“The french lieutenant’s

woman”
John Fowles
The French Lieutenant's Woman is a 1969 postmodern
historical fiction novel by John Fowles. It was his third
published novel, after The Collector and The Magus.
Originally published: 1969

Author: John Fowles.

Film Adaptations: The French Lieutenant's Woman (1981)

Page count: 445

Characters: Sarah, Charles Smithson, Mrs. Poulteney etc…

Genres: Postmodern literature, romantic, gothic novel

This novel is based on the nineteenth-century romantic or gothic novel,
a literary genre which can trace its origins back to the eighteenth century.
it has achieved enduring commercial and critical success.

Critics were shocked by Fowles' diverging from the form of the

Victorian novel, particularly with regards to the inclusion of a second,
alternative ending ,and such innovation signaled the "sudden but
predictable arrival of a remarkable novelist.”
In 2010, TIME magazine's critics selected The French Lieutenant's
Woman as one of the 100 greatest novels since 1923, with the rationale
that it is a "magnificent game of a novel"
WHAT’S THE NOVEL ABOUT?
The subject of this novel is essentially the same as that of his other
works: the relationship between life and art, the artist and his creation,
and the isolation resulting from an individual's struggle for selfhood.
Fowles uses dialogue to reveal the personalities of his characters and
often he will satirize them as well. ( For example, Charles' attitudes
toward Sarah and Ernestina are revealed in the way he talks to them. He
is forever uncomfortable with Sarah because she won't accept the way in
which he categorizes the world, including his view of her. )
In this romance, Fowles examines the problems of two
socially and economically oppressed groups in nineteenth-
century England:
1. the poverty of the working and servant classes

2. the economic and social entrapment of women.

 This story is thus not really a romance at all, for Fowles'

objective is not to unite his two protagonists, Sarah and
Charles, but to show what each human being must face
in life in order to be able to grow.
Sarah Woodruff is not really the
central character.
 She does not change greatly in the
novel as it progresses.
 she has already arrived at an
awareness that she must go beyond the
definition of her individuality that
society has imposed upon her.
she was forced to see through it and
beyond it in order to find meaning and
some sort of happiness in her life.
Charles is the actual protagonist of
this novel.
He must discard each layer of the
false Charles: Charles the naturalist,
Charles the gentleman, Charles the
rake, and perhaps even Charles the
lover, in order to find Charles the
human being.
He achieves a maturity that enables
him to control his life as long as he
remembers to look for answers
nowhere but in himself.
The Genre

The French Lieutenant’s Woman is not only a historical

novel, providing a convincing excursion back into mid-
Victorian England, but also a novel about the
relationship of the individual to the forces of a
particular time and of time.
Fowles’s novel is a throwback to earlier literary styles
in its chattiness and in its fatalistic mechanisms.
 As a pseudo-Victorian novel written in 1967, it seeks
to transcend the tyranny of Victorianism.
Point of view.
 There are elements of the omniscient narrator in the
point of view in that the narrator is definitely external
to the action and looking in at what is unfolding.
 There are areas where the traditional omniscient
point of view is not accurate . ( the narrator
constantly intrudes into the action, identifying
himself as the author and highlighting certain facts
about the production of this text)
Central irony
is related to freedom and who possesses it and who does not. As
the novel progresses, Charles, who apparently seems to have
everything in society a man could wish for, comes to realize how
actually he is very constrained and trapped by society and its
restraints. Ironically, Sarah, the figure who is shunned by society and
seems to lack freedom, becomes a symbol of the complete and total
freedom that he craves and desires to have himself.
The central irony of this novel therefore relates to the way in which
Charles, the novel's protagonist, moves from a position of feeling
himself to enjoy freedom only to realize that he suffers from its
profound lack.
Anachronistic imagery
The narrator emphasizes how out-of-place in Victorian society Sarah
is by using anachronistic imagery to describe her uncanny traits that
distinguish her from her peers - for example, he says that she has a
"computer in her heart" that allows her to read people's emotions with
incredible precision (87). Sarah could have been portrayed as a psychic,
but Fowles chooses to use imagery relating to modern technology to
drive home the point that Sarah is 'modern woman' and not at all like
Ernestina and Mary.
 THEMES

Social mobility and class revolution

Loss of faith in authority

The artificial nature of fiction

Love ,sex , freedom

Mistery and uncertainty

 SYMBOLS
Ware Commons Much of Charles and Sarah's initial interactions take
place on the wild Ware Commons, which is used as a symbol of a world
outside of the Victorian sphere of harsh morality and prudery.
 The crumbling cliffs of Lyme Bay

What the cliffs symbolize to Charles is the stately and monumental nature of
time, in which nature builds on top of what exists to create huge edifices. He
also sees the cliffs as symbolizing "the survival of the fittest and best," a
subset of humans to which he feels he belongs
The novelist as God The author of the novel compares himself
to "a god" in Chapter 13: he and God have both created a world,
over which they can exert some (or even full) control. Fowles
writes in Chapter 13 that “there is only one good definition of God:
the freedom that allows other freedoms to exist" (82). He therefore
allows, or pretends to allow, his characters some autonomy.

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