FOWLES ‘S THE FRENCH LIEUTENANT ‘S WOMAN AS A POSTMODERN NOVEL

Linda Hutcheon ( Hutcheon 1986: 81-94 ) and David Lodge ( Lodge 226-27 ) see John Fowles as a author, associating modernism and postmodernism and to them Fowles is a author with a dual background in both English and Gallic literature every bit good as in post-structuralist critical theory. Palmer asserts that

In his essay “Notes on an Unfinished Novel, ” in which he describes the initial construct and the procedure of composing The Gallic Lieutenant ‘s Woman, John Fowles asks himself two inquiries: “To what extent am I being a coward by composing inside the old tradition? To what extent am I being panicked into avant-gardism? ” His very act of presenting these two inquiries in the same paragraph defines his existent place and signals his pursuit for a in-between land between the two extremes. Merely as The Gallic Lieutenant ‘s Woman, written in an deliberately anachronic manner ( Mrs.Poulteney is, for illustration, an “inhabitant of the Victorian vale of the dolls” ) , strives to convey together the Victorian yesteryear and the mid-twentieth-century nowadays in order to specify a moral and experiential stance for the hereafter, so besides does Fowles in each novel strive to unify the traditional influences which he can non reject with the new fictional signifiers of his ain construct which he can non disregard. ( Palmer 4 )

The Gallic Lieutenant ‘s adult female of the rubric is Sarah Woodruff, a hapless Victorian adult female, an ex-governess. She begins the fresh standing on the seaport groin at Lyme Regis, Dorset, looking out the sea in 1867, precisely before the novel was composed. The locals say that Sarah is aching for her lover. Known as “tragedy” or “French lieutenant ‘s whore” she has the repute of a fallen adult female, because she has purportedly lost her virginity to Varguennes, the bygone crewman of the novel ‘s rubric. Charles Smithson, a minor Lord who is engaged to Ernestina Freeman, girl of a affluent store proprietor, sees Sarah on the groin. On the intent of assisting Sarah, Charles arranges a figure of meetings with her. He realizes he is attracted to Sarah but decides to give her money and send her away to Exeter. Soon afterwards, unable to get the better of his desire, he pursues her and they make love for the first clip in a hotel room. To this daze, he discovers that Sarah was a virgin, and that although Varguennes existed, the narrative of old seduction was a prevarication, apparently intended to estrange herself from Lyme society whose junior-grade moralism and narrow-mindedness she had come to detest. Charles offers to get married Sarah but she refuses and runs off. After interrupting of his battle to Ernestina, therefore efficaciously estranging himself from Victorian society ( and from Ernestina ‘s luck ) , Charles finds Sarah in London, where she is working as a theoretical account for the Pre-Raphaelite creative person Dante Gabriel Rossetti. At this point the secret plan of the fresh bifurcates. There are two terminations: in the chapter before the last, Sarah and Charles come together, and have a girl ; in the last chapter they separate seemingly everlastingly.

We foremost learn about Sarah in the 2nd chapter when Ernestina and Charles see her at the route:

‘Is she immature? ‘

‘It ‘s excessively far excessively far to state. ‘

‘But I can think who it is. It must be hapless Tragedy. ‘

‘Tragedy? ‘

‘A moniker. One of her monikers. ‘

‘And what are the others? ‘

‘The fisherman have a gross name for her. ‘

‘My beloved Tina, you can certainly – ‘

‘They name her The Gallic Lieutenant ‘s… . Woman. ‘

… .

‘ … Who is this Gallic Lieutenant? ‘

‘A adult male said she is said to hold… ‘

‘Fallen in love with? ‘

‘Worse than that. ‘

‘And he abandoned her? There is a kid? ‘

‘No. I think no kid. It ‘s all chitchat. ‘

‘But what is she making at that place? ‘

‘They say she is delaies for him to return. ‘ ( Gallic Lieutenant ‘s Woman 14-15 )

The 2nd scene where we learn more about Sarah is once more from others ‘ words. It is a scene where Mrs. Poulteney and the vicar are together, speaking. Mrs. Poulteney tells the vicar that she has been looking for person to work in her house:

‘If you knew of some lady, some refined individual who has come upon inauspicious fortunes… ‘

‘I am non rather clear what you intend. ‘

‘I wish to take a comrade. I have trouble in composing now… I should be happy to supply a place for such individual. ‘ … .

