2.1. Lyme Regis: Spatial Construction of Middle-Class Identity in John Fowles’s “The French Lieutenant’s Woman”

History is one of the main themes explored in “The French Lieutenant Woman” which is set in Victorian England of 1867 and is full of historical details and information about the Victorian time. The panorama of Victorian England offers close-ups of typical activities and lifestyles of urban and rural England, as well as numerous discussions of politics, science and economics in the 19^th century.

However, it is more than a historical novel as many scholars see it, the novel becomes an original modern expansion upon older traditional narrative forms. “The French Lieutenant Woman” is not a classical realist fiction, which would remain and operate only within the past Victorian times. It is a historiographic metafiction, which breaks traditional patterns of historical novels, and thus considerably changes the expectations readers might have. Moreover, “The French Lieutenant’s Woman”, is a typical example of historiographic metafiction. Throughout the novel, real-world figures not only from the Victorian, but also from the 20^th century context, are constantly referred to. Some of the most significant personages of science, history, politics, sociology, and art are mentioned to authenticate the context of the time: Darwin, Marx, Disraeli, Gladstone, Mills, Austen, Hardy, Tennyson, Arnold, and Rossetti to name but a few. Some of the personages enter the world of the characters, some remain in the world of the narrator; some of the personages remain only characters’ topics of discussions, some interact with them. The allusions to and the employment of the real personages help to introduce the milieu of the Victorian era and to reinforce the authenticity, credibility, or the illusion of reality.

The novel sets on in the small English town of Lyme Regis and its Cobb, a harbour quay, an apparently idyllic setting. Close to the sea and rich in nature’s beauty, it is a traditional romantic location, with all the opportunities of atmospheric description that an author could want. The novel starts out by meticulously describing the setting and atmosphere of Lyme Regis, which is important in connection with the romantic aspect of the book. In addition, the opening sentence establishes the temporal location of the action: “One incisively sharp and blustery morning in the late March of 1867” [30, p. 2]. The verb tense of the opening clause, “an easterly is the most disagreeable wind in Lyme Bay” [30, p. 2], asks the reader to see the event and its narration as simultaneous. This narrative technique evokes a feeling of magnitude and pulls us into the fictional world of the story. When Fowles later includes subtle references to the 20^th century “as full of subtle curves and volumes, a Henry Moore or a Michelangelo” [30, p. 2], we realize that the oscillated present is in fact Fowles’s own residence in Lyme, 1967, the date of the novel’s origin. (In “The French Lieutenant’s Woman”, Fowles mimics the openings of Victorian realism, the third-person objectivity of nineteenth-century realism with a unifying perspective centred in the narrating consciousness.)

The setting throughout the novel is predominantly Victorian. Most of the novel’s action takes place at Lyme Regis (Dorset), which serves as a graceful spatial metaphor that explicitly exposes the way that a human being imposes narrative order on non-narrative experience. With its charming system of roads, paths, streets and cart trades, it connotatively invites the reader to sit back, relax and begin a gradual process of immersion into an imaginary though life-like world. It is an impress on a landscape with its sombre grey cliffs masked by dense woods, wild engulfing channel waters and caves of mysterious geologic and cosmic enchanting mysteries. The provincial Lyme Regis in “The French Lieutenant’s Woman” was one of many small towns and villages in southwest England scattered along the coast. It consisted largely of small houses surrounded by hills on one side and the sea on the other. The Cobb was built along the shore and it is a promenade where people could enjoy the sea air while taking a walk. A section of the hills, known as the Ware Commons, was a meeting ground for most young couples and where Charles Smithson and Sarah Woodruff, the major characters of the novel, met clandestinely.

Lyme’s community was close-knit and provincial. Unlike the larger metropolitan areas such as London, here people upheld the prevailing social norms.

Life of Victorians was controlled by a rigid hierarchical society in which each order and occupation had a fixed position. At the beginning of the Victorian age, the upper class, consisting of the peerage (titled) and landed gentry (untitled) made up of about 300 families, controlled society and its politics. As most of the nobility were members of landowning upper-class, and the owning of land was a prerequisite and qualification for the right to vote in county constituencies until the Reform Act 1832, Parliament was in hands of the aristocracy [53]. However, with expansion of the middle class and consequently non-landed wealth, the bourgeoisie gradually grew in power and became more influential. Thus, landowning wealth of aristocracy was now becoming less significant than business wealth. Many industrialists, conscious of their importance, realized their need for direct representatives in Parliament. The Act extended the franchise and the number of people enabled to vote has increased of more than 60% granting seats in the House of Commons to representatives of large cities that had originated during the Industrial Revolution and still leaving about 95% of population with no vote, including women and working class males since the requirement to vote was to possess property worth £ 10 [54].

