Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro

Faculdade de Letras
Departamento de Letras Anglo-Germânicas
Narrativa em Língua Inglesa II
Prof. Dr. Thiago Rhys Bezerra Cass

Metafiction and parody in The French Lieutenant’s Woman,

by John Fowles

Carlos Eduardo Schmitt

DRE: 115170586

Rio de Janeiro

Julho de 2019
Introduction

In this work we aim to deal with the postmodern novel The French Lieutenant’s
Woman, written by John Fowles and published in 1969. We decided to work with two
features of postmodernist novels, that are metafiction and parody, applied to chapter 13
and to the three endings of the novel.

In order to structure our work, we will start mentioning some features of

modernist novels, putting special attention to metafiction and parody, the core of our
work. After that, we will start dealing with chapter 13 and with the three endings and,
from them, we will try to find some features that will help us to understand this novel as
a postmodernist one.

A postmodernist writer clearly understands the difference between art and reality
and they know how to express it. There are four aspects that can be considered. The first
one is play, considered only a pastime, that is to say, nothing really intrinsically
intermingled with reality. It is not a work that want to change the reader’s views or his
own life. It is just something meant to have fun, a simple pastime; the second aspect is
parody, that we will develop further; the third one is reflexivity, in which the author
demonstrates that the narrator is still thinking about what is going to create. It is a
process in which the person is still creating; and the fourth and last one is deflation, in
which there is a conscious attempt, in opposition to modernist novels, in making art
trivial, opened to different kinds of readers, and not to the specialized one.

Metafiction, parody and other features

About the features of postmodernist novels, we can identify, among others, two
important characteristics. The first one is mediation, in which language plays an
important role, that is to say, the art of representing it; the second is rewriting the
fictions of the past. A good example of it is Jean Rhy, who rewrote Jane Eyre in Wide
Sargasso Sea, published in 1966.

We will start dealing now with the two most important features for this work,
that are parody and metafiction. Parody, from a postmodernist point of view, consists of
bringing the past and showing how it is not adapted anymore. It happens because
writers start questioning their capacity of producing original work of arts. In this sense,
there is a dark irony regarding modernists, since they reject any attempt of originality.
Parody includes any practice that provides an allusive imitation or transformation in a
polemical way. And, by doing so, you may transform it. One example of it is Peter
Ackroyd in Hawksmoor, published in 1985. We could even go further as Alasdair Gray
did in Lanark and talk about parodying parody.

One of the most important things to understand metafiction in a postmodernist

novel is to think about it as consciousness about the language of fiction, since language
is mediated by language and fiction. Storytelling itself becomes an issue, as in the case
of the novel studied in this novel, in which the writer is trying to write a novel, that may
be perceived when the narrator talks about it. In this way, the narrator itself becomes
important and telling becoming as important as showing. We could think that if you
accept that you cannot escape from fiction, you liberate yourself and return to plot, even
though you know it is just fiction. In other words, story telling becomes an issue and
there is tension between telling and showing.

Chapters 13, 45, 60 and 61

From now on, we will start to analyze four chapters in the book and we will try
to recognize the use of metafiction and parody in them. The novel reads as if it were a
Victorian novel. The story happens in the nineteenth century. Charles is engaged with
Ernestina but falls in love with Sarah, known as the French lieutenant’s woman, since
she had had an affair with a French man and they lived together for a while without
been married. After a while she was abandoned by him, and became known as a fallen
woman, that is to say, a woman who engaged in premarital relation and was abandoned.
Let us analyze the beginning of the chapter:

I do not know. This story I am telling is all imagination. These

characters I create never existed outside my own mind. If I have
pretended until now to know my characters' minds and innermost
thoughts, it is because I am writing in (just as I have assumed some of
the vocabulary and "voice" of) a convention universally accepted at
the time of my story: that the novelist stands next to God. (FOWLES,
1970, p. 90).
 Chapter 13 is considered, among many scholars, the most important one. Until
this chapter, the novel is read as a typical Victorian novel, not only in theme but in form
as well. But it is in this chapter that the narrator shifts from a nineteenth century style
language to a twentieth one. And after that he starts shifting all the time. It is in this
chapter that we realize that the narrator is totally different from the one of past novels. It
is in this chapter that the narrator stops to think and realizes that he himself still does not
know completely what he is about to describe to the reader. He is still creating the
characters and the story, and this is clearly manifested here.

