The French Lieutenant’s

woman
Francesca Ferrante & Francesca Gavelli

Narrativa Anglesa I Cinema 2009-2010

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woman
Introduction
The French Lieutenant’s woman (1969) is a novel written
by John Fowles during the post-modern period. It is about
the tormented love story between the two main characters:
Sarah Woodruff and Charles Smithson.
 The French Lieutenant’s
woman
Introduction
The love affair
between Sarah
and Charles
inspired the film
adaptation
directed by the
Jewish film-maker
Karel Reisz and
written by Harold
Pinter in 1981.
 The French Lieutenant’s
woman
Introduction
The movie reproduces a time bounce from the Victorian era
to the present introducing a contemporary affair between
two modern characters:
Anna and Mike
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woman
Even if it was published in the second half of the 20th century, the
novel takes place during the Victorian era showing the
contradictions of that time and trying to subvert them.

What is the point of writing/shooting

a retro-Victorian novel/film in the
twentieth century?
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Cultural background
The French lieutenant’s woman is a Postmodern novel

What is Postmodernism?
Postmodernism is a cultural, artistic and intellectual phenomenon
that spread in the Western countries after the WWII.

The frame for the development of this movement was the sense
of dissatisfaction, loss of faith, sterility, ideological
exhaustion.
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Cultural background

Main features/concepts of Postmodernism

To make what seems natural to be constructed

Nothing is natural, everything is constructed

Objectivity doesn’t exist

De-naturalization
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Cultural background

How is de-naturalization achieved?

Parody
Parody is repetition with difference
The French Lieutenant’s woman is an example of Parody as reappropriation of past
forms or critical representation, a tool for the revision of past events, not just
mockery.

Continuity and difference

In the novel we find Victorian characters, but they don’t always act as the conventions
suggested, there we have the distortion.

An example could be Ernestina looking herself at the mirror and having sexual feelings
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The French Lieutenant’s woman is about the way we represent
reality.

It is a reaction against the realistic novel of the XIX Century

showing that realism is not the only perspective of view.

Realism represented itself as a given, as a natural representation

but Postmodernism changes completely this perspective.

As Fowles says "Fiction is woven into all, as a Greek observed

some two and a half thousand years ago. I find this new reality
(or unreality) more valid;"
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Fowles shows that XIX
century novel is not a
slice of life but is
something
constructed. We don’t
see the whole, we just
access a selected part.
The reader construct
and reconstruct the
reality as many time
as the characters.
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Sarah plays different roles. She keeps
constructing herself:
submissive, charming, artist, whore etc.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=faqZLeLOdcU&feature=related
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The French Lieutenant’s woman is a self-conscious
representation (Hutcheon)
↓
What is represented is not natural, is always
constructed
Awareness of fiction
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The narrator
Both in the film and in the novel the figure of the
narrator is used and abused.

Fowles wants to perform the fictional magic but at the

same time he wants to reveal us this process.

He wants to “summon up a sense of reality while forcing

us to attend to the nature and falsehood of art”
(Bradbury)
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The narrator
The narrator isn’t objective and invisible as in
conventional modern novels, but as George Gaston
states

“we have a highly self-conscious, active, almost

aggressive figure who manipulates, tantalizes, and
informs us at every turn. As a result, he becomes such a
powerful presence as the story unfolds that, in time, we
become conscious that he is perhaps the major
character in this fiction, and that this novel is ultimately
less about a story than about the magic of story-telling”.
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woman
The narrator
How the script and the director translated the voice narrator?

Since Fowles's story is essentially a novel within a novel, their

idea was to transform it into a movie within a movie.

“Pinter has written a script which retains much of the Sarah-

Charles story line but which replaces the active, con-
temporary narrator with contemporary actors (Anna and
Mike) who, while playing the roles of the protagonists in a
movie entitled The French Lieutenant’s Woman, carry on a
love affair which parallels and intersects the affair of the
couple they are playing”. (Gaston)
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The French Lieutenant’s woman is also Self-
contradictory in terms of forms

The natural way to reproduce reality was

Presentation
Development
Climax
Resolution

In naturalistic fiction everything coheres at the end

But this is just a way to reproduce reality!!!

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Postmodern fiction provides contradictory and

different endings.

The French Lieutenant’s woman, both the novel and

the movie give us various endings but not a
closure.

The narrator keeps contradicting himself and he

gives us free choice of interpretation.
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Answer
The French Lieutenant’s woman is a novel/film created
in the XXI century but it refers to the Victorian era
because is Postmodern.
As a Postmodern text/movie it reproduces the past
modifying it. It offers a parodic interpretation of the
Victorian conventions de-naturalizing and de-
constructing them.

The role of the narrator is abused, the idea of realistic

novel is subverted, the structure is contradictory.

All these elements make the novel/movie a kind of

repetition with differences.
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Bibliography

Bradbury, Malcom. The novelist as Impresario: The fiction of John Fowles

Gaston, George. The French Lieutenant's Woman by Karel Reisz, 1981

Gutleben, Christian. “Nostalgic Postmodernism” Postmodernism as otherness.

Editions Robopi. Amsterdam, 2001. 110

Hutcheon, Linda. The Politics of Postmodernism. New York: Routledge, 1989

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Thank you!!!