The upper class valued history, heritage, lineage, and continuity of their family line. They believed that they were born to rule and that it was their “nobles oblige”, their duty, to take care of society. The nobles were landed gentry and so they did not have to work, and instead enjoyed an idle life in luxury. In most cases their wealth derived from one or more estates, which included fields, pasture, timberland, hunting grounds, castles, etc. Nobles were expected to live “nobly”, from the proceeds of their property. Work involving manual labour or any professions, with the exception of military service, was frowned upon and considered as derogation from noble status. In case their position was threatened by financial difficulties they adapted and opened up their ranks to the wealthiest of the middle class to maintain their noble lifestyles [58].

Charles Smithson, the main character of the novel, is a typical representative of aristocracy. Although he did not possess a title, he was born in a family with close ties to nobility, had considerable education and respectable income. Charles was a lucky man, despite the fact that his father lost his land and fortune at the gaming tables leaving Charles with an insufficient income, Charles was to inherit from his unmarried uncle. As an heir to a title, he naturally was a good catch for single rich women. He considered himself a scientist, but Fowles points out that his main “distinguishing trait” was laziness: “How could one write history with Macalay so close behind? Fiction or poetry in the midst of the greatest galaxy of talent in the history of English literature? How could one be a creative scientist, with Lyell and Darwin still alive? Be a statesman with Disraeli and Gladstone?” [30, p. 7]. Idleness was a common trait of members of his class.

Fowles emphasizes that Charles’s identity and conduct was inherited and deep-rooted in the traditional social system. Though Charles was quite an interesting young man “his travels abroad had regrettably rubbed away some of that patina of profound humourlessness (called by the Victorians earnestness, moral rectitude, probity and a thousand other misleading names) that one really required of a proper English gentleman of the time” [30, p. 8], he is stacked in his class. Fowles portrayed Charles as a member of declining lifeless class, not able to survive in the world which was rapidly changing. For this purpose the author refers to Charles Darwin’s “The Origin of Species” in the epigraph to Chapter 3: “But a still more important consideration is that the chief part of the organisation of every living creature is due to inheritance; and consequently, though each being assuredly is well fitted for its place in nature, many structures have now no very close and direct relations to present habits of life” [30, p. 3].

In spite of his awareness of the narrow-mindedness of English moralistic society, Charles felt bound by the values of his era. He was not ready to revolt and was, indeed, a gentleman of the Victorian age, until he met Sarah Woodruff. From that moment he gradually viewed things differently. He started to see the bigotry of the ideals of Victorian Age, the ideals held by Mrs. Poulteney and even his wife-to-be Ernestina Freeman. Sarah and her resistance to Victorian restrains inspired Charles’s self-awareness. Dissatisfied with his useless life, he realized that he was to marry Ernestina only because she was naive, innocent, unquestioning and loving, a wife fitting for the perfect Victorian gentleman, which he was not.

However, he found himself too deeply rooted in the system, unable to challenge his destiny. For instance, when Charles came to Ernestina’s father to inform him of his changed prospects (resulting from his uncle’s marriage) and secretly hoping that he would be freed from the engagement to Ernestina, he got stunned by Mr. Freeman’s astounding offer. Mr. Freeman suggested that Charles could inherit his business and offered a partnership in his business. He asked Charles if commerce was abhorrent to him as business was not considered worthy of a gentleman. Charles was shocked with the idea of working in commerce, but assured Mr. Freeman that “my hesitation is in no way due to social considerations” [30, p. 122]. Mr. Freeman reminded him about their disagreement on theory of evolution and pointed out that “In order to survive, it must adapt itself to changes in the environment. …I have spent my life in a situation where if one does not – and very smartly – change oneself to meet the taste of the day, then he does not survive. One goes bankrupt. Times are changing, you know. This is a great age of progress. And progress is like a lively horse. Either one rides it, or it rides one. Heaven forbid I should suggest that being a gentleman is an insufficient pursuit in life. …But this is an age of doing, great doing, Charles. You may say these things do not concern you – are beneath you. But ask yourself whether they ought to concern you” [30, p. 122, 123]. Later, when Charles considered Mr. Freeman’s offer again, he found it unacceptable and even offensive, “he was a gentleman; and gentlemen cannot go into trade” [30, p. 122].