Other interesting parts are chapter 45 and the last chapters of the book. In them
we can see three endings. These are the first two paragraphs of chapter 45:

And now, having brought this fiction to a thoroughly traditional

ending, I had better explain that although all I have described in the
last two chapters happened, it did not happen quite in the way you
may have been led to believe.

I said earlier that we are all poets, though not many of us write poetry;
and so are we all novelists, that is, we have a habit of writing fictional
futures for ourselves, although perhaps today we incline more to put
ourselves into a film. We screen in our minds hypotheses about how
we might behave, about what might happen to us; and these novelistic
or cinematic hypotheses often have very much more effect on how we
actually do behave, when the real future becomes the present, than we
generally allow. Charles was no exception; and the last few pages you
have read are not what happened, but what he spent the hours between
London and Exeter imagining might happen. (FOWLES, 1970, p.
315-316).

We readers have the impression that Charles does not visit Sarah and that he
comes back to Lyme and reaffirms his love for Ernestina, marring her. Nevertheless, the
ending is dismissed as a daydream by Charles. This is clearly a parody of a Victorian
novel, as it is written in the beginning, it is a “traditional ending”. The entire excerpt
brings together metafiction and parody.

Before the other endings, the narrator becomes a character tossing a coin in the
same railway compartment that Charles was. We can interpret it as the endings he
would portray in the following chapters. The last two endings are interesting as well.
The second ending happens in chapter 60. Charles breaks with Ernestina, being
disgraced by her father, and engages with Sarah. She presents to Charles their daughter,
fruit of one sexual relationship they have had years before. We have again a Victorian
ending. Both the first and the second endings are a parody of Victorian novels. The first
one reinforces the idea of following the reason and the second one puts an especial
effort in bringing out feelings and passions. The second ending, from our perspective, is
the happiest one, since Charles stays with the person who he really loves and recognizes
his daughter.

If we keep establishing comparisons between these endings, we will realize that

the first one reconciles sexual desires with social norms. Somehow it is a parody of Jane
Austen. The second ending, that is Victorian as well, appeals to sentimentality. Let us
remember that they do not even embrace each other, but he only kisses her auburn hair.
That is really a parody with a deep dark irony. How is it possible that after three years
without seen each other he would only kissed her hair? We know this image is a sign to
express sexuality and desire.

If the novel had finished in chapter 60, we readers would not have any trouble to
understand and appreciate it, but it does not. In the beginning of chapter 61 we read:

It is a time-proven rule of the novelist's craft never to introduce any

but very minor new characters at the end of a book. I hope Lalage may
be forgiven; but the extremely important-looking person that has,
during the last scene, been leaning against the parapet of the
embankment across the way from 16 Cheyne Walk, the residence of
Mr. Dante Gabriel Rossetti (who took--and died of--chloral, by the
way, not opium) may seem at first sight to represent a gross breach of
the rule. (FOWLES, 1970, p. 421).

That is an image of the narrator and he will turn back his pocket watch by fifteen
minutes. So, the events are the same until Charles meet Sarah. In this ending they do not
understand one another and Charles does not even recognize the little girl, Lalage, as his
daughter. It looks that Charles will return to United States, having a really bad
impression on Sarah. This third ending may be considered a modernist ending. It is not
attractive to us.

Conclusion

As a matter of final considerations, we can understand better the impact of such

novel. All features of postmodernism can be widely identified in the novel, above all the
ones that we focused in our work, parody and metafiction, specially in the four chapters
analyzed here. Even though it can be easily read, since postmodernist novels are not
elitist, at the same time we realize the importance of intertextuality to deep in what is
read in the novel. We can only understand the real impacts and consequences of this
novel if we first study and upgrade our knowledge of, at least, the Victorian novels and
the modernist ones. Understanding parody in this novel is intrinsically related to
understand the mentioned novels.

Bibliography

BARTH, John. “The Literature of Replenishment,” in Essentials of the Theory of

Fiction, 3rd ed., ed. Michael J. Hoffman and Patrick D. Murphy, Durham: Duke
University Press, 2005.

FOWLES, John. The French Lieutenant’s Woman. Library of Congress Catalog Card
Number: 77-86616 First Printing, august, 1970, in <https://play.google.com/books/
reader?printsec=frontcover&output=reader&id=NMgbJAAAAEAJ&pg=GBS.PA2>