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.