Victorian Sexuality

Victorians are often viewed as prudish and repressed where the issues of sex and sexuality
are concerned. However, in the view of the fact that in spite of these strict moral principles
they actually consummated their love and created homes and families, sex and sexuality were
in reality unavoidable parts of Victorians’ lives. As Stearns notes sexuality was both a public
secret and the main moral issue of the nineteenth century:

“The Victorian world that was full of repression as for sexuality, spent a
great deal of time and energy focusing on sexuality. If sexuality was a secret then it was a
secret invested with enormous powers.”

The novel The French Lieutenant's Woman is almost as much about the twentieth century
attitude to the Victorian age as it is about its setting. The author, John Fowles, makes much of
contradictions (such as the popularity of pornography in a supposedly straitlaced culture),
implicitly drawing attention to similar contradictions a hundred years later- the novel is set
almost exactly a century before it was written.

The type of story told here is, with certain modifications such as overt sexuality, one which
could have been the plot of a nineteenth century novel. Although the main plot and writing
style of this novel seem very much like those of a Victorian novel, this story could never have
been produced in the nineteenth century. Above all, its treatment of sexuality is uniquely
modern, even if the sexuality it portrays is accurate to the Victorian era. As Fowles points
out, the Victorians are often defined in the public imagination by their sexual prudishness.
This aspect of their society has come to be overemphasized, however, in large part because
the middle and upper classes repressed expression of sexuality in art and literature. However,
Fowles argues that Victorians were just as obsessed with sex as any modern culture, and by
forbidding discussion of it and limiting practice of it, they in fact increased the pleasure that
they gained when they actually did engage in sexual actions. This novel, then, portrays what a
Victorian novel could not: the reality of Victorians’ sexual life, including graphic images of
prostitution and intercourse. Despite Fowles’s argument that Victorian sexuality is not
categorically different from contemporary sexuality, he acknowledges that sexual norms were
much different, which had profound effects on women, in particular. Victorian women were
coerced into limiting expressions of sexuality in part through the specter of becoming a fallen
woman. A fallen woman is one who has lost her virginity before marriage, become a
prostitute, or otherwise sexually compromised herself. Fallen women were usually ostracized
by society and often were unable to find a husband or have a proper family in a time when
these were supposed to be women’s sole markers of success. Tess Durbeyfield in Thomas
Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles is probably the most famous fallen woman in Victorian
fiction, but it was a standard trope used to frighten women into chastity until marriage.
Fowles means Sarah to also evoke this trope, though her embodiment of it is shown to be far
more complex than the confines of Victorian society would ever allow a novel to portray.
Sarah upends the idea that estrangement is necessarily a punishment for fallen women and a
deterrent to other women who might stray from norms. By inviting the label of “fallen
woman”—and relishing the ostracism that results—Sarah uses a clichéd archetype to subvert
society’s power over her sexuality. Sarah’s fluency with this trope and its effects—as well as
the fact that, in her case, it isn’t accurate—encourages readers to see the fallen woman trope
as a story that gained power through its constant retelling in real life and in fiction. While
exposing the trope as a fabricated story might seem to expose it as weak, Fowles instead
shows how much real-life power a cultural narrative such as this one can have. Even as Sarah
explodes the implications of the fallen woman trope, she’s still trapped within the confines of
its narrative, as it shapes her life and her actions in every possible way. Near the end of the
book, Fowles calls Sarah a “New Woman,” which was a term the Victorians used to denote a
more independent and progressive type of woman, who often transgressed sexual norms in
the name of social change. In this transgression of sexual norms, New Women and fallen
women were not so different. By calling her a New Woman, however, Fowles begins to shift
Sarah into a narrative of purposeful rebellion and out of the narrative of the woman who has
fallen by fate or moral laxity. He also implicitly politicizes Sarah’s actions, implying that
she’s part of a broader social movement away from the Victorian repression of women and
their sexuality. Overall, then, Fowles is arguing not only for gender equality and sexual
freedom, but also to change the modern view of the Victorians’ relationship to sex. By
showing his characters engaging in sexual activities that fall outside of the modern
conception of Victorian life, Fowles makes the Victorians seem more real and more fallible.
Humanity, he argues, always has the same desires and the same weaknesses, and it’s only the
way of discussing and representing them that changes.

This novel is at once a retrospective and a prospective, a narrative that ultimately erases the
temporal boundaries between the Victorian era and the modern reader's present moment.