The French Lieutenant's Woman

What else could a “helpless”, “hopeless”, and a “desperate” Victorian do? Religion was failing him, and science was unabashedly branding him as a descendent of the ape. He no longer had the defending luxury of tradition and Biblical scripture to count upon; Darwin’s theories of natural selection and survival of the fittest mocked and conflicted with the story of the Creation related in the Bible. Religion as an institution was beginning to lose its social and spiritual value. In the wake of evolution, geology, and an utterly questionable religion, the average educated Victorian resigned to a compromise with these opposing tendencies, keeping intact his faith in ‘duty’ and ‘convention’ as an agreeable conformity. While one might assume that such a resignation to compromise would render him meek and pitiable, however, that “compromising-Victorian” turned out to be a snob, and a thorough hypocrite, who denied all self-knowledge, and lived like a hostage within the self-built walls of history, religion, social position, and duty. However, beneath all that hypocrisy and snobbery that permeated every social aspect of the age, there lurked a strange sadness and misery in the bedroom of the Victorian, even between husband and wife the intimacy was largely governed by the iron laws of convention. A Victorian would understand ‘love’, but ‘intimacy’ would still be a strange word to him.



In The French Lieutenant’s Woman, Fowles slips back into 1867 and recreates the Victorian England in all its sartorial, behavioral, and verbal hues. His motive is not merely to travel back to the nineteenth century but rather to sneak into those spaces of the bygone era that were considered sinful and therefore largely omitted in Victorian fiction; it is a kind of voyeurism seen at its clearest and most notorious. However, having said that, ‘voyeur’ is still a misnomer for Fowles, for he easily assumes the role of a chatty, digressing, and a preaching nineteenth century novelist, who is more likely to evoke a strong reminiscence of Henry Fielding rather than any of the other Victorian novelists. The book is remarkable in its apt portrayal of the dark Victorian nights; the ‘bedroom’ of the gentleman, where the human impulse to sin crashes against the Victorian’s unyielding sense of ‘duty’, and the consequent ambivalences, tensions, and claustrophobia that best describe the tortured relationship of the Victorian male and female. Drawing exclusively from Tennyson, Hardy, and Arnold, Fowles creates an engaging parody of Victorian fiction, by assuming and mocking at the god-like stance of the Victorian novelist, digressing guiltlessly, and roping in subplots involving faithless servants, whose actions very often alter the fates of the major characters.


At the heart of the novel is the odd love story of two people, whose insight and imagination is more suited to current times than the age in which they’re so appropriately misplaced. The crisis of the novel eventually stems from this inappropriateness of the characters, whose sense of freedom is pitted against the cant and tyranny of the Victorian society. Charles Smithson, the protagonist of the novel is fashioned as a myth of rational thinking, for he’s a paleontologist, but is nevertheless tethered to old conventions of ‘duty’, which Fowles attributes to a “pot”: ‘Duty is but a pot. It holds whatever is put in it, from the greatest evil to the greatest good.’ Torn between liberty and restraint, Charles becomes a fitting portrait of a schizophrenic Victorian, not exactly in the medical sense of the term, but an individual caught in two minds, with one part of him hating to choose, and the other part feeling intolerably excited by the proximity of the moment of choice. Charles is engaged to Ernestina, the petty, one-dimensional daughter of a rich London merchant, but he is inexplicably drawn towards the quiet, intense, and baffling, Sarah Woodruff, the ‘woman’ of the title. The result, then, is a momentous clash between Charles’ Victorian compulsions to propriety and his heart’s innate desire for ‘freedom’, that finds its ideal place in the wildness of Sarah Woodruff.


Having made his decision, Charles asks Dr Grogan, “Would you have had me live a lifetime of pretence? Is our age not full enough as it is of a mealy-mouthed hypocrisy, an adulation of all that is false in our natures? Would you have me add to that?” To this Grogan replies, “I would have had you think twice before you embroiled that innocent girl in your pursuit of self-knowledge.” Charles answers more to himself than to Grogan, “But once that knowledge is granted to us, can we escape its dictates? However, repugnant their consequences?”


Freedom, is then what the book aims at, it is the only motive that sustains Fowles’ writing throughout the course of the novel. Unlike the Victorians, Fowles attributes the desire for freedom not as a means of escape from the tyranny of the social order but a return to a more natural order, where the individual is strengthened by his inner convictions, and self-fulfillment no longer remains a myth, and therefore ceases to be a situation of panic and terror.


“Come clean, come clean”, Sarah implores Charles, but by the time Charles chooses to actually “come clean”, Fowles acknowledges that he has absolutely lost control on his characters and allows them to choose their own finales. Although, such an explanation satisfies the multiple endings of the novel and gives the reader a taste of the novelist’s own right to a creative freedom, it nevertheless leaves the reader dissatisfied and one closes the book feeling immensely cheated and fooled by a writer, who would rather spend time lecturing on the decline of passion for freedom in the twentieth century, rather than finding logical conclusions to the miserable fates of his characters.


My Verdict: In the light of Darwin and Evolution, the novel best describes the complexion and character of the Victorian age, but it fails as a process, for all that talk about ‘freedom’ which eventually renders the novel, open-ended, seems to me, puerile, if not overtly devastating.

