (Fowles, 1969, p. 405) Ultimately, he decides not to decide
but to give the reader two possible versions of the ending and not allow him to choose between
the two endings.

Dickens’s use of his voice varies greatly, but for the most part it is heard in social and
moral condemnation of the evils of society. Certainly, the reader can find this voice in “The
French Lieutenant’s Woman” where the writer discusses social problems of the Victorian Age.
Fowles also adopts Thackeray’s tone in ironic comment on character and situation in “Vanity
Fair”. But Fowles goes farther in Thackeray’s puppet dialogue with the created characters and he
writes about the courses the characters have taken when in fact they haven’t – clear
demonstration of his control and manipulation. In the true spirit of the Victorian novel the reader
is drawn into the discussion of the characters. It should be noted that one of Fowles’s favourite
devices is to tease the reader by suggesting what his characters did do and then having them to do
the reverse. It serves to remind that we are reading fiction, which holds up the mirror to reality
but can never be reality itself. Fowles also picks up George Eliot’s moral comments and indicates
the alternative lives his characters might have led.

The novel is a third-person narration. The writer employs different subclasses of the third-
person point of view. He, certainly, uses the most common Victorian type of narrator that is the
omniscient narrator, who knows everything that needs to be known about the characters, actions
and events; he reports the characters’ thoughts, feelings and motives. Within the omniscient point
of view, the intrusive Victorian narrator is also used, who does not only report but also comments
on and evaluates the actions and motives of the characters and sometimes expresses personal
view on humanity in general. In this mode a lot of great Victorian novelists wrote and Fowles
skillfully uses the best examples of the fiction of that time. The narrator can be also objective, in
other words, he presents facts without any comment. In the first chapter it is emphasized by
expressions “the local spy” and “the telescopist”.

After describing the Cobb the narrator addresses the reader, as it was common in
Victorian fiction:
“I exaggerate? Perhaps, but I can be put to the test, for the Cobb has changed very little
since the year of which I write; though the town of Lyme has, and the test is not fair if you
look back towards land.
However, if you had turned northward and landward in1867, as the man that day
did, your prospect would have been harmonious” (Fowles, 1969, p. 4).
It is one of the first numerous passages where the two epochs are compared. So, from the first
pages of the novel we meet the narrator’s double vision and double voice. The narrator’s voice is
25
double-coded because there is a shift from the Victorian narrator to the modern narrator who
looks at the described events from the twentieth century perspective.

Fowles uses different modes of narration in “The French Lieutenant’s Woman”. The
narrative structure of the novel is highly traditional or Victorian as well as self-conscious or
postmodernist. He combines both the omniscience of the Victorian novel with a freedom of
action and expression for his characters – which postmodernist writers see as paramount. Fowles,
as a highly self-conscious postmodernist artist, constantly breaks fictive illusion and comments
directly on the action, the character’s motives and possibilities and explains how things might
have been different.

For instance, the first chapter of the novel already introduces different types of narration.
The omniscient nineteenth century narrator, having a wide-range vocabulary and vast knowledge
of political and geographical history, describes the main characters of the novel: Charles
Smithson, Ernestina Freeman and Sarah Woodruff, standing on Cobb, Lyme Regis harbour quay.
This narrator resembles Victorian intrusive narrators, when he remarks that Charles “had severely
reduced his dundrearies, which the arbitres of the English male fashion had declared a shade
vulgar – that is, risible to the foreigner – a year or two previously” (Fowles, 1969, p. 5). In the
next sentence we hear the modern narrator, who juxtaposes “then” and “now”. This narrator
describes how “the colors of the young lady’s clothes would strike us today as distinctly strident”
(Fowles, 1969, p. 5). The word “today” deliberately emphasizes the difference between the time
the novel is set and the time it is written in. Then the narrator gives an extended commentary on
the comparison between the two centuries:
“…but the world was then in the first fine throes of the discovery of aniline dyes. And
what the feminine, by the way of compensation for so much else in her expected behavior,
demanded of a color was brilliance, not discretion” (Fowles, 1969, p. 5).
The reader will find a lot of such comparisons of the two ages, revealing that the novel is written
by the twentieth century narrator who does not pretend that he lives in the nineteenth century.