[ The Vicar ] ‘An eligible has occurred to me. Her name is Sarah Woodruff. ‘ ( Gallic Lieutenant ‘s Woman 29-30 )

It should be noticed that Mrs. Poulteney is looking for “some refined individual who has come upon inauspicious circumstances” and the vicar, who is supposed to be a adult male of faith, is rather prejudiced in his position of Sarah. Thus Fowles introduces the typical Victorian adult female, Mrs. Poulteney along with the typical vicar of that age. The storyteller states that the vicar “was a relatively liberated adult male theologically, but he besides knew really good which side his pastoral staff of life was buttered” ( FLW 26-27 ) and that he is taking money from the rich ( FLW 27 ) . As for Mrs. Poulteney and her thoughts on faith, the storyteller is extremely critical:

Mrs. Poulteney was non a stupid adult female ; so, she had sharp-sightedness in practical affairs, and her future finish, like all affairs refering to her comfort, was a extremely practical consideration… As she lay in her sleeping room, she reflected on the awful mathematical uncertainty that progressively haunted her: whether the Lord calculated charity by what one had given or by what one could hold afforded to give. She had given considerable amounts to the church ; but she knew they fell far abruptly of the prescribed one-tenth to be parted with by serious campaigners for Eden. Surely, she had regulated her will to guarantee that the history would be handsomely balanced after her decease. ( FLW 27 )

Not merely her ciphering personality but besides her mentions to faith and God are clearly Victorian. It is the “hypocrisy” as the storyteller calls it, and “the spiritual bigot” as J’Nan Morse Sellery provinces ( Sellery 92 ) . Harmonizing to Tarbox, “Mrs. Poulteney demands that Sarah fit the narrative elements and run into the narrative form of the Christian sin-and-expiation plot” ( Tarbox 90 ) , and to Palmer, she is the “Dickensian character… who mimics the manners and attitudes of characters like the evil midget Quilp in The Old Curiosity Shop ( Palmer 24 ) . Fowles draws Mrs. Poulteney, and the locals as Victorian stereotypes. For illustration, in Chapter 12 – at the Dairy, – the dairy farmer becomes the mark of the novelist:

[ The dairy farmer ] gave his married woman a austere expression. She quickly forewent her yak and returned indoors to her Cu. [ Charles ] had barely taken a measure when a black figure appeared… It was the miss. She looked toward the two figures below and so went on her manner towards Lyme. Charles glanced back at the dairy farmer, who continued to give the figure above a dooming stare.

‘ … ..Do you know that lady? ‘

‘Aye. ‘

‘Does she come this manner frequently? ‘

‘Often plenty. ‘ The dairy farmer continued to gaze. Then he said, ‘And she beent no lady. She be the Gallic Loot’n’nt ‘s Hoer. ‘

Some minutes passed before Charles grasped the significance of the last word. And he threw an angry expression at the barbate dairy farmer, who was a Methodist and hence fond of naming a spade a spade, particularly when the spade was person else ‘s wickedness. He seemed to Charles incarnate all the hypocritical chitchat – and chitchats – of Lyme. Charles could hold believed many things of that kiping face ; but ne’er that its proprietor was a prostitute.

Fowles introduces a great trade of Victorian life and fiction in this novel where the relationships and the attitudes of Victorian people are parodied. Fowles takes his readers back to the Victorian period in an dry manner, in order to compare the nineteenth-century totalizing impressions of the nature of fiction and world, and “of ego and universe with those of existentialism” ( Onega 39 ) . Fowles meticulously, but besides cutely, tells us facts about the Victorian Era and Victorian fiction:

What are we faced with in the 19th century? An age where adult female was sacred ; and where you could purchase a thirteen-year-old miss for a few lbs – a few shillings, if you wanted her for merely an hr or two. Where more churches were built than in the whole old history of the state ; and where one in 60 houses in London was a whorehouse ( the modern ratio would be close one in six 1000 ) . Where the holiness of matrimony ( and celibacy before matrimony ) was proclaimed from every dais, in every newspaper… Where the female organic structure had ne’er been so concealed from position… Where there is non a individual novel, drama or verse form of literary differentiation that of all time goes beyond the sensualness of a buss, where Dr. Bowlder… was widely considered a public helper ; and where the end product of erotica has ne’er been exceeded. ( FLW 258 )

It is therefore, relevant to the Victorian traditions that while Charles is sexually experienced, and his experiences are unbroken secret ; Ernestina follows upper-class conventions and remains a virgin. They are bound by “elaborate convention, societal rite, and legal considerations in their engagement” ( Landrum 108 ) . Furthermore, when Charles is seeking to carry Sarah to go forth Lyme, and travel to London, she says that “If I went to London, I know what I should become” and that “I should go what so many adult females who have lost their honor become in great metropoliss… I should go what some already name me in Lyme” ( FLW 138 ) . This is evidently what Victorian novelists dealt with. Later, Sarah utters typical Victorian adult females ‘s discourse, when Charles states that he wants to go closer to her:

‘Because you have traveled. Because you are educated. Because you are a gentleman. Because. . . because, I do non cognize, I live among people the universe tells me are sort, pious, Christian people. And they seem to me crueler than the cruelest heathens, stupider than the stupidest animate beings. I can non believe that… there are non liquors generous plenty to understand what I have suffered and why I suffer. . . and that whatever wickednesss I have committed, it is non right that I should endure so much. ‘ ( FLW 139 )

She non merely has put the category differentiation between the two but besides her state of affairs as a fallen adult female in the Victorian age. Sarah eventually persuades Charles to run into her at the same topographic point stating that she needs aid in order non to travel huffy ( FLW 141 ) . Sarah ‘s intelligence, as the storyteller tells us, “belong [ s ] to a rare kind” is “not in the least an analytical or problem-solving” mind but she instead has an “uncanny” ability to sort and do “poetic judgments” about people “without being able to state how” she does so. She is merely able “to understand [ others ] , in the fullest sense of that word” ( FLW 57 ) . She states through the terminal of the novel “I have learnt much of myself… I am non to be understood even by myself. And I ca n’t state you why, but I believe my felicity depends on my non understanding” ( FLW 354 ) .

Although The Gallic Lieutenant ‘s Woman is a fictional postmodern narrative, it besides has in it most historical facts about Victorian times. The storyteller, at the really get downing asserts the day of the month “late March of 1867” ( FLW 9 ) , and the Victorian scene. The reader bit by bit encounters many elements of the Victorian period in the inner secret plan. The novel is placed in the Victorian epoch.

The majority of Fowler ‘s reading, nevertheless, has been in the genre in which he writes. At one clip or another in his novels he alludes to each of the outstanding work forces and adult females who preceded him and established the signifier of British fiction: Jane Austen, Dickens, George Eliot, Conrad, and, of class, Hardy. But he does non curtail himself to British fiction. He seems peculiarly drawn to the major Continental philosopher and novelists: Dostoevsky, Camus, Sartre… For a novelist every bit knowing as Fowles in the yesteryear of his genre and in the philosophical idea of his clip, the definition of influences is particularly of import. Even more of import is the definition of the complex mode in which Fowles uses and reacts to the literary and philosophical influences upon his fiction. Constantly, like the kid opposing the male parent, he rebels against an influence, reshapes it, or redefines it in a modern context… In The Gallic Lieutenant ‘s Woman, he really lampoons and satirizes his beginning stuff. ( Palmer 4-5 )

Charles and Ernestina ‘s ( his fiancee ) male parent, at the beginning of the fresh argue about Darwin. As Ernestina ‘s male parent does non truly back up Darwin and Charles ‘ scientific statements on Darwin, Ernestina tells Charles: “ [ My male parent ] did state that he would non his girl marry a adult male who considered his gramps to be an ape” ( FLW 13 ) . Here she comes to recognize that that is the “greatest obstacle” for their matrimony ( FLW 13 ) . Neary, suggests