"It irk'd him to be here, he could not rest"

It’s been a long time since I’ve been here. I had nothing new to offer; I had almost quit reading fiction. I read occasionally when the fit ceased me, but there were very few that I managed to finish off during those sporadic moments when you care nothing beyond the adventure held between the covers of a book. It so happened, that my growing interest and love for poetry was slowly but steadily taking me away from the world of prose fiction to that inevitably dicey and romantic world of verses. As I continued to spend tons and tons of my private hours reading Wordsworth and the Romantics, Tennyson and Eliot, Kamala Das and Jayanta Mahapatra, Eunice de Souza and Emily Dickinson, the charms of reading fiction grew thinner and thinner till the books I possessed became curiosities in a museum, that one ‘must not touch’. Nevertheless, I continued to buy fiction to feed the frail vanity of a reluctant reader. During one of those odd night hours when I did return to fiction, books that I’d already read continued to seduce me, and I would invariably find myself with Hardy (for he’s my favorite author) for a night or two or perhaps even a week. But seduction, darling, lasts as long as an ice cube and the inevitable need of the human mind to find new combinations of delight and cerebral orgasms seldom leaves the reader with one excellent man’s writing for too long. The Wessex tales therefore were locked up and they’ve now become an interdicted treasure.

So with Hardy and the classics being reserved for quiet summer afternoons I tried some binge reading. de Souza’s Dangerlok and Winterson’s Written on the Body formed a major part of the whole “binge-reading” plan, out of which only the former could be completed obviously because of its sheer slimness. As it turned out “binge-reading” did not quite hit my taste and Winterson too was reserved for another day. But “binge-reading” seemed to have whetted my appetite for more and some fiction had to be read, for poetry had left me with an almost bad heart. I wasn’t too keen on picking up anything new since that would include the added burden of worrying about the composition and not to mention the initial threat of being blown away by contemporaneity and losing all reverence to the dead (read classics). So I settled with an old favorite, Arun Joshi, the man who wrote The Strange Case of Billy Biswas.

It was somewhere around this time of the year in 2008, whiling away some good hours of my time amidst the shelves of my college library I found Billy carelessly stuffed in the American section screaming the name of an Indian writer never heard before. Call it serendipity or kismet, the paperback was of the first edition! It had a green binding (read cello tape) and the frontispiece had pictures that looked like water-color paintings of a man with sunglasses and a bright kerchief round his neck (which was also probably green), and two women, one on the left and the other on the right. The dusky one, though clad in a sari was bare shouldered and there was most likely a flower in her hair which was most certainly tied into a bun. The other woman too was clad in a sari but unlike the former was not bare shouldered and her hair was fashioned into French bouffant, or so it seemed. I don’t remember if there was a blurb, for I certainly would have remembered reading it. It looked like a cheap fiction in all aspects and assuming it to be some sort of a passionate love triangle, (for I was still high on Wuthering Heights) I got it issued.

For two years since then, darling readers, all my expeditions to streets and shops and fairs where books are sold, have always been in the hope of finding an auld neglected edition of Billy Biswas, for the book had long been out of print. The Alchemist philosophy eventually worked and Orient Paperbacks in its endeavor to revive some of the lost classics of South Asian Literature put Joshi into print again in 2009 and I finally got my copy of The Strange Case of Billy Biswas in February 2010, courtesy Flipkart. And after three years, I slipped into my favorite chair to read my favorite book at my favorite hour of the night, to bring back the same relish that I once had for fiction writing.






There is primarily one reason that explains my obsession with this book. There was “something” in the narrative that had struck a chord with me although I did not know what it was when I had read it for the first time. This time however, I could feel the weight of that “something” pressing on me right from the start, and like reading poetry, I was magically persuaded to believe that this too shall leave me with a bad heart. But a bad heart is much better than a broken heart. A bad heart is empty, it waits for nothing, it expects nothing, and like all doors, it locks one in and locks the world outside too. That “something” was ‘Silence’, and it is in silence that all bad hearts take refuge in. The narrative operates on two levels of acoustics, one being the eerie silence that accompanies every word, and the other being the pale sound of a storm buzzing somewhere so far, that although one fails to hear it, one does not fail to feel the power of it. There are real storms too. Storms that make Billy say, “Things might have been different, Romi, if that wretched storm had not come up when it did. You see what I mean, don’t you?”

It is Billy’s restlessness that makes him so enduring and separates what looks real from what isn’t. The narrative proceeds in a magic space in which one lives for a moment, holding one’s breath in some measure of wonder while being fully aware of the wretched silence that seems to be catching up with a primitive pace, ready to devour Billy into the dark mazes of the unexplained. The novel ends in a kind of waste dumbness and one closes the book with a pitiful hangover of silence and a faint reminiscence of Bilasia’s anklets echoing in the hills of Satpura.

My Verdict: You can avoid it for its sheer brilliance.

P.S: The writing looks obsessively sentimental but that’s exactly how I feel for certain books and that’s the only honest way in which I can write. Reserving my thoughts on Joshi’s The Foreigner for some other day, until then, happy reading!