However, owing to industrialization, which brought improvement and transformation in many spheres, the social stratification was shattered by means of social mobility. The middle class grew more quickly than ever before, comprising around 20 percent of the occupied population with greater differences of wealth, social position and kinds of work. These layers of the subclass were keenly aware of their subtle grades of distinction. Their incomes “ranged and stretched all the way from the bare competence of the clerks, small shopkeepers and schoolteachers of the lower middle class, struggling to keep up genteel appearances and often not able to afford a domestic servant, up to very wealthy families with three or four indoor servants and maybe an outdoor staff as well looking after the garden and the private carriage” [56, p. 173].

The new middle classes, having acquired their wealth, were not only demanding their rights to control the Parliament but also a share of the social position of the privileged upper classes. For a middle class member striving to gain respectable social standing and political power, it was quite difficult to penetrate these elite enclosed communities united by family relationships. As we can see in Fowles’s novel, Ernestina Freeman, a daughter of a wealthy tradesman, was trying to rise in social class by means of a union with the aristocratic Charles Smithson. Charles and Ernestina’s case demonstrates that money often married into a titled family: Charles Smithson, heir to his aging uncle’s wealth and title, represented the declining aristocracy while his bride-to-be Ernestina Freeman, heiress to the fortune her father had gained as an owner of a drapery and clothes sales department store in London, epitomized the rising wealthy middle class. Both of them were fully aware of the fact that their engagement was a legal contract that could benefit each of them. Especially for Ernestina, marriage meant an entrance into the aristocracy, raising of her social status, from a meaningless tradesman’s daughter to nobility. In this way the new gentry appeared, combining a titled birth with wealth and education. “The French Lieutenant’s Woman” sees this social mobility as one of the forms of emancipation, and it is one of the themes of the novel.

The growing number of wealthy businessmen moved away from their factories into the countries and had expensive houses built for them. Proud of having made so much money the new magnates naturally wanted to display it and show the world what important people they were. The more spectacular and decorative the house was, the grander it would be. Apart from the fact that Victorian middle-class valued domesticity and was the most home-centred group in British history, home was actually a sign of social status. In other words, the size, style and location of the house spoke of the owner’s precise place in the social hierarchy. These enormous houses were often a mixture of different styles, from imitation of romantic Gothic style of churches and castles with gables, turrets and battlements, long halls and narrow windows, grandiose but unpractical for a dwelling place, to the latest notions of comfort and convenience: supply of water closets, bathrooms, central heating, gas-lighting, hydraulic food and luggage lifts and last but not the least plumbing arrangements as attention to hygiene increased. Another typical Victorian feature was extensive wings for servants. Servants were moved out of the attics and basements and separated from the family rooms for the sake of domestic privacy. The another very common additions were billiard rooms, smoking rooms and gun rooms and other male territories created in order to protect delicate ladies from seeing anything unfitting [56, p. 152 -157].

In “The French Lieutenant’s Woman”, Mr. Freeman is most representative of “new recruits” to the upper middle class. Although he looked down on aristocracy, he was determined to be a perfect gentleman in manner and appearance. His study in the spacious Hyde Park house, where “little was not in the best of contemporary taste, gave no hint of his profession. The walls were lined by suitably solemn-looking books; a bust of Marcus Aurelius; one or two large but indeterminate engravings” [30, p. 120]. To separate his work from family and gain respect of the society he “had a newly built mansion in the Surrey pinewoods, but his wife and daughter lived there a food deal more frequently than he did. He was in his way a forerunner of the modern rich commuter, except that he spent only his week-ends there – and then rarely but in summer. And where his modern homologue goes in for golf, or roses, or gin and adultery, Mr Freeman went in for earnestness” [30, p. 120]. So the rich people, like the Freemans, could choose their dwellings according to their personal needs and tastes. The poorer, however, could only accept what was available and adapt to their conditions. Most of the working class people had to find a house or even just a room they could afford. Their irregular employment, unreliable earnings and the necessity of living close to factories resulted in worse housing conditions than those of wealthier classes. The most unfortunate ones had to live in cramped back to back houses or slums. Freeman’s employees were terribly exploited and lived in subhuman conditions, but by Victorian standards, “Freeman’s was an exceptionally advanced establishment, a model of its kind. When he went to heaven, he would have a happy labour force behind him; and his heirs would have the profit there from” [30, p. 120].