Charles… is to a certain grade a Victorian Rebel from the beginning. Having toyed with faith and hedonism, he has become a committed Darwinist ; now a reasonably skilled palaeontologist, he is besides “a rather competent bird watcher and phytologist into the bargain” ( 44 ) – a existent rational ally of his Godhead. Sexually, nevertheless, Charles is every bit conventional as a Jane Austen hero ; his wooing of Ernestina Freeman consists of the sort of repartee that witty Austen lovers engage in. ( Neary 168 )

While the secondary secret plan is about Sam Farrow and Charles Smithson and chiefly about category battle, the reader can easy detect some category issues besides in the chief secret plan: Sarah Woodruff must gain money and digest the oppressive adult female Mrs. Poulteney in order to last. Charles Smithson is rich Victorian adult male who has ne’er worked in his life and who has spent his life clip with travel and avocations, waiting for heritage ( FLW 13 ) .

Sarah, early in the fresh feels inferior to Charles ( as stated before ) , and at one clip, when they meet in Cobb, Charles tells Sarah that “I am rich by opportunity, you are hapless by chance” ( FLW 161 ) . The storyteller states here that Charles is seeking to be “sympathetic” to Sarah but “this so was his plan” , he in fact wants to “establish a distance [ in order to ] remind [ Sarah ] of their difference of station” ( FLW 161 ) .

Sarah tells about her life in chapter 20. Her male parent was belly-up and “all [ their ] ownerships were sold” and he “had died in a moonstruck asylum” and she became entirely without any relations ( FLW 167 ) . Of the alleged lieutenant, Varguennes, Sarah explains to Charles that he took her to a hotel which was “less expensive than the other [ s ] and frequently used by Gallic seamen” as Varguennes told her ( FLW 169 ) . Then she says “I hold given myself to him… So I am a double dishonoured adult female. By fortunes. And by choice” ( FLW 170 ) . When Varguennes “could no longer conceal the nature of his existent purpose towards [ Sarah, ] … . she chose to remain [ with him ] ( FLW 170 ) . The grounds for why Sarah gave herself to Varguennes are explained by her as “I did it so that people should indicate at me, should state, there walks the Gallic Lieutenant ‘s Whore – oh yes, allow the word be said” ; she besides states that she could non get married him so “ [ she ] married shame ( FLW 171 ) . It is the first minute the narrative becomes flooring. The reader does non truly guess Sarah, the traditional Victorian adult female, to do such accounts. Michael puts Forth, at this point, a feminist attack to the novel:

The feminism, which Fowles wants to impute to Sarah, is evident in the words she is made to talk. Sarah proudly asserts her developing independency when she states that she has “married shame” because there was “no other manner to interrupt out of what I was” and that as a consequence she now has “freedom” and “No abuse, no incrimination, can touch” her ( 175 ) . Fowles has Sarah make her ain fictions in order to stress Sarah ‘s effort to step outside of conventional patriarchal society and to specify herself outside of male fictions about adult females… By the terminal of the novel, Sarah ‘s words — “I want to be what I am” ( 405 ) — and Charles ‘ perceptual experience that she has gained a “new self-knowledge and self-possession” ( 451 ) indicate that Fowles wishes to portray Sarah as holding realized a feminist consciousness. It is apparent that, although Fowles to a certain grade romanticizes Sarah ‘s pursuit for a feminist consciousness by picturing her as an puzzling and tragic figure, the novel does asseverate this subject of emancipation and of Sarah ‘s development into “the New Woman” ( 443 ) . ( Michael 226-7 )

When Sarah learnt that Varguennes was a married adult male and realized that he would non come once more, she decided to hide her supposed yesteryear from everyone in order to go ‘an castaway ‘ . Now, she does non desire to go forth Lyme since she does non desire to go forth her shame: the locals see her as the Gallic Lieutenant ‘s Prostitute and she is someway pleased with this shame. Gaggi asserts that the things that “motivate [ Sarah ‘s ] manipulative actions in relationship to Charles” are “love, revenge against the societal category that excludes her” and “ [ the ] hatred of the male sex” ( Gaggi 117 ) , and puts forth an interesting statement stating,

