2.3. Sarah Woodruff as Challenging Englishness in “The French Lieutenant’s Woman”

The Victorian period viewed women as belonging to the domestic sphere. A great deal of repressive conventions, norms were imposed on women by the dominant patriarchal society, and a Victorian woman was expected to accept the norms unhesitatingly meeting the needs of her husband and her children. However, the picture changed with the emergence of the “New Woman”. The “New Woman” was a feminist ideal that emerged during the late nineteenth century, which pushed the limits set by the male dominated society. The “New Woman” was a reaction to the long held notions of femininity; it discarded the Victorian norms of sexuality and made itself free from the idea that a woman should be shut behind the four walls of a home. A new woman was characterized as living a single emancipated lifestyle, having adequate education and a new sense of dressing style. Sarah Woodruff in “The French Lieutenant’s Woman” is a perfect example embodying the image of a “New Woman”.

Fowles describes Sarah as “an independence of spirit… a determination to be what she was” [30, p. 51]. Sarah was not influenced by the stereotypical and traditional roles of a woman. Her ideals about marriage were rather different from the ideals of other women in the Victorian society. Fowles uses a visual description of her appearance to symbolize the difference of opinions between herself and the people of her time: “Delicate, fragile, arched eyebrows were then the fashion, but Sarah’s were strong, or at least unusually dark, almost the colour of her hair, which made them strong” [30, p. 51]. She liked her eyebrows had a strong sense of what she wanted to do and did not let anyone else’s opinions stand in her way. She continued to take walks in Ware Commons even after she was forbidden to do so. She was a woman far ahead of her time. Sarah had freedom, which allowed her to be truly not like other women. Sarah went to London without telling Charles about it, who still was in love with her, looked for her for the next several years and found her living in the Rossetti’s house enjoying her newfound freedom. Charles was surprised to see her in the new creative look which had broken his traditional belief that “a fallen woman must continue falling” [30, p. 189].

When Charles met Sarah in the Rossetti’s house, she re-appeared as a “New Woman” with her fresh dressing style. She rejected the contemporary clothing style and her new image surprised Charles: “And her dress! It was so different that he thought for a moment she was someone else. He had always seen her in his mind in the former clothes, a haunted face rising from a widowed darkness. But this was someone in full uniform of the “New Woman”, flagrantly rejecting all formal contemporary notions of female fashion” [30, p. 189], and Charles had a feeling he was back in America for that was the way smart American women dressed. Though in America he found that style practical and charming, there in England it felt embarrassing.

Sarah was a different person, had a new life, she had grown in many aspects. Their roles had turned upside down: “He had come to raise her from penury, from some crabbed post in a crabbed house. In full armour, ready to slay the dragon – and now the damsel had broken all the rules. No chains, no sobs, no beseeching hands” [30, p. 190]. However, Charles found out that Sarah did not need his protection and rejected his proposal to become Mrs. Charles Smithson: “I do not wish to marry. I do not wish to marry because…I do not want to share my life. I wish to be what I am, not what a husband, however kind, however indulgent, must expect me to become in marriage” [30, p. 192]. Charles did not understand why Sarah rejected the marriage. For him, a Victorian man, to be a wife and a mother was the only possible purpose “for which woman was brought into creation” [30, p. 193]. Yet Sarah wanted to have freedom, while to be a wife in Victorian age meant to be completely dependent and inferior to a man.

Her new dressing style reinforced her frankness and directness. She had chosen not to pursue the conventional woman’s career of marriage and motherhood. Sarah’s achievement of subjectivity in the final second ending by refusing the imprisonment of marriage was the significant element to consider her as a “New Woman”. Sarah asserted the finding of her true happiness and the achievement of her selfhood by refusing Charles’ proposal of marriage even though he assured her freedom without setting any condition: “Mr. Smithson, I am happy, I am at last arrived, or so it seems to me, where I belong” [30, p. 193]. She no longer bore the name of the “Poor Tragedy” or the taint “The French Lieutenant’s Whore” anymore. Her liberation from the social and sexual shackles was possible due to her denial of marriage: “I don’t want to share my life. I wish to be what I am, not what a husband, however kind, however indulgent, must expect me to become in marriage” [30, p. 193].

