I usually
open these posts with a warning that I will be spoiling a lot about the novel. I want, as I head into this post about John
Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman, to put emphasis on that
warning. I am not just going to be
revealing a fact or two; I am going to be talking about the ending at some
length, so if you haven’t read this book and have any desire at all to do so—and
you really should want to read it,
because it is absolutely wonderful--do no read this blog. Bookmark it and come back after you have
finished it. My post will still be here
gathering digital dust until you come back.
Not having
read the book before, and having read nothing about it ahead of time, I had no
idea what Fowles’s novel was about—except perhaps a woman who associated with a
lieutenant from France. It was great fun
for me to watch the novel unfold as I scribbled notes on the four 4x6 cards that
I keep with each book for that purpose.
On these cards, I keep track of characters, when they are first
introduced and when information about them is revealed; I write down quotations
that I feel are central to what the novel is doing or that I think are just
cool; and I scribble down themes and revelations as they come to me. My first note of substance here was “narrator
conscious of the historical context of novel written from 1969 [as the novel is set
in 1867].” Little did I know how
important the narrator was going to become.
I actually tried to keep track of when Fowles’s narrator broke the
temporal fourth wall (fifth wall?), drawing attention to the historical nature
of the novel. Yeah, I abandoned that
effort only a few chapters in, because of course the narrator never lets the
reader forget that the novel is historical and artificial and a figment of the
author’s imagination. In fact, the
thrust of the narrative is set aside entirely in Chapter 13. The previous chapter ends with two questions:
“Who is Sarah?” and “Out of what shadows does she come?” Chapter 13, then, begins,
I do not know. This story I am telling is all imagination. These characters I create never existed outside my own mind. If I have pretended until now to know my characters’ minds and innermost thoughts, it is because I am writing in (just as I have assumed some of the vocabulary and ‘voice’ of) a convention universally accepted at the time of my story: that the novelist stands next to God. He many not know all, yet he tries to pretend that he does. But I live in an age of Alain Robbe-Grillet and Roland Barthes; if this is a novel, it cannot be a novel in the modern sense of the word.
How fantastic is
that?! I wanted to put all of chapter 13
onto my 4x6 cards!
So what we
have in the end is a love story that, for the most part, follows the
conventions of a Victorian novel, much like one Hardy would tell. But in addition to that story, set in the
late 1860s, we have a meta-experience of the novel from the narrator/author
who unravels this tale in the late 1960s.
In lesser hands this would amount to little more than a gimmick, a
tricky way to have his Victorian story and his modern sensibility at the same
time. But far from being a gimmick, The
French Lieutenant’s Woman is a moving and intellectual study of modern society
both at its roots with the growth of the middle class and at the present time. Fowles manages to imitate the voice and poise
of a Victorian narrative throughout the novel, writing beautiful sentences and
looking into the thoughts and behaviors of all his characters (at least when he
wants to), laying them out sensibly, articulately, and artistically. Then, sitting just on top of that narrative,
like a clear overlay or like neatly written marginalia, Fowles adds humor and
irony from his modern perspective and self-aware uses of convention. The thing that makes it all work is Fowles’s
refusal to romanticize either the past or the present. He goes through great pains to illuminate the
Victorian world in the 1860s, discussing such scientific, social, and political
giants of the time as Darwin, Marx, Arnold, Tennyson, Rossetti, and many
others. Fowles displays nothing but
respect for the times and his characters, even as he keeps a nearly clinical
distance.
For me, the
novel was an intellectual joy for the first three quarters, and I was thinking
of the novel as a 4-star affair, leaving back that last star because I was not
emotionally invested in what unfolded.
But the last 70 pages changed all that.
And here is really the part that you want to stop reading if you ever
want to be able to experience the sense of discovery when you read this novel somewhere
down the road. Seriously. Stop reading if you haven’t read the
novel. Go read the novel! You will not regret it!
Okay. From Charles’s breaking of his engagement
with Ernestina to the end of the novel was a whirlwind for me that kept turning
the screws, to paraphrase Henry James, pulling me more and more into the
emotional center of the novel. Actually,
the last movement should date from Fowles’s first false ending, the ending that
Charles imagines for himself. And as
everything fell apart for Charles and as Sarah was nowhere to be seen, I found
myself caring more and more about his predicament and I wanted him and Sarah to
have a happy ending. I suspected that
there was no way Fowles was going to allow the two to find happiness together,
but damnit, I wanted it deep inside. I
knew this was partly because of my own expected conventions (just as I knew
happiness was dubious because of different conventions) and partly because I
liked both Sarah and Charles. So much
was riding on Sarah and Charles’s final encounter for me as a reader. My entire evaluation of the book rested on
what happened in that final exchange. I
suspect I was not alone.
The ending
was . . . brilliant. Charles’s talk with Sarah is exquisitely
painful. Narrative desires dictates that
Sarah realize that she loves Charles who has righteously pined for her. But Fowles constructs the scene to mirror
Charles’s dumping of Ernestina. At that
earlier scene we rooted for Charles to break it off no matter how painful it
might be for Ernestina because he couldn’t chain himself to a life of
unhappiness in the name of duty. So
here, as Sarah reveals that she is genuinely happy, that she in fact does not
want to be married to anyone, my heart was pulled in two as I realized she was
right. And yet still I rooted for a
union. And I wanted Sarah to be
free. And I wanted a union. The pull in both directions was equal and
painful and so beautifully balanced that I had nothing but admiration as Fowles
punched my heart again and again. And
then! To give us two endings! Neither one completely satisfactory, but
together somehow more complete.
I knew that
Sarah would be something of a feminist hero when the first thing we encounter
is her gaze, which “pierces” and “diminishes” Charles. Any feminist scholar is familiar with the
male gaze as a violent and dominating thing, so to have the strength of the
gaze given to Sarah made me put a few exclamation points on my 4x6 cards. Her determination to not marry at the end of
the novel comes across as a truly transgressive act and not some half-assed attempt to be progressive. Yes, she could have been even more aggressive
in her drive for independence, but to make her such would change her very
character and I think gain very little, because her final decision and her
rejection of Charles would lose all its punch and meaning. And I can see someone making the argument
that Fowles’s own inability to pierce Sarah’s character and motives feels like
an unnecessary continuation of the notion of woman as an unsolvable mystery, but again the
protective shield around Sarah’s heart and mind seems complete when not even
the narrator and creator can penetrate them.
The
French Lieutenant’s Woman is a stunning and wonderful novel.
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