Sarah is intriguing because she eludes all systems, including the four major Victorian systems featured in Gallic Lieutenant: spiritual morality, societal category, male domination, and empirical scientific discipline. The first two are epitomized by the ugly Mrs. Poulteney. Charles and Emestina naively regard themselves as modern, enlightened persons, Mrs. Poultney ‘s antonyms in all respects. In malice of his committedness to ground, nevertheless, Charles is non at all so free of conventional, if non spiritual, morality as he thinks, and he is surely non free of biass and presuppositions based on category and sex. And scientific discipline, for him, is itself a faith, one he portions with Dr. Grogan. When Charles and Grogan confess themselves to be Darwinians, it is as if they are admiting rank in a secret religious order. Grogan subsequently swears secretiveness to Charles, utilizing The Beginning of the Species as if it were a bible. ( Gaggi 119 )

Although the book seems to be about Sarah, we ne’er learn profoundly about her. Jackson provinces in his article that Given merely a au naturel lower limit of her history, we can do merely the most obscure and general sociohistorical accounts for her situation” and in order to back up his position, nowadayss Jane Eyre who “after all lived much the same life as Sarah ( Jackson 233 ) .

The storyteller interestingly states “My job is simple – what Charles wants is clear? It is so. But what the supporter wants is non so clear ; and I am non at all certain where she is at the moment” ( FLW 389 ) . So the interior ideas of the supporter are left obscure. As Jackson states “ { I } n all the most dramatic scenes between Charles and Sarah, descriptions of her actions are peppered with the equivocal phrase ‘as if ‘ and words such as ‘seems ‘ and ‘almost’” ( Jackson 233 ) . While Palmer sees Charles and Sarah as supporters ( Palmer 65 ) , Neary states that “the supporter of The Gallic Lieutenant ‘s Woman may good be non one of the narrative ‘s characters but instead its storyteller, its voice ( Neary 162 ) and harmonizing to Cooper,

[ When ] Sarah tells Charles apparently true narrative of her seduction in Chapter 20, … she is presented for the first clip as commanding storyteller – although the reader at this phase perceives her as autobiographer instead than a fictionalizer – for up to now her narrative has reached us merely through the disconnected versions of the vicar, Dr. Grogan, and the book ‘s storyteller… We are therefore invited to see Sarah ‘s narratorial map as at odds with her nature, a necessary ruse defiling her unconditioned simpleness ; it seems that to be an creative person is non Sarah ‘s career. The terminal of the novel confirms this by demoing her as the contented helper to an creative person. ( Cooper 120-121 )

Linda Hutcheon remarks on the map of these storyteller ( s ) :

The metafictionally present modern storyteller… jars with and parodies the conventions of the nineteenth-century novelistic narrative of Charles, Sarah, and Ernestina. The assorted… storytellers and fiction-makers ( Fowles, the storyteller, his character, Charles, and eventually Sarah ) enact the novel ‘s subjects of freedom and power, of creative activity and control. The multiple lampoons of specific Victorian novels ( by Thackeray, George Eliot, Dickens, Froude, Hardy ) are matched by more generic dry drama on nineteenth-century important narrating voices, reader reference, and narrative closing. ( Hutcheon 1988: 45 )

Fowles ‘s auctorial voice asserts itself within the text, and its importance can non be overlooked. When the storyteller steps into the novel as a character in Chapter 13, a sharper differentiation is created between writer and storyteller that emphasizes the layering of “voices” doing up the text. The storyteller claims that “This narrative I am stating is all imaginativeness. These characters I create ne’er existed outside my ain mind” ( FLW 97 ) . Fowles puts forth the postmodern technique, the novel speaking about itself. The storyteller – or the writer – in this chapter, is discoursing the features of novel as a genre along with the procedure in which the novelist creates his/her novel. Fowles breaks the regulations of conventional composing right at the center of a Victorian “novel” , turn toing the reader:

But I am a novelist, non a adult male in the garden – I can follow [ Sarah ] where I like? … You may believe novelists ever have fixed programs to which they work, so that the hereafter predicted by Chapter One is ever inexorably the actuality of Chapter Thirteen. But novelists write for infinite different grounds: for money, for celebrity, for referees, for parents, for friends, for loved 1s ; for amour propre, for pride, for wonder, for amusement… Merely one same ground is shared by all of us: we wish to make universes every bit existent as, but other than the universe that is. Or was. This is why we can non be after… We besides know that a truly created universe is independent of its Godhead ; a planned universe… is a dead universe. It is merely when our characters and events begin to disobey us that they begin to populate. When Charles left Sarah on her cliff-edge, I ordered him to walk directly back to Lyme Regis. But he did non ; he gratuitously turned and went down to the Dairy. ( FLW 98 )

In the Victorian period, fresh authorship was based on picturing the existent as it is. However, fiction has ne’er been every bit existent as the universe itself. The storyteller ‘s statement “The novelist is still a god” ( FLW 99 ) foregrounds Fowles ‘s function as the writer. The writer is a God in the sense that he still creates. The storyteller states “What has changed is that we are no longer the Gods of Victorian image, omniscient and decreeing ; but in the new theological image, with freedom our first rule, non authority” ( FLW 99 ) . Furthermore, Fowles brings Forth, in the same chapter, the traditional thought of a fictional character: usually the reader would believe a character is “either ‘real ‘ or ‘imaginary ‘ ; nevertheless, Fowles ‘s storyteller contradicts the reader stating, “You do non even think of your ain yesteryear as rather existent ; you dress it up, you gild it or melanize it, censor it, tinker with it, . . . fictionalise it, in a word, and put it away on a shelf” ( FLW 99 ) . What we think existent is even non existent in the sense that we fictionalize all the truth in our personal life. The semblance of the fictional universe is broken when Fowles emphasizes the writer ‘s entry to the fictional universe and therefore enters himself to the novel.

If I have pretended until now to cognize my characters ‘ heads and innermost ideas, it is because I am composing in… a convention universally accepted at the clip of my narrative that the novelist stands following to God. He may non cognize all, yet he tries to feign that he does. But I live in the age of Alan Robbe-Grillet and Roland Barthes ; if this is a novel, it can non be a novel in the modern sense of the word. ( FLW 97 )

The storyteller in The Gallic Lieutenant ‘s Woman, is one who “ … sporadically enters his ain narrative to notice upon ( among other things ) the procedures of story-telling itself” ( Cooper 104 ) . It is the 20th century postmodernist writer and an “intrusive and parodically all-knowing narrator” ( Onega 39 ) writes about Victorian characters. The historical Victorian and the modern-day are mingled in the same book.

By offering a modern-day position on 19th century experience, the storyteller represents the hindsight made possible by history, and in this manner, facilitates the light of the yesteryear in the eye of present. Furthermore, in an opposite but equal manner, his historical dual vision besides allows the present to work as a mirror for the yesteryear, and the reader may contemplate the Victorian age from the self-contradictory position of future… [ I ] t is a personified storyteller who ranges knowledgeably over the rational landscapes of the 20th century while looking with confusing physical specificity, in the geographical landscapes of the nineteenth. ( Cooper 105 )

We can non be certain whether Sarah has planned her actions – or the storyteller has planned about her actions ; – or Sarah has disobeyed the storyteller as he has stated in Chapter 13. Sarah exposes herself to Mrs. Fairley, the adult female who tells Mrs. Poultney that Sarah was seen in the Cobb Gate walking “by the sea” ( FLW 67 ) despite her warnings. We do non cognize the ground why she is stating prevarications. “We witness her puting up the scene in Exeter. But in fact merely after Exeter can we look back and suspect that she may hold been be aftering from the really first” ( Jackson 232 ) . Sarah is an castaway. She blames both the fortunes ( her destiny ) and other people. She is here a typical Victorian governess from the typical Victorian Literature in England.