Sarah Woodruff is the only character that challenges the societal conventions and its order. Being named after her, the novel is primarily concerned with her development as an individual. While Sarah and Charles both fit in the thematic concerns of the novel, Sarah is much more involved in the narrative structure. In Sarah Woodruff, Fowles “creates a positive role model …a woman of imagination, intelligence, daring, and moral integrity” [19, p. 306]. The story of the novel revolves on her being the “surrogate author”. She is in fact the “magus” of the novel’s world, as she creates a reality; her “fake” encounter with the French Lieutenant; and, she is the one who allows other characters to take actions within that reality. As Patricia Hagen suggests, by “re-writing herself as a “fallen woman”, Sarah rejects the roles constructed for her by Victorian convention and writes for herself a freedom” [34, p. 446].

Establishing Sarah as the surrogate author of the text plays a significant role in considering the political nature of the novel. Her thoughts and feelings are not offered to the reader unless she wishes it so. Philip Cohen argues that, by “placing a veil between Sarah’s thoughts and the reader, the narrator may be respecting her autonomy, but someone is keeping the book’s structure intact” [21, p. 158]. Nevertheless, Sarah’s autonomy has another purpose, as it defines the structure of the novel and it also shows Fowles’s concern with the emancipation of women.

Sarah Woodruff is the one who guides Charles through the hard process of evolution that will eventually lead both of them to freedom. She embodies the values more of the 20^th century and perhaps her ability to mesmerize Charles is a part of modern time. Sarah’s plight is Victorian in nature: her isolation because of her past reputation, her work as a governess, the lack of career choices and the opportunity of spinsterhood are “all nineteenth century impositions on her liberty and autonomy” [29, p. 78]. Sarah, however, maintains her autonomy and independence in spite of the social norm. Her appearance (dark “beautiful hair fully loose” [30, p. 70], full lips, “heavy” eyebrows) resembles one of the modem age rather than of the Victorian, as well as her look that is often described as “naked” (“those sincere naked eyes” [30, p. 61]), which emphasizes her open, untamed sexuality.

It is interesting how at times Sarah contradicts Charles and is outspokenly opinionated, following the pattern of the behaviour of a 1960 woman rather than a 1867 one. Sarah Woodruff is an early model of a self-liberated woman, who “thinks her own thoughts, shapes her own identity, and ultimately pursues her own destiny” [29, p. 79]. Sarah is the woman who magically excites and attracts Charles who does not understand her nature or “the enigma she present[s]” [30, p. 54]. In the sleep scene on the Cobb, Sarah caught him watching her and their gazes did not meet but merge: “Charles did not know it, but in those brief poised seconds above the waiting sea, in that luminous evening silence broken only by the waves’ quiet wash, the whole Victorian Age was lost” [30, p. 31].

Moreover, Sarah Woodruff represents the artist figure in the novel. Through her character, Fowles examines the relationship between life and art. An artist is expected to be aloof from his/her creation. T.S. Eliot insisted on the non-personal involvement between the writer and his creation. The theme of an individual desiring selfhood is explored in Sarah’s character. She had consciously created a world in which she could freely choose her own destiny. The two of her choices are especially important in the text: her choice to lie about the French Lieutenant (“the French Lieutenant’s whore” is her creation) and her decision at the end of the novel to live without a relationship with a man. The last choice proclaimed Sarah’s freedom from the conventions of the Victorian society. She is a social “outcast”, lost in the society’s opinion, yet she becomes “authentic”, existentially speaking, due to the freedom she creates for herself. In terms of emancipation, Sarah becomes the New Woman, the woman who escapes the “Adam-consciousness” that defines the nineteenth-century patriarchal society.

Magali Michael states that, the novel “wants to assert the theme of feminism and yet fails as a feminist novel” [46, p. 225]. Although the novel does not construct a narrative in which words “acquire new meanings which validate and celebrate a new, positive version of women” [61, p. 9], the obvious feminist notes cannot be ignored. By making herself the “surrogate author”, Sarah challenges the male power. The male characters closest to Sarah are Charles and Dr. Grogan. In Dr. Grogan’s opinion, Sarah suffers from “melancholia as plain as measles” [30, p. 66] and she “wants to be a sacrificial victim” [30, p. 66]. Sarah’s sadness is not because of the French Lieutenant, as Dr. Grogan falsely believes. Her despair comes from being “allowed to live in paradise, but forbidden to enjoy it” [30, p. 72]. To achieve freedom in paradise, Sarah makes up the story of the French Lieutenant: “all her conduct all her motives in Lyme Regis have been based on a lie” [30, p. 151], so that “she should never be the same again. She did it so that people point at [her] … there walks the French Lieutenant’s Whore. …So that they should know she has suffered, and suffers, as others suffer in every town and village in this land” [30, p. 75]. Fowles sounds concerned with the social position of women in the male dominated society, which has such enormous powers over women. Identified with women in other towns, Sarah becomes the voice of emancipation of women.

