The French Lieutenant

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The French LieutenantsWoman

• John Fowles

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Sarah Woodruff a "female Heathcliff" a
genuine rebel against social constraints

• a catalyst in Charles's development
• represents a kind of social freedom
• the "narrator's surrogate
• the sexually exciting "mystery
• woman" seen by Charles
• a social outcast, naturally isolated
• and alienated

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Sarah as the French Lieutenants Woman,
tragedy or the French Lieutenants whore

• a heroine who struggles with "integration," a
  crisis of self-awareness of her
  "being-in-the-flesh" triggered by erotic desire.
• the "dark" lady exiled from her society
• wear clothing which disguises or expresses
  contempt for her sexual characteristics Sarah in
  black, outsized man's coat and black bonnet
• withdraw from the society, weep without rational
  cause, and is prone to melancholia
• increasingly conscious of her growing erotic
  power

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• educated above her "station" in a class-bound
  society
• long experienced herself as a misfit somehow
  offensive and alien to her community solitude
  . My life has been steeped in loneliness
  (170)
• clings to the fictional persona of fallen woman
  because it reinforces her vital sense of
  separateness and uniqueness
• A negative identity she is a power and that she
  is different from Victorian notions of what women
  should be. And until Sarah is able to imagine a
  more positive persona, she clings to the
  ash-girl/fallen woman identity by refusing to
  leave Lyme or Mrs. Poulteney's house, the house
  of the step-mother.

solitude
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Sarah's suffering is frequently figured in images
of a wound

• the "blood sacrifice" demanded by Mrs. Poulteney
• the blood drawn from the hawthorn when she makes
  her confession to Charles (176)
• the lamed foot which she pretends in Exeter
• her blood on Charles's shirttails
• menstrual imagery suggests that Sarah's sorrow
  is a condition of flesh that bleeds, the flesh of
  a woman

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Mrs. Poulteney Sarah Woodruff s fairytale
step-mother

• Mrs. Poulteney is an almost Dickensian
  caricature of those aspects of the motherland of
  Victorian England which Sarah must defeat.
• Mrs. Poulteney is representative of the larger
  society. Sarah's painful relations with her,
  mirror the heroine's sense of alienation from the
  dominant social environment.
• 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.

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Mrs. Poulteneys two obsessions "Dirt" and
"Immortality"

• The "great secret" of her life is her belief in
  hell (26), and her hatred of all that symbolizes
  life in the flesh is reflected in the repressive
  religious and intellectual traditions she is able
  to tolerate.
• Mrs. Poulteney personifies the society which
  judges the offensive flesh of the heroine who
  feels herself to be different and her perception
  of the girl's worth keeps her in the ashes--at
  least temporarily.

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Wild Undercliff and Ware Commons

• Sarahs garden "an English Garden of Eden
• Like Sarah's secret psyche, it is sensual and
  wild, dangerous to the unwary, shockingly
  different from the terrain around it, strange,
  separate, and very beautiful. Most important, it
  is Sarah's alternative world, the escape from all
  that Mrs. Poulteney represents
•  For the heroine to leave the ashes and the
  garden
• to perceive herself positively, to unite her
  fragmented perception of herself into a whole, a
  mature female personality. What gives her the
  strength and energy to make this leap is her
  princely lover's power of vision, his capacity to
  see her "whole."

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Charles Smithson

• a wealthy, not-bad-looking, touchingly innocent
  gentleman who thinks of himself as a man of the
  world
• An admirer of Darwin
• Bored and dissatisfied with the course his life
  is taking

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• Charles is betrothed to what he believes is a
  safe, knowable future--to financial and domestic
  security with Ernestina, to intellectual respect
  as a scientist, to social position and
  well-defined traditional values as a baronet.

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• The advent of the mysterious Sarah, the
  unexpected waking to life of the Well Beloved,
  shatters all these illusions and shocks Charles
  into a painful and wonderful awareness that his
  life, and the greater world, is unpredictable,
  Clearly a fragmented personality, Charles is
  presented as a man in flux, a visionary moving
  between a dualistic, judgmental way of perceiving
  and a transient but unified, "whole-sighted" mode
  of perception which is more encompassing,
  mysterious, and creative, a way of seeing, in
  fact, which is Sarah's own.