During her absence, the reader, it is no longer the all-knowing storyteller who is in a god-like place and knows everything. The reader no longer knows about Sarah. After she leaves Lyme, Sarah is absent in the novel and is merely present in Charles ‘s head and the locals ‘ oral cavity. She does non look in the novel once more – despite the rubric ; – Charles and Ernestina come together ; the storyteller explains that they “did non unrecorded merrily afterlife ; but they lived together, though Charles eventually survived her by a decennary ( and seriously mourned her throughout it ) . They begat what shall it be – allow us state seven children” ( FLW 325 ) .

The storyteller subsequently states “What happened to Sarah I do non cognize – whatever it was, she ne’er troubled Charles once more in individual, how – of all time long she may hold lingered in his memory” ( FLW 325 ) . This sort of stoping would be an unhappy one as the storyteller, excessively, suggests ; and it can be considered a false stoping. The reader shortly realizes that the novel has non finished yet when the storyteller begins Chapter 45 noticing on this sort of traditional stoping:

And now, holding brought this fiction to a thoroughly traditional stoping, I had better explicate that although all I have described in the last two chapters happened, it did non go on rather in the manner you may hold been led to believe. ( FLW 327 )

In the 2nd stoping of the novel, Charles decides to travel to Endicott ‘s Hotel. The reader feels deceived for the 2nd clip when s/he realizes Sarah ‘s prevarication about the Gallic lieutenant. In this 2nd stoping, Charles goes to Endicott ‘s Family Hotel to see Sarah once more and when he does, she “seem [ s ] to him much smaller” ( FLW 332 ) . “Seeing her [ is ] the need” ; he wants “to possess her, to run into her, to fire, to fire, to fire to ashes on that organic structure and in those eyes” ( FLW 334 ) . The storyteller states that Sarah is “his slave and his equal” ( FLW 334 ) . After they make love in chapter 46, both feel estranged for they have “sinned” ( FLW 340 ) . No affair how Charles insists on matrimony, Sarah rejects it and insists that “ [ she ] is non worthy of him” , but Ernestina ( FLW 339 ) . Charles realizes that she was a virgin and he is responsible for this ; “she had non given herself to Varguennes. She had lied” ( FLW 341 ) . She confesses that she has deceived him and that “the one thing in which [ she has ] non deceived him: [ she ] loved him” ( FLW 342 ) . In Chapter 50, we see Charles speak to Ernestina who is wholly submissive and inactive before him. She says that “I know I am non unusual. I am non a Helen of Troy or a Cleopatra” ( FLW 363 ) , and that “I bore you about domestic agreements, I hurt you when I make merriment of your fossils” ( FLW 364 ) . She states that she can go better “under [ Charles ‘s ] education” ( FLW 364 ) . She is inactive plenty when she “begs” ( FLW 364 ) him and promises that she “would abandon anything to do [ him ] happy” ( FLW 365 ) . After he leaves Ernestina, he decides to happen Sarah. While giving Charles ‘s hopeful hunt for Sarah, the storyteller interferes once more and addresses Charles: “What the Satan am I traveling to make with you? He goes on stating,

I have already thought of stoping Charles ‘s calling here and now ; of go forthing him for infinity on his manner to London. But the conventions of Victorian fiction allow, allowed no topographic point for the unfastened… My job is simple – what Charles wants is clear? It is so. What the supporter wants is non so clear ; and I am non certain where she is at the minute. ( FLW 389 )

The storyteller ‘s job is that, because of the alphabetic nature of linguistic communication, he “ can non give both versions at once” ( FLW 390 ) . Charles, at this point, is looking at the storyteller as if he is “a gambler or mentally deranged” ( FLW 390 ) ; after all he is the creative activity of the storyteller – or the writer.