Thus, from the outset of the book the reader understands that the novel is written by the
writer living in the twentieth century. Like the writers of the Victorian period, Fowles uses a
number of learned references. Like them, he comments on the important events of the day – the
influence of Darwin’s theory, the Second Reform Bill of 1867, of J. S. Mill’s attempts to raise the
status of the women. The narrator converses with the reader informally, comments on the
described events using modern knowledge and ironically compares the two different epochs.
Fowles manages us to sink into Victorianism with the twentieth century minds. Leaving outside
the actual plot, one learns more about life and society in those times from “The French
Lieutenant’s Woman” than from reading the whole library of learned histories.

The narrator imitates a Victorian style in many chapters, yet he is clearly a late-twentieth
century thinker and he often intrudes with his own viewpoint, judging the characters with the
hindsight – as, for instance, in the third chapter where the modern nineteenth century narrator
writes about his main character. He comments on Charles’s outlook on life and on the attitudes
that were typical of the age in 1867 and, as usual in the novel, compares them with 1967. The
reader is introduced to a very interesting observation on the attitude to time in the two centuries:
26
 “Though Charles liked to think about himself as a scientific young man and would
probably not have been too surprised had news reached him out of the future of the
airplane, the jet engine, television, radar: what would have astounded him was the
changed attitude to time itself. The supposed great misery of our century is the lack of
time; our sense of that, not a disinterested love of science, and certainly not wisdom, is
why we devote such a huge proportion of the ingenuity and income of our societies to
finding faster ways of doing things – as if the final aim of mankind was to grow closer not
to a perfect humanity, but to a perfect lightning flash. But for Charles, and for almost all
his contemporaries and social peers, the time signature over existence was firmly adagio.
The problem was not fitting in all that one wanted to do, but spinning out what one did to
occupy the vast colonnades of leisure available” (Fowles, 1969, pp. 11-12).
Such a deep and truly comparison can be only written in the twentieth century because notions of
this time are presented here. Certainly, the airplane, jet engine, television and radar did not exist
in the nineteenth century. The observation about the lack of time in the twentieth century appeals
to the modern reader, who experiences this himself. It is one of the numerous passages of
numerous of the novel where Fowles juxtaposes the two centuries.

Fowles goes on comparing the two centuries, showing his wonderful knowledge of
Victorian England:
“One of the commonest symptoms of wealth today is destructive neurosis; in his
(Charles’) century it was tranquil boredom. It is true that the wave of revolutions in 1848,
the memory of now extinct Chartists, stood like a mountainous shadow behind the period;
but to many – and to Charles – the most significant thing about those distant rumblings
had been indisputably prosperous; an affluence had come to the artisanate and even to the
laboring classes that made the possibility of revolution recede, at least in Great Britain,
almost out of mind. Needless to say, Charles knew nothing of the beavered German Jew
quietly working, as it so happened, that very afternoon in the British Museum library; and
whose work in those somber walls was to bear such bright red fruit. Had you described
that fruit, or the subsequent effects of its later indiscriminate consumption, Charles would
almost certainly not have believed you – and even though, in only six months from this
March of 1867, the first volume of Kapital was to appear in Hamburg” (Fowles, 1969, p.
12).
Here Fowles again juxtaposes the two time periods, comparing their symptoms of wealth:
boredom of the nineteenth century and neurosis of the twentieth century. Victorian revolution and
Chartist movement are opposed to Marxism and socialist revolutions happened in the twentieth
century.

The scene where Sarah first looks at Charles when the latter has advised her to return
from the end of the Cobb to a safer position contains the narrator’s observation about her
behaviour which is not typical to a Victorian woman and, as usual, the reader feels that it is
written from a twentieth century perspective:
“She turned to look at him - or as it seemed to Charles, through him. It was not so much
positively in that face which remained with him after that first meeting, but all that was
not as he had expected; for theirs was an age when the favoured feminine look was the
demure, the obedient, the shy. Charles felt immediately as if he had trespassed; as if the
Cobb belonged to that face, and not to the Ancient Borough of Lyme. It was not a pretty
face, like Ernestina’s. It was certainly not a beautiful face, by any period’s standard or
27
 taste. But it was an unforgettable face, and a tragic face. Its sorrow welled out of it as
purely, naturally and unstoppably as water out of a woodland spring. There was no
artifice there, no hypocrisy, no hysteria, no mask; and above all, no sign of madness. The
madness was in empty sea, the empty horizon, the lack of reason for such sorrow…”
(Fowles, 1969, p. 10)
It goes without saying that this description of Sarah is presented by a twentieth century narrator
who has a deep knowledge of Victorian time. He emphasizes that in Victorian times women
should be obedient and shy. In the novel the position of Victorian women is opposed to the
position of women in the twentieth century.