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Charles as a character in process

• Charles Smithson has a partial or double vision.
• Torn between two ways of perceiving and never
  quite resolves the ambiguity. Fowles depicts
  Charles as a character in process, one with two
  selves that see differently. One aspect of this
  character sees in an ironic mode, detached,
  observant, but ultimately content to "be what one
  was" (349). The other aspect is a new "better
  self, that self that once before had enabled him
  to see immediately through the malice of Lyme to
  her real nature ..." (441).
• Both "selves" of this fragmented Charles are
  present when Sarah, ritually displays her
  emerging erotic feminine identity.

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Sarahs sexual Performance

• For this performance, where her lover is her
  observer, Sarah leads Charles to her carefully
  selected "minute green ampitheater ... stunted
  thorn ... towards the back of its arena" in the
  most secluded part of the magic garden of the
  Undercliff (162). Sarah performs her
  "confession," the story of her erotic awakening,
  her willing seduction by the "devil," Varguennes
  (170).
• The presentation of Sarah's self-created and
  assumed identity as "the French Lieutenant's
  Whore" (171)a superb sexual performance.

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Sarah's confession "I give myself to him." (170)

• Sarah's seductive tale presents her as a dark,
  erotic gift-giver
• this particular gift of her virginity is a
  fiction, an externalized image of her inner
  emotional reality. The performance is all the
  more powerful for Sarah's captive audience by
  being a fiction (although at this point in the
  novel, neither Charles Smithson nor Fowles's
  reader is aware of it).
• By believing in and accepting the image of Sarah
  that she herself creates, Charles gives her the
  strength to defy the step-mother and leave the
  Undercliff garden.

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• In his own imagination Charles becomes the man to
  whom the gift is given and in this "sudden shift
  of sexual key" he has a vision of a lost world of
  beauty and power, a sacred precinct in himself
  (172). "But even then a figure, a dark shadow,
  his dead sister, moved ahead of him, lightly,
  luringly, up the ashlar steps and into the broken
  columns' mystery" (173). Clearly an anima figure,
  the sister is the long-dead "feminine" part of
  Charles himself.
• She is a way of being, and knowing, that
  masculine Charles--and all that is rational,
  enlightened, progressive, and self-satisfied in
  his age--has left behind. The sister is a rich
  darkness of possibilities arising from a past,
  even ancient, world. She is a dead "other self,"
  a giver of wholeness, which Charles finds himself
  joining as, in his imagination, he joins himself
  with Sarah.

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Feet and fallen women/Fire

• Unlike other women of the time, Sarah has proven
  herself always able to see her own feet, just as
  she is aware of her own true nature. She always
  knows the step she takes, even when she genuinely
  fears it.
• Charles joins her in the ashes, "to burn, to
  burn to ashes on that body and in those eyes"
  (334).
• in orgasmic imagery the coals from the fire
  explode (336)
• Fowles associates the loss of Sarah's virginity
  with her feet, specifically the "injured" foot

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"double ending"

• After the surrender of the "slipper," the heroine
  unexpectedly flees, leaving her lover in stunned
  astonishment. Charles must himself seek the wide
  world over his lost love.
• When Charles Smithson finds his beloved after
  years of searching, their reunion is crippled by
  his double vision, his inability to see whole.

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• Charles is unable to see Sarah as a whole being
  and only succeeds in re-imposing the destructive,
  fragmenting dualism that Sarah has long outgrown.
  Each ending dramatizes one way in which Charles
  perceives Sarah. Each is a partial truth
  neither is wholly satisfactory because each
  neglects the central qualities which makes the
  other work.

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• Charles's doubled perception and fragmented self
  is his repeated vision of Sarah as a dead woman.
  Over and over again, seemingly without cause,
  Charles expects to see a dead woman and then is
  astonished to find that she is alive.
• Ex. In the Edenic garden of the forbidden
  Undercliff
• (70-72) a rendezvous with Sarah at
  Carlake's Barn (174, 239-43, 249-52)

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Karl Marx emancipation

• Every emancipation is restoration of the human
  world and of human relationships to man himself.
• Emancipation appears as dissolution, and this
  dissolution/emancipation pattern continues
  throughout the novel.
• the meta-narrative of Marxism

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Class Struggle/ social stratification

• Sam Farrow and Charles Smithson aspects of class
  struggle
• Sarah Woodruff the tyrannical Mrs.
  Poulteney
• Sarah's fathers obsessed with the supposed
  gentility of his family madness (58-59)
• Sarah's economic marginality
• Charles and Ernestina Sam and Mary,
• Sarah Ernestina,
• Sarah Mrs. Talbot

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Sam Weller and Sam Farrow

• Sam Weller, Mr. Pickwick's servant in Pickwick
  Papers, is a character who rather starkly
  illustrated to Victorian readers the suffering of
  the Victorian underclass.
• Sam Farrow's situation with Charles is not
  romanticized. Fowles comments, "the difference
  between Sam Weller and Sam Farrow (that is,
  between 1836 and 1867) was this the first was
  happy with his role, the second suffered it"
  (47-48). The solution of the benevolent and
  innocent master who wins the undying loyalty of
  his servant is not workable in the case of Sam
  and Charles. Their antipathy grows as the novel
  progresses.