In Chapter Forty-four Charles Smithson “felt himself coming to the terminal of a narrative ; and to an terminal he did non like… . The book of his being, so it seemed to him, was about to come to a clearly moth-eaten close” ( 266-67 ) . To Charles, an almighty Victorian novelist is, for the interest of convention, enforcing an kernel upon his being. But in Chapter Forty-five Charles takes on new life, and a different stoping ( or set of terminations ) begins. Just as Charles finds the conventional stoping of a love matter with Sarah “distinctly shabby, ” so besides does Fowles happen the traditional Victorian stoping to his fresh unsatisfactory. Fowles ‘s characters… garbage to be Victorianized ( victimized, tyrannized ) , and the novel continues in order to carry through itself as a graphic work of art. ( Palmer 73 )

Charles ‘s concluding meeting with Sarah in Dante Gabriel Rossetti ‘s house is another alternate stoping of The Gallic Lieutenant ‘s Woman. Sarah sounds modern-day at the terminal of the novel when we learn that she is working as a theoretical account for Dante Gabriel Rossetti. For both of the terminations Charles, holding given up everything for Sarah, discovers that she has left, and he has lost her. He searches for her, eventually gives up, spends two old ages going as an flight, and returns when his attorney writes informing him she has been found. At this clip, she is working as a secretary for Dante Gabriel Rossetti. She has non become a cocotte as she had earlier imagined her destiny to be but has become “the liberated adult female she possibly ever was” ( Gaggi 124 ) . When Charles tries to carry her to get married him she refuses him saying that she has chosen freedom.

The Gallic Lieutenant ‘s Woman is possibly the best novel by Fowles. It is non merely the narrative of Charles and Sarah but besides of a novelist. Along with the love narrative, it has the postmodern narrative. Fowles makes usage of both Victorian traditional issues and postmodern authorship technique that is to state, footers, auctorial invasion and quotation marks from other literature. By utilizing the stuffs of two different ages, he connects past and present. The different terminations one being conventional and the last one being modern-day besides contribute to this connexion of yesteryear and nowadays ; hence, the traditional and the postmodern.

Primary Source ( s )

Fowles, John. The Gallic Lieutenant ‘s Woman. London, Vintage: 1969.

Secondary Beginnings

Cooper, Pamela. The Fiction of John Fowles: Power, Creativity and Femininity. Canada, University of Ottawa Press: 1991.

Gaggi, Silvio. Modern/Postmodern: A Study in Twentieth-Century Arts and Ideas. Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press: 1989.

Hutcheon, Linda. “The ‘Real World ( s ) ‘ of Fiction: ‘The Gallic Lieutenant ‘s Woman’” English Studies in Canada 4 ( 1978 ) . Reprinted in Ellen Pifer, ( erectile dysfunction ) , Critical Essays on John Fowles. Boston, Mass. : G. K. Hall, 1986.

_______________ . A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction. London, Routledge: 1988.

Jackson, Tony. E. “Charles and the Hopeful Monster: Postmodernist Evolutionary Theory in ‘The French Lieutenant ‘s Woman’” Twentieth Century Literature. Volume: 43. Issue: 2. Hofstra University: 1997.

Landrum, David. “Rewriting Marx: Emancipation and Restoration in ‘The French Lieutenant ‘s Woman’” Twentieth Century Literature. Volume: 42. Issue: 1. Hofstra University: 1996.

Lodge, David. The Modes of Modern Writing: Metaphor, Metonymy, and the Typology of Modern Literature. London: Edward Arnold, 1977.

Michael, Magali Cornier. “Who is Sarah? A Critique of the Gallic Lieutenant ‘s Wotnan ‘s Feminism” Critique. Volume: 28. Issue: 4. : 1987.

Neary, John. Something and Nothingness: The Fiction of John Updike & A ; John Fowles. Carbondale, Southern Illinois University Press, IL. : 1992.

Onega, Susan. “Self, World and Art in the Fiction of John Fowles” Twentieth Century Literature. Volume: 42. Issue: 1. Hofstra University: 1996.

Palmer, William J. The Fiction of John Fowles: Tradition, Art, and the Loneliness of Selfhood. Columbia, MO, University of Missouri Press: 1974.

Sellery, J’Nan Morse. “A Struggle with Sarah: Fowles, Pinter, Reisz, and the Gallic Lieutenant ‘s Woman” West Virginia University Philological Papers. West Virginia University, Department of Foreign Languages: 2000.

Tarbox, Katherine. “‘The French Lieutenant ‘s Woman ‘ and the Evolution of the Narrative” Twentieth Century Literature. Volume: 42. Issue: 1. Hofstra University: 1996.