As Thompson comments, all the layers of society were graded according to the size of house they occupied since house structure determined their social structure and social behaviour. Thus, between these two extremes of wealth and poverty there is a complicated territory of different housing types and living conditions, a series of “stepping stones that became more elaborate in reflecting the increasingly fine and intricate social distinctions within Victorian society. Social mobility was a matter of individuals or families stepping from one stone to another; social change a matter of altering, enlarging, and regrouping the stones” [56, p. 153].

With its rising authority the prosperous middle class started to enforce its values within the society from the late 1830s and even strongly in the middle of the century. Not only economic success and intellectual achievements in industry strengthened the power and status of the bourgeoisie, but their devotion to individualism and an eager Evangelical Christianity were systematically implanted in the culture. The impact of the middle class on culture played a significant role in shaping the nation’s character.

Middle class ideas, aspirations, and values such as the importance of work, the individual’s responsibility for self-improvement, the distinct and separate roles for men and women or the earnest commitment to duty prevailed in the shaping of the country’s self-image in public and private life – the sphere of the marketplace and the sphere of the home. However, these middle class principles are also parallel to the cultures of upper and working classes with which the middle class crossed and competed [49, p. 4].

Through the image of Mr. Freeman in “The French Lieutenant’s Woman”, his manners, life principles, and behaviour, Fowles reflected the actual power of middle class over declining aristocracy. Mr. Freeman looked down on Charles and his class as one of the worthless idlers, men of fine manners and unpaid bills. When Charles was forced to sign a statement of guilt he was humiliated: “Charles flushed red. Mr Freeman’s eyes bored into him. He could only lower his head” [30, p. 176]. Charles was deprived of inheritance, title, wife and even his honour. He was a victim of evolution, an example of a gentleman – a dying species. However, Sam’s revolt against his master when he needed to “consider (his) own situation” and his effort to control his Cockney fire while using gentleman’s finer weapons, on the other hand, was an example of working class potency to break the stranglehold of subordination. Indeed “it was such an age of change! So many orders beginning to melt and dissolve” [30, p. 140].

The evolution of society is clearly visible in the novel, while Sam and Mary, like the Freemans, are also rising on the social ladder. Through Sam’s engagement in commerce, Sam and Mary are able to elevate themselves to the position of the middle class. At the same time the tradition of the lower class respecting the superiors and the higher class protecting the lower classes is not always valid anymore. Citing from Matthew Arnold’s critical essay in an epigraph Fowles demonstrates the transformation of the society: “…the strong feudal habits of subordination and deference continued to tell upon the working class. The modern spirit has now almost entirely dissolved those habits… More and more this and that man, and this and that body of men, all over the country, are beginning to assert and put in practice an Englishman’s right to do what he likes: his right to march where he likes, meet where he likes, enter where he likes, hoots as he likes, threaten as he likes, smash as he likes” [30, p. 164].

Fowles makes allusions to class struggle and revolution. Firstly, he mentions the improbability of revolution due to prosperity of the “sixties” and “…the beavered German Jew quietly working… in the British Museum library; and whose work in those sombre walls was to bear such bright red fruit” [30, p. 6] and the appearance of the first volume of his “Kapital” only six months later. Secondly, he places the quotation of Marx’s “Kapital” into the epigraph in chapter seven, which introduces and describes Sam’s character [43, p. 104]. This epigraph aims to bring out Sam’s social status as a servant. In the same chapter the reader learns about Charles’s behaviour towards his servant. On the one hand, the author reassures us that Charles was a benevolent type of master to his servant and that he felt “a kind of affection” to Sam Farrow and did not exploit or mistreated him. On the other hand, the reader sees that Charles’s attitude was distressing and arrogant. His superior position of a master toward his servant, and of an upper-class member towards the lowest one on the social ladder, allowed Charles to bully and insult Sam. By quoting Latin to him, accusing him of being drunk, reminding him that he was “born in a gin palace”, calling him a Cockney, mocking Sam’s bewitchment by Mary and after accusing Sam of being too “fast” with her, told him, “if you’re not doubtly fast with my breakfast, I shall fasten my boot onto the posterior portion of your miserable anatomy” [30, p. 18]. Charles unintentionally demonstrated his superiority. Charles, who “could not have imagined a world without servants”, was aware that Sam was “too young to be a good manservant and besides, absent-minded, contentious, vain” and that there are “better machines” to be found [30, p. 19]. He regarded Sam as his companion especially for his ability to amuse him. Nevertheless, Sam detested his job and got angry with his master’s offensive manner.

