Title: The French Lieutenant's Woman
Rating: 5 Stars
Several decades ago, I watched the film adaptation starring Meryl Streep and Jeremy Irons. I don't remember too much from it. Seeing the novel on the Time magazine best novel list, I was inspired to give the novel a shot.
The novel is set in the 1860s. It features Charles Smithson, a very proper Victorian gentleman of some wealth that will inherit a title once his childless uncle dies. He is very much the type of gentleman that is horrified even by the thought of taking up a trade. As a gentleman of leisure, he spent his twenties traveling around the world and indulging in paleontology as a hobby. He is proud of holding such progressive views as Darwinism. In short, he is very impressed with himself and with his station.
Having reached that point in his life when a gentleman such as himself must find himself a wife, he meets, courts, and becomes engaged to Ernestina Freeman. Much younger, completely innocent in the ways of the world, Ernestina dotes on her clothes and worships Charles.
All seems perfect in their Victorian world.
That is, until they accidentally cross paths with a hooded woman named Sarah Woodruff. She is a woman with a past. She had a liaison with a lieutenant in the French navy. She gave herself to him and then he abandoned her. She later discovered that he was married.
The resulting scandal ruined her. Her only employment opportunity is as a servant to the severe, judgmental Mrs Poulteney. Her only solace is long, solitary walks.
Charles, given that he has a passion for paleontology, wanders off in a search for interesting fossils. In a remote area, his path crosses with Sarah. From this first encounter, they meet clandestinely several more times. Although nothing overtly sexual happens, it's clear that, despite Charles' intentions, they are developing an intimate relationship.
Sarah is a woman completely unknown to Charles' experience. His previous experience with women seem to be limited to harlots and prim Victorian virgins. Sarah is a fully realized woman with intelligence, complexity, sensitivity, and passion. Confronted for the first time with an actual three dimensional woman, Charles is bewitched by the mysteries of Sarah.
Here is when things get a bit weird. The novel is narrated in the third person by an omniscient narrator. Even more than most, this narrator injects himself into story. Writing from his current day (ca 1969), he regularly comments upon differences between 1860s Victorian England and his present.
At a critical point in the story, the narrator himself appears as a character in the novel. Dressed as a Victorian gentleman, he shares a compartment with Charles on a train journey. While Charles naps, the narrator closely scrutinizes him.
From that point on, the novel presents three different endings. One is the traditional Victorian stiff upper lip in which Charles forgoes his passion and lives a conventional and passionless life with Ernestine. In the other two endings, Charles succumbs to his passions for Sarah, with differing results.
In terms of how I felt about the novel, first of all, unlike other semi experimental novels like these, this was actually an enjoyable read even without its novelties. I found myself invested in the stories of Charles, Ernestine, and Sarah. That alone is a fresh take compared to other postmodern novels.
The characters are pretty stereotypical. Apparently Fowles is an expert on Victorian literature and he populated this novel (with the exception of Sarah) with archetypes from that literary era. Charles really is kind of an insufferable, prissy, self-important, self-satisfied gentleman. Similarly, Ernestine is vacuous. She was raised to see her role as nothing more than to be the wife of a gentleman and the mother to future gentlemen.
At first, they are both happy playing their assigned roles, knowing nothing else. It is only when Charles is exposed to the complex Sarah that he understands how sterile his life is and will be if he marries Ernestine. It kind of reminds me of an old film called Pleasantville. Filmed in black and white, everyone is seemingly happy. It's only when a character is introduced that brings color to the town that everyone understands what they are missing. Charles and Ernestine are living in a black and white world. Charles sees his duty as continuing to live in the world but can't thwart his desire to move into a color one.
When I researched the novel, I discovered that it's apparently classified as historiographic metafiction. I have to confess that this term is new to me. The metafiction part of the classification is fairly clear. It's a novel that, as you read it, makes overt the structure of the novel and the fact that you are reading a novel. Clearly, this novel does that. The historiography is a bit trickier. Clearly, the novel is set in the past. Also, as the novel unfolds, Fowles makes connections between the reality of the 1860s and the time in which he is writing (the 1960s). Fowles has incorporated his expertise in Victorian England in the writing of this novel. Together, this makes this a work of historiographic metafiction.
Some critics have made the claim that this is a strongly feminist novel. After all, as my blog title states, Charles is poleaxed by Sarah. Victorian England is a male dominated society and Charles is near the top of even that male hierarchy. However, Sarah's actions render him helpless. She drives the plot. She beguiles him, not through the acts of a tawdry seductress but through her blazing intelligence and passion. She singlehandedly, almost effortlessly, demolishes Charles' patriarchal pedestal.
On the other hand, Sarah is a completely external character. Although our omniscient narrator can see the thoughts, emotions, and motivations of Charles and Ernestina, he is quiet on the internal workings of Sarah. I'm sure that this was by choice, but it seems difficult to assign the label of feminist to a novel in which the strongest female character is unexamined.
In summary, not only was this novel thought provoking but it was also a joy to read. I'm not sure if I will, but now I kind of feel the need to re-watch the film. As I recollect, although done differently, it also had non-traditional metafiction elements. That'd be an interesting compare/contrast to the novel.
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