A Newsletter Guide to John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman: Victorian Fabric, Postmodern Threads
An Introductory Exploration for the Reader
Greetings to all students of literature, from the dedicated university scholar to the curious literary enthusiast. Welcome to a deep dive into one of the most ingenious and pivotal novels of the twentieth century: John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969). This is not merely a historical novel set in 1867; it is a bold, self-conscious interrogation of the very act of writing history and fiction. Fowles masterfully drapes a tale of Victorian passion and repression in the fabric of postmodern technique, creating a work that is as much about the 1960s as it is about the 1860s. It challenges our notions of authority—authorial, social, and historical—and places the concept of choice at its fractured heart. This guide is designed to equip you for rigorous academic engagement by unpacking its narrative audacity, thematic richness, and enduring critical legacy.
Part I: Narrative Innovation – The Postmodern Framework
Fowles does not simply tell a story; he displays its mechanics, inviting the reader to witness the gears and pulleys of its construction. This self-reflexivity is the novel’s defining feature.
The Intrusive, Metafictional Narrator:
Explanation: The narrator is a deliberately anachronistic construct, a godlike figure who is sometimes a conventional Victorian omniscient voice and at other times a mid-20th-century authorial presence who comments on his own creative process. He famously intervenes in Chapter 13 to declare, “This story I am telling is all imagination. These characters I create never existed outside my own mind.” He discusses the limitations of the Victorian novel, compares his characters to puppets, and openly wrestles with what they might do next.
Why It Matters: This technique shatters the “illusion of reality” prized by classic realist fiction. It forces the reader into an active, critical relationship with the text. The narrator’s intrusions highlight the author’s power (and its limits), comment on the historical distance between the 1860s and 1960s, and establish the novel’s central theme: the anxiety of freedom, which applies to characters and to the author himself.
The Radical Multiple Endings:
Explanation: The novel offers not one, but three possible conclusions. The first is a conventionally Victorian, although ironic, ending where Charles accepts his societal fate with Ernestina. The second provides a more modern, tragic-romantic resolution. The third—the most radical—sees Charles and Sarah meeting again, but their future is left uncertain, and the narrator literally turns back time and exits the scene, leaving Charles alone.
Why It Matters: This is the ultimate expression of the novel’s existential and postmodern philosophy. By rejecting a single, authoritative ending, Fowles rejects the deterministic narratives of both Victorian providence and traditional plot. He transfers the burden of meaning-making to the reader and underscores that in life, as in fiction, there is no single “true” ending, only a series of choices and their consequences.
Intertextuality and Historiographic Metafiction:
Explanation: The novel is saturated with references. Each chapter begins with an epigraph from Victorian poetry, fiction, scientific texts (Darwin), or social commentary (Marx). The prose style imitates Victorian giants like Hardy, Eliot, and Austen. This creates a dense dialogue between Fowles’s text and the literature of the era he is reconstructing. Furthermore, as critic Linda Hutcheon identified, the novel is a prime example of “historiographic metafiction”—it uses historical settings and details with scholarly precision while simultaneously questioning how we can ever truly know the past, acknowledging that all history is a narrative construction.
Why It Matters: The intertextual references ground the novel in authentic Victorian discourse while providing a critical counterpoint. The epigraphs often ironically contrast with the chapter’s events. The pastiche is not mere imitation; it is a critical tool. The metafictional layer reminds us that our understanding of the Victorian age is itself a story, filtered through contemporary perspectives and biases.
Part II: Thematic Interrogations – Victorian Constraints, Modern Questions
Existential Freedom vs. Societal Determinism:
Explanation: Fowles grafts 20th-century existentialist philosophy (particularly Sartrean ideas) onto his Victorian characters. Charles Smithson, the gentleman paleontologist, is the primary vehicle for this. His journey is from a deterministic worldview—shaped by class, duty, and Darwinian theory—towards an agonising awareness of his own radical freedom. Sarah Woodruff acts as the catalyst for this crisis, herself embodying a mysterious and self-willed existence that defies societal categorisation.
Key Question: Is Sarah a genuinely free existential heroine, or is she, as some critics argue, a “mythic” projection of Charles’s (and Fowles’s) desire for an elusive, transcendent other?
Study Point: Analyse Charles’s fossil-hunting. How does his scientific interest in extinct species mirror his own fear of becoming an evolutionary dead end, trapped by obsolete social codes?
Gender, Sexuality, and the Feminist Critique:
Explanation: The novel offers a scathing critique of Victorian sexual mores. The contrast between the innocent, commodified Ernestina Freeman and the transgressive, enigmatic Sarah Woodruff lays bare the patriarchal prison of the “angel in the house” ideal. Sarah’s claimed “fallen” status is a form of power, a self-created identity that liberates her from society’s expectations, even as it ostracises her.
Key Question: To what extent is Sarah’s character a genuine recuperation of female agency, and to what extent is she a male fantasy figure—the mysterious, sexually experienced woman who exists to educate the male protagonist?
