John Fowles in “The French Lieutenant’s Woman” offers a satirical insight into the Victorian society, and its narrow-mindedness, pretentious piety and constructed false reality. To be able to carry out his mockery the author employs a rather straightforward (and perhaps cliché from the first glance) plot line: an engaged gentleman Charles starts an intimate relationship with a Fallen Woman Sarah. However, the novel turns out to be anything but banal. It is an account of two people entangled in the maze of social expectations, prejudices and prohibitions of the epoch.
Charles is an heir to a comfortable income and property, therefore he can afford to be idol as a proper gentleman, and basically does not do anything in his life. He has no job, no occupation, no earthly worries, except for a very earthy hobby – gathering fossils. They play quite an interesting role in the development and the symbolics of the novel. First of all, while looking for some fossils at the Lyme Regis beach Charles runs into Sarah, an unmarried woman who supposedly was a mistress of a French officer. Sarah later on will use the fossils as an excuse to approach Charles, will present him a gift of two samples and eventually put a spell on him with her story. The symbolics of the fossils resonates with the reoccurring theme of time and how it defines people. What else are the fossils if not creatures forever stuck in time?
The image of the Fallen woman is be crafted by whoever feels like contributing. The story of Sarah Woodruff is put together piece by piece with the effortless help of a small town gossipers. One of them is Mrs. Fairley, a mean housekeeper of the residence where Sarah has been accepted to live. From the start Mrs. Fairley dislikes her, therefore on any occasion she tries to spoil Sarah’s image in the eyes of the house mistress Mrs. Poulteney. Mrs. Fairley’s reports are with necessary omissions and additions, always distorted. Doctor Gorgon is another character who is said not to be trusted by the narrator himself. And that is a man Charles turn to for his confession and advice about Sarah. As a reader, you are stunned, amused and anticipate with pleasure the approaching disaster. Sarah, on the other hand, the one who could give the real account of the events surrounding her life and image, is kept silent and mysterious. When she eventually speaks, she tells a lie.
The readers will feel that they also have a say in the story’s development, since the narrator is addressing us directly in various stages of the plot. Not to mention that he offers three alternative endings to choose from. In the book there are entire paragraphs and even chapters where the story telling is disrupted by the narrator’s self-reflective sections, or dialogues with us. The following lines illustrate that quite well: “ A character is “real’ or “imaginative”? If you think that, hypocrite lecteur, I can only smile. You do not even think of your own past as quite real; you dress it up, you gild it or blacken it, censor it, tinker with it… fictionalise it, in a word, and put it away on a shelf – your book, your romanced autobiography. We are all in flight from the real reality. That is a basic definition of Homo sapiens”.
This excerpt does not only show how the narrator enters into a dialogue with the audience, but it also ties in nicely with one of the leitmotivs of the novel: the doubt of absolute truth. We are constantly asking: what is real? which version of Sarah’s story is the true one? how and why the characters, including her, are changing it? In the end, with some of the view points presented, and some – never revealed, we are given freedom to make our own interpretations.
Juste, Dec 2015
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