Fowles as Postmodernist/Existentialist

The postmodern tactics employed by Fowles in The French Lieutenant’s Woman reveal his personal disdain for Victorian England as well as his espousal of existentialism.  A.A. DeVitis and William J. Palmer explain that Fowles’ twentieth century perspective is looking back upon a period that is dead; Fowles, unlike his characters, knows there is a world beyond the Victorian world.  This detached, informed perspective confers knowledge that there are possibilities other than the ones offered within the confines of Victorian ideology.

            This act of recounting a Victorian tale with a contemporary perspective gives the narration a heightened consciousness.  If an author was writing a Victorian novel while living in the Victorian age, he or she would be more likely to accept implicitly the practices and conventions of the time with an unquestioning certainty.  While within the parameters of a specific framework, it is difficult to displace oneself and objectively consider the merit of that framework.  Most humans probably do not spend a typical day wondering why we have sight instead of some other unknown sense, or why it is necessary to breathe instead of performing some other function in order to survive—when people have been under certain conditions their entire lives, they cease to speculate as to why those conditions were first conceived and assume there could simply be no other possibilities.  The hyper sense of consciousness that allows people to banish all assumptions and not merely exist a certain way but constantly reflect upon why they exist in that way is a pervasive theme in postmodern writing.  The ability to think this way, however, often necessitates a withdrawal or detachment from whatever is being reflected upon.  In The French Lieutenant’s Woman, Fowles projects his consciousness onto a period rife with dogmatism and unreflected beliefs.  From his vantage point, it is easier to see the shallow propriety of being a “gentleman”, the hypocrisy of professing piety and then viciously judging others, and the oppressive, unnatural views people held about sex.  By reflexively narrating a story set in Victorian England, and more specifically the provincial town of Lyme Regis, Fowles shows how unexamined lives can have such non-existent foundations.

            John V. Hagopian asserts that Fowles parodies the Victorian novel and the way authors treated themselves as puppeteers.  In the Victorian Age, the characters of a novel were particularly shaped by the will of the author.  Every event in the novel was ineluctable—out of the myriad of possibilities, whatever actually happened was regarded as the only possibility that could have happened.  The Victorian novelists, like the belief sets of the age they lived in, operated from an unreflected position; the authority they accorded themselves allowed no room for alternative possibilities.  Therefore, the novelists permitted themselves to artificially impose definitive endings on their works.  The conventional Victorian romance novel frequently ended in marriage.  After the marriage, it is implied that a state of perpetual marital bliss ensues, and thus there is nothing left to narrate.  Fowles subverts these Victorian conventions by investing his characters with the freedom to make their own decisions, allowing for the numerous possible conclusions explained in my introduction.

            There is an inherent paradox in this postmodern abandonment of authorial will because the author inevitably chooses what he or she puts on the page.  Even though Fowles explores several eventualities, there are countless possibilities that he did take the liberty of dismissing, and there are many events throughout the novel where no alternatives are offered.  Regardless of the obvious limitations of renouncing authority, Fowles successfully reveals to the reader his belief that people should not adhere to a prescribed path; they should be free to pave their way of their own volition.  According to this view there is no metaphysical truth that people’s lives should be spent pursuing, and any truth believed as such is a human construct which externalizes and therefore obscures people’s inner yearnings and enslaves them in a world where they should be essentially free.

            Fowles is careful not to contradict himself in his conviction that humans do not have a preordained path which will reveal itself over time; Charles does not necessarily end up finding the consummation of his desires in his relationship with Sarah.  Ironically enough, Sarah pulls Charles away from his Victorian world by calculated deception, not by showing him truth.  Sarah serves as the impetus to Charles’ disillusionment with his society’s value system, but not the embodiment of destiny and ultimate happiness.  Fowles therefore does not offer a corrective strategy in opposition to the Victorian era; he simply shows the hypocrisies and fallacies and ignorance that predominated the time.  Hagopian explains that Fowles is a committed existentialist, and in The French Lieutenant’s Woman he aims to project the existential experience onto the reader by immersing him or her in a world with numerous paths that lead to inevitably different results, none of which offer the crystallization of truth and meaning.   This notion is fundamental to postmodernism—postmodern writers do not attack certain belief sets or modes of authority for possibly leading people astray and preventing them from discovering truth, but rather they express the condition of living in a world where all ideologies have broken down and ultimate truth and understanding are impossible.              Charles forsakes his Victorian society for what he believes to be sublime love and self-realization.  Upon realizing that his life’s answers are not to be found in Sarah, he is still incapable of returning to his old world, because he then knows that his life as a gentleman betrothed to Ernestina and his running away to be with Sarah were both ineffective attempts to solve the unanswerable question of existence.