Chapter 2. Englishness: the conception of english national identity in john fowles’s novel “the french lieutenant’s woman”

John Fowles’s reputation as an important contemporary author rests on his novels and essays that incorporate elements of mystery, realism, and existential thought. An allusive writer, Fowles has experimented with such traditional prose forms as the mystery novel, the Victorian novel, and the medieval tale, and his writings are characterized by strong narration; vital, resourceful characters confronted with complicated situations; and lavish settings permeated with references to historical events, legends, and art. Other distinguishing features of Fowles’s works include his rejection of the omniscient narrator and his use of ambiguous, open endings lacking resolution. Fowles believed his responsibility as an artist demanded that his characters have the freedom to choose and to act within their limitations. This practice parallels his conception of “authentic” human beings, or people who resist conformity by exercising free will and independent thought [12].

It was in England’s south-western countryside, where the family moved to escape the German air raids of World War II, that Fowles first experienced the “mystery and beauty” of the natural world, the importance of which is evident in his fiction, philosophical writings, and his avocation as an amateur naturalist. As a novelist Fowles made his debut in 1963 with his novel “The Collector”. Though not his first attempt at a novel – Fowles had produced several manuscripts since 1952 – it was the first he deemed worthy of publication. Fowles’s second novel “The Magus” appeared in 1965. Since 1966, Fowles has lived in Lyme Regis, a coastal town in southern England and the setting for “The French Lieutenant’s Woman” published in 1969. This novel is considered his best work. It is a pastiche; an attack on Victorian conventions. Malcolm Bradbury holds that the novel is “telling one of the era’s key fables the male hero faced with the choice between the fair and the dark lady, between sentiment and sensuality, social reaffirmation and danger” [14, p. 168]. It is a picturesque description of two epochs – the 1860s and 1960s, – the confrontation of the Victorian and the modern is reported, as Marie-Claire Simonetti has pointed out, “a highly self-conscious, contemporary narrator who comments on the nineteenth-century narrative from a twentieth-century perspective” [55, p. 301]. “The French Lieutenant’s Woman” was followed in 1977 by “a very long novel about Englishness” entitled “Daniel Martin”, which is also full of observations on aesthetics, philosophy, cultural history, the difference between Britain and the United States, archeology, and myth. In his murder mystery “A Maggot” (1985), Fowles returned to the layered structure of “The Magus”. He has also published poems, short stories, screenplays, translations, and diaries. The author’s philosophical basis for much of his work can be discerned in his early collection of essays and aphorisms, “The Ariosto” (1964), originally subtitled “A Self-Portrait in Ideas”, elucidating Fowles’s evolving personal credo in the context of explorations of other philosophies, notably existentialism, which seems to have had some influence on him, as have the ideas of Jung.

John Fowles (1926-2005) has the distinction of being both a best-selling novelist and one whose work has earned the respect of academic critics. He has tremendous narrative drive, the ability to compel his readers’ attention from the beginning of his novels to the end. Fowles also includes the erotic in his novels because, he has said, “I teach better if I seduce”. “What he seeks to teach us, in large part, is the importance of striving to understand ourselves better, and of founding relationships on friendship and trust rather than merely on sexual attraction. The right kind of relationships, he emphasizes in his fiction, can be highly educational, and especially so for the male of the species, since men, in his view, are more likely than women to need help in coming to terms with their sexuality” [8, p. 398]. For Fowles, just as it is important that sensitive, intelligent men explore the feminine component within themselves, so it is important that such men throw off the shackles of convention and freely discover their authentic selves – the people they really are.

Moreover, John Fowles is an anomaly, almost a literary contradiction. He is both a traditional writer and an innovative metafictionist. Fowles draws upon past literature but changes the direction of the tradition in which he writes. He simultaneously accepts and rejects the literary past, while at the same time, he questions contemporary avant-garde attempts to redefine the novel genre. His fiction is a centrifuge in which past, future time and space are wrapped together.

Critical reaction to Fowles’s work, which continues to be the focus of much literary debate, has centred on his treatment of historical and existential themes and his narrative methods. Scholars have noted, for instance, that in both “The French Lieutenant’s Woman” and “A Maggot”, Fowles assumes a modern authorial consciousness, presenting history as incomplete and thoroughly connected with the present. Commentators have looked to such devices as the god-game and recurring traits ascribed to his characters to thematically link Fowles’s works. They note that his characters frequently live outside the conventional moral boundaries of society and typically reach crucial turning points requiring a re-evaluation of self. The women are intelligent and independent, while the men are usually uncertain and isolated, in search of answers to the enigmatic situations in which they are enmeshed. In most cases, however, they do not find simple solutions; rather, their quests for answers result in additional mystification.

Critics argue that Fowles’s concern with mystery and ambiguity, which is particularly evident in his reluctance to provide authoritative resolutions to many of his works, prompts active audience participation in the quest for answers and emphasizes that reality is illusory and alterable. Describing Fowles as a literary explorer, Ellen Pifer has commented: “Fowles has investigated a wide range of styles, techniques, and approaches to writing… He has affirmed the resources of language and at the same time delineated the strictures inherent in representing reality within literature and art. By acknowledging these limitations, yet continuing to struggle against them, Fowles has indeed proved himself a dynamic rather than a static artist” [51, p. 26].

John Fowles’s novel, “The French Lieutenant Woman”, published in 1969, produced a lot of controversy in the literary and critical circles. James Aronson, in the Antioch Review, stated that with this novel, Fowles showed himself to be “a novelist as great as [Joyce] Carey and [E. M.] Forster” [20, p. 7]. Paul Edward Gray of the Yale Review called it “a modishly-framed imitation of Victorian fiction” that was nonetheless “remarkably satisfying” [20, p. 5]. Some critics saw the virtues of the book in comparison to his later works. Denis Donoghue, in a negative review of “Daniel Martin” for the New York Review of Books, notes that “The French Lieutenant’s Woman” is Fowles’s “best work because he found for that occasion a major theme of great historical and personal importance, and he commanded a language at least adequate” [20, p. 15]. But not all reviewers were as pleased. Jonathan Keates of The New Review, after reading the work, felt “irritated at having to endure a drenching from a mixture of archly self-conscious detachment, toe-curling patronage, and a set of opinions, stated or implied, on the Victorians which I didn’t share” [20, p. 16].

Fowles was accused of mimicking the Victorian novel’s narrative techniques; nonetheless, the work is not a copy of the Victorian novel, but an exploitation of the narrative form. Fowles returns to an early form of fiction as a way of constructing his own novel.

“The French Lieutenant Woman” is a novel, which bridges the Victorian literary tradition with the experimental tendencies stimulated by the new postmodern era. This means that, on the one hand, it draws upon the legacy of the Victorian novel genre, but, on the other hand, it transforms it, using the innovative and experimental “devices”, and thus re-shaping the traditional historical fiction into the postmodern genre of historiographic metafiction. The novel thus playfully re-works the tradition and breathes new life into the novel genre. “The French Lieutenant’s Woman” both challenges the conventional constituents of fiction, yet, it simultaneously installs what it challenges by overtly showing the possibilities of the continuation of the “old” within the “new”.