The French Lieutenant’s Woman: John Fowles's meta games are unexpectedly fun
Since I’m writing about The French Lieutenant’s Woman, let’s get meta. Last week, I enjoyed pretending to know something about postmodernism, as well as making some grand claims about character autonomy and John Fowles’s narrative technique. But in doing so, I think I may have misrepresented his novel.
More than anything I can say about the ideas in Robbe-Grillet’s Pour un Noveau Roman, The French Lieutenant’s Woman is fun. It is gripping, dramatic, immersive. You can plunge right into the evocative descriptions of the “microscopic Athens” of Lyme Regis and its Dorset surroundings like the “green Brazilian chasms” of the Undercliff, “choked with ivy and the liana of wild clematis; its bracken that grows seven, eight feet tall”. Even better are the portraits of the people walking around this landscape, starting with the evocative description of the titular French lieutenant’s woman, Sarah Woodruff, standing motionless on the Cobb, “staring out to sea, more like a living memorial to the drowned, a figure from myth.”
Related: The French Lieutenant's Woman by John Fowles is our Reading group book for November
The book is also funny. Many of the gags are of the you-have-to-be-there variety so I won’t ruin them by trying to explain them out of context. But you can get a flavour of Fowles’s clever humour from the multi-layered jokes around the title. Early on, we learn that Sarah is not called the French lieutenant’s woman by most people in Lyme Regis, but “the French lieutenant’s … woman”. As Sarah herself eventually tells her paramour Charles Smithson, this basically translates as “The French lieutenant’s whore”. But even that turns out to be misnomer when we understand that she never belonged to the French lieutenant, either biblically or psychologically. And in the final chapters, Sarah also rejects the idea of being considered anyone’s woman, even Charles’s.
Talking of Charles, there’s another sly joke in the title. It’s Charles who drives the action, not the woman. Like Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White and Richard Blackmore’s Lorna Doone, Fowles is riffing on those Victorian novels that name a woman in the title but hand the narrative over to a man, usually one (like Charles) who imagines himself “in full armour, ready to slay the dragon” and rescue the damsel of the title. We are always deliberately swept up in Charles’s point of view – but also made to question it, to wonder where poor Sarah gets a look in and eventually, whether she wants to be rescued at all.
For Charles, the story is an amour fou, an uncontrollable passion. He risks his social standing and his engagement for Sarah. They have one brief physical liaison and ever after he passes lonely days and nights, “her spirit beside him, over him, before him”.
But we know nothing of how Sarah is feeling. Even on their climactic night together, Sarah does not get to climax. It’s a very odd scene: Charles starts kissing Sarah, runs off to check on the bedroom next door, runs back to grab her, carries her into the bedroom and dumps her on the bed, runs back out to the next room to tear off his clothes, runs back “bare legged”, falls on top of her with “frantic brutality” and begins to ejaculate “at once”. The whole episode lasts, as the author tells us “precisely 90 seconds”. A few minutes later, Charles is out of the door. Nine months later, Sarah gives birth.
Charles isn’t exactly a great seducer, then, and that the experience wasn’t satisfying for Sarah doesn’t cross his mind at all. It’s grimly amusing. But like many of the best jokes, it reveals a horrible truth: Charles’s extreme solipsism. In all the time he spends obsessing over Sarah, he barely considers her feelings.
The focus is so sharply on Charles’s agonies that it comes as a surprise at the end when Sarah is given a chance to speak. Finally, we realise how much we have been missing. It feels audacious and revelatory – like so much of the book.
But this chapter has nothing on the end. Here, Fowles brings “a new character on to the scene” – the author who has been telling the tale. If the novelist is also a character, we have to be sceptical about the ideas he has been feeding us about characters having autonomy, his awareness of his own technique, everything. When this author then gives us an alternate ending – the third in the book – it shows that, ultimately, we’ve been reading a shaggy dog story. But what a tale!