In “The French Lieutenant’s Woman”, Sarah represents the predicament of the surplus women. She is a victim of the society. Due to her intelligence and education Sarah does not fit in any of the classes and is doomed to spinsterhood. Her father, a common farmer but excessively ambitious, sent her to a boarding school. Given a veneer of a lady she was “forced out of her own class” [30, p. 23] but could not be raised to the next. Thus, “to the young men of the one she had left she had become too select to marry; to those of the one she aspired to, she remained too banal” [30, p. 23] Sarah explains that she turned down a rich grazier yet fell for the lieutenant, because she “was born to be a farmer’s wife but educated to be something…better” [30, p. 72] and she adds: “I was born with natural respect, a love of intelligence, beauty, learning...I have no right to desire these things, but my heart craves them” [30, p. 72]. Marriage seemed to be impossible for her but she desired to have what Mrs. Talbot had: a happy marriage, home and adorable children. According to society expectations, Sarah had, besides the marriage, only few options of respectable positions – a lady’s companion or a governess. Both of them were pitiful and both led to spinsterhood. In Victorian times the failure to get married and become a mother indicated a failure of womanhood. Therefore governess – “a young woman without children paid to look after children” – is not a Victorian ideal of woman. As a governess Sarah felt as “truly dead” because she could not be like other women with their husbands, children, and “innocent happiness they have” [46, p. 226]. Sarah explained that this position was unbearable; governesses could never be happy, because they live in scenes of domestic happiness but are not allowed to enjoy them.

Again, Fowles goes against conventions of Victorian novelists. No brothel or asylum for a rebelling woman. On the contrary, at the end we find Sarah to be an example of an emancipated woman. Sarah Woodruff is the one who always represents this rejected – narrative reality. Sarah felt entirely out of place in the world. She confessed that her choice to marry Shame by following the French lieutenant gives her freedom that other people cannot understand: “What has kept me alive is my shame, my knowing that I am truly not like other woman” [30, p. 75]. Charles felt that Sarah had fallen into the clutches of a horrible villain. Nevertheless, at the same time, Sarah played games with the word “fall” as a concept and a word. Through a parody of falling, she locates and dislocates another sense of falling and turns the falling action of a “whore” woman into freedom: “I think I have a freedom they cannot understand” [30, p. 75]. Sarah wants to fall into a space where no reasons are claimed. She uses the falling precipice to free herself from narrative clutches: “I threw my self off a precipice... I knew of no other way to break out of what I said... I have set myself beyond the pale” [30, p. 75]. Sarah approaches what Best and Kellner describe as, “the body that breaks free from its socially articulated, disciplined, semiotized, and subjectified state... to become disarticulated, dismantled and deterritorialized, and hence able to be reconstituted in new ways” [11, p. 90-91]. She in turn becomes a narrative space by such a dislocation. Sarah wants to be released from the plot as well as the narrative-bound sense of identity; she wants to find her own reality.

Ironically, Sarah does have a place in the community as its outcast. In this connection, it is significant that “The French Lieutenant’s Woman” is the first of Fowles’s novels to arise from an image of a woman that had come to mind with involuntary, almost mystical insistence. The woman, who eventually became transformed into the character Sarah Woodruff, appeared to be an outcast, and Fowles found himself wanting to protect her, even falling in love with her. It is a peculiar feature of the novel that we never enter Sarah’s mind, and can therefore only speculate on what she is thinking: she is an endless mystery to the reader, just as women are, as Fowles implies, an endless mystery to men.