Fowles also gives hints to the potential revolution. Sam was in a bad mood and easily irritated, was testing the blade of the cut-throat razor “on the edge of his small thumb, with an expression on his face that suggested that at any moment he might change his mind and try it on his own throat or perhaps even on his smiling master’s” [30, p. 18]. Comparing Sam Farrow with Sam Weller, Mr. Pickwick’s servant in Dickens’s “Pickwick Papers” and their mutual class struggle, Fowles points at the difference between the working class of the 1840s and 1870s. Unlike Sam Weller, who was loyal to Mr. Pickwick, Sam Farrow was not happy with his role, a “more like a modern working class man” and, aware of the fact that times had changed, was determined to be liberated from the social restraint, from his subservient position [43, p. 107]. The relationship between Sam and Charles were not at all ideal and their antipathy grew gradually.

Similarly, class distinction is portrayed in the relationship between Ernestina and Mary. Although Mary was a servant of Mrs. Tranter, who was very benevolent towards her, Mary had to serve to Ernestina while she was visiting her aunt. Ernestina was spoiled; she intimidated Mary and enjoyed giving orders. Though Mary was envious of Ernestina’s wealth and marriage, she was quite content with her role in the society and really liked Mrs. Tranter.

In spite of Fowles’s hints at the notion of revolution, there was no violent rising of the working class. Sam told Mary about his ambition, that he was dreaming of going into business: “His ambition was very simple: he wanted to be a haberdasher. He had never been able to pass such shops without stopping and staring in the windows; criticizing or admiring them, as the case might require. He believed he had a flair for knowing the latest fashion. He had travelled abroad with Charles, he had picked up some foreign ideas in the haberdashery field” [30, p. 56]. He wanted his dream to come true and change his life; however obstacles such as lack of education and money kept him aback. After he happened to catch Charles with Sarah in the cottage, Sam saw the chance. However, at that time Charles’s prospect of inheritance was endangered by his uncle’s marriage and Charles assured Sam that he would grant some sum of money from Ernestina’s dowry. When Sam found out that Charles visited Sarah in Endicott’s Family Hotel, he decided to betray Charles.

Later in the novel Mary and Sam were shown living comfortably in London, with a child and even a maid: “Even if it was hardly yet reflected in their accents and use of the language these two were rising in the world; and knew it. To Mary, it was all like a dream. To be married to a man earning over thirty above ten! When her own father, the carter, had never risen above ten! To live in a house that cost £19 a year to rent!” [30, p. 181].

Victorians were members of a confident nation, yet they lived in permanent fear: “fear of the social circle, fear of the newspaper, fear of being odd… still greater fear of what somebody may say” [37, p. 398]. The critical watchfulness over the moral message of the art was mirrored in lives of all Victorians and their conduct, which was constantly monitored and judged by the ever present eyes of society. But setting the tone for all classes of the mid-nineteenth century society it was the middle class with its virtues and attitudes of self-improvement, temperance, duty, thrift, and piousness which caused the spread of Victorian morality [58].

Unlike anonymous London or Exeter, Lyme Regis was a small provincial town where people’s conduct was being watched very closely. While in London Charles was able to pursue his desires anonymously, in Lyme he must be very careful in preserving a flawless reputation of a proper gentleman. As Ernestina puts it in reference to Sam’s unscrupulous behaviour: “There is a world of difference between what may be accepted in London and what is proper here” [30, p. 45].