Study Point: Examine the portrayal of Mrs. Poulteney. How does this grotesque symbol of mercenary piety serve to critique the hypocrisy at the heart of respectable Victorian society?
Class and the Erosion of Certainty:
Explanation: Set at the precise moment when the old aristocratic order was crumbling under the weight of new industrial and scientific thought, the novel captures this seismic shift. Charles, an amateur scientist and landowner, is caught between worlds. His engagement to Ernestina, daughter of a wealthy nouveau riche merchant (Mr. Freeman), represents a pragmatic, declining class alliance. His attraction to Sarah, a disgraced governess, is a transgression of all class boundaries.
Key Question: How do the debates between Charles and Mr. Freeman about Darwinism and commerce reflect the broader ideological battles of the age?
Study Point: Consider the symbolism of the Undercliff, the wild, natural space where Charles and Sarah meet. How does this liminal geography mirror their social and existential liminality?
Science, Religion, and a World in Transition:
Explanation: The conflict between faith and doubt permeates the novel. Charles’s profession is symbolic: he digs up fossils that testify to a world older than Genesis, undermining biblical certainty. The narrator himself adopts the role of a scientist, dissecting his characters and their society with analytical detachment. The loss of religious teleology creates the vacuum into which existential anxiety flows.
Key Question: How does Fowles use the metaphor of evolution—both biological and social—to structure the novel’s exploration of change and adaptation?
Study Point: Analyse Dr. Grogan’s role. As a man of science who diagnoses Sarah with “obscure melancholy,” does he represent enlightened progress or a new, reductive form of determinism?
Part III: Character as Conundrum
Sarah Woodruff: The Sphinx Without a Secret?
Analysis: Sarah is the novel’s central enigma. Is she a tragic victim, a cunning manipulator, a proto-feminist, or a symbol of existential freedom? Fowles deliberately keeps her motivations opaque. Her lie about the French lieutenant is the act of self-creation that defines her. She refuses to be narrated by others, ultimately even escaping the control of the author himself in the final ending.
Charles Smithson: The Existential Everyman
Analysis: Charles is the point of identification and the site of struggle. His education is the novel’s plot. He moves from a state of genteel complacency, through a crisis of desire and doubt, towards a painful awareness of his own responsibility. His tragic flaw is perhaps his need to “solve” Sarah, to assign her a fixed meaning, which is the very opposite of the freedom she represents.
Ernestina Freeman: The Angel in the Gilded Cage
Analysis: Ernestina is not a villain but a victim of her time. She is the perfect product of her class: pretty, pious, innocent to the point of ignorance about her own body, and treated as a commodity in the marriage market. Her stability and predictability are what Charles initially seeks and ultimately finds suffocating.
Part IV: Critical Contexts and Enduring Debates
Postmodernism and the Legacy of the Novel: Situate Fowles alongside writers like Borges, Nabokov, and later, Julian Barnes, who play with history and narrative. The novel is a cornerstone of British postmodern fiction.
Feminist Re-readings: Critiques, particularly from the 1980s onward, have questioned whether Fowles’s “liberation” of Sarah is authentically feminist or merely serves Charles’s existential journey. This remains a lively debate.
The Adaptation: Discuss the successful 1981 film screenplay by Harold Pinter, which ingeniously solved the “multiple endings” problem by adding a modern-day framing story of actors making a film, thus mirroring the novel’s metafictional layering.
Historiographic Metafiction: Use this critical term (Hutcheon) to show how the novel doesn’t just use history as backdrop but makes the process of historical understanding its very subject.
Important Examination Questions for Consideration
“The most powerful presence in the novel is not a character, but the narrator.” To what extent do you agree with this assessment of The French Lieutenant’s Woman?
How does Fowles use the multiple endings not just as a formal trick, but as the ultimate expression of the novel’s central philosophical concerns?
Analyse the character of Sarah Woodruff. Is she best understood as a realistic psychological portrait, a symbolic figure, or a metafictional device?
“The novel is a critique of Victorian society, but it is also a product of the 1960s.” Explore this statement with reference to Fowles’s treatment of sexuality, class, and existential freedom.
To what extent can The French Lieutenant’s Woman be accurately described as a “Victorian novel”? Justify your answer with close reference to Fowles’s narrative techniques.
Conclusion: A Landmark of Literary Liberty
The French Lieutenant’s Woman endures because it is a novel of dazzling intellectual bravery and profound humanity. It respects the texture and complexity of the past while liberating itself from its narrative conventions. It asks the most fundamental questions—about how we live, how we love, and how we tell the stories of our lives—and refuses to provide pat answers. In its playful, serious, and relentlessly intelligent pages, the Victorian era is both vividly resurrected and thoroughly demystified, leaving us with a timeless exploration of the perpetual human struggle between the prison of circumstance and the terrifying wonder of free will.
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