Sarah, whose only respectable position in the society is the one of a governess (a role which is unbearable for her) knows that if she remained in this post “by now (she) should be truly dead” [30, p. 75]. In other words she would become one of Charles’s fossils. She is freely able to reject this predetermined path and to choose her own identity in order to liberate herself from society’s bounds and to survive. To achieve her social freedom she becomes a fallen woman – the French lieutenant’s whore. Sarah tells Charles, who believed that she was a naive and innocent woman seduced and forced, that it was her own decision to “marry the shame”: “I gave myself to him. …So I am doubly dishonoured woman. By circumstances. And by choice. ...I did it so that I should never be the same again. I did it so that people should point at me, should say, there walks the French Lieutenant’s Whore – oh yes, let the word be said. It was a kind of suicide. An act of despair. …I know it was wicked…blasphemous, but I knew no other way to break out of what I was. If I had left that room, and returned to Mrs. Talbot’s, and resumed my former existence, I know that by now I should be truly dead…and by my own hand. What has kept me alive is my shame, my knowing that I am truly not like other women. I shall never have children, a husband, and those innocent happinesses they have. …Sometimes I almost pity them. I think I have a freedom they cannot understand. No insult, no blame, can touch me. Because I have set myself beyond the pale” [30, p. 75].

For Charles, a gentleman with a strong sense of duty, sympathy and charity, ready to help Sarah – a lady in distress, Sarah’s revelation of her free behaviour at the Weymouth inn is incomprehensible. In fact, her character does not make sense to both a nineteen century hero and to a reader of Victorian fiction. Sarah evidently fails to fit into any of the society classes, nor is she a typical Victorian woman. It can be assumed that Sarah, though living in Victorian times, might belong to a modern age and might be a voice of the twentieth century author or a new, evolved type of human being.

The question is: “Who is Sarah? Out of the shadows does she come?” [30, p. 40]. And most importantly what is her purpose? We do not know what her motives are, she never says what she wants and she even fails to understand herself. She remains mysterious; her face is half hidden or turned down or away, staring to the sea. We can only tell from what Charles sees, and Charles, “he understands all, except Sarah”, or from what the author knows about her, but he claims he does not know her mind or “innermost thoughts” [30, p. 41] and even does not intend to find out. Indeed, we are confused when Fowles pretends that he is not sure where Sarah, the main protagonist and the woman of the novel’s title, is or what her plans are. In fact in Chapter 13, which could instead of the epigraph bear a title Unfolding of the Sarah’s true state of mind, the author refuses to produce an analysis of his protagonist: “Certainly I intended at this stage…to tell all – or all that matters” [30, p. 41]. Both the reader and Charles are cheated. The innocent woman who either falls in love with a man, or is seduced by a man and thus becomes an outcast has been a common theme in world literature. Hawthorne’s Hester Prynne or Thomas Hardy’s Tess d’Urberville are both examples of social and moral stereotypes, both are tragic figures and victims of the hypocrisy of the society [36, p. 120].

Though Fowles’s Sarah appears to be a victim, but actually is a victimizer. We discover that the seducer is only Sara’s fabrication, that she is not the weak Victorian woman. On the contrary, she is the superior one, who has a power to create her own fate and to control the others. She not only manipulates and seduces Charles, but also changes his life. Charles does not understand her and consequently is attracted and obsessed. Conradi assumes that, since “Sarah remains an enigma, she is not to be understood. In that sense Sarah might not be a protagonist of the novel and actually represents “a symbol rather than specific human being” [23, p. 230].

Actually, in the first ending when Charles decides to go through with his marriage to Ernestina he is thinking of the woman he has left in the city: “…it was hardly Sarah he now thought of – she was merely the symbol around which had accreted all his lost possibilities, his extinct freedoms, his never - to – be – taken journeys. He had to say farewell to something…” [30, p. 142]. Furthermore, Fowles tells us what happened to all characters, except Sarah. He says: “What happened to Sarah, I do not know – whatever it was, she never troubled Charles again in person” [30, p. 144]. She will not even stay in his memory, as though she never existed. As it was already stated, she probably does not exist in Charles’s world.

In the light of what was said, it is possible that, as Conradi suggests, Sarah was designed to be just a tool, an instrument of the author to make Charles see beyond, be able to take his destiny in his own hands, to be aware of his freedom to make his own choices to create his future, consequently to liberate himself from the constraints of conventions in his times and at the same time, to discover his selfhood.

In order to attract Charles’s attention and be able to control and manipulate him Sarah is provided with necessary qualities and abilities. First, to arouse pity and sympathy Sarah is shown as a poor Tragedy – a person in “adverse circumstances” [30, p. 11]. She also appears to be insane. Charles, a real gentleman, whose duty is to care for less fortunate, feels bound to help Sarah and engages in her. Sarah appeals to his generosity and nobleness: “Because you are a gentleman… I live among people the world tells me are kind, pious, Christian people. And they seem to me crueler than the cruelest heathens, stupider than the stupidest animals” [30, p. 60]. Although he is aware that Sarah is a “woman most patently dangerous” and that he was about to “engage in the forbidden, or rather the forbidden was about to engage in him”, he wants to show he is a noble, compassionate person, and moreover, after Dr. Grogan explains Sarah’s diagnosis, he sees, besides the impropriety and element of pleasure, an element of duty – “a scientific as well as a humanitarian reason in his adventure” [30, p. 70].

