The French Lieutenant’s Woman

By John Fowles

First in a series of 3 installments — 26 October 2008

The Magus is a book about a modern man drawn into a scheme that, while fascinating, is really more like an intricate private fantasy than anything we can imagine happening in real life. The Collector takes place buried in the psychological prison of an enclosure behind a secret door at the back of a basement. How disconcerting it was that the third book of Fowles’ I read should open up its doors on the Victorian era.
For readers of the English language, the Victorian era is the closest thing we have to public space in the world of literature. Wuthering Heights, Emma, Pride and Prejudice, David Copperfield, Oliver Twist, Alice in Wonderland, The Christmas Carol; even in a modern America that shuns literacy and denies the importance of anything even slightly old or unfamiliar, our schools and our teachers do seem to recognize that there’s something universal in these stories that can engage children. From early childhood it was always Victorian images that were the strongest in my mind when I was asked to imagine the past, the way the world must have been before the invention of cars and lightbulbs. Knights in armor, cowboys and horses, all these had the aura of something that was partly make believe. But the Masterpiece Theater world of Victorian England was the world as it really was.
In this book, Fowles puts his own research at the forefront. He’s constantly breaking into the narration with references to his sources, with data about the working life of Victorian servants, the prejudices of the middle and aristocratic classes, and especially with reminders about how we must not mistake the attitudes of the Victorians with those of today’s world.
Far from breaking the illusion, these references serve to make this novel feel more real and more interesting, not only because you feel like you’re getting a really high quality tour of the world as it once existed, but also because in setting his novel in the Victorian Era, Fowles has found a perfect setting for his own ideas.
This is how I would propose it: In The Collector, Fowles shows us two people separated by a wall that cannot be broken. The wall is composed of class prejudices, of sexual desire and internal repression, of primal fear and of self-absorption. In The Magus, we see the story of a man who, through the extraordinary efforts of an eccentric millionaire, is allowed for just a moment to see his own personal walls shattered. It’s a compelling story, at least to me, but it’s somehow very hard to understand completely what barriers it is that Nicholas Urfe breaks down, because he lives in the same world we all do.
But the world of The French Lieutenant’s Woman is far enough removed from our own that we’re able to distance ourselves from the character of Charles Smithson, a young man who expects to inherit a baronetcy and a substantial fortune, who’s on the verge of affecting a very comfortable marriage with a woman—Ernestina—who seems perfectly satisfactory by all the standards Charles has been trained to apply to the world around him.
And then there’s the outcast woman, Sarah Woodruff, called “The French Lieutenant’s Woman” by some and “The French Lieutenant’s Whore” by others, because she is said to have lost her virginity to a handsome foreigner who has since abandoned her.
John Fowles tells us that the phenomenon of Charles falling in love with Sarah is identical to the end of the Victorian era. And because he’s dug up so many wonderful facts and stories about 19th Century England to illustrate his point, this rather abstract metaphor becomes quite visceral and believable. Unlike Nicholas Urfe’s brief period of disorientation at the hands of the scheming Maurice Conchis, Charles’ crisis is drawn out over more than a hundred pages as he resists Sarah, condemns her as mad, sees his hopes for inheritance dashed, runs for consolation to the seamy demimonde of London, and finally succumbs to the temptation to destroy the self that Sarah represents.
It works precisely because Victorian literature is characterized by such a wonderful tradition of coincidence. Whereas Maurice Conchis’s whole consciousness shattering project seemed a labyrinthine contrivance whose complexity often obscured the revelation at its own heart, the downfall of Charles Smithson seems to be driven by the same forces that drove the fates of Jane Austen and Charles Dickens’s characters.
IB Singer said that every writer needs to find stories that no one else can tell. It’s impossible for me to imagine anyone else telling the story of Sarah Woodruff. Fowles intentionally makes her an enigma. The great characters of the Victorian era, Sherlock Holmes and Emma Woodhouse, Ebenezer Scrooge and David Copperfield all are so vivid that they can live inside our minds. But Sarah Woodruff seems to pass mysteriously just beyond our grasp in a way that eludes the Victorian style and makes this novel seem truly a feat of magic.