Throughout “The French Lieutenant’s Woman” the reader is constantly reminded that this
Victorian novel can be written only in the twentieth century. For this reason the year 1867 is very
often repeated in the novel purposely to remind the reader of the difference between his and the
Victorian time. In the fourth chapter, for example, the year 1867 is repeated in the description of
Mrs. Poultney’s house, Sarah’s employer:
“The basement kitchen of Mrs. Poultney’s large Regency house, which stood, an
elegantly clear simile of her social status, in a commanding position on one of the steep
hills behind Lyme Regis, would no doubt seem today almost intolerable for its functional
inadequacies. Though the occupants in 1867 would have been quite clear as to who was
the tyrant in their lives, the more real monster, to an age like ours, would beyond doubt
have been the enormous kitchen range that occupied all the inner wall of the large ill-lit
room” (Fowles 1969, p. 18).

Or we may take another example where the year 1867 is mentioned. In the second chapter
of the novel the intrusive narrator gives a full account of Charles’s state of mind after the incident
on the Cobb, where Charles met Sarah for the first time:
“After all, it was only 1867. He was only thirty-two years old and he always asked life too
many questions” (Fowles, 1969, p. 11).
As usual, Fowles does not miss the chance to mention the year when the novel is set, stressing
that the novel is double-coded.

In the fourth chapter Mrs. Poultney, the Victorian lady, is described using the Gestapo
notion which, certainly, belongs to the twentieth century:
“There would have been a place in the Gestapo for the lady; she (Mrs. Poultney)
had the way of interrogation that could reduce the sturdiest girls to tears in the first five
minutes. In her fashion she was an epitome of all the most crassly arrogant traits of the
ascendant British Empire. Her only notion of justice was that she must be right; and her
only notion of government was an angry bombardment of the impertinent populace”
(Fowles, 1969, p. 20).
This description again shows that the writer consistently reminds the reader of the difference
between the time of the novel and the time of writing. Fowles uses the notions of the twentieth
century to indicate the time he writes in: one of the most significant notions of the twentieth
century, the Gestapo notion, is used to describe a nineteenth century lady.

28
 Describing Charles’s walk along the wooded Undercliff in search for the fossils, the
author again stops the narration to converse with the reader about the difference between the two
centuries; he invites us to smile at Charles’s inconvenient equipment:
“He (Charles) would have made you smile, for he was carefully equipped for his
role. He wore stout nailed boots and canvas gaiters that rose to encase Norfolk breeches
of heavy flannel. There was a tight and absurdly long coat to match; a canvas wideawake
hat of indeterminate beige; a massive ashplant, which he had bought on his way to the
Cobb; and a voluminous rucksack, from which you might have shaken out an already
heavy array of hammers, wrappings, notebooks, pillboxes, adzes and heaven knows what
else” (Fowles, 1969, pp. 46-47).
Here Fowles, as usual, makes the reader pay attention to the difference between the two ages. He
writes:
“Nothing is more incomprehensible to us than the methodicality of the Victorians; one
sees it best (at its most ludicrous) in the advice so liberally handed out to travellers in the
early editions of Baedeker. Where, one wonders, can any pleasure have been left? How,
in the case of Charles, can he not have seen that light clothes would have been more
comfortable? That a hat was not necessary? That stout nailed boots on a boulder-strewn
beach are as suitable as ice-skates?
Well, we laugh. But perhaps there is something admirable in this dissociation
between what is most comfortable and what is most recommended. We meet here, once
again, this bone of contention between the two centuries: is duty to drive us, or not?”
(Fowles, 1969, p. 47)
This ironical comment on the Victorian custom contains the author’s serious footnote to the word
“duty” where the writer discusses the differences between mid-Victorian agnosticism and
atheism. This footnote clearly proves that Fowles is rightly considered to be the writer who
demands a lot of from his reader and this passage, as many other places in the novel, clearly
shows that this statement is true.