In Lyme, where convention was observed and where a person or visitors were “certainly expected to allow themselves to be examined and spoken to” [30, p. 43], eyes of Victorian society were represented by the character of Mrs. Poulteney, who personified morality. Mrs. Poulteney is a vivid example of Victorian England’s rules and conventions in the novel. As the narrator writes about Mrs. Poulteney: there “would have been a place in the Gestapo for the lady; she had a way of interrogation that could reduce the sturdiest girls to tears in the first five minutes” [30, p. 9]. He describes her as a woman with two obsessions: “Mrs. Poulteney had two obsessions: or two aspects of the same obsession. One was Dirt – though she made some sort of exception of the kitchen, since only the servants lived there – and the other was Immorality. In neither field did anything untoward escape her eagle eye. She was like some plump vulture, endlessly circling in her endless leisure, and endowed in the first field with a miraculous sixth sense as regards dust, finger marks, insufficiently starched linen, smells, stains, breakages and all the ills that houses are heir to”. She guarded the morality in Lyme Regis but at the same time she was even stricter when monitoring the conduct of her unfortunate employees: “The failure to be seen at church, both at matins and at evensong, on Sunday was tantamount to proof of the worst moral laxity. Heaven help the maid seen out walking, on one of her rare free afternoons – one a month was the reluctant allowance – with a young man. And heaven also help the young man so in love that he tried to approach Marlborough House secretly to keep an assignation: for the gardens were a positive forest of humane man-traps – “humane” in this context referring to the fact that the great waiting jaws were untoothed, though quite powerful enough to break a man’s leg. These iron servants were the most cherished by Mrs. Poulteney. Them, she had never dismissed” [30, p. 9]. In other words Mrs. Poulteney was a sadist and it was understandable that her servants “took just so much of Mrs. Poulteney’s standards and ways and then they fled”. One of her butlers actually proclaimed: “Madam, I should rather spend the rest of my life in the poorhouse than live another week under this roof” [30, p. 9]. A gardener would be dismissed for being seen to come into the house with earth on his hands; a butler for having a spot of wine on his stock; a maid for having slut’s wool under her bed. Being a God-fearing woman, Mrs. Poulteney had acuity in practical matters, “believes in hell” [30, p. 9]. Trying to “win the seat to heave”, she has to let Sarah into her home (a woman of immorality and open sexuality in Mrs. Poulteney’s eyes) because “there [was] God to be accounted to” [30, p. 12].

In “The French Lieutenant’s Woman”, Mrs. Poulteney is a kind of an archetype of monitoring system of religious morality. This “Poulteneyism”, as Charles Scruggs argues, prevails over the Victorian society of “morality tight-laced”, supervises middle-class everyday life, and precludes any ideas of sexual and moral laxity from infiltrating [30, p. 99]. Mrs. Poulteney evaluated a person with the frequency of church attendance. The more frequently he/she attended the church, the more pious he/she was for God. She was the guard of morality in Lyme Regis and the very representative of male-dominated moral surveillance, devoting her whole attention to eliminate anything sinful and immoral. Therefore, Sarah was the one needed to be redeemed because of her sexual incautiousness. Only such a pious person like her could redeem Sarah from her sexual sin on behalf of God. However, the fact that Mrs. Poulteney took in Sarah as her maid in fact showed not only her hypocritical benevolent deed in religious practice but her desire to be a candidate for heaven. In fact, the public of Lyme Regis had the antipathy towards her licentious behaviours.

Another patriarchal figure in the novel is Dr. Grogan, though he declared himself to be an elite educated by scientific training and the advocator of Charles Darwin’s theory. Examining Sarah from pathological standpoint, he concluded that Sarah’s deviant behaviours result from the suffering of hysteria, caused by sexual repression. In addition to his medical perspectives of female hysteria, he employed the Victorian psychological theory of associationism – the study of the working of mental processes and the relationship between ideas and behaviours – to interpret Sarah’s malicious intention to arouse Charles’ sympathy. Sarah thus became a cunning schemer, like the female hysterics in medical literature cited by Dr. Grogan. Dr. Grogan’s medical theories and arguments for Sarah’s mental disorder epitomized the Victorian medical system. He unconsciously fell into the ideology of patriarchal sexual morality and phallocentric dogmatism about female sexuality. Sarah, an enigma to Dr. Grogan, resisted this man-dominated diagnosis. In the context of phallocentric society, she showed us the limitation of Victorian medical perspectives of female hysteria. She was not an insane female hysteric labelled by the law of patriarchal medicine. Rather, it is Fowles’s strategy to let Sarah be diagnosed as a hysteric, showing her non-conformity and unpredictability for the purpose of rebelling Victorian demonization of female sexuality and oppression over female pursuit of sexual liberation. She achieved her freedom through this artifice. Her reappearance with a fresh image as a New Woman contradicted the patriarchal analysis. Sarah was a fallen woman for the public of Lyme Regis and a hysterical patient for Dr. Grogan. Sarah’s tainted past was disclosed by her loss of virginity that caused the alias of “The French Lieutenant’s Whore”. The alias showed that she abandoned the most significant attribute of a Victorian feminine ideal, namely, her chastity. Such a licentious life convinced the public in Lyme Regis and Charles that she was really a fallen woman. She should be redeemed, since she was not on the normal and moral trajectory of Victorian society.