Secondly, Sarah is provided with a “computer” in her heart and the skills of “an experience horse dealer” [30, p. 23] which enable her to classify other people’s worth. As she has the ability to sense “the pretensions of a hollow argument, a false scholarship, a biased logic” [30, p. 23], and sees through people to what they are and not as they try to seem, Sarah is able to see beyond Charles’s artificial Victorian facade. Once Sarah realizes Charles’s interest in her, she starts to manipulate him, begging him to listen to her story. Dr. Grogan sees behind Sarah’s actions and warns Charles of her cunning schemes: “I am a young woman of superior intelligence and some education. I think the world has done badly to me. …I put out a very professional line in the way of looking melancholy. I have tragic eyes. I weep without explanation…And now…enter a young god. Intelligent. Good-looking. A perfect specimen of that class my education has taught me to admire. I see he is interested in me. The sadder I seem, the more interested he appears to be…He treats me like a lady…more than that…he offers to help me escape from my unhappy lot…I can use none of the wiles the more fortunate of my sex employ to lure mankind into their power…I have but one weapon. The pity I inspire in this kind-hearted man…I have fed this good Samaritan my past and he has devoured it. So what can I do? I must make him pity my present. …when I am walking where I have been forbidden to walk I seize my chance…I get myself dismissed from my position. I disappear…and then I cry to my saviour for help” [30, p. 95]. Indeed, Dr. Grogan’s hypothesis is quite correct, unfortunately Sarah’s powers are too potent though Charles he realizes that he was led by his nose, cannot help himself. As we see later in the novel Sarah keeps luring him until she finally seduces and then abandons him.

Thirdly, Sarah is aware of her own sexuality and uses it, consciously or unconsciously, to control Charles. When Charles meets Sarah at Ware Commons for the first time he sees her lying and innocently sleeping and for Charles “there was something intensely tender and yet sexual in the way she lay” [30, p. 30]. The wild nature around and even her loose hair with red tints evoked sexual memories of another girl he had known in France. She employs her sexual feminine tricks and, at the end, even her virginity. Her behaviour is so unvictorian, rebellious and incomprehensible. Sarah, who has already found selfhood is trying to awake Charles and through her stories, lies, and manipulation teaches him to question his own life, makes him see there are other possibilities to be discovered, many paths to be taken to finally discover the real self. Charles realizes that her eyes display “an intelligence beyond convention” [30, p. 60]. When she looks at him he can see what she is able to see, and in her eyes he finds his reflection: She raised her face to his, with an imperceptible yet searching movement of her eyes; as if there was something he must see, it was not too late: “a truth beyond his truths, an emotion beyond his emotions, a history beyond all his conceptions of history. As if she could say worlds; yet at the same time knew that if he could not apprehend those words without her saying them” [30, p. 111].

What is more, Sarah is a unique woman, who serves as a proof that women are not to be categorized as either virgins or whores. Sarah’s emancipation echoes back the historical year of 1867 in the novel. This is the year when the feminine emancipation begins in England. Girton College, the first residential college for woman, was established in 1869. 1869 is the year that responds to Sarah’s reappearance with economic independence as the Pre-Raphaelite model. She challenges Victorian sexual codes by means of her fabricated story. Her stigmatic past initiates her journey of pursuing subjectivity and her rejection of the confinement of marriage signifies her successful struggle from the social and sexual imprisonment. Sarah, as a New Woman, does not submit to the social and political pressures on the individual to conform. Finally, she realizes her desire of self-fulfillment, independence, and emancipation by destroying the sexual taboo. Sweeping aside the old cliché and moral attitudes boots her into sexual autonomy and sexual liberation.

Fowles presents Sarah stigmatized as a fallen woman, an outcast rejected by her society for her image of being a whore, but she reappeared with the fresh image of the “New Woman”, challenging the conventional Victorian attitudes towards women. Sarah rejected the codes of womanliness in her continuous pursuit of her individual self. The strangeness in her character and her varied images of a governess, a virgin, a fallen woman and a hysterical patient echoed her freedom.