Or let’s take another example where the narrator talks about Mary, Ernestina’s servant,
whose future can be certainly predicted because it is also the narrator’s present:
“Mary’s great-great-grandmother, who is twenty-two years old this month I write in,
much resembles her ancestor; and her face is known over the entire world, for she is one
of the most celebrated younger English film actresses” (Fowles, 1969, p. 75).
In the next sentence Fowles again uses the chance to remind the reader of the difference of the
two epochs: “But it was not, I am afraid, the face for 1867” (Fowles, 1969, p. 75).

Or one more example, which also serves to remind that the novel is written in the
twentieth century. The narrator describes the penny which Charles pays for milk in the following
way: “A penny, one of those charming heads of the young Victoria that still occasionally turn up
in one’s change, with all but that graceful head worn away by the century’s use, passed hands”
(Fowles, 1969, p. 85). In this description Fowles again juxtaposes the time of the novel and the
time it is written in.

In chapter 9 more information on Sarah is given. She is also characterized from the
twentieth century viewpoint:

29
 “She had some sort of psychological equivalent of the experienced horse dealer’s skill -
the ability to know almost at the first glance the good horse from bad one; or as if,
jumping a century, she was born with a computer in her heart. I say her heart, since the
values she computed belong more there than in the mind. She could sense the pretensions
of a hollow argument, a false scholarship, and a biased logic when she came across them;
but she also saw through people in subtler ways. Without being able to say how, any more
than a computer can explain its own processes, she saw them as they were and not as they
tried to seem” (Fowles, 1969, p. 52).
The computer, certainly, did not exist in the Victorian age. The mention of the computer, the
notion of the twentieth century, clearly shows that this Victorian novel can be written only in the
twentieth century. The reader is reminded of the computer in Sarah’s heart in chapter 14 when
Mrs. Tranter, Ernestina’s aunt, invites Sarah to come and see her:
“That computer in her (Sarah’s) heart had long before assessed Mrs. Tranter and stored
the resultant tape” (Fowles, 1969, p. 103).
This is one of the numerous examples where the reader is deliberately reminded of the
differences between the two centuries.

Existential ideas, the notion of the twentieth century, are also mentioned directly in the
book, for example, when the narrator talks about Charles:
“After all he (Charles) was a Victorian. We could not expect him to see what we are only
just beginning – and with so much more knowledge and the lessons of existentialist
philosophy at our disposal - to realize ourselves: that the desire to hold and the desire to
enjoy are mutually destructive. 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 I am sad” (Fowles, 1969, p. 69).
Here the writer again invites the reader to think about the two time periods, the differences in
their perception of life.

For the same purpose of juxtaposing the two epochs Fowles mentions the cinema and
television which people did not certainly have in the nineteenth century. Thus, in chapter 16 there
is a very interesting narrator’s comment on Victorian evenings:
“And the evenings! Those gaslit hours that had to be filled, and without benefit of
cinema and television! For those who had a living to earn this was hardly a great problem:
when you have worked a twelve-hour day, the problem of what to do after your supper is
easily solved. But pity the unfortunate rich; for whatever license was given them to be
solitary before the evening hours, convention demanded that then they must be bored in
company” (Fowles, 1969, p. 113).
Again Fowles’s narrator makes an important distinction between the two centuries, showing a
wonderful knowledge of the Victorian age. The reader is reminded of the absence of cinema and
television without which it is difficult to imagine a present life.