Second in series of three installments — 2 November 2008

So what is it that this Sarah Woodruff symbolizes? Like the White Whale in Moby Dick, she stands at the center of a network of symbolism that fills up the whole book, but she never quite passes completely into the realm of pure symbol. In one very interesting chapter Fowles pulls out of the narrative entirely and declares that, although Sarah, like all the characters in the novel, is his creation, he cannot and will not reveal her inner motives, although he had planned to do so. She won’t reveal them up to her author.
Sarah stands out as being the only character in the book that acts even slightly an adult. This is another theme that seems to run through Fowles’s books—although the characters are all adults with adult responsibilities, they seem to be ruled by a set of childish vanities. Charles and Ernestina go through life as though they’re living in a fairy tale, partly because that’s precisely what they are doing. They’re both slated to earn huge inheritances, and while they each have their little cavils and pouting fits with one another, they’re both bolstered deep down by the thought that the ultimate struggle that lies in store for them is the choice of what kind of prosperity exactly they want to choose. Will they move into the large manor house or the small manor house? Will Charles carry on with his amateur paleontology, or will he find some other hobby to occupy his time but not fulfill his longing to ambition.
At first, Sarah seems to be childish as well. She spends her life moping about, staring at the sea, presumably in hopes that the French Lieutenant who once seduced her will come back. But as the novel progresses and she continues to meet with Charles in the primeval groves of the wild region known as the Undercliff, it begins to become clear that she’s not as much a victim of childish passion as we first thought. Does she really have any illusion that her French Lieutenant will ever come back? Did she even love him in the first place? And if not, why does she willingly allow herself to remain in a community where she’ll always be shunned as a fallen woman? Confused by these questions, Charles confides in his fellow Darwinist Dr Grogan, the only man he can trust to respond rationally.
As a Darwinist and atheist, Dr Grogan seems to stand outside the prison of stereotypes and that defines the Victorian era of this book, and yet his response hardly seems that of a reasonable man. He feels certain that Sarah is dangerously ill and must be institutionalized immediately. She is, after all, the inferior of Charles, who must seem to her like a god.
As it turns out, Dr Grogan is correct in thinking that Sarah represents a great danger to Charles’s future as a happy Victorian gentleman, but his notion that Sarah is mad seems diametrically opposed to the sort of rational humanism that Grogan wishes to represent.
The Undercliff, where Charles and Sarah meet, is home to a series of fossils that inspire Charles to realize the fact that Darwin’s natural not only carries the potential for evolutionary progress but also for mass extinction. Sarah Woodruff represents all the forces that will eventually extinguish the Victorian era, but what are those forces? I think that the answer lies in the other name that she’s given by the people of Lyme Regis, the name that’s used least frequently in the book: Tragedy. The true blindness of the Victorian era is not just a denial of sexual desires or the baser nature of even the most refined gentleman, but rather the denial of the tragic nature of life, in the sense of Greek or Shakespearean tragedy where a system destroys itself by its own striving toward nobility. The name “Tragedy” is appropriate for Sarah, but not so much because she’s a victim of tragedy but an agent of tragic catharsis. Although I doubt I can get to the bottom of it, I will try to expand on that idea in my next installment of this review.

Third installment • 23 November 2008

I remember one time I had an acting teacher who suggested that we almost always see the people around us as representations of something rather than as actual human beings. We see people as representations of our ambitions, as challenges to our status, as political opponents or as collaborators at work, as role-models and as supervisors, as parents or children, but it’s exceedingly rare that we simply view them as people who have been set as unwillingly and unwittingly into the great en medias res of life as we ourselves have been.
That memory came to me today as I was thinking about what more there was for me to say about French Lieutenant’s Woman. It seems to me that in all of Fowles’s works I’ve read so far, his central theme is precisely this blindness we carry around with us, this blindness which keeps us from ever quite recognizing the people around us for what they really are. Victorian society especially seems to depend on such blindness. Charles and his fiancée Ernestina enter into the book with a pat answer to every question of human nature that might come their way.
What makes this argument worth listening to is that Fowles doesn’t write off the blindness of the age as a mere handicap. He’s explicit about the fact that he has a great admiration for the achievements of Victorian society, for the incredible productivity and creativity that arose during that time, but he does seem to suggest that these benefits were achieved at the price of creating a society that was incredibly rigid and unyielding in its notions of human value.
I think that one of the weaknesses of Fowles is that his focus on satori-like moment when the scales fall away from a person’s eyes requires him to make his plots pivot on these moments of personal revelation that are very difficult to communicate to the reader and that must seem contrived and alienating to anyone who hasn’t experienced such moments themselves. One of the ways that Fowles manages to get around this problem is by repeatedly bringing up excerpts of poetry by Tennyson and Clough that are always closely attuned to the inner entrapments and awakenings of Fowles’s characters. Another way that he manages this is by admitting that the character of Sarah Woodruff resists even the omnipotence of the novelist. He cannot see fully into her mind, cannot even guess at her true motivations, and in the end this puts her not only beyond the Victorian stereotypes that Charles uses to navigate his way through life, but also puts her outside of the Freudian and Marxist analyses with which Fowles tries to explain his other characters.