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Ernestina and Mary

• Mary is actually a servant of Mrs. Tranter but is
  made subject to Ernestina during the latter's
  stay at Lyme Regis. Ernestina tyrannizes Mary,
  bullying her and ordering her about, using the
  language and position to intimidate. Mary senses
  oppression, but in a different manner from the
  way Sam reacts to Charles. She is envious of
  Ernestinas economic superiority (79). Mary is
  also sexually free in contrast to Ernestina's
  sexual repression the former was dismissed from
  Mrs. Poulteney's for kissing a groom there and
  becomes sexually involved with Sam not too long
  after they meet.

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Economic Advancement

• Mary does not attempt to break out of the
  repressive relationship with Ernestina (partially
  because Mrs. Tranter is a genuinely benevolent
  employer who shows her disregard for class
  distinctions by occasionally dining--in
  private--with Mary). Sam, on the other hand, is
  defiantly determined to find a way out of his
  situation, to be liberated from the social bonds
  that hold him in a subservient position. Sam
  wanted to be a haberdasher (132) .

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The contrast

• Whereas Charles and Ernestina are bound by
  elaborate convention, social ritual, and legal
  considerations in their engagement, Sam and Mary
  can be direct, honest, open with one another.
• Whereas Charles and Ernestina are bound by
  elaborate convention, social ritual, and legal
  considerations in their engagement, Sam and Mary
  can be direct, honest, open with one another.

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The indeterminacy of history

• "History is not like some individual person,
  which uses men to achieve its ends. History is
  nothing but the actions of men in pursuit of
  their ends." (Chap.42, 310).
• History is the actions of individuals as they
  attempt to construct their lives. The ideological
  vituperation that sometimes seems to drown out
  the human factor in Marx's pronouncements is here
  set aside and the infinite possibilities inherent
  in human freedom are recognized.

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Study Questions

• 1. Comment on the narrative point of view.
• 2. Compare the characters of Sarah and
  Ernestina. In what ways are they affected by
  Victorian attitudes towards women? In what ways
  do their different social and economic status
  affect their experiences?

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• 3. Compare the lives of Sam, Mary, and other
  members of the working class with those of their
  employers. What social attitudes do they have?
  In what ways do their attitudes diverge?

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• 4. Discuss Charles. In what ways does he avoid
  learning about who he is? For example, discuss
  his interest in paleontology or his desire to
  help Sarah.
• 5. Why does Charles decide to go to the brothel
  and then change his mind? Compare this with his
  experience with the prostitute Sarah. What do his
  reactions mean? Discuss whether it would be
  possible for a man to idealize some women, while
  he might feel no guilt about exploiting others.
  What attitudes towards women would this foster?

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• 6. Why does Fowles give the novel two
  conclusions? Do you consider them to be equally
  viable options, or is one more of a conclusion
  than the other?
• 7. How is Charles changed by his romance with
  Sarah? Is it a change for the better or for the
  worse?
• 8. Why does Sarah allow herself to be called
  the French Lieutenants whore when in fact she
  never had sex with him? Why in fact did she
  start the rumor at all, since she was the one who
  first mentioned it to her employer, Mrs. Talbot?

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• 9. Compare this novel with a popular romance
  or a gothic novel, either of the nineteenth
  century or the present. What conventions of these
  novels does Fowles adopt? What does he change or
  discard?
• 10. Discuss the two long poems quoted from by
  Fowles in his novel.

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• 11. Read the other poems referred to in the
  opening quotations. What light, if any, do they
  throw on your understanding of either the novel
  or Victorian attitudes towards life.
• 12. Is Fowles too one-sided in his
  description of people in the nineteenth century?
  Discuss.
• 13. Compare this novel with a novel by Thomas
  Hardy, George Eliot, or Charles Dickens.