One more example of the juxtaposition of the two ages is presented in chapter 17. Here
the narrator states that the people in the Victorian Age do not have a common language and it is
difficult for them to communicate. Then Fowles explains that this difference in communication of
the people of the two centuries is now rubbed by technological advances of the twentieth century:

30
 “It is difficult to imagine today the enormous differences then separating a lad born in the
Seven Dials and a carter’s daughter from remote East Devon village. Their coming
together was fraught with almost as many obstacles as if he had been an Eskimo and she,
a Zulu. They (Sam and Mary) had barely a common language, so often did they not
understand what the other had just said.
Yet, this distance, all those abysses unbridged and then unbridgeable by radio,
television cheap travel and the rest, was not wholly bad. People knew less of each other,
perhaps, but they felt more free each of other, and so were more individual. The entire
world was not for them only a push or a switch away. Strangers were strange, and
sometimes with an exciting, beautiful strangeness. It may be better for humanity that we
should communicate more and more. But I am a heretic, I think our ancestors’ isolation
was like the greater space they enjoyed: it can only be envied. The world is only too
literally too much with us now” (Fowles, 1969, pp. 130-131).
This authorial comment makes the reader not only to understand the difference between the two
time periods, but to think more deeply about the problems of communication in the twentieth
century.

Much of the time Fowles tells the reader openly about the ideas that lie behind his novel,
although he often introduces them with self-deprecatory humour. In the famous chapter 13 the
narrator even stops the story and speaks directly to the reader. He confronts us with a fact that he
has created the illusionary reality of the fictional world:
“This story I am telling is all imagination. These characters I create never existed outside
my mind” (Fowles, 1969, p. 95).
This is known as the “self-conscious narrator”. Fowles reveals to and reminds the reader that the
narration is a work of fictional art by shattering any illusion that he is telling something that has
really happened. The novel proves that, as it has been mentioned earlier in the paper, that
postmodernist fiction has brought the author back to the surface that is free to break upon the
fictional world.

Then, in the same chapter, the writer jokingly announces that “perhaps I am trying to pass
off a concealed book of essays on you” (Fowles, 1969, p. 95) and gives some spoof essay titles,
such as “On the Horizontality of Existence”, “The illusions of Progress”, “The History of the
Novel Form” and some others. Despite his humour Fowles shows that he is aware of the
philosophical currents of his time. “The French Lieutenant’s Woman” was composed in the late
1960s when Roland Barthes published his long-influential essay “The Death of the Author” and
Fowles certainly was familiar with his idea that the author was no longer a privileged source of
textual meaning, as he had been in traditional literary criticism. Through its references to Barthes
and some other critics, the novel becomes not only a parody of a Victorian love story, but also a
thoughtful examination of the act of the authorship and the role of the artist. In the novel the
narrator goes on discussing the difficulty of writing a story when characters behave
independently. Charles, he complains, did not return to Lyme Regis, as the narrator had intended,
but went to Dairy to ask about Sarah.

In this chapter the narrator refuses to be a god-like Victorian narrator who knows the past,
present and future, secret thoughts and feelings of his characters. Instead Fowles says that he does
not know what his characters will do, but determines the plot by chance. He contrasts himself to
31
Victorian omnipotent narrators and declares he is a new kind of author-God, with freedom his
first principle, not authority:
“The novelist is still a god, since he creates (and not even the most aleatory avant-garde
modern novel has managed to extirpate its author completely); what has changed is that
we are no longer the gods of the Victorian image; omniscient and decreeing; but in the
new theological image, with freedom our first principle, not authority” (Fowles, 1969, p.
97).

It is clear that the intrusive narrator plays an extremely significant role throughout the
novel. In Victorian manner, he continually interrupts the Victorian narrative with comments on
his characters, bits of social history, erudite discussions, comparing Victorian Society with the
time the novel is written in. These authorial intrusions and comments remind the reader that he or
she is reading fiction and emphasize the duality of presentation.

It should be noted, that the novel “The French Lieutenant’s Woman” is double-coded. As
it is common in postmodern literature, the writer takes a skeletal form of another kind of work (in
this case the form of the Victorian novel) and places it in a new context with new contents.
Fowles uses the twentieth century narrator that allows him to present the Victorian Age from the
twentieth century perspective. He constantly reveals to the reader that he or she is not reading a
traditional Victorian novel. For this purpose Fowles mentions the year 1867, when the novel is
set, a lot of times in the book; he also discusses the differences between the two ages and talks
about the modern issues of the twentieth century in numerous authorial intrusions. This complex
mixture of past and present gives the novel much of its appeal.

32
 2. 3. Multiple Endings of the Novel and Their Function

The novel “The French Lieutenant’s Woman” is also famous by its multiple endings, a
technical trick which could only belong to a novel of our century. As Fowles points out, “the
convention of Victorian fiction allowed no place for the open, the inconclusive ending” (Fowles
1969, p. 405) but he overtly challenges this convention. The use of multiple endings is a common
postmodern device and Fowles uses it to avoid closure and to make the reader choose one of the
given versions or make of his own interpretation.

The first ending, a traditional happy resolution to the Victorian love story, comes
improbably in the middle of the book. Here Charles makes the right, if not altogether happy,
choice of turning his back on Sarah and marrying Ernestina. He decides not to see Sarah but
rather do his duty to Ernestina. Charles arrives in Exeter, goes on to Lyme and confesses to Tina.
The narrator recounts that they will have seven children and live well into the twentieth century.
This is a conventional Victorian ending. In the next chapter Fowles, however, explains that this
traditional ending is just one possibility, a hypothetical future for his characters.

The other two endings are more complex. Fowles shifts back at the moment of choice.
Now Charles orders Sam to stop at Exeter to visit Sarah. Charles has a passionate encounter with
Sarah and discovers to his shock that she is a virgin. The story of her seduction by the French
lieutenant was a lie. So, doctor Grogan’s opinion of her as a plotter seems to be true. Charles
leaves Sarah thinking her to be false and himself to be duped.

In church he, however, realizes the fundamental truth, that true freedom is the casting off
of hypocrisy. Charles decides to go back to Sarah, but first he must confess to Ernestina. He
returns back to Lyme Regis and horrifies Tina and her relatives by breaking off the engagement.
In the meantime he orders Sam to deliver a letter to Sarah in which he promises marriage. But
Charles cannot find Sarah when he hurries back to Exeter because Sam has not delivered the
letter. Sarah has gone to London having left no forwarding address, not knowing that Charles has
made up his mind to marry her. Charles resolves to find her.

At this point, Fowles’s narrator appears in the story. As Charles follows Sarah by train, a
bearded figure sits opposite him and watches him. This is the narrator himself, who is wondering
what exactly to do with Charles. He proceeds to structure two equally valid endings. Because the
last ending will seem privileged by its final position, he flips a coin to determine which ending to
give first. The appearance of the writer himself in a figure of the bearded impresario serves as a
reminder to the reader that he or she is reading a fiction. Furthermore, we are left to make up our
minds about which ending we will accept as the right one.

After an intensive search for Sarah through detective agencies fails, Charles travels
abroad for two years. He is beginning to believe that he has been duped. Only two years after
Sarah’s disappearance Charles gets a cable from his solicitor saying that Sarah has been found.
Charles hopes that Sarah has decided to answer the ad, but the narrator explains that Mary has
33
seen Sarah enter a house and that it is Sam who remorsefully lays anonymous information about
the whereabouts of Sarah. When Charles arrives at Sarah’s house, he finds her surprised to see
him and not apologetic about having left him not knowing her address. She seems to have no
need of Charles. Now she lives in a house of a pre-Raphaelite artist Dante Gabriel Rosetti.
Charles accuses her of implanting a dagger in his breast and twisting it. She decides not to let
Charles leave without revealing that she has had a child by him named Lalage. The penultimate
chapter ends with the three of them on the threshold of some kind of future together.

The last chapter provides another ending. It begins with the bearded narrator in the front
of Sarah’s house with a watch, which he sets fifteen minutes back and drives off. The appearance
of the writer himself in the figure of the bearded impresario serves as a reminder to the reader
that he or she is reading fiction, composed by the author and the events he writes about have
never existed. It is a typically postmodern device that serves to break the fictional illusion. The
narrative resumes with the same piece of dialogue from the previous chapter about twisting the
knife. However, this time there is no understanding, nor is there any love between them. Charles
is outraged at the discovery that she has no intention to marry him. “I cannot love you as a wife
must,” Sarah declares (Fowles, 1969, p. 467). Charles leaves without realizing that the child he
notices on the way out is his. So they separate for ever and Charles is left with “an atom of faith
in himself” (Fowles, 1969, p. 467). He feels dejected but in his desperate loneliness he senses that
he is reborn to a new life.

Two possible concluding chapters have been provided and the reader can choose either
according to taste. If freedom of the individual is the goal then why should the writer determine
the conclusion. Better leave it to chance, because chance determines many things in life. Fowles
says that we cannot determine even the present, let alone the future. So why not open up the
different possibilities and let the reader conclude in his own way. Giving two alternative endings
in the end, Fowles leaves the reader no alternative but to move towards existentialism. The reader
must exercise individual freedom of choice how to end the novel. Once again Fowles shows his
existential philosophy. The writer presents us with the existential story of a man who must
exercise his free will by making a choice. Charles finds his lady but the main mysteries of
existence, of freedom, of love, of creativity of the role of the past, of death remain unsolved. At
the end, Sarah stands for a mystery of “the river of life, of mysterious laws and mysterious
choice” (Fowles, 1969, p. 467). The imagination itself seems to grant greater power than the
orders that narrative organization requires.

To sum up, the use of multiple endings in “The French Lieutenant’s Woman” also gives
Fowles the opportunity to break fictive illusion and remind the reader once again the fact that he
or she is reading fiction, in which the author is free to think of any ending he likes. It should be
also taken into consideration, that the use of multiple endings is a postmodern device that self-
consciously breaks fictionality of literary texts. The first, typically Victorian, ending parodies the
conventions of the Victorian novel, in the form of which “The French Lieutenant’s Woman” is
written. Fowles makes the reader think that this ending is not very probable in real life. The
second two endings allow the writer to appear in the novel as one of its character. The appearance
of the author in his literary work is also a typically postmodern device. Fowles does not miss the
chance to converse with his reader, discussing the most probable ending of the novel. He invites
the reader to think more deeply about the fate or the main characters of the novel and to choose
34
the ending he likes. It is certainly not common in the Victorian literature. Multiple endings also
show that the novel is double-coded, that it is written in the twentieth century using the
conventions of the Victorian novel of the nineteenth century.

35
 CONCLUSIONS

The novel “The French Lieutenant’s Woman” by John Robert Fowles (1926-2005), a
prominent postmodern English writer, is one of his most famous works. It is a brilliantly
innovative and complex book. The novel is an example of postmodern playfulness. It is a highly
unconventional postmodern narrative in which Fowles widely experiments with writing
techniques such as self-conscious authorial intrusions, duality of presentation, dislocations of
time and multiple endings. The book is also a commercial success because the surface story, that
of a passionate love affair, could be readily enjoyed without having to engage deeply with the
philosophical ideas underlying it, but those postmodern ideas and techniques, that the writer uses
to convey them, make the novel so remarkable. The writer presents us with the realistic picture of
the nineteenth century compared with the twentieth century. In the novel Fowles uses works of
earlier artists as material for his own novel; he takes up subjects from the history of English
literature. This reflects the postmodern thinking in which art is seen to mirror other arts (texts),
not life or “reality”.

“The French Lieutenant’s Woman”, being one of the best-known examples of

postmodernist metafiction, deliberately breaks fictive illusion and comments directly upon its
own fictive nature or process of composition. In the Victorian tradition, each chapter of the novel
has at least one epigraph, taken mainly from Victorian literature. The epigraphs do not only
reflect the Victorian climate but they make our understanding of the novel deeper. The purpose of
them is to set the tone for the chapter which follows and to comment on the events of the chapter,
for example, on the situation and character. The epigraphs also serve as foregrounding. They
prove once again that “The French Lieutenant’s Woman” belongs to postmodernist metafiction
because epigraphs break the fictive illusion, remind the reader that he or she is reading fiction.

Fowles’s method of dealing with narration is something new in the book The novel is set
in Lyme Regis in the1860s but with a contemporary narrator who lives in the twentieth century;
in other words, the plot of 1867 is seen through the interpretations and perspectives of a hundred
years later and our twentieth century perspectives are reinforced by the duality of presentation.
There are two perspectives, the one from the Victorian point of view and the other from the
modernist twentieth century. The reader is constantly, almost in every chapter, reminded of the
year the novel is set. There are also a lot of authorial intrusions where Fowles directly discusses
with his reader the modern issues of the twentieth century or compares the two ages. The
complex mixture of past and present gives the novel much of its appeal.

The novel “The French Lieutenant’s Woman” has multiple endings, a technical trick
which could only belong to a postmodern novel. It is a common postmodern device which gives
the writer the opportunity to stress fictionality of his literary text. Multiple endings remind the
reader once again of the fact that he or she is reading fiction, in which the author is free to think
of any ending he likes and even give more than one ending to his work. The first, typically
Victorian, ending parodies the conventions of the Victorian novel, in the form of which “The
French Lieutenant’s Woman” is written. Fowles makes the reader think that this ending is not
very probable in real life. The second two endings allow the writer to appear in the novel as one
of its characters. The appearance of the author in his literary work is also a typically postmodern
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device which breaks fictive illusion. Fowles does not miss the chance to converse with his reader,
discussing different endings of the novel. He invites the reader to think more deeply about the
fate of the main characters of the novel and to choose the ending he or she likes. Multiple endings
once again show that the novel is double coded, that it is written in the twentieth century using
the conventions of the Victorian novel of the nineteenth century.

In conclusion it should be stated that the epigraphs, duality of presentation and multiple
endings of the novel make “The French Lieutenant’s Woman” an outstanding parody and
imitation of the Victorian novel. It is a retrospective twentieth century examination of the
Victorian novel of the nineteenth century.

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 SUMMARY

Darbas pristato J.R. Faulzo romaną “Prancūzų leitenanto moteris”, kaip karalienės
Viktorijos epochos romano imitaciją ir parodiją. Šiam teiginiui įrodyti naudojamas Genetto
pasakojimo diskurso teorija. Romane Fowles plačiai naudoja postmoderno rašymo technikas,
tokias kaip drovios autoriaus intarpas, supažindinimo dualizmas, laiko sutrikimas ir įvairiarūšės
pabaigos. Novelė, būdama postmodernios metafikcijos pavyzdžiu, tyčia sulaužo fiktyvią iliuziją
ir tiesiogiai paaiškina jos nuosavą išgalvotą kompozicijos prigimtį arba procesą. Pirmiausia darbe
analizuojami romane moto ir epigrafai. Epigrafai ne tik atspindi karalienės Viktorijos epochos
aplinką, bet ir daro mūsų romano supratimą gilesniu. Jų paskirtis užduoti skyriui toną ir
pakomentuoti skyriuje išdėstytus įvykius, pavyzdžiui, situacijas arba charakterius. Epigrafai ne
tik atspindi karalienės Viktorijos epochos atmosferą, bet taip pat pabrėžia išgalvotą iliuziją,
priminant skaitytojui, kad jis arba ji skaito beletristiką. Antra, romanas yra dviprasmiškas, nes
karalienės Viktorijos epocha pateikta iš dvidešimto amžiaus perspektyvos. Kaip taip būdinga
visai postmoderniajai literatūrai, Fowles paima karalienės Viktorijos epochos romano formą ir
suteikia jai naują kontekstą, kurį jai suteikia dvidešimto amžiaus pasakotojas. Autorius pabrėžia,
kad jis nerašo romano karalienės Viktorijos laikais, bet rašo ją dvidešimtame amžiuje. Skaitytojui
nuolat, kiekviename skyriuje, primenami 1867 metai, kai prasidėjo romane pateikti įvykiai.
Gausiose autoriaus intarpuose Fowles atvirai lygina dvi epochas arba aptarinėja šiuolaikines
dvidešimto amžiaus problemas. Pagaliau, įvairiarūšės romano pabaigos, būdamos tipine
postmoderno priemone, dar kartą parodo, kad ši karalienės Viktorijos laikus aprašanti romanas
galėjo būti parašyta tik dvidešimtame amžiuje. Ji primena skaitytojui apie romano netikrumą, nes
skaitytojui siūloma pasirinkti pabaigą, kuri jam arba jai daugiau patinka. Įvairiarūšės pabaigos
taip pat suteikia rašytojui galimybė aptarti su skaitytoju karalienės Viktorijos laikų susitarimus ir
dvidešimto amžiaus egzistencijos idėjas. Pabaigoje reikia konstatuoti, kad epigrafai,
supažindinimo dualizmas ir įvairiarūšės romano pabaigos, kurie analizuojami darbe, padaro
“Prancūzų leitenanto moterį” išskirtine karalienės Viktorijos laikų romano parodija.

38
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